To know on the edge of your screaming that you’re gonna be alright, to see it plain as day in the darkness, you go on steam engine, you take your task with God.
I don’t know if it’s gonna rain mud puddles in my mind, firecrackers in my heart, but I’ll be okay. The world has caved in, and sunshine has found me lying in the sun.
Do you know sleep? Do you know how to sleep? It’s a ridin’ all night long the team fellows of the mind with what you need to know liberty while you’re still in bonds. It’s a conscious sleep. You hear it talk to me now.
You can’t spend me. I’m a waste of your time, but I will speak to you from the hours the training of the ways, deep soliloquies of love that hasn’t found its purpose yet but challenges the world with it anyway.
You will laugh at me, but I know time like you know your own hair, and I can stand up and sing when God is killing me. What is a poet for? Can I quote my little boy? It’s for blankets in the sea. I can only grasp his hand in verse. I can’t see him anymore.
Whales sing, and they bring in the ocean round to itself. It’s more than call letters. It’s an attempt to dare fate and expose ourselves to bright shiny blades, so we can give time its meaning, even if that’s just a language cloak. You sit there and read us those bright and shiny blades.
Fuck you I love you the poet says. Nithish did you hear that? It’s how we meet the world Planet Us and not die in the telling. We undress in front of the world and give it its mic, all the while singing our hearts out in front of I don’t care.
I am loud in a sea storm, Prometheus battles night on top of an angry world because he’d brought fire down of the Gods into the people of his sleep, and lit the poet’s tongue on daily cares, common battles, and everyday falls to know we are more than these.
I am Nithish a growing poet. I will write for the world and me, and I will take big steps anywhere, anytime. I am opening (muse) my marker a bag with development. If the bag doesn’t get bigger I will fly away.
Oh I am high on poetry. Get me a ride home. Hey god, how tall are you? Ha h aha I’m going to my job.
2nd Part
Exchange the world for some divine, and my marker call the muse. Will you listen to the paper it’s right. Why are the poets here for?
George de Forest Brush – Orpheus, 1890 (public domain)
This is a poem written to G Surya Prakash Rao, the founder and managing editor of Muse India, an online literary magazine, in regards to their rejection and criticism of Nithish’s poem “Paradise Things With Lyrics”, which was submitted to their online forum Your Space, not to the literary magazine itself. A Twitter/X photo-poem of mine would give more details: “Where Were the Ones That Felt?”
And the poem below was submitted to Muse India for publication, not through their regular channels, directly to the managing editor, as we were having a brief email conversation regarding the boy’s poem. I would gather he doesn’t want to publish the poem below, and that in itself I find remarkable, and you will have to read the poem to find that remarkable too, but the fact that he won’t even bother to tell me, I find that absolutely incredible.
Human civilization is a world apart. I grab you by the poetry today. The overhead music, the overhead town, some suggestions for your unmanageable poetry scheme sir. I speak poetry to your sense of self, and that’s a long ride, half-religion, in the carnival of God. Do you wear zeitgeist on your sleeve, offended if I grab your ass and smile? Man I tell yah where we put poetry today, in the hullabaloo.
You give me 40 lines to tell. How people don’t know it, tellin’ poetry to be quiet is sexual reassignment surgery, cuts its dick off. Well foreign he’s brave. That room is shocked. That room is sorry. This one here, what do you do? Do you publish a poet, Donny Lee Duke?
Teacher of the day master of the poetry. Who says that’s prayer or insightful? That’s a line from the movie Beat Kids. I’m throwin’ at you rabbits to know the meaning of the word, its symbolizing form. Rabbits are a dictionary, and they fecund.
How do I open poetry in your heart that’s not a diction model, phrased put? But I’m putting sound down as a vehicle of meaning, categorically put. Imagine we lived in a rose, and we petaled differently, the speaker said.
You’re not huntin’ meaning. You’re all about sound rose a churppin’ model with words you can cut your finger on, your personal stuff that sees the corners of things, gets at feeling and taste, ode to a green jar and supposin’.
I wrap you around wood in a different kind of glory. I laugh-loud you to go get greater silk to stand your life, because I’m sittin’ here strandin’ mine, where it hurts, where it counts, and that’s bubblin’ up poetry.
That’s not it I’m listenin’ to myself speak, here I am on the table the thought of London, Batman in robes, lyrical put. A new generation of poetry, a new thought of poetry, here I am and you chase me down this mountain you tin can. I’m a dormitory of words.
Is that bowl I’m missing let’s listen to Tennyson? Grab your evolution by the poetry sir. Blast your pillars of salt. Blast your shadow kings. Don’t look back at some exam of poetry Orpheus. Grab your poetry by today.
To the editor of Sky Magazine: change Orpheus into a pillar of salt. Lay down your lines you’ve surrendered to poetry. Can you hear that? Muse India a scolding. How sad. You hear that?
The tops of teas lyrical ballads. Where am I at? I don’t think you’d recognize me. I’m poetry fits the day, sudden splendor.
Can we get to the top of that mountain? I offer you a chair. It’s closer than you think, a morph of Orpheus, of your kind. You open it binoculars.
Peace is a drug that you get from the upper store. [above line Nitish’s muse, my 12-year-old grandson] Nithish’s smile. Your anthology papers, post my letters, it is very change. I’m not lookin’ forward to the new ghost story. Oh man, do your ignore me? A new music, a flute overhead, we need that to survive. Things are not going in our direction, and can we just change the tunes? What a poetry says a culture does.
You’re not playin’ around with smithereens. Come on don’t groupthink and let poetry rock. I don’t understand you sir. Does it have to be highfalutin? You stuff shirt, come out in the world and see. Am I wrong? Do we need something more out of poetry that we’re not getting?
