Reconstructed Happiness by Trish Hopkinson (I Am Waiting Poetry Series)

RECONSTRUCTED HAPPINESS
a found poem in reverse of Ferlinghetti’s “I Am Waiting”
by Trish Hopkinson

I am fleeing.
Perpetually,
I am my typewriter.
I am green.
I am my childhood.
I am wonder.

I am the dream
of innocence in Wonderland
and I am Tom Sawyer
and I am birth, music, sound
and I am reconstructed
happiness, the storms of life
and eternal life discovered.
I am anxiously new.

I am like rain
and I am the earth
and I am salvation waiting
to be called.
I am perpetually new again.
I am the channel.
Really, I am.
I am the state of revival,
a birth of wonder—
perpetually, I am.

I am anarchy.
I am waiting to up and fly.
I am a new discovery.
I wail.
I am someone
and I am,
I am waiting.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “Reconstructed Happiness” is a new poem written specifically for this series. I wanted to delve into “I am Waiting” with the careful reading that writing found poetry provides. The repetition in the poem presented a challenge in creating something new enough to become a found poem able to stand on its own, so I reversed the order of the lines for a different approach. The last line became the first, and all other lines followed until the first line became the last. Something unique emerged as I erased phrases and words–a poem with the theme of not becoming something new, but rather being something new. A reconstructed happiness of sorts arose from an original work expressing a tone of dissatisfaction.

IMAGE: “The Happy Family” by Pablo Picasso (1917).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Trish Hopkinson has always loved words—in fact, her mother tells everyone she was born with a pen in her hand. She has been published in several anthologies and journals, including The Found Poetry Review, Chagrin River Review, and Reconnaissance Magazine.She is a project manager by profession and resides in Utah with her handsome husband and their two outstanding children. You can follow her poetry adventures at trishhopkinson.com or on Facebook.

Three adverts. for America, poem by Michael Paul (Mythic Poetry Series)

Three Advertisements for America
by Michael Paul

Mood-lit and punch-drunk, Sisyphus in a ’67 sedan
(same rock, new hill) this puer aeternus
perennial adolescent frat boy
cum artiste, whose ears are pointed
like a leprechaun’s, displaces air
downtown; spends inordinate energy
pondering:
the politics of desire
the philosophies of drunken Indians
the glide to weight ratios of butterflies, and
the history of Amanda Pays lips, fingers
tapping on the wheel.
Searches the classifieds
for a sunset to ride into.

The White Rock Fairy, having had enough
of ups and downs, puts on black pumps (and nothing else)
flies in with documents to prove her indigence.
At the Presbyterian Clinic she cops a scrip
for Prozac (the fin du siècle panacea).
She sighs, scans the tabloids:
‘Speedy Alka-Seltzer Reveals That He is Bi-
Carbonate’ ‘Smith Bros. Commit Suicide’ ‘Mr. Clean
Bagged in Crack House Bust’
There is a painful period of adjustment
becoming an obsolete trademark.

Under the bridge a gaggle of broken people
are tuning their fillings to different stations –
lining their hats to attenuate the signals.
On 17th Street a man shambles and rants:
‘When I was in the Navy…when I was in the Navy…
it was never like this when I was in the Navy!’
Eight Blocks away an old woman in brown coat and
babushka, pushing all her worldly goods in a shopping cart,
mumbles in reply: ‘Awww, you were never even in the Navy!’
All over the city there are similar transmissions
on frequencies I hope your radio
will never receive.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This is a free form poem which references a mythical character in the first stanza and a fairy tale character co-opted as a brand logo in the second.  Hard to describe my creative process — a non-poet read some of my work and asked incredulously “Is this how your mind works!?”

