SARCASTIC FRINGEHEAD'S POETRY CAVE

let's start a magazine

by e.e. cummings

"let's start a magazine
to hell with literature
we want something redblooded

lousy with pure
reeking with stark
and fearlessly obscene

but really clean
get what I mean
let's not spoil it
let's make it serious

something authentic and delirious
you know something genuine
like a mark in a toilet

graced with guts and gutted
with grace"

squeeze your nuts and open your face

Problems with Hurricanes

by Victor Hernández Cruz

A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it's not the wind
or the noise or the water.
I'll tell you he said:
it's the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.

How would your family
feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.

Death by drowning has honor
If the wind picked you up
and slammed you
Against a mountain boulder
This would not carry shame
But
to suffer a mango smashing
Your skull
or a plantain hitting your
Temple at 70 miles per hour
Is the ultimate disgrace.

The campesino takes off his hat--
As a sign of respect
towards the fury of the wind
And says:
Don't worry about the noise
Don't worry about the water
Don't worry about the wind--

If you are going out
beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.

Victor Hernández Cruz is an acclaimed contemporary poet born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. "Problems with Hurricanes" is from Red Beans (©Coffee House Press, 1991).

Have you anything to say in your defense?

by Cesar Vallejo

Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

They all know that I'm alive,
that I'm vicious; and they don't know
the December that follows from that January.
Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

There is an empty place
in my metaphysical shape
that no one can reach:
a cloister of silence
that spoke with the fire of its voice muffled.

On the day I was born,
God was sick.

Brother, listen to me, Listen...
Oh, all right. Don't worry, I won't leave
without taking my Decembers along,
without leaving my Januaries behind.
Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

They all know that I'm alive,
that I chew my food...and they don't know
why harsh winds whistle in my poems,
the narrow uneasiness of a coffin,
winds untangled from the Sphinx
who holds the desert for routine questioning.

Yes, they all know...Well, they don't know
that the light gets skinny
and the darkness gets bloated...
and they don't know that the Mystery joins things together...
that he is the hunchback
musical and sad who stands a little way off and foretells
the dazzling progression from the limits to the Limits.

On the day I was born,
God was sick,
gravely.

Cesar Vallejo (Peru, 1892-1938) was one of Latin America's greatest 20th-century poets. English translation of "Espergesia" by James Wright, from Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, edited by Robert Bly (©Beacon, 1971).

Temptation

by Nina Cassian

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you
that for the first time you'll feel your pores opening
like fish mouths, and you'll actually be able to hear
your blood surging through all those lanes,
and you'll feel light gliding across the cornea
like the train of a dress. For the first time
you'll be aware of gravity
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will ache for want of wings.
Call yourself alive? I promise you
you'll be deafened by dust falling on the furniture,
and you'll feel your eyebrows turning to two gashes,
and every memory you have--will begin
at Genesis.

Nina Cassian is a well-known Romanian poet. English translation of "Temptation" by Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant, from Contemporary East European Poetry: An Anthology (©Ardis, 1983; Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).

Christmas

by Joan Salvat-Papasseit


I feel the cold of night
			                       and the dark holiday drums.
Like the group of young men who go by now singing.
I hear the celery cart
			                      that the pavement supports
and the others who push it, making straight for the market.

Those at home		in the kitchen,
					                               near the burning coal-stove
with the gaslights turned up have prepared the cock.
Now I gaze at the moon, which seems full;
and they gather up the feathers,
				                                     already longing for tomorrow.

Tomorrow at our table we'll forget the poor
--as poor as we are--.
			                       By then Christ will have been born.
He'll glance our way during dessert
and when he sees us	    he'll break into tears.

Joan Salvat-Papasseit (1894-1924) was a Catalan anarchist and avant-garde poet. English translation of "Christmas" © 1979 from David H. Rosenthal, Modern Catalan Poetry: An Anthology (New Rivers Press, 1979).

Ars(e) Poetica

by Sarcastic Fringehead

The greatest poets of the last millennium
thought they had a monopoly on the f-word.
FTW, they said. Fuck the World.
And also Fuck Shit Up. And Fuck Authority.
Word riots on the streets of every town. Fuck
Art, Let’s Dance.
Then the vice-president said it too,
and all bets were off.

2004:
Set yr fat poetic ass
to writing scripture.
That’ll throw them.
Anyway, the End is coming
sure enough, just like it says
in the Bible. Just ask
Sarcastic Fringehead,
who lives under the sea, sees everything,
and isn’t telling.

At the aquarium people said man,
that fish is butt-ugly.
Yeah I got an attitude he says,
So what?