Come out of your damn ivory tower and touch the world. Is that so hard to listen to? What are you doing that you can’t see this is poetry? And I will haunt you for the rest of your life a poetry gun, a poetry speaker, a poetry man.
I don’t think you realize the power of poetry, the muse today. It will be inevitable we dance along the Thames putting it out like Shakespeare. It will come out of its bottle and change the world. Too strange driven, you think it just needs to be thrown away, like this email’s cut off here. Are you kiddin’ me?
Who stays close to skyscrapers?
A digital bureaucracy
won’t look at my poetry.
I don’t know what it means.
Man’s critical college parallel universe was
thrown into poetry.
I don’t think no one reads him,
even though it was a parallel universe.
Did I just say that?
You like mules
that have no meaning behind them
when they’re pullin’ a plough.
You don’t like to figure out stuff.
I don’t think you like meaning.
It’s read it’s bread.
Stop and take a look no way.
How do we bring down poetry into the universe?
My God the spheres here.
I can make up a poem to please yah.
See Dick run after Jane?
Okay get out of the knob Joe.
Meaning is paradise.
It’s not your guttural wear.
The random nonsense of meaning words,
did I just say paradise?
I’m at a loss for words.
Nobody understands me.
Critical Hank,
is that self-meaning or self-pity?
What do you see in an enemy?
A reader.
I’m all out of poems,
and they just comin’.
I’m really not doin’ this.
Poetry has grabbed my testicles and is squeezing them.
In silence no one can hear you scream.
That’s what my mind dirts,
when poetry comes in my window.
I’m liftin’ silence to read it.
It gets you all trashed
in dirt modules,
the mind’s interference,
and unfortunately the more trashed the more you like it.
I hear the mind there
all readable by rationality.
The mind likes symmetry.
I put a poem in pieces
where silence holds my poem.
I’m tryin’ to say this pure verse,
really, really from the silence,
unadulterated
by anything mind can give.
Do you see me there?
I’m listenin’ hard.
Like I say I come in pieces.
How do you value a poem?
It’s meaningful to you.
I don’t think you’re concerned with the silence.
The root of poetry has no meaning
to someone who looks at stuff all the time.
Pure abstractness’s not what I’m talkin’ about.
If you let it happen,
meaning would come in time
personal to you.
It would hit you on the nose
a vehicle trip.
I can't get at this abstraction.
Well can you let poetry breathe,
take off your thinking cap a moment?
You’re gonna be taken for a ride kid
in the hit you of your stuff,
in the node of your surround things.
Poetry will take you somewhere
out of yourself
in the larger spheres.
It has meaning
all wrapped up in purpose,
and we clear here.
Poetry is a vehicle of meaning
that will look at you in your underwear.
Are you desnudo?
Wow, amazing,
can you come read your poetry?
Can we understand your poetry together with silence?
I think the reader’s talking to me again.
Okay let’s say some hard words.
I’m a stallion in Paris.
When I look through my radar I see you.
I’ve opened my first book.
It’s just terrible.
It’s just terrible.
We can reader handle a book,
shall we?
You pronounce it better,
that publication.
They say I’m crazy.
And a book shall lead them,
trusting you.
You’re open.
You can definitely see the Sun.
Get out of the way,
and it will rain down upon us
how to do poetry,
be happy with what you make in a better way.
Tall recognition
of you’ve got some answers,
the answer,
despite failure.
I put failure in.
You got the Sun in your eyes.
You can check and see if it’s there.
Read this one.
You’re having a beautiful Yahtzee surprise.
Sit Sharma you have done.
A poet has his word out.
Shoulder gets a new test.
Oh, this is getting down to me,
the purport of poetry:
be meaning and don’t expect anything in return.
I think we just said the universe.
How do we do that,
get we and put it in a higher position?
Yeah, okay, struggle to survive.
Why am I gaslighting this?
I broke through the crowd and I silenced the sound.
They wondered if I was to blame
for Mary. [This two above lines heard sung by Bob Ayala, “The Song of Joseph”]
Into the divine,
can I take you?
There’s no struggling with,
there’s no struggling with another person.
Goddamn dude,
it was nothing but
I wonder why the U. S. has so many problems controllin’ that track right there. [line spoken at the end of a dream, a question I asked, a Green Beret in the dream, seeing a heavily armed train belonging to the Taliban insurgents, the track being representative of the field of Afghanistan while the U. S. was still there]
Hey come here—
wastin’ time. [heard sung by Dobie Gray, “Drift Away”]
Just don’t bombard me okay?
Go and see that
as a blockbuster. [vision of having gone to the ocean floor to see the wreck of the Titanic]
Harry Potter,
you’re tryin’ to swim
unlimited.
We’ll be right back.
That must be the phone.
Now bring meaning down to time.
I’m every bit in your skyscraper.
Bring me down-to-earth, will yah?
Get me outta here,
a lonely meaning in time.
I’m all about your reveille post.
Open up to the meanings you have missed.
I’m only there.
I should explain that this poem was posted for just a few moments on Oct. 26, 2022 and then reverted to draft so to submit to Poetry Magazine, and it took eight months for them to reply. Here is their email in regards to this poem, dated May 18, 2023:
Dear Donny Duke,
Thank you for sending your work to POETRY magazine—and thank you, too, for your patience as you waited for our response.
We won’t be publishing anything from your submission, but we wish you the best of luck in publishing it elsewhere and appreciate you sending it our way.
Thanks so much for your support of the magazine. We hope you are as safe and well as can be.
Harm's End 