To Bangkok

Oh, sword of the white ninja
where have you gone?
I've been un-manned by the Thai concubine:
unbeckonned, she arrives
at my door at night
bringing her paid blockade.
I am limp with coup. My coup...
Believing in a deserved rest
a "sun outage" blocks the satalite.
She turns off the Television,
she slickens my streets with tanks.
The room falls quiet.
White ninja, your sword.
She is loaded with ping pong
balls.

I've been noticing that a lot of poets out there are writing poems that are a part of a larger series. So I thought I'd give it a try. Here's a follow up to my Iraq poem. I was thinking I could write one for every wore-torn country or every country with a fascist regime that will probably become wore-torn. But this time I will not rhyme. Ooops. I did it again (like Britney Spears).

Dear Iran,

I will bear the cell phone of a non-
wore-torn country and debate you on
it. Since George Bush won't. Mahmoud,
I'm talking to you. Just what kind of dude
do you think you are, with your beard
and your nukes? Can you not hear
the tears of future-dead children?
Can you cure their cancer? Since when
do you treat the U. S. of A. like some weak
country? I'm like Hulk Hogan, and you...the Iron Sheik.



Sorry. I couldn't help but rhyme. It's just in me.

I couldn't figure out how to spell pussy in that last poem, like pus comes out of the boils, not pu$$y like cat or the bang-bang, but like ejaculates from the skin.

Did you know Iraq didn't have cell phones? Well, they didn't and they still don't. Out of all the things the United States can do you'd think they could get Cingular or Verizon there. But they can't. Recently I have been worried about the growing violence in Iraq. I know we are there as a nation in order to free and protect these people, but sometimes I wonder if we aren't doing more harm than good. Many news stories have come out in the last few days about how the United States in Iraq has made life in the Middle East worse. How is that possible, you may ask, how can life there be any worse.

Dear Iraq,

I will bear the sword of the white ninja
to regect all who have sinned against you (Saddam!)
and slash the hypocracites in their pus-y boiles
as the sectarian violence rolls and roils
neighbors and foreign governments covet your oil
and force you into the refugees toil.
Who will come to aid you when you are alone
crying greivious cries into inoperable cell phones?
I will come to you like Billy Baldwin in the night
bringing blazing Democracy to make your country right.

Seagulls in the Light

On the beach, a box of light
Where a few seagulls stand
And peck for scraps.
They flap
Their wings if a passerby
Comes to close
Or a stiff breeze blows
Their feathers.

I throw them a piece
Of my sandwich,
Which they scuffle with each other over.

I turn to you.
How many times have we,
Like the seagulls,
Scuffled over scraps of that coveted bread
We feel we can’t live without
Only to realize,
In the calm that follows the storm,
That what we were fighting over was little,
And that we have wings
And can fly
together

Or fall?

To MFA or Not, That is My Question

I know many of you have mfa degrees, and many people tell me this is the only to get published or get a job. I'm thinking about applying, but to where? Here's my list so far:

Iowa (because Robert Lowell and WD Snodgrass went there)
NYU (Galway Kinnel & Sharon Olds are great poets, so they must be awesome teachers)
Columbia
Ohio
Boston U (I love Seamus Heaney)


I'm thinking two NYC schools because I love the New York School.

Any suggestions?

This is a poem I wrote when I was at a summer workshop a few years ago. I was listening to this woman's story of how she was abused. Everyone in the workshop was really worried about her well being and we spent a good hour learning all about her life.

Thought maybe I could write a poem like her. This is what I came up with. I showed it to a friend and they thought I was the subject of the poem, but I am not. This is for that woman.

I didn’t want him touching my Rabbit

The reckoning aftermath
You feel like the moment itself
It is real, harrowing, and unbearable
Isolation
It could have started at twelve
Some sort of confrontation

Things die along the way
As they must
This is different
A rotting child
We all have to forgive our parents
You know what you did
Keep telling the story
Or kill yourself

Every time I read a new book by a gay poet I start to think that maybe I would get more exposure if I were gay. Last night I was reading Richard Silken's Crush. It is a really good book. Very intense and it deals with issues of homosexuality, love, abuse, sex. I highly reccomend it.

