Memoirs of a Banana

Men creep around,
take my measure,
denigrate my size,
discuss Freud's theory
about penis envy
in loud voices
ad infinitum.

I ignore them.

Women peel me
with gentle hands.
Swallow me
with warm mouths.
I have given my life
many times
for the love
of a good woman.

Once I starred in a movie.
W.C. Fields.
Mae West.
Lord, that woman
adored me.

That was my finest hour!

The Woman Next Door

She was odd, they said. Eccentric. A strange one.
Blind in one eye, a Cyclops, she hid in the attic,
wrote dirty poems and, just to keep them all guessing,
she sometimes howled at the moon.

I saw her downtown, trolling fast-food dumpsters
for bits of tossed burgers or left-over potatoes.
Dressed in black from felt hat to laced slippers.
Patch over that obscene bottomless space
on her forehead, I expected her to soar suddenly
upward, broom under one arm, chanting incantations.

At the time, I was prone to odd fantasies of my own.

Once, the unexpected feather-like touch of her hand
startled me--not harsh, like the rough beating wing
of a killing hawk, but more that of a baby bird.
Lost. Hungry. Frightened. In search of its home

Pris Campbell(c)2004

Saving The World

Grace Slick photo from one of her fan club sites

Segue back in time. Last year of graduate school. Sprawled on the apartment sofa of the man who is to become my first husband 14 months later, after his time in Viet Nam. He plays his latest LP. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds fills the room.

Not since Bill Halley came out with Rock Around the Clock in my childhood, causing instant sermons on the sins of Rock & Roll all over the country, had I heard a piece of music that I knew would change the face of music in a major way once again.

We all thought Lucy was about the Beatles tripping (and yes, as we found out later, they did do that, too), but they claimed that the song came from a drawing by one of their six year olds. I'm not sure I believe them, but we'd have to play Revolver backwards to find out the truth on that one, I suppose. If you were born after the sixties, ask your mom or dad to explain that last reference.

Enter Grace Slick. Wilder than the Beatles could ever be. A sensual Janis Joplin in white boots, springing up on radios all over the country. Jefferson Airplane, her group. What could be more glamorous than the combination of San Francisco, the Filmore West, Haight Ashbury, and Ken Kesey blowing the scene , all at the same time. Grace was every wild woman's alter ego. She was music. She was sex. She was drugs. She knew no boundaries. I heard White Rabbit...here comes Alice..and she's ten feet tall...and no-one could say GRACE was singing about her six year old's drawing. Grace Slick and the Airplane became the music of the times. She made your heart thump, your feet long for adventure.

I finally saw her perform in the mid seventies. The band had changed names. Grace was older, tired-looking on a platform stage in a gymnasium somewhere in Massachusetts. The fire wasn't there like before, but the man in my life at that time and I sat on the gym floor in the dark, listening to that famous voice and were swept back to times when our generation believed flowers, protest marches, bell bottoms and free love would still save the world.

9/18/2003

Embers

Original photograph by Sue Baker Wilson of New Zealand

Day of the King

In the summer of 1963, before graduate school started that fall, I headed to Manhattan to live with a racially mixed group of twelve in a Columbia University frat house, rented for the summer.

Our stated goal? To study international relations. Our real goal? To party and explore Manhattan as much as one perched on the threshold of adulthood can do with barely a cent in pocket.

The requirement was to find jobs during the day to pay for our room and board. The study groups would be early evenings. Having no workable skills, a Black church in Brooklyn was kind enough to hire me half time to teach a summer class of five year olds in a tiny sweltering room, its one window frozen shut by paint, loosened only after hours of frantic scraping.

When the cook for our group threw up her hands and quit after one week, our erstwhile chaperone offered that job to me and another group member with only a half time job. We grabbed it. Cooking meant no dishwashing duties. We weren't dummies. One problem. Neither of us knew how to cook.

Sue and I found ourselves staring at a cast iron stove in the cellar, pots reaching chin height, with no clue what to do. Our group good naturedly suffered through blackened pork chops, burned mashed potatoes, and undercooked vegetables throughout the summer. Our evenings, after group study, were spent wandering the streets or sitting on the fire escape out back, searching for stars through the smog enveloping the city.

This also was the summer of the Great March on Washington, an event no-one thought would be more than a simple protest, quickly forgotten.

We didn't count on Martin Luther King.

A friend and I rode down on the church bus. When the folk singing was over, King stepped to the mike to tell us his dream. One important thing I discovered that day: Martin Luther King was not only a great orator, he was a poet, a man who knew how to hold his audience by the rhythm and repetition of his words. As he sang his poem of promise to us, a thrill swept through the crowd. We saw his dream. We believed it would come true. We laughed. We cried. Our differences disappeared.

Summer ended. Time has passed. The dream hasn't manifested yet, but I still hear his song. It plays over and again in the jukebox of my heart. I still believe what he told us. I still believe that, one day, skin color will no longer mean hatred and prejudice.

We need another poet like King to come along to song us, to pied piper us the rest of the way home.

Could that pied piper be you?


******


(note: I use the term, 'Black', since that was the preferred usage during that period of time)

Jack In Sepia and Nothing Else

This is a cropped/darkened out(modest, shall I add?) version photo from a nude male calendar I did, some years back, with a good friend from Boston. Some day I'll post about our experiences doing this, but not today. For now, let me say if you do this, expect the unexpected AND the men we worked with didn't mind at all taking their clothes off for a photo for women they didn't know. And all for no pay.

