Cliff "Clifford" Crowe
Riverside, California
_________________

HANDS OF GLASS
To a Wind Chime

(A cluster of three earthen vases
hangs inverted, transformed into chimes,
pouring out harmonic sound from
little wafers of gossamer glass
suspended like hands on stringed arms,
serving as instruments for the wind.
Pendulous they swing to nudge the triad,
heralds of the stirring breeze.)

When on some distant future day,
I have returned to native clay,
will any skilled and knowing hand
convert me into crystal sand
and shape me as a little round,
that makes such tactile tinkling sound?

A host of clappers will applaud the wind,
like castanets that must depend
on zephyrs for their lilting air,
and tremble all the while they share
those clattered wind-sounds' happy pealing,
wasting not a waft of feeling
as the joyous tones go through
the pendants to their rendezvous.

Cliff Crowe
1997

       SILVER STRAND BEACH PARTY

You were at a beer bust
and forgot to puncture the can
of beans you just
wanted to heat under the fire in the sand.

You remember the forgetting
and you laugh. You were letting
a tragedy be funny, as the hot
exploding coals
shot
far
across the sand and burned some holes
in your blanket and guitar.

Now the holes are evidence
of all the stored up power,
charred rings, the elements
of small delights gone sour,
a little can that needed to relieve
the pressure you would cause.
And now you can't believe
that it was just obeying laws.

The holes are not what brings regrets,
or that the beans were lost.
Your guitar still has strings and frets
fragmented words. You hum
a song
you can't forget
from some
long
time ago.
You know.
And mostly you recall again
you simply didn't think to punch a hole
into that can.

Cliff Crowe
1996

         HAIKU

Dandelion bloomed,
yellow turning now to white.
I start to grow old.

Cliff Crowe
2002


POETASTER NATUS


Images can't really talk.
It's words you poets use to hawk,
imposing on us all, your mental strictures,
making readers think in pictures,
that Auden's Breughel's Icarus' legs
or Keats's Chapman's Homer causes moods.
Being skillful turners of the phrases,
you know not of the havoc that you wreak.
You lead your readers through those complicated mazes:
A circus in a poet's world, poor freak,
who shows and tells, performs and begs
and gives estovers as our intellectual foods.
A crafty fire eater devours his own work
and watches our reaction with a smirk,
as if Nietzsche's Ecce Homo turned
upon itself, consumed its very world, then burned.

I would rather feel what I think
than see the images I realize
blindly and forever wrought
in hasty scrawls of scholar's ink.
I would be Tiresias and be taught
to see both present truth and ancient lies,
alluding only to myself, not needing eyes.

Do you know that when I, poet, drink
out of your glass, I find that you have left engraved
upon the rim etched images of depraved,
delated inability to tell me what you think?
And now, although my thirst is no great matter,
I take a sip and feel my mouth has stretched,
so not to feel the burry furrows which you etched
upon the glass I should proceed to shatter.
Yet hardly ever do I fail
to read Ecce Homo in lip-braille.

Clifford Crowe
1998
 

THE STAMP OF FATE

A latent postage stamp once had
an experience that wasn't bad,
One evening, right before he glued,
his backside got licked by a dude.
This was nothing ordinary,
That dude's lick was salivary.
The stamp sure wanted to lick back,
but tongue-wise, seems he had a lack.
Alas, he wound up on a letter,
which, for a stamp, was likely better,
so on a journey he was sent.
And that's how his whole life was spent.

Cliff Crowe
2001

Cliff Crowe
2001

For this purpose, let us suppose that disconance in the whole data base would involve summarizing the discrete aspects of therabotic booleation in all the excess quarks, except for those which had been linked into connubial concatenation. This would require transmorgration of the protactical points during production of any unwanted mithrins. Such a process can occur in only an environment of total indebretion, provided the latter has access to unlimited lacrothesial proclesions.

Technically speaking, subtransmogordial plaxody will copy all the other aspects of unigraphesis, to the extent that the complexities of pseudomachrymal trunculations are brought into consideration as a possible explanation of dyspreterginally exophrenic thanagloceramiosis. Few, if any, attempts at trying to circumvent this anomaly have ever had any dramatic effect on the consequences of such tangential ramifications except those by the notable German program designer Moxmir Nixaus.

Unquestionably, there will be more inquiries into the whole subject of plaxody as soon as reports are published explaining the findings of Mr. Nixaus. Much more powerful proquinceivers will come into the forefront, making possible a heretofore unthinkable degree of capufection in the micronalization of most varieties of mezzotransprismarites. When these devices are commonplace in their operation, you will see and finally understand that hortamonophasic plaxody is no longer the enigma it has been up to the present time.

Cliff Crowe
2003