John PERREAULT
From: MOTETS*
Happy Is the Man
Happy is the man who can reply
Show me the apple of happenstance
to fate with faith or fakery
and I, merely a poem, will
in order to fool the foolish world.
give you a kick in the pants,
into leaving him alone to fly,
leave abject complacency well behind
wings outstretched or folded
and form an arrest committee
to meet the mockery with smiles
so evil we will have no chance to
and defeat the hungry infantry.
set fire to my burning fence.
I Can Be You
I can be you. Or if not you,
At the bottom of the garden is
then at least your twin, to give
a hard-on and not a fountain.
the expectations a difficult ride.
That fountain, like tumescence,
But why? I'd rather be a shadow,
is also a sham and a sock and not
then a reflection in some other
a thimble like the flower or
world of reversals, when and if
the crown that is upside down,
the shadow world would sink.
your headdress of old fathers.
These Living Words
These living words are swards
No land in sight will tell me
and even boards, sword-cut swards,
where the woods ends and
through a forest of cards
the park begins because, my friend,
make my starry forehead ache.
your verbiage is still cabbage.
You, my heart throb, are my brake,
I myself am so quiet that
causing all my grief to break
it might appear that I am alone.
into a sweat or crash or squeak.
I'm not. I am whatever it takes.
In Time
If in time everything comes out fine
forgetting the name of a bay window
then you could only blame
or bay. Likewise what is the term for
the lack of communication between
speech or lightning or beach?
the left and the right
And if you knew this vocabulary
or the strange effect of change.
would you be wiser, kinder?
Chance in all its forms is always fate
Or would you be on the outside,
and luck is on the broken plate,
too much like the other side?
Lava
Lava is the yes of the wise cliff
where half the land is pregnant and
whose love is both hello and goodbye
the platform is loaded with flowers
as well as romance and best wishes.
just before the bloody picnic
One word covers everything in the world
of flattery and anger, the barbecue
except no; this is a longer house
of roosters. The hula is hidden
of work at quitting time for the stranger
because of my boyfriend in the dark
without a genealogy of chants
who will only stalk the same old park.
The Men's Room
The men's room is out of bounds
a massage and a raw fish salad
to the old-timer and his local ways.
are the same word and therefore
The Thief wants the grub for himself
are the same, unlike toilet and feast.
and he wants to hug his grandchildren
Thus we thank the mahu for his gratitude
stuck in the cone of wind, the season,
because he is facing the sea
on the lanai hung with necklaces.
and is in love with a pair of pants
His garlands are of seaweed because
who is free with his fruits and plants.
Where the Pen (Perpetual Motet)
where the pen is mightier than the fence
unlike all the others who are dressed
that holds your fine ponies for recompense
in towels. You try your very best
inside the eyelids of the storm
but your honesty is not enough.
worms of sorrow eat the warm.
We can't explain the ax man's bluff.
All death's children are equally drawn.
and we fail to answer the questions
It is not dusk but yet another lawn,
without making innumerable suggestions
the morning after the penultimate finals
to the examiner and his panels
where you are dressed in your flannels.
*Note: Inspired by the 14th Century motets by Phillipe de Vitry in which different texts are sung simultaneously, the poems in my book MOTETS can be read line by line and by separating out the
odd lines and then the even ones, to read two additional poems, as in Happy Is the Man, I Can Be
You, and These Living Words. Sometimes the scheme creates one additional poem, since the even
lines are continuous with the odd ones, as in In Time, Lava, The Men's Room. Where the Pen is an
example of one of my Perpetual Motets: when even then odd then even lines, etc., are read
continuously, there is no ending line. When reading these poems aloud it is usually more effective
to read the buried, alternating lines first, followed by the line-by-line reading of the poem that
results from the interweavings, for then the latter seems to retain the imprint or ghost of the
former. In silent reading the imprint is subliminally visible, if not totally comprehensive until
alternate lines are read.
From: STOLEN RHYMES**
Leda and the Swan
At noon it is terrible and still
as if the streetscape has been caressed
by the arrival of the horrible bill
for the secret of my breast.
When I get to the door and push
I see your distant thighs
in the middle of the rush
made up of truth and lies.
Someone else is happening there
and I am under the sullen tower
but then I awaken too far up
in the crystal, bright blue air
where I have no thought or power
and where I let my message drop.
A Crazed Girl
In a world without brief music
there would be only shore
and not the crashing ocean itself,
and only tide wrack where
the festival steamship
has run aground. I thus declare
without a word there is no thing
but only shadow can be found.
If in the future this has occurred,
where we can smell the wound
our present triumph
will have stuck where it lay
and now would not be the sound
of the uprising at last of the sea.
Shakespearean Sonnets
One
All things important outside the frame
are not. You see we all dwell
in a movie that is the same
and cannot, will not ever excel
whatever it is the camera's on.
We are never here, but always there
where the influx has finally gone
inside the fear and tenor where
smoke and dust and trust are left.
Your world is a world of tinted glass.
Even the photography is bereft
of what for a moment really was
the temperature where we will meet
that judgment that is all too sweet.
Two
Too much humanity, too much light
all gone in the blink of an eye
to hide behind the disguise of sight
to shield us from so much majesty.
I thought the mountain merely a hill
and saw that I would age
but I am now much younger still
in the middle of this pilgrimage.
Too much laughter in the car
and too many nightmares in the day
is why we are the way we are
and cannot be another way,
at suppertime, in love, or at noon
when we turn from our gruesome son.
Three
When it is only when sadly
that you confront this joy
then I will borrow you gladly
and take you there to annoy
your dreams with the sounds
I whisper to your inner ear
so that my logic confounds
all the verbiage you cannot bear.
If you want truth then have another
while you try me out by ordering
something you can't quite mother
with that song you sometimes sing.
You know it. You know the one.
It is the song that is loved by none.
She Walks in Beauty
If these be demons, then let the night
uphold the secret, tumbling skies
off valleys where the engine rallies bright
accomplishment to all our eyes.
I am not the hallways, not the light
but only the pleasure that sleep denies.
Dreams are gloss. Sanity is even less
when confronted with your seamless grace
to see your hair instead of your tress
as glorious inside this hallowed place.
Let's not put the art before the brow,
wasting crime on time's too eloquent
waist. It's the sign and not the glow
that will make for us a purse well-spent
so far beneath what's here below
in the prison they've made of the innocent.
**Note: STOLEN RHYMES were initially inspired by reading that W.B. Yeats often wrote
his rhyme schemes before he composed his poems. My poems, based on borrowed
rhyme schemes, are not intended to be disrespectful, nor are they necessarily meant
as comments on the rhyme scheme sources. Imprints and ghosts remain, but these are
only undertones that show how much a rhyme scheme can determine content. The
overtones are created by the collision of my poems with the earlier ones.
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