~~A Literary Ode for Norma~~
Current mood: loved
Category: Writing and Poetry

A Literary Ode for Norma

Shakespeare would've compared thee to a rose.
But you'll never be the pallid rose is a rose of Gertie.
I wish I could hold Blake's infinity in my palm
and give it to you to express my eternal love.
If only we were contemporaries of literary luminaries,
we could explore first hand the fury of Faulkner,
the prissiness of Proust,
the wickedness of Wilde,
and the contempt of Camus.
How wonderful would it be
for us to sit with Virgina in the room of her own?
Ah to cut a rug with Fitzgerald!
Or stalk some buff with Papa Hemingway!
Good thing my last name isn't Macomber.
Should we shun our sobriety
we could shroom with Carroll,
or borrow Burrough's opium pipe.
We were born too late, lamentably,
to sort out D.H. Lawrence's sexuality.
Yet, you can be my Lady Chatterly,
and I'll be your gamekeeper.
It would've been fun
to camp out with Carver in his cabin
or roll the dice with Dostoevsky.
But I've woven such a fable here,
mere wishes without Aesop moral,
a writer's midday dream.
Just be secure my sweet Norma,
we'll write our own poetry
you and I,
greater than any Homeric ode.
And while I search for the perfect way
to illustrate what you mean to me,
sorting through the sage words of literary past,
I'll borrow bon mots from Henley's "Invictus" to state—
I may be the master of my own fate,
but you're the true captain of my soul.


© 2008 PJ Maytag all rights (and Norma) reserved

**postscript—I've been a bit scarce this week on blogs cause I'm having connection issues at home and I have to be careful to not be on long while at work, but I think I've resolved the issue and can catch up a bit finally. You know me, the good codependent I am, I hate being behind on my blog reading and comment response cause I feel so guilty...lol. If I missed something you want to make sure I read, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to oblige. It's great to see you all here and I appreciate you taking the time to read and comment on my work—it means a lot to me. =)

8:08 PM - 25 Comments - 52 Kudos - Add Comment

~TESTIMONIAL~
Current mood: cynical
Category: Writing and Poetry

TESTIMONIAL

Their lives a living verse
Their words testify
See the inanimate anchorman reporting a country's conflagration
He testifies
See the keening woman clutching a triangled flag
She testifies
See polygamy's children haunted by confession
They testify
See the meth monster dumpster diving for cans
It testifies
See our ashen faces
We testify
You revel in the void
Evil invisible to unwilling eyes
Ash keeps falling from heaven
Silent testimony
The castigated angel of the flame


© 2008 PJ Maytag all rights (and world weariness) reserved

Currently listening : Viva La Vida By Coldplay Release date: 2008-06-17

2:00 AM - 35 Comments - 64 Kudos - Add Comment

Billy—Saturday in the Park
Current mood: busy
Category: Writing and Poetry

A couple weeks ago I went to Sunrise Park here in Palm Springs with a group of gals called Brainwave, a grassroots community of women who want to make a difference in our town by doing different charitable works. We brought a potluck to the homeless people that live in the park—feeding lunch and snacks to nearly 30 people. Some of them had been on the streets for years, but more alarmingly were the working poor and families we encountered who have a job but no home cause they can't make ends meet. People like you and I, some with families to support, that were victims of circumstance. It's not just the crazy, alcoholic and addicted stereotype living on our streets these days. It really changed the way I looked at the homeless. So many stories…Billy was just one of them.

*P.S.—The pic isn't from that day, I found it on the net, but it reminded me of the scene at our park-it was taken in a park in Salt Lake City I think…


Billy—Saturday in the Park

Hawaiian shirt. Faded ball cap.
Leather tan. Missing teeth.
Like yellow broken piano ivories.
Billy's spent six years on the street.
"Thanks for the sandwiches," he said.
"And for the books—I like Patterson."
I told him it was my pleasure,
the least I could do.
Then he snatched my hand, whispering,
"But most of all," he smiled,
"Thanks for actually talking to me,
people seldom do."
Sandwiches may fill the belly
for an hour, maybe two.
Kind words though,
feed a homeless soul,
lingering
a little longer.


