Poem/Response Poem

About a year ago Arlene Ang dropped this poem into my comments as a surprise. Arlene is the former editor of the Italian edition of Niederngasse, as well as a wonderful poet and human being. Arelene, I hope you don't mind if I print this again. It still moves me so deeply when I read it.

On Waking with a Different Woman
for Pris

Imagine the morning:
that lost bracelet around
my wrist, sun filtered by organdy
curtains, tinnitis and sore
throat like distant sea
in a conch shell.

The bed is peeled of its
worn look, Schumann's concerti
softly thread through air,
my voice is back. Daffodils
in a crystal vase remind
me of yesterday:

the ten-speed bike,
propped against a rusted
steel cabinet, its tires unchanged
from the day I pedalled
across town for
breakfast at Janelle's.

The garage smelled
of fresh paint; I moved freely like
the top that spun only from
other people's hands. Giotto's
Lazarus on the wall
didn't make the room turn.

Imagine old friends
coming over for a barbecue
and I call everyone
by name. Sometimes it's so real
I taste their favorite drinks
on my tongue.


Arlene Ang 2005



Remembrance

Photographs of daffodils
flood my bedroom wall.
Yellow shades to pink
in the fading sun.

He brought me daffodils once.
I didn't hold his arm for
balance then. My top spun
too fast to topple.

Our days dance in circles now;
orbits rarely intersect.
Silence has become my ally.
My enemy, too.

Imagine...friends lift me
to my bike again, gears
oiled, tires repaired.
The ocean draws back
from my breeze.
Sea shells tumble.

Awake, salt still stains my cheeks.
My bracelet jangles with the
morning blue jay's song.

I think I will name him Schumann.


Pris Campbell 2005

Pris at Thirteen

(posted on MySpace earlier today...if you read my blog there, you've seen it)

I stumbled across a diary I kept when I was 13 and re-reading it had me rolling on the floor in parts. Crushes. Friendships. Family. The diary all brings it back. Poignant in some ways, too. Life was so innocent then and family was still alive and something I never even thought about losing. The immortality of youth...



The above is me at age 13...no, my hair isn't all gone. It's in a pony tail. Three diary pages below. Do you have an old diary? Share if you did. Maybe I'll dig out the ones from age 15 at some point. Those are great, too ;-)

(Click to enlarge and remember, Windows resizes. Run your curser over the bottom righthand corner till an orange square appears. Click on it and the pages will be readable easily)

Tropical Storm Ernesto

It's out there pointing this way. Nobody yet knows if it will grow to hurricane force, but the possibility is again there. After the last two years here in Florida and watching the Gulf devastation, just the word is enough to send my stress levels up. We keep prepared at basic levels all during the season, but now we're gasing up the vehicles, making sure any prescriptions are up to date, getting a little bit of gas for the generator we finally broke down and bought for this year that will run the fridge and a small fan, at least.

Now we wait and see.

the wind
chases its tail
emptied beaches

Pris

Martin Luther King: MIA

I'm looking for you, Martin,
I'm searching Selma, back-row
bus seats, filthy lunch counters,
Dylan's guitar, Hoover's files ,tapes
of your I Have A Dream march
through days when protest and love
beat within the same heart chamber;
days when we thought black
would meet white and white would
meet black in a role reversal melt
down of ivory keys played
on a Sunday organ in churches
pouring christ's blood into silver chalices
to hand out to whoSOEVER believed.

Where are you, Martin?
Do you sit, unseen, in laps
of the homeless, the disenfranchised,
the beaten and raped women,
the molested children and sad,
jobless men, telling them love
will still rule the world and no hand
will ever again be raised with whip,
chain or fist to innocent backs
and no lips will mark just-born babies
with a hunting dog's thirst for the kill?

Come back, Martin.
Take up your staff, strap
on your sandals. Lead us forward
to a salvation of arms outreached
in an endless ballet where princes
remains faithful and trapped swans
are set free by long journey's end.


