more collaboration...

This is another piece done by myself and my brother Chad Austin. My favorite that we have done together.

Brothers in Arms

Sitting in the fading afternoon sun,

warm breeze carrying
my thoughts away, I look over

a reticulation of high-ridged

moraines and drumlin hills, gently rippling.

The stippled light reveals

a bird in flight, caught

in time lapse motion. Slowed wings

beating inaudible rhythms, captured

 inside my tympanic chest

while perched here in this hillside copse.

Ice dammed lakes give way 

to kettles, conjuring childhood memories

of playing a fox-holed soldier, fallen

limb for a rifle, prepared to ambush

any "foe" caught unaware. We were

brothers in arms, him and I.

These days time does the assailing

and each hour carries boyish dreams off 

to settle in some new child's head. 

Memories of climbing

immense sand dunes fall away.

My brother running ahead,

the delicate patterns in the sand turning

to wrinkles at the corners of my eyes. 

Deep furrows in my hands mirror

the landscape stretched out below.

His head disappearing

on the down-slopes, taking longer

each time to reappear.

Still I struggle to catch up. 

Sand kicked up by blistering wind

temporarily blinding.

Lost from sight now,

these recollections sting

like those wind-whipped grains

on youthful cheeks. Scars remain,

with the glacial passage of time.

His face in the knotted bark

of an elm tree, his voice whispering

in rustling leaves, telling tales of chasing 

deer and quail and each other

through these woods- easier prey

than our demons and shadows. 

name change

Sorry for any confusion, but I felt the need to change the title of this blog. I never did really like the title anyways but at the time I just wanted to get started and see where this would lead...

Please keep reading and enjoying

another collaborative poem

This one was done with Paul Enea and Steve Pump(2 guys from my poetry group). If you know them and their work, enough said.
If not...well let me just say, this one kind of took on a life of its own and got a little crazy. Steve  did a revision of this one that turned out great, if I can find a copy of it I will post soon.
In the meantime, do not try to "understand" this one, just enjoy it, it may make you laugh or cry or experience some other deep-seeded emotion.
_______________________________

a star, trying to speak

blinks like a stuttering neon sign

before giving up. give us

gibson, give us gaga on a glitter stick!

a rave girl dancing in a vacuum, shouting

more please, more surd than word,

heard only in math dream deeps, drums the floor.

save your wishes for the unextinguishing

exorcists in your family. pledge

to continue from where they expire.

purple plasma embers caught in a jam jar, kept

beside pickled onions in gaga’s dressing room

-a grandmother’s cryptic gifts. give us

Keith’s open G - libretto for a blues opera

and grandma’s guitar all day long. deliver

us into song. speak, star. or at least

light my way to the stage, before

betelgeuse outshines the moon

(it may be sooner than we think).

raise a glass to the cross-dressing cousins, married

then murdered for diamonds on their honeymoon. the killer

left behind a clue:  a chord that hung mid-air,

resonating for a sharp-eyed, noir private dick

whose pain-tuned ears detected a whispering music box

in hell.  hell, raise a glass to anything.

I'm sorry, I think you have the wrong number...

there are no answers here, but if you stay  

where you are, an outline may appear, a ring

of light, but try not to look directly into it, unless

it speaks to you.

As a poet there is no greater feeling than finishing a poem. Not that we feel a poem is ever finished; there is always tweaking, addition or subtraction that can be done to change its tone or enhance its feeling when looked at days,weeks,months or even years later. What I really meant to mention is the feeling one gets after "finishing" a poem and intuiting that it is a worthy addition to the world of words and letters. Most poets do not feel that any and every poem they write is "worthy." Those that do are probably only fooling themselves.(sorry for the sidebar.) Aside from creating a work of art alone, I have found that collaborative poetry has brought me great satisfaction as well. I would like to share some collaborative poems I have worked on.

This first one was a collaboration with my brother. We took one line each alternately.

Sunrise Cynic

Time is ticking on a madman's watch
like the irregular rhythm of a lapwing in flight
flushed by the footsteps of an unsuspecting traveler

heavily, another minute alights,lost-
the cost of sitting alone in darkened room,
dreading dawn's approach

patiently weeding twilight's garden
tending her seraph-star
discarding unsought thought streams

harrowing song of early morning wrens
welter of discordant sounds
fracturing silence, bearing ill tidings

no dreams visit, to share in a cup of coffee,
a casual glance, a slight smile
a neophyte in solitude, loathsome-
resigned to wait for a celestial reunion

day begins for the consummate insomniac
weary eyes, heavy soul, sunrise cynic
practiced art, this daily grind
the hours, gravity's co-conspirator,
keep me earthbound

The luck continues...

