There is a neat service I just yesterday found out about. Its name is ISSUU and it is a very nice showcase for making our writings attractively available to wide audiences.
You can check out my April Dailies 2011 as one example there (and I hope you will), and you can also see many magazines etc. and/or put up documents of your own.
Poetry lightens shuttered hearts,
engages jaded minds.
Its lines illuminate cold nights,
ameliorate hot days.
It celebrates the best in us,
retells that till it’s true.
Forever here until it goes,
each poem preserves its space
in thoughts as visible as wind,
as loud as falling snow.
Home from the towers hiding suit go in village
big shirt and jeans custom scuffed leather boots
Rolling Stone issues with O’Rourke a must read
Punch in the great years of editor Cohen
seeming like old Times humour now gentle
music like thunder on bridges on way home
after smoke after taste faux friendly noise
bars well known and never forever returning
grimaces stranding in stand in emotions
first light not all right quick love making all right
off in a daze breakfast snack bars and papers
up in the tower a suit among peer groups
and papers those always and budgets and bytes
random lunch restaurants over tipped waiters
cars for the trip back and tipped back and snoring
next morning meetings prepared for and boring
systems arising and changing the world
ways not imagined or cared about much
systems devised cause we could and we did
we can and we do it we do it again
thunder like music it’s all rock and roll.
It could be worse, unlikely as that seems.
We have paid to watch an angry woman talk.
We get more than we’ve bargained for: she screams.
About unfairness. She says choices stalk
and mess her up. She says she tires of Free.
She strides unlady likely on the stage
demanding Structure, hating Sartre. ‘He,’
nonstop she’s shrilling, ‘has saddled me with rage!’
I could ask how, but fear that would incite
her formulation of a louder answer.
I cannot stand to sit here stunned all night.
There is mostly monologue, no song, no dancer.
I watch my watch and realise some days
the ticket’s not the only price one pays.
rat pack made benign
alcoholism graceful
as seen on tv
always glass in hand
many talented crooners
ready quips and laughs
golden voices
left alone in limousines
once brightened our lives
maybe also theirs
anyone listening
might have thought back then
The below-horizon sun redlines the clouds,
accelerates their thinning till all’s clear.
The day makes light of darkness and its shrouds
and with silhouette and sound the birds appear.
Grey herons lift from graveyard nests and plane
above the houses cruising to the sites
they will fish today. From trees blackbirds explain
in glorious song their territorial rights.
A mallard beats a rival with his beak,
re-joins his pretty partner and they fly,
they and the rival. Jackdaws light and seek
what darkness hid, and find it now the sky
is filled with sun and sound. Old church bells ring
in another summer day this magic Spring.
When ‘why’ deserts me and now rye’s anathema
and wordplay fails to keep emotions out
I grow sombre, still, elated. I am a jumble.
My memories fill and empty what was me
– or ‘I’ – I still search language for a clue
to what it’s all about – until, relaxing,
I join enjoyed memories and flow.
Our decades on the throne give us perspective.
We do not listen to the folk we greet.
If they have titles, they are derived from some selective
amusement. We and they both know it’s meet
that they bow somewhat profusely while we gaze
at the wall behind them. Each must know his place
as we know ours. Until the end of days
we will reign sublimely, chosen by the grace
of God, our only peer, He’s claimed to us.
Things change and princes marry, die, divorce
not always in that order and the fuss
of ministers and budgets is a course
to run, say some unhindered by a throne
and wishing till they’re ill they had our own.
Earth Tourist 