Norman Fischer
Four Poems

More Than Before

 

At least as much as before

More than wanted or thought to

Or hurled words upon the soft

That one confesses pelting

Rawness without sorrow or wound

In this perfectly perfect painterly picture

Pervading permissible places with names

The low the high the bad the good etc.

To be shouted into storm

At least as much as before

 

 

 

Poem (marching orders)

 

No use trying to hide the plain-sight secret

Whose secret? Not mine, yours

The peripheral knows the peripheral speaks the peripheral

Slides out from the clammy cupboard so scummy in there so fly-blown

Then get born and picks up marching orders it’s all

Demarcated in advance so much time for so many

Steps each one deft according to the chart

Whether you take it

Or stumble back

Words remain bombastic and ironic the whole time you mouth them

As you stew in life’s duplicitous everydayness

Of obdurate stuff and uncooked emotion

Gray outside today as usual on windy California coast

One among the conceivable locations some daytime light 

Moon and stars at night

 

 

 

Poem (song birds)

 

Control the children if you’re able

Can’t then get them back into their outfits

Ladies, please come forward

With your hand-held roses

Corruption presides over all the world

Under a yellow parasol 

And then songbirds walk gingerly

Over corpses or other meathunks

As discovered later when people finally

Find gumption to peep out from under covers

Driven to that of their own unhappiness

That finally got too much, the unfairness of it all

Makes them weep they know not why

Wide world of whose making?

Mantled world masked by whom?

Noted duly and circumstantially inspired

In this duet I’m singing with you

In my male and female voices

 

 

 

A Riddle?

 

It’s

A fat monk

In bulky robes

Shaved pate

In slightly bent

Posture

 

It’s Australia

With a little happy

Cloud floating

Overhead

 

It’s a person

Hair blown back

By wind

Looking forward

Resolutely in teeth

Of that wind

 

It’s two 

Little clouds

Chasing

Each 

Other, one

In foreground

One in distance

 

It’s 60 people

Sitting so close

They seem like

One large clotted person

 

It’s a brain 

Outside a windowpane

A nationstate

A lake

 

 

 

As World Turns

 

There’s a reason for it

Far out in space perhaps

But I couldn’t know

That the way I’m tuned

So to self thought

Such local thought

This one, that,

So noble and fine

While birds around

Here flit cheerful

Fight over food just

Being alive 

Birds come, go,

Dart all ways

Nest and breed as

Things do once they 

Start I’m unsure of

Thoughts, words

Form them it might 

Be me creates 

World I have to live in

With others 

Rub sticks together’s friction

Or fire if you’re

Persistent 

Or need the warmth

That burns you down