Kenneth Rosen
Graffiti
(for Bill S.)
I tagged. I breached
The avid gates
Of anonymity, still
Retaining my sweet
Secret of livid being,
My Blake, my white
And black. And then
I retreated again,
Into the truth, sooth’s
Troubled sleep
And life’s
Silent choler.
This is the hiss
Of this—rubber tires,
Traffic’s whimper. This
The me that is me,
Not the hauteur
That was I.
No Beautiful Swan
i.
No, Anderson, most ugly ducklings
Grow up to be ugly ducks,
Done in confronted, day after day,
By the vital yet vitiating
Disappointment of their faces
In their mirrors and the mildest,
Most courteous and evasive
Excuses and abuses in the chaos
Of elective affinity’s pitiless
Marketplace: ill-concealed winces
As others glimpse the Dead-End
Neon sign flickering toward failure
At the front of an ugly duck’s head—
Its daily prophetic condemnation.
Last night near here, a pale white male
In a gray hoodie struck from behind
ii.
Another young woman walking home
Alone with a club or other
Blunt object, ran away down Pine,
Then Carleton toward Brackett
And escaped, despite police officers’
Efforts to track the bastard
With their K9 dog. Fourth attack
Like this in half a year, the man clearly
An ugly duckling grown up
An absolute swine, no beautiful swan,
A creep inflicting the curse of birth
On women he imagines angels. Our tales,
Hans Christian, are a demonic
Masquerade, chunks of flint tenderly
Flensed from our gray matter’s
Dwindling store of stone water.
A Mirror of Furor
i.
Manufacture anger to justify
Amorous failure. Call your former
Amor a bastard or bitch
Before the pain of love’s cathexis
And avulsion—like the tail
Torn off a cat a bitter janitor
Hurls alive and yowling
Into the roaring jaws
Of an orange furnace—bites you
In the ass, just as it chews
And chaws at your mind
And that dented Bing cherry-
Red valentine you call your heart,
And you too leap or slip off a cliff
Or the lip of an Amherst stadium
ii.
Onto a street’s witch grass,
Dandelions and concrete,
And your limp, at least at first,
Body blocks the path of loveless,
Cautiously horrified pedestrians
And that love-moth, which it was,
Flies into the abyss again
Of all and forever, away from
Earth’s tarpit memories of dinosaur
Anguish and writhing paralysis,
Where your body’s dead monkey
Feeds worms and fungus,
While your soul, like your poetry,
Flies free, pretty girl,
Now eternally breathless.
Settlers
i.
God sits in heaven and laughs
At our infinitely
Distinct yet familiar April snows
Fallen on thawed
Ponds’ onyx waters, cares and woes.
Up there with Him
Are safe and happy billionaires,
While down here we
Strive in labyrinthine social sewers
To win one hybrid
Tug-of-war after another with friends,
Foes, cousins. I once
Had an uncle who, arriving at a family
Outdoor affair,
ii.
Was obliged to relieve himself
Publicly: stand up
And squat in a playpen arrangement,
Sort of a framed
Open tent, and after he’d peed
Or changed Depends,
Would call me out—eldest, like me,
At most gatherings
I still attend, and inquire, Ken, what
Do you think about
The world situation? He’s gone,
That whole generation’s
Gone, children of those who’d fled
On foot Mount Ararat’s
iii.
Turkish-Armenian slope—been there,
I’d love to go back,
But I'm way too old. Today I’d say,
Uncle, we are settlers,
All of us settlers, despised for clinging
To our shredded
Or swollen, weaponized heritages’
Pious hopes, rueful
Jokes and practices, earnest, almost
Honest myths of nothing
But the shirts on our backs, of days
In the desert, or
Rocking on crowded boats, reviled
For our resolve to survive.
Three Robins
Three robins sat in a leafless thicket
Of gaunt, self-strangulated, winter-
Bare, antler branches. Turdus migratorius.
Sentinels. Reproachful. Morosely cold.
Studying me and indifferent to the flitting
Of finches and darting sparrows
Deftly alighting, then again up away darting.
Quite frigid out today, a mere 3 degrees
Fahrenheit over zero. At last those robins
Also arose in their larger, languid, muscularly
Dignified modalities, flapped and flew away,
And I alone was left to tell thee
How I too shall soon arise and go,
Lumbering me, to my own lake isle
In a sky gray as water lapping at mud as bleak
As those three robins’ brown-black wings,
Away alone alas aloft and free, the sky’s
Breast now ruby-red as any of the three.
Ostriches and Lions
Lots of gender excitement in those
Wiki-votes as to whether an ostrich
With its four inches of claw
And two-thousand-pound power
Of kick can kill a lion, though also online’s
A video showing a golden king of the beasts
Hopping onto to the back of an ostrich
Absent-mindedly trotting along—not home
Guarding her eggs, so presumably male—
The feline eagerly eating it raw awhile,
As if chicken meat, sliding down
When done, wandering away, ostrich
Sort of surviving awhile. So much of earth
And hunger’s practical politics
And the metaphysics, cosmic or not,
Of mercy and justice, are to me
Incomprehensible, or a baldly unbearable
Horror, such as why put such terror
And gore as this online? Ask the dead
Stars into which darkness pours.
Ask why people evolved to snore, foul
Eden’s heavenly nest, or write poems
To inflate by your mouth your ego’s balloon,
Which explodes and plasters your face.
Kenneth Rosen lives and writes in Portland, Maine. He swims daily in Portland's public pools and before that ran marathons, one 50-mile ultra, a race up Mt. Washington’s auto road, one up Sugarloaf Mountain, and many other distance races throughout New England. He's published poetry and reviews in hundreds of journals, and ten poetry collections. His latest, Gomorrah, is a collaboration with Portland artist, Richard Wilson, on love’s illuminated life. Rosen taught at The University of Southern Maine, and was Fulbright Scholar with commissions in Cyprus, Egypt, and Bulgaria. He founded and directed USM’s Stonecoast Writers’ Conference for many years, where he was awarded the annual Distinguished Faculty Award and held its Russell Chair.