Sunday, November 15, 2009

Botanical Gardens

(for Dawn S.)

I’m in a tree maze searching for a minotaur.
I’m eating a bowl of cereal pretending I’m not lactose intolerant.
I’m thinking of you thinking of me as we both pretend otherwise.

I want you.
I want you so bad.
I want to marry you and have broken children with you.

We are film noir.
We are the dingy undigested streets of Los Angeles.
We are Betty and Veronica.

I am trying desperately to make friends with a mind I have ignored since before I was a tadpole or baby cookie monster.
I am trying unsuccessfully to get you to return to a farm neither one of us seems to believe in any longer.
I know my intellect both electrifies and scares you to death and that eating in some greasy spoon with you was just the tip of a very intimate but freezing cold ice-cube.

I need to be Winslet to your DiCaprio, Hepburn to your Tracy, Eve to your Adam.
I need to stop clinging to that which does not cling back and try once and for all to be more than just somebody else’s spilled milk.
Watching movies with you was like attending Church except no one judged you and the sermons actually made sense.

Touch of Evil is playing in my head except in this version Charlton Heston’s part is played by an actual Mexican.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to watch Chimes At Midnight without falling asleep.
I wonder who your Rosebud is and if like me you weren’t too terribly impressed with Citizen Kane but loved The Magnificent Ambersons.

You are like an open book written in some foreign language.
You are like a distant memory incapable of closure or recompense.
You are my Scopes Trial and I refuse to be anyone else’s monkey but yours.

Charles Eric Cicirella
November 15, 2009

OH MY GOODNESS!

(for Dawn F.)

You need to give yourself more credit
You need to give yourself a head start
You need to need without worrying so much about the ramifications or repercussions of giving a damn about another living, breathing human being.

I’ve had friends who were lions
I’ve had friends who were tigers
I’ve had friends who were grizzly bears
Oh my goodness I’ve had a petting zoo worth of acquaintances, lost and found in an Emerald City of supply and demand gone awry.

You need to begin the process of healing and rejuvenation
You need to need something apart from that which appears before you as a safety net or comfort zone.
You need to relocate the fairy-tale-princess held captive inside of you before all the stores close and the starry night blinks out from either lack of interest or intrigue.

I shouldn’t be telling you what you need
In truth I haven’t a clue what I need
I’m just another doggie-for-sale in a department-store-window located somewhere over-the-rainbow or around the next slow-train-bend in an upturned road of automated commerce and blues-tinged-song lyrics.

Highway 61 calls out to us like it must still call out for Zimmerman.
Highway 61 a folded tartan napkin desperately trying to locate the culture it once purged like are- you-experienced-vomit or vociferous prayer.
Highway 51 runs right by my baby’s door and that’s no secret nor is it much of a confession.

We must stop dancing so insidiously in the shoot-out-the-lights dark.
I believe we desperately need revisit the casinos inside our holy-uncompromised-selves and get in touch with this slot-machine-mentality brimming beneath a comic-book-facade we too quickly dismiss as unnecessary and undeserving of human love or animalistic desires.
We must soon recreate the first day we were born and wish upon every shooting star crucified before our tired eyes like a traveling salesman or unmitigated song and dance man.

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”*

Charles Eric Cicirella
November 12, 2009

*Amazing Grace by John Newton (1725-1807)

Julianna Muse

The fire inside of me is burning to get out.
I want to eat an ice-cream sandwich.
I want to watch old movies and eat Chinese food with you in bed.

Here I am for the world to see but the world ignores me and the secrets I conceal are really not worth the paper they’re scrawled upon.
Here I am like Alice in Wonderland except I am not blonde and I do not believe in making friends with rabbits who carry a timepiece.
I am right here riding along with my dark passenger completely unaware of how vulnerable and naïve I oftentimes am.

I know you’re not a gilded lily.
I know you’re not a foreign film whose subtitles are difficult to read.
I know you’re not the Holy Bible shoved inside some motel drawer like an unpopular weather report or melting hot fudge sundae.

Julianna Muse is a rock star.
Julianna Muse is inspiration incarnate.
Julianna Muse is the most beautiful and moving prayer I will ever meditate upon.

The fire inside of me wishes it knew how to roller skate.
I want to eat a piece of pecan pie heated up with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream.
I want for us to drive through a sandstorm together listening to big band music, forgetting that we ever felt alone, unwanted or undesired.

I know what you are thinking.
I know I am too smart for my own good.
It’s true I have fallen upon my own sword too many times for this to not work out.

The fire inside of me is yearning to meet your fire head-on.

