Starpoet by Lisa Jain Thompson
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Starpoet Newsletter Vol. VIII, No. XXXVII

Saturday, 08 September 2007 21:00 Last Updated on Saturday, 08 September 2007 18:39
The
Starpoet 
Newsletter 
Vol. VIII, No. XXXVII
 
 
 
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Do you not see how I alter:
My skin with its aging,
My black hair gone white,
My legs scarcely carrying
Me, who went dancing
More neatly than fawns once
(Neatest of creatures)?
No, no one can cure it; keep beauty from going,
And I cannot help it.
God himself cannot do what cannot be done.
 
Sappho c. 580 B. C. E.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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I shall to the Renaissance Festival this weekend go.  Will try for new photos, jewelry, and soothing words.
 
 
 
 
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I was listening to Rhino's Peter, Paul, and Mary Greatest Hits CD, when I decided that Noel Paul Stookey's Wedding Song needed updating for the new millennium.
 
 
 
 
The Gentle Feet of the Cretan Girls
(A Wedding Song for the Rest of Us)
 
 
Now go to sleep
On the breast of your sweetheart
 
 
At the calling of your hearts, you will be married,
Raise high the roof beams, you will be married.
As sure as the sunshine falls from the heavens,
United in your spirits, you are one in your hearts.
Wherever two or more are gathered in love,
Love will win out.
 
 
One will leave their mother, another will leave their home,
To call upon the four winds that the two shall be as one,
As it was in beginning is now and till the end,
We draw life from each other and give it back again,
Where there is love,
Love will win out.
 

What is the reason for becoming partners,
Becoming two hearts beating at one rhythm?
Love is the answer, we must believe
That even when the world is crashing in around us,
Where there is love,
Love will win out.
 
 
The marriage of your spirits, the joining of two lives,
Wherever you are gathered, there will be love,
And love will win out.
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2007
 
 
 
 
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 shopping
 
 
 
Lipstick, Smoke, and Shadows
 
 
 
Let us go shopping, you and I,
Into the hungry maw of the mall,
Where half-naked victorias
Titillate boys eyes
And the season's designers beckon
From every well tricked window.
 
 
We can buy our cent at the make-up store
-- Carefully selecting the one that's just us,
Pushing our way through the young girls in the aisles
Apply color to each other for good practice --
Then have coffe and biscotti outside Nordstrom's
While we check the balance on our debit cards.
 
 
We can be good and patriotic Americans,
Driving the economy to new heights,
With each dress and high fashion purchase
Providing housing for the associates tending counter.
What a grand thing to do on a sunny afternoon!
 
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2007
 
 
 
 
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I'm so pleased Michael Vick found Jesus.
I remember when Bonnie and Clyde found Jesus.
It was during those moments when Ranger Captain Frank Hamer
was peppering their car with machine-gun bullets.
I also remember when John Dillinger found Jesus.
It was just after he walked out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago,
and federal officer Melvin Purvis said, 'Hold it right there, Johnny.'
-- Sally Jenkins’ Father
 
 
 
 
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setting the stage
 
 
 
Ink on Paper
 
 
 
In the dying days of ink on paper,
I sit quietly forming my black marks on white lined paper,
One voice in a long line of very old magic.
 
I sing with those things that float around me,
Tumbling out of the shifting welter into carefully constructed artifacts
Of entanglement and confusion.
 
I find myself an ancillary character,
Hovering above the chaos as I cast my shadow
Across the growing clutter of viral videos and narrowband casts.
 
But a year from now, a decade even,
This page will remain, this ink, unstuck from time and flashful nodes,
A virtual moment assembled on the fly.
 
There are no bright stage lights, there is nothing left to win.
In vast gulf of stars and silence, I work at my game,
Crafting aural exercises that the eye must hear,
 
Cascading gray matters into bright neural synapses
That outlast the few seconds of conscious recognition
To connect us all with our ancestors and ourselves.
 
