Channie Greenberg, Intelligence’s Vast Bonfires

excerpt

Intelligence’s Vast Bonfires

Author: Channie Greenberg
Publisher: Stonesthrow Poetry
Lazarus Media LLC
(December 15, 2012)
Vendor: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Print Length: 167 pages
File size: 273 kb
ASIN: B00AP05JK6

It is insufficient either to be the next widget writer, or, at the other extreme, to struggle to please academic champions. Living verse necessarily has to gambol past imaginary hedgehogs chowing on jelly-filled doughnuts, beyond the strictures of high ranking scholastic trolls, and into the rainbow abysses found only in rural, secret places. Successful poetry must simultaneously hamper mundanity and shun the use of thick words.

Within Intelligence’s Vast Bonfires, jeremiads sit alongside of celebrations, and announcements of scientific discoveries make friends with samples of more exotic arts. Forays into civilian disobedience are illuminated, here, next to stanzas that toady hegemonic strictures. Praise, flash, and glory are housed, as well, adjacent to the fetid trenches of convergent marketing efforts.

Accordingly, Intelligence’s Vast Bonfires concurrently beams worshipful and cheeky, touches on commonplaces as well as on specialized topics, and freely makes use of motes both odd and ordinary. What’s more, this compilation makes no apologies, even between the lines, for phrases which strive to be fully corporeal or for literary devices which are functionally more magic than median.

Imaginative writings, despite protests to the contrary, given linguistic limitations, must mirror, at least partially: the social-political places to which their creators have traveled, the interpersonal negotiations in which their creators have involved themselves, and the difficult pecuniary decisions which their creators have made. It remains ineluctable that poetry, including the pieces assembled here, can not otherwise be brought into existence.

To Eat One More Bouquet of Ethereal Flowers:
Doggerel’s Flophouse

To eat one more bouquet of ethereal flowers,
Perfumed by sunlight and by rainbows,
Signed sincerely,
Could bring trouble.

Waking up in verse,
When words float toward mindfulness,
Evading more than red box bark,
Or recessives of doggerel’s lost beauty.

Mislaid letters sent ahead,
To fledglings who comprehend
Just pieces highly illuminated,
Stinking until tomorrow.

Arguments might flow
From points,
Softness, or inbetween,
Ineluctably.

Hence, while mangy mental wombats sing
Praises of well-turned prose,
I cringe, I hide, I decry things
Better left unsaid, unknown.

Crying on Borrowed Time

All but fishers, ermines, raccoons
Subjugated themselves,
When that sweet girl, Luri,
Dropped redwood tears and such.

Speaking softly to some unknown
Ghost, spirit, apparition,
The maid wailed
With bovine elegance.

In her haste to press sylvan,
She tore her petticoat,
Muddied her apron,
Ruined her mascara.

The ravens blamed
Some optic nerve hypoplasia
Before their entire coterie
Enjoyed fresh, virgin lunch.

Tang Rather than Piquant

Tang rather piquant fills teapots these mornings.
Worse than the high cost of disposable diapers and hospital birthing fees,
Urban rents loom so large as to become sufficiently gaseous to cause ride failure.

Consider that adding dive brakes to the cars does naught to thwart pedestrian accidents;
Mechanical permutations still can’t transform broken hearts into complete units.
Singing round after round of “The Farmer in the Dell,” too, remains an ineffectual patch-up.

Given that most pungent, static creatures, otherwise not on A Lists, gyre, woofing sadly.
Children’s affections, cost more than cotton candy, looms for loons, hunting licenses, steel wool.
Adult love, as well, flares less spectacularly than dandruff, unless plastic surgery fees get paid.

Residual romances, too, collected with soiled socks, dead mice, tripe, serve as waste boxes.
Bounteous orders for April Fool’s cards, likewise, indicate that matrons seeking half salaries win.
Even when their keepers forget to apply kindnesses, those birds flock over corpses.

As if we emphasized all upcoming performances of pantuom, of villanelle, of Malayan verse.
Repeating our lives’ lines for audience neither appreciating nor disdaining, instead, ignoring those works.
Coming together, two disjointed entities cease to amaze, to comfort, to confer hope. Spit, though, rocks.