Charles Cicirella
November 12, 2009

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Julianna

Climb inside the fire
What haunts you often makes you whole
Treasure buried beneath our memories.

Before I was a poet I was nothing much
Before I was a cow I was a dolphin
Before I became a star I did not matter.

Do you remember first time you sat around a campfire?
Do you like your marshmallows roasted or in hot chocolate?
Do you ever dream you are Amelia Earhart?

Climb down inside the volcano
What hurts you often makes you stronger
Cloudbursts buried above our humanity.

Before you were a vision you were out of sight
Before you were a ballerina you were a mermaid
Before you became a muse you were a fairy goddess.

Do you recall the first time you rode a bicycle?
Would you rather dream when you are sleeping or when you are awake?
Do you ever wish that everything would stop making so much sense?

Enter the friendly fire
What scares you to death often brings you back to life
The secrets behind your brilliant eyes give you away every time.

Charles Cicirella
November 10, 2009

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Chai

(for Malkah)

Strumming your guitar
Strumming your sixth sense
Strumming the Heavens with your cup over flowing

Words like paint burst forth like droplets of blood and honey
A messenger arrived in the night bursting with sunlight
A lantern of foresight burns inside you

Rilke spoke of the bees of the invisible
He spoke loudly and he spoke clearly
Rilke like Milton communicated with God out of pure devotion

Your every move lights up the sky like shooting stars
Do you recall sitting on Mark Twain’s knee as he spun you the tallest of tales?
Every time you walk out onto the unfashionable stage an angel learns how to fly

We’re all children still in some fashion or another capable of responding to both suffering and joy
Even a Pale Horse must be led to water from time to time and made to drink.

Charles Cicirella
September 21, 2009

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Innuendo

(for Malkah)

title came yesterday
then I forgot
slept instead

Charlie Patton screamin’ and hollerin’
Mississippi Delta
roaring in cans

no innuendo
no impropriety
no indirection

title arrived late last night
wrestled me to cold ground
like a tentative whisper

I knew when it materialized
it would be for you Malkah
a convertible poem for a convertible kinda girl

roll windows down
throw out peanut shells
Gabriel’s Horn both infinite and finite

Charles Cicirella
September 19, 2009

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

I Don’t Feel Like Driving Through The Sun Today

(for Malkah)

Air conditioning just went on
Dust is everywhere
Carl Sagan isn’t returning any of my calls.

I don’t feel like driving through the sun today
Don’t feel like pretending I like you or that I actually ever did
Last time I felt anything medication meant aspirin not a bullet to the head.

I was flipping burgers when I got the call
He stood on a little garbage pail and ended his life
It’s been eleven years and I still couldn’t say how I feel.

Sure I miss him
Sure I miss feeling like someone actually gets me
Sure I miss not having to explain every little thing.

Can’t wait till the air goes back on
Maybe it will help disperse some of this dust
Maybe Carl Sagan will rise from the dead and tell us what it was like meeting Walt Disney.

I don’t feel like looking or even touching the telephone today
Did you ever cover up your television realizing once and for all how much it controls us?
First time I got high I was rolling around in the grass not smoking it.

Charles Cicirella
September 14, 2009

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Sweet Potato Pie

(for Dawn)

You are perfect
You are so fine

Perfectly timed
Perfectly aligned

Wishful sinner
Wishful beginner

I like pie
I like your sweet talk

You are something else entirely
You are no one’s back up singer!

CEC
8/15/2009

permanence versus impermanence

(for the Seeger family)

everything torn away,
but nothing torn down
and that which can be redeemed
will always be held sacred in our
lonesome blue cornflower hearts.

he strode into the saloon like a lone gunman
whose only purpose was the integrity
he knew must be upheld at any and every cost.

Atlas shrugged and Mike didn’t even blink
as vampire killers go he was as cool as a cucumber
flying beneath a status-quo-radar he knew he mustn’t
pay any actualized attention to for his work was far too
important to carry through and carry out before twilight
called him back home.

permanence versus impermanence such an empty debate
when too many real artists are going down beneath Noah’s flood
and his new lost city rambling ways taught a lesson to even the
oldest and most obstinate of dyed in the wool shaggy dogs.

a pioneer of future heroic feats whose beautiful Spirit will shine
forever more like Vincent’s brushstroke and Charley’s pick-strum
technique and there is high-water everywhere, but the music this
man created will never be washed away, will never be shot full of
holes, will never lead us astray.