Pris Campbell
(c)2006




Martin Luther King at the 1963 March to Washington civil rights rally, giving his I have a Dream speech.

Marty McConnell Performance Poet

With a fantastic poem and as one of a series of def-poets performing on an HBO series. This lady is a powerhouse!

Definition of def poetry from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Def Poetry, also known as Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry or Def Poetry Jam, is an HBO television series produced by hip-hop music entrepreneur Russell Simmons. The series presents performances by poets who are established in the world of slam poetry, as well as up-and-coming ones. Well-known actors and musicians will often surprise the audience by showing up to recite their own original poems. The show is hosted by Mos Def. Def Poetry is a spin-off of Def Comedy Jam. As he did on Def Comedy, Simmons appears at the end of every episode to thank the audience. The show premiered in 2002

Hindsight and Dimly Lit Nights

Using her starry eyed, fairy taled fore
sight, Sarah steps into white pumps,
unzips her dream bag, and strides
down the magic carpet of
'I take thee' words, gumdrop sweet
kisses, and him hard inside her
sighing, their names embedded
in the bright lights of endless memories.

Using her swollen eyed, blind sided hind
sight, Sarah finds herself night
after night in their empty house--
a moth beating its heart out
against ticky tack wallpaper
and platefuls of cold dinners,
her once-brilliant wings torn, her vagina
a black hole of unfathomable loneliness
and no arm 'round her waist to hold her
when the lights eventually go out.


Pris Campbell
©2006

Gigapxl Project

Most of us have digital cameras that take photos in the range of around 3 to 5 megapixel capacity. Now a GIGABYTE camera has been developed. Not only does this site show off the detail this camera can achieve, but it does it through a series of beautiful photos, taken in different locations here in the states. The gallery alone is worth a look-see!

Click on: Gigapxl Gallery

Below is a shot from the site of the Lake Superior coastline, but on the website, a set of increasing closeups are shown that let you see the incredible detail in the photo: (Click to enlarge)

Gory Story (thanks to Geoff Sanderso)

I'd sent Geoff the graphic in this, also telling him my dizziness that comes with CFIDS for me had abated enough to allow me to drive a short distance for the first time in longer than I want to think about. He put the two together and came up with this gem:-) Ahh...the English. Think we should dump their tea again??

Eulogies and Other Things Forgotten

(this is one I wrote last year..tucked it away and just pulled it out for a revise today)


Coyly tucked beneath a virginal
sheet: electroshock mindfuck on wheels.
Convenient.
Rolled right to you.
Pizza delivery techno
in the mental death ward.

Other candles zapped, one by one,
it's Sarah's go round at the party.

Forgotten memories cram the room,
burst through a distant window.
Visions vaporize of an ashen man
sprawled on his suicide bed,
leftover pills, stardust, around him,
that note bequeathing Sarah
his Marilyn books still curled
in the crotch of his battered Royal.

Pris Campbell
(c)2006

Happy Birthday Bukowski and Elvis

...and my good friend, Margie Stevenson!

Billy Joel Sings Piano Man

You have to go to the site to see it, but it's fun to see Billy Joel from the seventies in this vid, set in a pub, singing Piano Man. This used to be one of my favorite songs, and I still love it. A lot of vids and movie clips are found at www.ifilm.com.

Click HERE to see the Billy Joel Vid. If you click on the lower right corner of the video screen after you hit 'watch' and it loads, the screen will go larger.

Pris

Interchangeable Goddesses

He built my pedistal
in seven days,
seven nights.

He had a God complex, some said.

Used cement swiped from a site
down the street.
Polished my crown with his tongue.

Honeysuckle vines grew from the sky,
circled my breasts, my thighs.
Elvis left the supermarket
to croon Love Me Tender
each night.
No snake appeared, but

my crown toppled off
and the pedistal crumbled,
tossing me hard to ground.

When I whimpered, he shrugged.
Love can be blind, like
the man begging quarters
on Second Street.