2011 continues to be a good year for me... Verse Wisconsin has decided to publish another piece of poetry by yours truly. http://www.versewisconsin.org/  Northlawn will appear in a forthcoming issue, presumably in 2012 since they have just published issue no. 107 this week.(chek it out) Hopefully the good tidings carry over into next year. Coincidentally, my poetry group(which I will call Panoply until otherwise notified) will be publishing our book soon. Look for it by January 2012 at the latest. It is titled Portal and Piers. We also have started a blog by the name of Sunday Morning Press- This what we are using as a "publishing house. I have a link to it on this blog. The eventual hope is to be in a position to help publish not only more of our own stuff, either as a group or individually as well as others we feel are deserving and maybe do not have the knowledge, funds or support to do so themselves. We will most likely be selling the books from the SMP blog and/or Facebook links. It would make a great Christmas gift- if we can get it out by then. Only $10! I may even be able to get you a signed copy...

For now, I'll leave you with this;

Mosaic

I watch the treetops as they sway in the breeze

dancing freely, on a cool summer’s eve

the crickets sing their nighttime song

while one dog dutifully patrols the lawn

the other lay panting at my feet

glad for the reprieve from late summer heat

a purple and green mosaic fills my eye

night acting as canvas for the firefly

update...

2 out of 3 pieces sent to Upstreet have been rejected; Defined and The Ladder, still waiting to hear about Eclipse, as well as the poems sent to Adirondack Review and Verse Wisconsin. Still keeping my fingers crossed...

Defined

We live our lives

pressed together

between the pages

of a dictionary

placed here by some

odd coincidence of origin

our inked skin defines us

to one another, though

we still struggle to understand

the words being shouted

from this album left

resting on a high shelf

The Ladder

My wife watches from her post

on the porch as I disappear

into the garage, emerging

a few minutes later, after

some clanging and banging,

carrying a ladder.

A satisfied look settles

on her face, thinking

I am finally getting

to the honey- do list

left magnetized

to the refrigerator.

“What are you doing?”

She calls after me as I walk

to the middle of the yard, laying

the ladder in the un-mowed grass.

Sharp, deep green blades part to make way

for the aluminum rungs and rails.

Without answering, I stand back, admiring

the play of the sun off the gleaming metal

and the contrast of silver and green

before returning to my blue plastic chair

on the ray soaked patio, picking up

pencil and notebook once again. Intending

to write about the jaunty angle of the ladder.

Or, how unapparent it would be to any observer

as to which way is up and

which is down and where

one would be going anyways

that such a conveyance would be needed.

The re-imagined structure has become

as much a curiosity to me-

the creator as the hundreds

of bugs now crawling along it stiles.

Behind me I hear the opening

And closing of the back door.

sharing is caring

Billy Collins is my favorite poet, as I am sure he is many an aspiring poets favorite. He is the master of the everyday minutiae of simply living life. Collins is a former Poet Laureate of the United States. I want to share a few poems from Ballistics 2008.

The Idea of Natural History at Key West

When I happened to notice myself
walking naked past a wall-length mirror

one spring morning
in a house by the water
where a friend was letting me stay,

I looked like one of those silhouettes
that illustrate the evolution of man,

but not exactly the most recent figure.
I seemed to represent a more primitive stage,
maybe not the round-shouldered ape

dragging his knuckles on the ground,
but neither the fully upright hominoid

ready to put on a suit and head for the office.
Was it something in the slope of my brow
or my slack belly?

Was this the beginning of the Great Regression
as the anthropologists of tomorrow would call it?

I was never the smartest monkey on the block,
I thought to myself in the shower,
but I was at least advanced enough to be standing

under a cascade of steaming water,
and I did have enough curiosity to wonder
what the next outline in the sequence might look like:

the man of the future stepping forward
like the others rising to their hind legs behind him,

only with a longer stride, a more ample cranium,
and maybe a set of talons,
or a pair of useless, cherubic wings.

Divorce

Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they hired.

Ornithography

    The legendary Cang Jie was said to

    have invented writing after observing

    the tracks of birds

A light snow last night,

and now the earth falls open to a fresh page.

A highwind is breaking up the clouds,

children wait for the yellow bus in a huddle,

and under the feeder, some birds

are busy writing short stories,

poems and letters to their mothers.

A crow is working on an editorial.

That chickadee is etching a list,

and a robin walks back and forth

composing the opening to her autobiography.

All so prolific this morning,

these expressive little creatures,

and each with an alphabet of only two letters.

The Golden Years

All I do these drawn-out days

is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge

where there are no pheasants to be seen

and, last time I looked, no ridge.

I could drive over to Quail Falls

and spend the day there playing bridge,

but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail

would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

I knowawidow at Fox Run

and another with a condo at Smoky Ledge.

One of them smokes, and neither can run,

so I'll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?

I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.