But after I put the book down, I started thinking of all the gay poets that publish and what their books are like. It often feels like gay poets get to have a different standard than straight poets. Like, if I were to pick up a book of poems that are page after page of straight sex poems, I'd probably be turned off by all the sex. But with gay poets, its totally okay to write poems about sex and romantic love. It seems to help if the romantic love is with an abusive person or somebody dying of AIDS. There are plenty of poems about poets loving people dying of cancer, but they just don't seem to pack the same wallop as a dying-of-AIDS poem.

I'm sure this is only a partial list of poets who deal with these issues, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head:
Walt Whitman
Shakespeare
Emily Dickenson
WH Auden
Murial Rukeyser (SP???)
Molly Peacock
Henri Cole
Mark Doty
Richard Silken
Spencer Reece
DA Powell

It may also help to be a little insane.

You may want to click on the links I put up on the right.

The first is the Academy of American poets which features tons of poems and great poets. Many of the living Academy poets win a lot of the big prizes. Its always been my secret dream to win the Yale Younger for my first book.

I have poety daily, which I check religiously everyday. They have some great poems from the countries best poets and journals. It's really helped me discover great poems.

Last I have Ron Silman's blog. I don't know much about him but he is supposed to be like the uberblogger of the poetry blogsphere. At least that is what Wikipedia told me when I was doing some internet research on poetry blogs.

Looking back over the posts from today, I think I am going to like this blogging thing. I probably won't always post as much as today, but I'll try to be as regular as possible.

I finally discovered the poem that to me, perfectly gets at that dark place I felt in my chest on that fateful day. The poem is by the great Mexican poet, Fredrico Garcia Lorca, who in my opinion is right up there with the greatest poets of all time: Whitman, Hass, Olds, Marvin, Siken and Jackson (Major).



Dawn
—a translation of Fredrico Garcia Lorca

Dawn in New York bears
two columns of ash
and a tornado of black pigeons
dappling the water with their throats slit.

Dawn in New York morns
on the escalators of air
which lead out to a red ocean
where seagulls and wreaths of garlic drift.

Dawn descends with no lips to kiss it,
because today no morning or promise is possible.
Only on occasion, the exquisite singing of coins
that splash in the cups of the blind, which remind us
we were children.

The quick on the streets know not to dream:
for them, no new Eden, no love deleafing;
they seek a new hieroglyph in the sky, primed to choke
any sport devoid of genius and the sweat which knows no profit.

Light is drowned in steel, endless alarms,
and the terror of technology: rootless, dispeopled, unable to shadow.
And dazed there, staggering like ghostwalkers— the insomniacs,
as if narrowly emerging from an apocalypse.






And below is my humble response to the beautiful words of Garcia Lorca. My attempt is not to try to write a great poem like Lorca (because let’s face it, that’s impossible!!), but to write more like we write today, while still using some of that Surrealism that made Lorca’s poem so memorable:

Dawn 2
—after Garcia Lorca

Lorca, you couldn’t imagine
what those planes looked like
(if they even had planes back in your day)
flying into those two silver towers
like metal birds flying into metal trees.
Words cannot describe these things.

Thinking about writing a september 11th poem, i find it really hard to think of a way to capture the image of the planes hitting the towers. Maybe one will come to me.

I am also reminded of Cate Marvin's book World's Tallest Disaster. It came out before the disaster of September 11th, but that title always makes me think of the towers falling down. That's a really good book. If you don't know who Cate Marvin is, she edited an excellent new anthology of contemporary younger poets called Legitimate Dangers. I would have liked to have been in it, but I don't have a book out yet. I always feel I'm behind the curve on those things anyway. If only I can get my manuscript in front of the right judge.

I thought that I would write a September 11th poem to commemorate today. I haven't had time to do it yet, so I decided to post this old poem from when I went to visit NYC a few years ago.

THE SUN

Big

Yellow

as the Sun

brighter than Times Square

making plants

happy

and grow good

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

come shine

on me
real good

My First Blog Post!

Hi everybody!

This is my first blog posting! Having gotten very little exposure in the print world, I have decided to post my poems and ideas here on my blog! I hope you like my poems! I just can't get enough of words!

Gil Childers