Readers...tell me one of the most outlandish--and fun--things you've done in the comment section. Dare you.

Watching Over

To see a full sized image, click HERE

Original photos used in this collage, except the background are by Sue Baker Wilson of NZ.

The graphic is dedicated to Pat Jakubowski, my apartment mate in graduate school, who just wrote that she is struggling with a serious disease. Please keep her in your thoughts.

Dreaming the Dead

Click HERE to see this haiga, since it's animated. The link goes to a page on my website. Turn on sound, and scroll far enough to see the haiku below the image. The original photograph was taken by Sue Baker Wilson of Katikati, New Zealand, of a graveyard angel near her hometown. Thanks, Sue!

Comments welcome.

After the Rains

Image by Marquis Vickers
copyrighted and used with permission

After the Rains

You spoke of her
many times in the days
before our first sudden embrace.
Her scarlet blouses...
the scent of jasmine perfume.

After our first night together
you spoke of her, never.
Did I replace her,
erase that space
that once filled your heart?

As anticipation fueled our days,
and lust kidnapped our nights,
with your many caresses marking
my body as yours, misgivings faded.

Until, last night, after the rains,
in that moment of mindless oblivion,
you called out her name.


Pris Campbell
(c)9/16/2001

Published in Limestone Circle

The Edge of Night

Forgotten Dreams

Whan I was young, I wanted to be a ballerina. In fifth grade, I was first on my toes in the ballet class--then the ballet teacher moved away and our small Southern town could no longer sustain the salary for a new one. I don't honestly think I would've made a good ballerina, but the dream still captures me at times and takes me to bright stages, fluttering arms, and graceful leaps, the audience gasping.

Bordellos and Troubadours

Bordello by Pris Campbell copyrighted 2004

The following guest poem, accompanying my graphic (created in Paint Shop Pro 8), is by James Fowler. Thank you!


Troubadour's Dream

Silken shift caresses the honey
colored lute of your body,
cloth kisses' tingle and touch.
Held in sweet support,
fingers gentle on fulsome flesh
make it sing in motion. Warm notes
shiver skin, dark sable rides
the arrow, quiver of quim,
buttocks cupped. Ballad rises
from a deep drone,
tight muscle strings vibrate higher,
notes of love's passage, rise,
and fall finally,
sweet song to another world.

Used with permission and copyrighted.

The Society of Orphans

When my mother died in 1996, my last surviving parent, a good friend wrote me, "Welcome to the society of orphans". She had lost her last parent a few years earlier. At first, I thought the idea odd--an orphan at my age??

Yet, as the years creep by, so many times the thought has slipped throuugh my mind, "I need to call and tell mother this"....and then, suddenly, I remember. I can't.

My family of aunts and uncles, gone now too, was large and close. Mother held the role of family matriarch to my cousins, and chief story teller to us all. Never could a holiday come without us gathered around dining room table or sprawled on den floor to call out, "tell us the one about cousin Sudie cheating on the Bible Quiz again", or "what about when Uncle Harry used to drive up to the whorehouse on Saturday nights with a fake siren to watch the men of the town run outside, pants in hand", or "tell us about how greatgrandpa Dickson met greatgrandmother Anne Harris because of a promise he made to his dying buddy, after the Great Civil War was over, to deliver the buddy's last letter to his sister, Anne".

Sad stories too. My grandmother dying of the flu that devastated our country in 1920, leaving behind mother, aged 13 and her younger brother, only five, the last ones of six sibs left in the household. When told his mother had gone to be with God, Uncle Herman replied, 'Doesn't God know a little boy needs his mother?" Her death was followed five years later by my grandfather's, driven off the road by a drunk driver.

My mother's stories brought flesh and blood to the family who had come before me, to the upper generation of cousins and grandparents I had never known.

It is from my mother that I inherited my love of a good story--read, told, or written. It is the feelings they generated in me that drives my poetry now.

If she were alive today, I would say to her, "Oh mother, now Becky is dying, too," and we would recite together the stories we remembered of Becky from infancy on, weaving her, by those tales, into the heart tapestry of our family already passed.

I have no sibs, no children, few remaining close cousins. Since I cannot travel, I often wonder if I will ever see any of my blood kin again.

I do know I will never again lie on that den floor, stuffed with fried okra, squash, and country-cured ham, surrounded by the family I love, and hear the stories of cousin Sudie, Greatgrandpa Dickson, or Uncle Harry.

I miss her still. I miss it all.

Written 2001
From the Musings section of my Website

Note: Becky died later that year at age 49.




Haiga made from a photo of my mother in her twenties. She was voted most attractive in her college senior class--with good reason.

The Naming of the Blog

I named my blog after the following poem I wrote in 2003. The idea of turning feelings over to Mother Nature for release or balm has always appealed.

Songs To A Midnight Sky


Daily, you draw the line
between yesterday and today,

dare me to cross,
dare me to get close.

I stand in the backyard rain,
shirt soaked, jeans sucking
against hungry thighs, hear
you move around in the den,
stereo rising high
over a flash of lightning
to the east .

The Lettermen

But of course
you would put them on
to taunt me

Defiant, I sing along,
face the night sky,
swallow raindrops, dance,
until I know that yes,
I can survive anything.

Even you.

Later, when I shiver out of wet
into dry, you already sleep,
back walled to my side of the bed,
dreaming your own song alone.

Pris Campbell
©2003

Published in Blackmail Press