IMAGE: “Faun with Stars” by Pablo Picasso (1955).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Michael Paul is an award-winning visual artist in traditional media who came upon poetry by a happy accident in April of 1996, during the inauguration of National Poetry Month. Michael has since achieved a number of publication credits in literary journals, has been invited to be the featured reader at numerous venues, including spots in both the Los Angeles and Orange County Poetry Festivals, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of six chapbooks as well as a full sized collection of poems titled Dog Whistle Politics, which his publisher, Lummox Press of Southern California, states is the micro-press’ best seller on Amazon.com. Michael currently resides in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California with his wife Claudia Licht, and is the proud father of two, and grandfather of five children.

Snappy Refrigerator Magnet Saying, poem by Nancy Lynée Woo (Mythic Poetry Series)

Snappy Refrigerator Magnet Saying
by Nancy Lynée Woo

I like my men how I like my
crossed word puzzles:
complex, frustrating and
nongiveupable –

The only love worth having
labyrinthine.

I am no princess hoping on toads;
Give me your ugly, your worst,
your most frightening Minotaur
and a string.

SOURCE: Originally published at Cadence Collective: Long Beach Poets (Feb. 21, 2014).

IMAGE: “Minotaur’s Repose” by Pablo Picasso (1933).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The whimsical, fanciful and mythological are of special interest to me. I love poetry because it lives in the world of the imagination, yet it is the imaginative act that often allows space for a hard truth to be seen. As humans, we have always told stories, and it’s fascinating to see certain archetypes appear throughout time and across different cultures. I am endlessly intrigued by the process of mythologification—how our mythologies influence or shape the way we think about the world and what we come to believe, and vice versa. Plus, it’s just great fun to write about goddesses and monsters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nancy Lynée Woo spends her free time hitching a ride to the other side of maybe. She is cofounder and editor of a social justice-based literary press called Lucid Moose Lit.  Often caught cavorting around Long Beach, California, this poet can also be found at nancylyneewoo.com.

Self in Blue, poem by Jay Passer (Self-Portrait Poetry Series)

SELF IN BLUE
by Jay Passer

alive despite torture device
man with options for hire
rewinds news feed

super victim
with baccalaureate in
opiated weaponry

thoughts scripted for distortion
open heart carved from
treasure chest

mirror shard reflecting
sacral svadhisthana
some beer bellied bespectacle

four seam fastball for a brain
wolf in need of a
shave

IMAGE: “Self-Portrait” (Blue Period) by Pablo Picasso (1901).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jay Passer‘s work has been published in print and online since 1988.  He is the author of numerous chapbooks, the most recent being At the End of the Street (corrupt press, 2012).

Mirror oh dear mirror, poem by Jacque Stukowski (Self-Portrait Poetry Series)

MIRROR OH DEAR MIRROR
by Jacque Stukowski

Mirror oh dear mirror,
what have you to say today?

Is my wavy hair of brownish red really filled with oh so much grey?

Mirror oh brutally honest mirror,
Is that really me I see?

Has my face really aged beyond
the youthful sparkle in my eyes?
Has the darkness inside me stolen my infectious smile once again?

Mirror oh cracked mirror,
Oh what distortions you now display!

From the jagged slice that highlights the softness of my lips,
or the long triangular angle jutting downward, towards the curvature of my hips.

Mirror oh blood-stained mirror,
How much more I love this new
me you now reflect!

Like stained-glass panels,
you refract the different parts of me, highlighting features that I may
have never even seen.

Mirror oh fragmented mirror,
What can I say? I like this
Picasso like mixed up version your glass reflects my way.

Mirror oh broken mirror,
all it took was my fist to smash.

For now through your cracks
I can see, the me I’ve longed to see.
Deep blue eye here,
highlighted curl there,
Oh and don’t forget those ruby lips!!

Mirror oh portrait of me mirror,
Oh how I’m mixed up so.
Like a Picasso woman within all your shards of glass. You’ve shown me that there still is beauty on the outward parts of me. All it took was little a bit of creativity for me to see . . .