© 2008 PJ Maytag all rights (and random acts of kindness) reserved

Currently listening : Friend Opportunity By Deerhoof Release date: 2007-01-23

1:16 PM - 58 Comments - 66 Kudos - Add Comment

In The Colorado Desert (May)
Current mood: mellow
Category: Writing and Poetry

In the Colorado Desert (May)

Today's desert squall
loosened heat's smothering grip.
For the briefest caesura
temperance peered out
from behind spring's fading veil.
Like a small child peeking behind a curtain
relieved to find no boogeyman lurking;
ignoring the arid darkness spilling
from summer's closet door left ajar behind her.
The rain's blessing a paltry penance paid,
forgotten under tomorrow's torrid sun.


© 2008 PJ Maytag all rights (and sweet sudden storms) reserved

Currently listening : Narrow Stairs By Death Cab for Cutie Release date: 2008-05-13

12:16 PM - 33 Comments - 36 Kudos - Add Comment

~The Lush Life~
Current mood: fermented
Category: Writing and Poetry

The Lush Life

She presides there,
at the farthest corner of the bar in the Last Drop Inn.
Her cigarette smoke stroking the willing air with nicotine seduction
before it curls around her head,
like some ether bound crown of thorns.
She stares at her Glenlivet on the rocks,
marveling at the erosion of the ice,
the scotch licking the round hollow cubes from the inside out.
Just like her past hollows out her heart,
a lifetime of "if onlys" the mortar of her misery.
Her hidden cancer, the self respect she keeps in her bell jar,
more elusive than the white picket hopes
of her youth thrown beneath disillusions wheels.
She assuages her precarious ego with an alcoholic grandiosity
that evaporates each night between the sheets of her sterile bed.
Some nights she's the callous courtesan to the desperate johns of 2 am
beer blind to the crosshatch of time on her over made face.
They never linger—leaving a couple twenties on her nightstand,
guilty tithes to the previous nights transgressions.
Yet every night you can find her here at the Last Drop Inn,
the booze banishing her emptiness,
for another day, another hour.
Her barfly stigmata, the highball in her cradled hands,
the mark of a life spent stalking
the asphalt jungles of Upton Sinclair.


© 2008 PJ Maytag all rights (and bitter barflys) reserved

Currently listening : Pretty. Odd. By Panic at the Disco Release date: 2008-03-25

12:24 PM - 63 Comments - 60 Kudos - Add Comment

9:32 PM
Current mood: amorous
Category: Writing and Poetry

The Louis Agassiz statue at Stanford after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (amazingly enough, only its nose was broken from the fall)



9:32 pm

Contentment's silence is found
in our epilogue's waxing pages.
A knowledge
rather than felt.
The heart skips during the aftershock
not the quake.
That easy peace
love
before the fall.



© 2008 PJ Maytag all rights (and happy landings) reserved

Currently listening : In Rainbows By Radiohead Release date: 2008-01-01

1:38 PM - 50 Comments - 52 Kudos - Add Comment

False Idols
Current mood: obsequious
Category: Writing and Poetry

(I guess my muse is stirring—finished this one last night)


Worshiping False Idols

Late at night your seduction whispers Aramaic to my heart
Stony lips mouthing dead language dreams
My body flushes a white-washed Vicodin sweat
The slap of your bruised knuckle words a one-two punch

You're the ache in my bone that severs sleep
A nauseous heat so far away within
Consonants breathe their needling pain in my desire
A symbiotic code contextualizing my libido

Your sentences like Easter Island statues stack
Testament to lust's sweet decay
All your promises, the pagans dancing round my ego
Kissing extinction's lips behind a skein of lies


© PJ Maytag 2008 all rights (and Houdini disappearing acts) reserved

Currently listening : Vampire Weekend By Vampire Weekend Release date: 2008-01-29