Charles Cicirella
Monday, August 10, 2009

Genesis

(for Dawn)

the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of the world begins
and we are children
laughing
levitating
above swing sets
above clouds
we impersonate mayhem
we depersonalize mystery
the end of the nothing of the nothing of the world ends
and we are laughing stocks
stoic
silent alarms
under trees
under foot
we are unmade beds
we are the lumps in our own throats
the something of the something of the world does something new
and if I knew what it was I’d teach myself and others to speak in a new tongue
instead of all these dead languages projected inside our heads like Nostradamus on a bender..

Charlie
7/25/09

inclusive emotion

(for Laurie)

civilization
pottery shards
unicorn mystic
key to the highway

brazen intellectualism
beautiful bombshell
mermaid guardian
keeper of the keys

how do you keep so much truth
distilled inside of you like celebratory wine?
I believe you are a weather vane keeping the
secrets of mother nature safe and sound

human beings are not civilized
God did not invent progress
progressive thoughts minted God like senseless
dollars and cents

pottery constructed from defiant dreams
smoke and mirrors both divine and conquer
she is not an illusion nor is she formless
we are all keepers of an internal flame.

Charlie
July 18, 2009

3:33

Another dark night of the soul.

Another black hole I refuse to get sucked into.

Enough is enough until even enough neither satisfies nor satiates you.



I’d say I was out of my mind except not certain I was ever in my mind.

I’d say I will never give up the fight and yet the towel may have been thrown in over two thousand years ago on a Place of Skulls.

Belief is never an illusion and illusions are best when understated and pickled in brine.

I would whisper sweet nothings in your ear if I could find your ear and if I honestly believed saying nothing would make much of a difference at this time of insurrection.



Another dark night of the soul.

Another poem written in chicken scratch while my best intentions are left out in the cold.

I wish I had a box of Good & Plenty and there was an old theater I could escape inside.

Now I’m reminded of when we watched Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson in “Once Upon A Time In The West” and how everything we needed was right there.

Now I’m reminded of a time when pushing fast forward and rewind didn’t press so urgently on my heart and mind.


Charles Cicirella
May 27, 2009

Saturday, May 09, 2009

One and the Same

I am watching this life behind many eyes
I am passing through many different minds

I see, hear, sense but can not touch you
If I had the strength to wish upon a star I’d be a God but that is no longer a possibility in these impenetrable days of waste and nights of lost prayer.
I am no longer willing to fall upon my own sword or lend you the determination to shirk the responsibility you owe so faultlessly to yourself.

I am no one’s kindred spirit
My inner children refuse to speak to me
Future Gospels the same as ancient days.

I am a remote viewer, remote lover, remote sage
I am the refuse you refuse to accept before turning the page
I am the amusement park closed down over a thousand years ago out of pure spite.

I was in Vegas
Took Communion
The Priest an Indian Giver who demanded I return the Host.

Charlie
May 9, 2009

Days On End

I can feel poetry flowing through my veins.
I’m not The Terminator.
Can decide for myself what crimes to commit or not to commit.
I’m not a serial typist.

When we forged our deal we were supposedly in love.
A deal requiring us to be honest and trustworthy.
Did either one of us really have the wherewithal to make such a deal?
When the going got rough why did we so callously throw our love out the window?

Say what you will you still went back on your word while I left too much to chance when swallowing my words for naught.
I believe we were complicit for not spending enough time going out of our minds.
I believe we committed the perfect crime by allowing the passage of time to pass judgment on our desires and our passions.

I can feel providence flowing throughout my body.
I’m not The Second Coming.
Can’t decide which pair of pants to wear or why it’s so important to even wear pants.
I am complicating things again by pretending things are in fact complicated.

Charlie
May 1, 2009

Fits & Starts

I am watching a story
This story is my life
The beginning and ending
Are secrets in my heart.

I am not telling you anything you don’t already know
Not spilling any deep seeded secrets or revealing any long
Forgotten truths. I’m not a harbinger nor am I a perfect storm.

Everything takes place in fits and starts
My birth was like this and so will be my death
You don’t remember but it only happened yesterday
You were born a smooth artifact and will pass away just the same.

I am viewing a picture show
This show another Power Point Presentation
The Alpha and Omega are tragedies and comedies alike.

You are nothing I haven’t experienced before
You’re nothing new and still you make everything feel new
You are a positive flowing influence and a purring pussy cat.

My dreams take place in fits and starts
My dreams a dwarf donning clown makeup and smoking a cig
My dreams a Bruce Davidson photograph come to life
You don’t remember, but I was there when you were created
I was the one with all the bad intel but with a heart of pure gold.

I was the one burning to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.

Charles Cicirella
April 24, 2009