IMAGE: “Woman with hat” by Pablo Picasso (1962).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jacque Stukowski‘s blog God[isms] is her personal space to vent and share stories of growth through life’s ups and downs living with BP and ADHD. It’s a place where her writing and photos collide with spirituality, a dash of 12 steps, and a sprinkle of the daily trials of being a Christian wife, mother of two boys, and a full-time graphic designer. She frequently uses metaphors and symbolism to connect the reader to real life things in nature to convey the message she’s writing about. Her poetry has appeared in the Silver Birch Press May Poetry Anthology (June 2014) and Half New Year Poetry Collection (July 2014).

Girl, poem by Elizabeth Jacobson (Self-Portrait Poetry Series)

GIRL
by Elizabeth Jacobson

Is summer
on a painted bench
hair pulled back
lips pink
knees to her chest
the bony part browned
darker on the top.
Heat is fluid in her.
A bath running
birds in the yard sounding
like cats, like nursery rhymes;
clocks ticking.
Evening doesn’t end
pours from one open mouth
into the next
a syrup of days,
the past and future
at the same time all at once

SOURCE: “Girl” appears in Elizabeth Jacobson‘s collection Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Little Girl with a Blue Jersey” by Berthe Morisot (1886).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elizabeth Jacobson is the author of the poetry collection Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012). She is the founding director of the WingSpanPoetry Project, which brings weekly poetry classes to the residents at the Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and creates poetry workshops for various programs at other local shelters. She has taught writing for over 25 years at colleges and elementary schools, in both New York and New Mexico — most recently with ArtWorks in Santa Fe. Elizabeth is the winner of the 2013 Mountain West Writer’s Contest from Western Humanities Review, the recipient ofthe Jim Sagel Prize for poetry from Puerto del Sol, and has an MFA from Columbia University. Visit her at elizabethjacobson.net. 

Did the little boy exist? poem by Alexander Limarev (Self-Portrait Poetry Series)

DID THE LITTLE BOY EXIST?
by Alexander Limarev

Who was that little boy
In a frill from magpie fluff?
Who was that little boy,
whose fingers are tenderer than tarragon?
Who was that little boy
in a cloak from the tears of Harlequin?
Who was that little boy
with a look of a work-worn scaffold?
Who was that little boy whose thoughts…
But what do we know?
Precipitated into a hellhole
(for the others to feel shame)
’cause he couldn’t bear
in his haggard body
the gift of God –
a beautiful soul?
An immortal soul.

Did that little boy exist?
It seems that all this is rubbish
and cowardice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alexander Limarev is a freelance artist, mail art artist, curator, and poet from Russia. Participated in more than 250 international projects and exhibitions. His artworks are part of private and museum collections of 45 countries. His art and poetry have been featured in various online publications including Time for a Vispo, Expoesia Visual Experimental, The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing, Baa:Be:l, Nothing and Insight, Foffof, Spontaneous Combustion Language Image Lab, Fooom, Poezine, Degu: A Journal of Signs, Existere, ffoOom, Chernovik, The White Raven, Undergroundbooks.org, ŎŎŏŏŏ, Boek861, Tip of the Knife, Bukowski on Wry, Kiosko (libera, skeptika, transkultura), Microlit, Metazen, Blackbird, Zoomoozophone Review, and M58.

IMAGE: “Paul as Harlequin” by Pablo Picasso (1924).

Self-Portrait as Woman, poem by Mary Stone Dockery

SELF-PORTRAIT AS WOMAN
by Mary Stone Dockery

Before they came for me, I exfoliated in white wine,
watched the glass empty itself like it had every
time before, watched the way my hands exposed
the blue-red veins beneath the skin, how my
fingers would keep moving, touching buttons
or peeling the label from the bottle, or reach
for an invisible choke in the air, grasp, release
nothing. I had waited a long time for their smiles,
their long arms, white teeth. I had waited a long
time to be held like that in someone’s arms,
as if being lifted for the first time. And they took
me, carried me into a place where my body
disappeared slowly into grains of paint, colors
and canvas. There I was able to watch them all,
my hair never blowing up in the wind, the wine
bottle on the table before me never opening,
never spilling, their faces before me large, eerie,
my ability to see more in their pores
than they in me.