My lover stole those quarters
for a train straight to Georgia,
built a pedistal for a woman
with flames in her hair, howard hughes
toenails gripping the cement,
wondering how long she had
before the swift rains came,
dissolving her own goddess gown
into pools of spangles to float
down some other gal's street

Just Another Roadside Attraction

There's too much on this site to go through in one shot, but a peek inside is well worth the time. Go to roadside photographs to find photos of the 'older America' that's managed to cling on by way of attractions, signs, and other things proving that the fast food chain places haven't yet run us over!

Here are three shots from the site. Click to enlarge. Thank goodness everything doesn't like a clone of something else...yet!

Damien Rice

Damien Rice sings The Blowers Daughter.

The visuals in this video are as good as the song. Taken from the movie, Closer, staring Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Jude Law and I'm blanking on the other actresses name who won an best supporting actor academy award for her performance (as did Clive Owen), this video was at the end of the dvd. Scenes from the movie are interspersed with scenes of Damien Rice singing to a woman standing beside a crashing sea. I loved the song in the movie. It opens and closes it and this vid is well worth the time.

Pris

sleepwalking

A friend who posts on Haiku Hut, along with me, has his computer in the shop, so we have a series of haiga going on the 'broken computer' theme waiting for him when he gets back--an experience I think we can all relate to. Anyway, this is one of my zanier ones :-) (click to enlarge)

Ocean Road With Clouds

(Click to enlarge)

This is a view of the ocean road three and a half miles to the east and just south of where I live.

Chicken Feathers and Park Benches

At age six, my cousin became
an animal rights advocate
when she saw mother wring
our chicken's neck,
sending it on its John The Baptist run
across the back yard,
feathers flying
like a summer snowstorm.

She stopped eating chicken.
Opened their pen to let them escape.
Hid them under the house.
Wrote Santa to rescue them
in his sleigh, come Christmas.

Later, she found her own roost on the streets
as manic depression spread its wings,
darkened her sky.
She was raped twice on park benches,
traded her body in cold weather
for a few nights in some strange man's
warm bed.

She lived on a cot in a friend's walk-in closet for a year.

She refused to go home,
refused to stay with a mother
who'd abused her while my uncle,
the minister, sat,
fingers pyramided in silent prayer
to a god who was too busy to listen
to one child's scream.

My cousin would give you her last dollar,
her last cup of coffee,
probably her soul if you needed it.

The streets can kill you or break you,
but angels tread that pavement, too,
wings hid beneath unwashed clothes,
chicken feathers spinning in circles
around invisible, but well-deserved halos.


Pris Campbell
2006

Cuba, Land of Mystery

In this week's online National Geographic, a video taken in Cuba was introduced in the following way:

August 1, 2006—Cuban leader Fidel Castro has temporarily ceded power for the first time in his 47-year presidency in order to undergo surgery. But regardless of when he returns to power, Castro's mark on the country will remain for years to come.

Join National Geographic writer Jon Bowermaster on a 2002 assignment to explore Castro's Cuba, which has been closed to U.S. tourists for decades.

You can see the short video at this National Geographic link.
(a brief commercial always preceeds National Geographic videos)

Cuba, a place people escape from for a better life. Cuba, a land its people still embrace, despite the hardships. Cuba, a memory of the old days before the revolution and the U.S. was banned...Hemmingway with his cigar on a hotel patio. Most of all, Cuba, the home of Castro, a mysterious figure to us all. Did he save his country or did he destroy it? Who has the answer?

A rest day...

I'm back from a class giving lessons on how to give a daily shot of a one year med that will help me with my bone density. It was an astounding -3 in some areas of my spine when tested, making me a fracture just waiting to happen. I usually know either right away or else within a few days if I can take a med without having debilitating side effects, so wish me luck. I'm super tired, though. The class was a lot of lecturing about bone density etc before they ever got to teaching the shot. By then, my usual dizziness from CFIDS had kicked into overdrive and I was glad the nurse provided a rubber ball for us to practice on first. Plan to just chill today and hope Tropical Storm Chris decides not to aim towards us or the Gulf states.

Pris