7:40 PM - 52 Comments - 48 Kudos - Add Comment

JULY ’03
Current mood: hopeful
Category: Writing and Poetry

Hey guys!
First of all, I owe you all a HUGE apology for disappearing for so long. It was really thoughtless and all around shitty to take time off from MSpace without letting you all know, but I had some personal issues (more than I care to go into at the moment) I just had to sort through—and then I fell in love. Presto: the lesbian in love disappearing act! But that's no excuse and I realize I hurt a lot of feelings because of my selfishness. Many people dropped me as a friend, and well, I don't blame them. I hope those of you who didn't 86 me can forgive me—and I promise I won't pull that kind of happy horseshit again.
Norma's a wonderful woman—everything I dreamed and more than I could imagine love could ever feel like. It blows away every conception of what I thought was true love. Mushy? You bet, but I can't begin to articulate what a beautiful human being she is except to say she's my soul mate. That's why I asked her to marry me…and we're tying the knot on 08-08-08. Best of all, it'll be a legal union in the state of California now, thanks to the state Supreme Courts decision. Hopefully it's a first step towards removing sanctioned discrimination towards people like me in this country. Being marginalized really sucks the big one.
Another reason I haven't been on is I lost my poetry muse for real. I haven't written a poem, nor been able to—since last January when I wrote this poem. It's a poem I've wanted to write for the last five years—I hope you like it.
I'm really looking forward to talking to everyone—please believe me when I say I've missed you all and thought about you all while I was gone, and I'm looking forward to reading your writing and catching up with you all.
—PJ


JULY '03

That July was dusted
with Redtail feathers and regret.
When bruises were tattooed
and planes went nowhere.
Hours occupying hollow
darkness like the dank owl nest
found in our cottonwood.
The same tree that snowed
feather dander every June.

That July you had mummy feet,
the skin on your legs
the angry shade
of a contused merlot.
Your taloned toenails
chalky jaundice-white.
Your lower limbs looked like
a child had drawn them
with waxy crayons marred by heat.
Mapping the brevity
between baby teeth and cremation.

We spent a week of afternoons
flying in your bed,
in your figment fuselage,
you inquiring,
where were we flying?
A week logging the gurgled bellows
from your lesioned lungs
beneath the cobalt marrow
of Wyoming sky.

That same sky you once carved
with metaled ailerons,
before you became the hawkish man;
translucent skin draped
upon your skeleton frame,
looking more like a raptor hatchling
with electric wisps of downy hair
crowning your bald pate.

And at the terminal,
life's circuit was somehow completed
by the puerile snores
from your four year old granddaughter,
succumbed to sleep
on the carpet next to her Gimpy's bed.
As you whistled tandem grace
with each sodden breath.

I wonder if she dreamed of airplanes,
or maybe impossible hawks.
As were your dreams.
Always it was wings with you.
I wish you flew faster dad—
that July.

Currently listening : A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation By The Wombats Release date: 2008-01-13

4:22 PM - 54 Comments - 50 Kudos - Add Comment

Mi Dispiace (I’m sorry)
Current mood: indescribable
Category: Writing and Poetry

Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, finished in 1452 (started in 1425), Firenze, Italy


Mi dispiace (I'm sorry)

Ghiberti's Gates may promise paradise,
but really it is only illusory space.
A gilded door delineating
sackcloth delights.

And Beatrice is always
betrayed because Italian
is the language of harlots
and pious popes—such irony.

My torpid tongue cannot spit out
the tangled ti amo of your kiss.
My linear perspective
a lapse of moral indiscretion.

Your obsession…
the vanishing point.


©2007 PJ Maytag all rights (and guilded moments) reserved

Currently listening : Can I Keep This Pen? By Northern State Release date: 28 August, 2007

5:44 AM - 60 Comments - 89 Kudos - Add Comment

~~~Declination~~~
Current mood: hungry
Category: Writing and Poetry

Declination

The days run like brandy skin clinging to a snifter glass;
a cobalt glaze creeping down the cup of tethered sky.
Naked October in the leafless mantled desert
filled with dust devil's lazy gyres stirring dry.

Still, saber sunlight cuts creeping shadows,
its oblique rays redefining reality mundane.
As if the world has turned the other cheek and
in anticipated hush, awaits winter's snowy frame.

Yet the desert only shrugs its sandy shoulders,
never having kissed the bastard child of fall.
Unable to wear aspiring autumn amber,
its temperate ears deaf to her seductive call.


©2007 PJ Maytag all rights (and only two seasons) reserved

Currently listening : Atlantis: Hymns for Disco By K Os Release date: 20 February, 2007

2:40 AM - 59 Comments - 123 Kudos - Add Comment