SOURCE: The Montucky Review (August 25, 2011).

IMAGE: “Head of a Woman” by Pablo Picasso (1946).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary Stone Dockery‘s poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Mochila, Gargoyle, > kill author, Midwestern Gothic, Weave Magazine, The Medulla Review, scissors and spackle, and The Montucky Review. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She is also the recipient of the Thomas J. O’Donnell Award for creative nonfiction and an honorable mention for the Vic Contoski award in fiction. Her poetry collections include Mythology of Touch (2012) and One Last Cigarette (Honest Publishing, 2013). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she received an MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Visit her at marystonedockery.wordpress.com.

Self-Portrait, Rear View by Sharon Olds

SELF-PORTRAIT, REAR VIEW
by Sharon Olds

At first I do not believe it, in the hotel triple mirror
That that is my body,
In back, below the waist, and above the legs
The thing that doesn’t stop moving when I stop moving
And it doesn’t look like just one thing
Or even one big double thing
Even the word saddlebags has a smooth calfskin feel to it
Compared to this compendium of net string bags
Shaking their booty of cellulite, fruits, and nuts
Some lumps look like bon-bons translated intact from chocolate
box to buttocks
The curl on top showing slightly through my skin
Once I see what I can do with this, I do it
High-stepping to make the rapids of my bottom
Rush and ripple like a world wonder
Slowly I believe what I am seeing
A 54-year-old rear end, once a tight end
High and mighty, almost a chicken butt
Now exhausted as if tragic
But this is not an invasion
My cul-de-sac is not being used to hatch
alien cells, bald peas, gyroscopes, sacks of marbles
It’s my hoard of treasure, my good luck
Not to be dead, yet
Though when I toss the main of my ass again
And see in a clutch of eggs, each egg on its own as if shell-less, shudder
I wonder if anyone has ever died looking in a mirror of horror
I think I will not even catch a cold from it
I will go to school to it, to Butt Boot Camp
To the video store where I saw in the window
My hero, my workout jelly roll model, my apotheosis–
Killer Buns.

IMAGE: “Girl Before a Mirror” by Pablo Picasso (1932).

MORE: Watch Sharon Olds read “Self-Portrait, Rear View” at youtube.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sharon Olds’ National Book Critics Circle Award-winning volume The Dead and the Living (1984) has sold more than 50,000 copies, ranking it as one of contemporary poetry’s best-selling volumes. After attending Stanford University, she earned her Ph.D. at Columbia in 1972. Her collections include Strike Sparks (2002), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, One Secret Thing (2009), and Stag’s Leap (2012)—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Britain’s T.S. Eliot prize. Olds served as New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University.

A Lonely Road Is that I Walked, poem by Pablo Picasso

A LONELY ROAD IS THAT I WALKED
by Pablo Picasso

I walk a lonely road, the one and only one I’ ve ever known.
I don’t know where it goes, but I keep walking on and on.
I walked the lonely and untrodden road for I was walking on the bridge
of the broken dreams.
I don’t know what the world is fighting for or why I am being instigated.
It’s for this that I walk this lonely road for I wish to be
alone.
So I am breaking up, breaking up.
It is the lack of self control that I feared as there is something
Inside me that pulls the need to surface, consuming, confusing.
being called weird I walk this lonely road on the verge of broken dreams.
And so i walk this lonely road and so just keep walking still

IMAGE: “Self-Portrait” by Pablo Picasso (1906)

MORE: Pablo Picasso started writing poetry at age 54. In 1935, he stopped painting, drawing, and sculpting, and committed himself to the art of poetry. Although he soon resumed his art career, Picasso continued in his literary endeavors, writing hundreds of poems, assembled in The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in 1959. In 1968, City Lights published his collection Hunk of Skin as Number Twenty-Five in its Pocket Poetry Series. To read more about Picasso’s poetry, visit wikipedia.org.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR/ARTIST: Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet, and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for cofounding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.