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2007
 
 
 
 
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another view of the mountain
 
 
 
 
The Poet, Year Zero
 
 
 
Up on the tightrope,
The glare of the camera's lights
Shadows every move;
A palpable sense of mystery
Is difficult to maintain
Above the earth's every eye.
 
 
If you want to give me an award,
I will accept it,
But I may not party with you afterwards;
The moment flies by so swiftyly
And then no more.
 
 
The excitement of virtuality passes,
Words fade,
The cheers grow distant,
Memory persists.
The ages know if I have done well.
 
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2007
 
 
 
 
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Whenever I hear survivors of natural disasters
thanking God for sparing their lives and their homes,
I feel nothing but amazement and incomprehension.
How can anyone possibly see his neighbor's house destroyed by a tornado
and think that a deity had something to do with sparing his own house?
What utter arrogance is embodied in such beliefs!
As for the victims, the idea that "God must have his reasons"
is the embodiment of utter passivity,
a survival from the infancy of the human race.
There are reasons, and they have nothing to do with gods
and everything to do with the human capacity
for evil and the indifference of nature.
--  Susan Jacoby
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 9.11.01
 
 
 
 
 
 
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How can you tell someone is an intellectual? 
 
Their hands are uncallused.
 
 
 
 
 
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as usual, looking around
 
 
 
 
Mutual Distractions
 
 
 
When we are young, sex is everything,
Driving us to orgasm by hand or partner,
A deep bred instinct to perpetuate the species
That few of us have the willpower to ignore.
 
 
We pretend to be making love,
But most of us are simply fucking,
A girl or two here, a boy over there,
A child if we are mad with obsession.
 
 
We could cloak ourselves in scholarly explanations,
Redemptive stories of church and bride,
Familial demands for rapid propagation,
That clothe with finery our animal nature.
 
 
But once whatever love has gone
With legal paperwork, paid and settled,
What remains is the memory of the fucking
And wonder how we could ever have been so wrong.
 
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
Septmber 2007
 
 
 
 
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same mountain, another view
 
 
 
Blue Nile Drainage
 
 
  
I have no interest
In the latest celebrity lurid car crash,
The slow motion wreckage
That passes for skill and talent,
The mad hospital rush to rehab,
Jesus, and redemption.
 
 
I live in carefully constructed chaos,
Sucking earth and air into my lungs
In great breaths of creation.
 
 
Out of the high plains of the Ethiopian plateau,
Out to the last shards of firmanent
Burning themselves to extinction,
I find my way, a single voice
Alive with my humanity
And the bright promise of our existence.
 
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2007
 
 
  
 
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Are sex dolls asking for it?
 
 
 
 
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cutting through identity politics and all the gender theorists
 
 
 
 
The Path of Least Resistance
 
 
 
 
The crackle of everyday resistance,
Participating in the world
Because it's the only thing to do,
Never articulating the issues,
Feigning disinterest in news articles
And media explorations
While purusing every odd paper
In the medical journals:
The inner life is all.
 
 
Bright girls on scholarship,
You live, you suffer, you live some more,
Hiding yourself in drugs and drink
And the heave and sweat and lurch
Of physical contact
As you ruminate about the malady
Of being alive.
 
 
Cramming yourself into little boxes
More suitable for your brother,
Your sister,
Your parents and grandparents,
Losing your soul in pledges of equality,
The overthrow of the bourgeois patriarchy,
The triump of the working class
As you rebel against whatever you've got,
Knowing there is no privacy
When everything you are
Must remain deeply private.
 
 
Compensating by living as intensely as possible
Until you reach that point
When either death or sea change
Is a foot step away
And you realize that not changing
Is like death itself and there is
A brightly split moment
When you just don't know
If you are reaching for the gun
Or reaching for your cell phone
As you wonder how your children
Will think of you
After everything is said and done,
The words are spoken,
And the parent they knew from birth
Is gone.
 
 
 
Lisa Jain Thompson
September 2007
 
 
 
 
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PEACE
 
  
 
 
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Copyright © Lisa Jain Thompson 1995-2007. Further distribution of this newsletter in its entirety is authorized. Email your letters and postcards or visit her contact page at the Starpoet website.
 
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