by Darryl Price
I took 7 Beatle Song Titles and Made 7 Darryl Poems Out of Them
"Some musicians heal ethnic groups. Some musicians heal nations. The Beatles healed an entire planet."--Joe Queenan
"There was adventure,knowingness,love,and abundant charm.From any angle,they are the perfect pop group."--Bob Stanley
Rain
becomes anything you'd like—war, famine, disease,
even intoxicating love before it all
dissolves right before your disbelieving eyes. It
quickly walks away into a delicious great
nothingness and doesn't look back at you. You're left
with whatever repairs your mind can see fit to
make to the see-through air. You can point to certain
surprisingly fast trees and flowers as your heart's
missing proof, but this soggy map doesn't quite seal
the abandoned hole in your being when she's not
around. Nothing does. Nothing ever will again
until a gifted surfacing occurs in the
unmistakable condition like a wild thing
suddenly in flight. Only then will you uncurl
and accept the atmospheric smell of her hair.
We Can Work It Out
if we could only try to. There's no hidden
catch, except the happy one caught on our
remaining breaths. Except the actual
one that only lifts the lily latch at
your handwritten touch, your recognized, and
ridiculously soft request. That has
awaited you in the sought for moment
your whole life through. Do you even hear me?
The finest hour is not light-years away,
but within our own circular range like
a horse rhymes with forever wheeling birds.
Like the obliging tempting buzz of stars
infiltrates through a painted afternoon--
like a box of love letters! O third wave!
Strawberry Fields
is a real place where real children
put their real fingers through the real
iron gate trying to feel out if
there's something different. Something
found. Something wanted. A something
better, big enough to matter
more than the real loneliness of
being alone. Something noisy.
That always makes the world sit up
and listen. They like bombs, don't they?
Bombs get them. They don't always pay
attention to smiles or groans or
jumps. They like newspapers, folding
chairs, but not holding hands. They will
prefer silent cars. Their big shoes
belonging in boxes in closets.
Their shirts all like beautifully built
ships. This place is not yet a room
with a fireplace, but it's a ghost
factory. It uses children
to make them so ethereal. If
you can hear me, please come and find
us. I want to go home with you
right now. Right away, if you please.
If I Fell
over the hillside of myself would you replant
the radiant clouds on either side of the sky
to catch or watch me? You could do this, but it would
certainly require an oceanic kind of
sacrifice on your part either way. I can't say
what this new horizon eventually would
become exactly because it would belong to
your heart alone. Your naming it would give it the
raw power to divide and conquer. Someone else
could always perform this same kind of nakedly viewed
magic but the result would be a different
day altogether. That's what I'm asking you for.
Will you do the deed only you can make happen
for me? That's the question every person needs an
answer for to choose a side in life. Of course you
have the militants who say you only need a
small mirror to shave in. I think this is madness.
And others think you need everybody with you
stuffed into a phone booth to feel anything at
all like love. I want what spring does, everything to
come fully alive, to feel you put your hands on
my face. To flow and to hum. Remembering what it is to speak.
Because
this one little effort was made here just
for you to read and no one else, you are
felt to be becoming the new perfect
morning. All a picture could ever want.
Enough light and shade to stage out your own played
garden of roses on the sides of your pretend
house like clumps of burning lamps buried in
the attractive breasts of the earth like the
best biological facts around. Does
it have to be more profound than that? Here
are a few more wise flowers for the most
obvious course of these human events:
because I heard the paltry voices as
a child and figured I might as well wait,
because this is just one way of looking
behind a closed door, because you and I
are in way over our heads like kept barn
animals, because occasionally
there is another way in, because I am
dragging my tail in the mud, only a
few pages ago we were tender and
funny together, because we looked at
one another and agreed to accept
desire as a good thing, and you laughed so hard at heaven.
Things We Said Today
will have to do for tomorrow as well as the now. We don't
really know what worlds we'll take with us on our next amazing
journey. Or what words will still have strength enough left in them to
walk to work and back each day with us. The power is half chewed up from
where I'm sitting. It's a warehouse full of souls in jars and well
nobody seems to be watching the stacks, if you know what I
mean. So the words keep us moving along the belt. One day I won't be
able to arrange a time and place for our meeting like this.
It won't matter. But the words will pass on my spirit. Hello
blood vessels. Hello, hello dizzying lanes of traffic. Hello floating dust from
cameras. Hello January chains on my heart. Hello
again every step we took toward peace. Hello to my room.
Hello this is your pocket poet speaking. I had a sensation
of things as they are-- a very pleasant surprise, not nearly
as heartbreaking as I thought. Goodbye father. Good night Mother.
That's the moon I like, soaked in bat signals. On top of that I was
such a small frightened god, these are the facts now, I am nothing so clear.
A moth. Look closely, I am left feeling funny all over. Another close call.
For No One
There are restless and various winds coming
alive today I think in all the
self-deceiving windows of silence but one.
Like flaming squirrels they live in the
cemetery gutters and jump through
all the cracks in the known to be fallen down
worlds, chattering incessantly on
about nothing and everything. They
live for philosophical chaos because they are so
eternally young and curious
and love to snack on our houses and garbage
files of old ragged flags flown up and down
these empty streets like wheatfields. They eat this raunchy
stuff constantly. But that's just the one
beginning, the start of a feeling I'm having to attend to.
Is it about you? I don't know. The
rest is less observation, more gut
stomping ache. For instance right now I
take a very deep breath, let it out, the world's
a brown paper bag with a hole in its soggy
bottom, but that is not all it is,
because you're in it, too, somewhere, I'm
guessing. You should toss me a warm smile once in a while
unless things get too quickly boring.
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The Beatles brought joy to a deadened, dull and dangerous world. They knew how to laugh and have fun. But beyond that they knew how to hope, to dream, to imagine, to have joy.. All my life I've tried to repay them in some small way--for the creativity, for the good times, for the smiles, for the great, interesting, original music,film,art and poetry. They were companions to my youth who gave off great amounts of light in a time of great darkness on the earth. Were they perfect? No. Were they human? Yes. But their vulnerabilities were used as strengths, as wellsprings for good action, and for caring. "There's nothing you can do that can't be done,"sang John."We can work it out,"sang Paul."Love is what we came here for."sang George. And Ringo:"Goodnight Everybody Everywhere." Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.
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John Lennon is the reason I got into poetry in the first place. You brought all those warm feelings back.*
A clever idea beautifully executed. *
* excellent work
*sigh*
and then
*hits the fav button*
Good suite. Good approach, DP. I like.
Good prompts and very musical responses.
This is beautiful, reading it is like floating on a river in sunlight. *
Very creative. *