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 Poet of the Moment
The Poet of the Moment for this issue is:
John Heymann
Corpus Christi & Austin, Texas
"My name is John Heymann. I could tell you my middle name, but then I'd have to kill you. I'm nineteen, and I'm a self-conscious philosopher. I read the comics every morning, even when I'm late, I have random, unbridled bouts of happiness, and I think wisdom is more important than knowledge. I'm a hopeless romantic, an undying idealist, and a starry-eyed dreamer. I'm also irrepressibly silly. As for my social spheres: Loners confide in me, nerds champion me, the social elite befriend me, bullies respect me, and girls worship me (ok...maybe not so much that last part, but I'm working on it). Other than that, just ask...I'm not that shy."
John is a 19-year old freshman at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a debate champion and a graduate of Corpus Christi King High School. He is a poet and short story writer, and a brilliant thinker. I've known John for some seven or eight years, and he's never failed to engage me in the depths of some subject that i've only cursorily considered before. Lately we've thrown each other thousand word e-mails in search of the meaning of everything, horked a few readings in Austin, commiserated about lost girls, and eaten Pad Thai with his roomate Noamy at a Guadalupe Street joint. More than a little of all of that is hidden in the pieces that follow and in the long story on the Story of the Moment page.
-- tony gallucci
18 November 2001
PAPER FRIENDS
I'd like to take a match
And one by one burn all my paper friends
Whose width is my caring and concern
And whose shallow breadth is their own nothing
So they flit and bend in a fickle breath
With sharp edges, their razors-under-tongues
And I would too - burn them that is -
Commit their ashes to their own damn winds
Like so many bridges
If only there wasn't the chance, like
Pinocchio, that they might become real
RESTING IN THE CREVICES
In the dusky evening
when the gray clouds overhead
blot out even the pale glow
of the midnight moon
He walks
He walks
His heels clop clopping
On the wet cobblestones
Down alleyways and through neighborhoods
Briefly passing under the flickering low
of electric street lights
Casting their melancholy light
On dismal puddles
Innumerable, resting in the crevices
between the cobblestones
As he passes under a light
The unnatural glow discovers
a man
hands stuffed in worn pants pockets
head hanging forlornly
And down these dark passages
And under that dreary canopy
Where the wind howls
A chilly breeze at his back
The smell of rain in the air
His tired feet
carrying him aimlessly
down a maze of dimly lit streets
and dark alleyways
in an uncaring city
Walks a man
Who knows the nature of love
UNTITLED
Wind whispers in the trees and
the leaves heavy with water
dance
Waking from their idleness to play
Swaying, lifting up, drifting down
faster and faster and wilder and wilder
dancing crazily with the howling wind
Moving like a thousand natives to the
rhythmic pounding of a drum
And the droplets still falling
swirling to Earth and striking
upturned faces and
running in rivulets
from the corners of smiles
While adults watch -detached- through plate glass
windows streaked with spattering rain
And think adult thoughts
I, nearly an adult myself,
but only nearly so
cavort with the leaves
In the rain and the wind and the world
Untethered, I spin about in nature's breath,
a human pinwheel
Jumping and turning in awkward, barefoot pirouettes
And I
Glad to be a child a little while longer
Think nothing at all
BLOOD ORANGES,
BLONDES, AND
CHOCOLATE
No chink in our armor so abrasive to touch
No one lived carelessly who ever loved much
We are each of us blood oranges
Safe within our shell
We are each of us blood oranges
With secrets left to tell
But cut us open with a keen blade and we're revealed
Red, fleshy pulp, the orange concealed
A raw, shivering soul shy and meek
Bleeding, and staining a white paper plate
Chocolate and blood, a symphony of tingling
tickling our cheek
Sweet and bittersweet, mingling love
To love is to be vulnerable
To give the knife to pierce your skin
Your protective wall dulls the pain of caring
But smothers the heart within
Redheads, Brunettes, and Blondes will bend
Like a willow before a wind
We are all only humans in the end
With our secret lives to tend
Our skin is tough, but find a knife
That's sharp enough
And we will surely bleed
We're blood oranges every one
CORPUS TO CHICAGO
The miles give way to less
countable measures of progress as
we thread the eye of the horizon
watching the world pass by in
intervals of stolen awareness
Lunch here
Gas there
Like a strobe in slow motion
Through parched pastures
With cows in the shade
Into the timberland with lush
giants
by the beryl blue lake with the
sleeping boxcars
Then the dusk
Next the dawn
What tomorrow brings
And the Windy City
From one to another and back
again
A stitch--
WINTER SPRING SUMMER AUTUMN
These are the seasons and I'm glad we've got `em
NATURE'S BREATH
Nature's breath is autumn's breeze
With dreary skies and naked trees
Is Winter's gale with ice and snow
Whose tired exhale the Spring will blow
Is Spring's caress I long for thee
To wake and clothe the naked tree
Is summer's gentle zephyr wind
Who teases me but is my friend
HORIZONS OLD AND NEW
The horizon is a metaphor
For what I've seen and done before
For wishes, hopes and dreams galore
For thoughts on poems and words in store
My horizons are all these and more
But I will stop before I bore
MY MIND AND ME
My mind and I are not the same
For sometimes -I am- where he is not
And sometimes I wish he would tell me something
But he replies: "Go ask a friend."
And though he knows
He will not talk
My mind and I are not the same
But we do not dislike each other
SHADOW
In every man
a shadow lives,
in every man like me.
His faith is fate;
His torpor cries:
I wait for destiny.
UNTITLED
Today, I don't think I'll follow
the norm, or care about what I usually do.
Maybe I'll just sleep in today,
and try to forget the problems I have,
the problems I make for myself
because I expect so much, what I have
been taught to expect of myself.
Maybe I'll just sleep in today,
and tomorrow, and the day after
and not wake up until all my problems go away.
But I guess that won't happen, so
I'll just get up today after all
Go and face "my life."
I'd like to be one of those people
You know, the ones you see in movies.
The ones who take everything in stride,
For whom everything always works out
Who live by the seat of their pants
On a day to day basis
And never have to face the consequences of
their actions.
The ones who always get the girl in the end.
PIECE UNTITLED
apologies to J.D. Salinger
Flighty, I like that. Jumping from one idea to the next, not caring who's
following except once in a while to get some, possibly false, affirmation
that someone, anyone, is still listening, or, if not listening, at least
hearing.
You know?
Yea
I mean, you know what I'm saying, right?
Yea, Yea, Oh yea.
It's weird, I know, that's just how I feel--
Nothing. Nothing but a hollow affirmation to keep going...and only so social
taboos can be cast aside in a mad race after beautiful thought,
beautiful--because it's real. You know I heard that people who talk to
themselves might be crazy? Well...
And the best thing about being flighty is that you can block out the onrush
of phony idiocy, or worse, genuine idiocy...as it washes against you in wave
after wave slamming against the breakers of reality, of pure flowing
thought...or worse than idiocy...shocking, titillating, bored ideas...like a
tit, in itself...or obtuse metaphors that other phonies nod and agree with in
insane agreement as if to say: "ahh, you are an idiot, incapable of any
original, lucid thought. You are one of us." Yea, flighty...I like that.
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