Ugly Dog Poetry. New Site @ Uglydogpoetry.com

Hi

Thanks for coming by - please forgive my spacing problems, I wont stress anymore, I wanted to give you the best presentation, please accept I have done the best I can - I just want you to read me. If you want to comment go to gsbuss1@aol.com. Thanks to Inisbua Mastiffs for the photo, she's beautiful not ugly.

More poetry on Ugly Dog Too - follow the link on the bottom of the page. G S Buss MP3s available on other sites, follow the links at the bottom of the page.

Introduction

We all want to be the stone that makes the ripples go out, running into other people’s lives in some way, we all want to be written in the recording angel's clay tablets, if we are just dust and water, mud wrapped around bones then why is our voice so strong? So in need to be remembered? We want repetition and security but the brave remember that each day is infinitely different to the one before, we have not been here before, the calender date, the sun, our new breaths.


Plaza de Armas

The light through the Cathedral door turned
into a stained yellow lamp that swung from
left to right scattering dust particles
of incense in the entrance.

Beggars sat outside stretching cupped hands
into the salved conscience of the leavers
as they crossed the studded doors threshold out,
over the sword buried with the musket and
lead shot in the gates foundations.

The flat Peruvian sun does not fit into the streets,
it rests on the roof tops, leaving air thick with
herbs and dirt and people.
Obtuse light makes unclear the passing of time,
it falls unmarked against the white wash.

Indian girls with braids selling tall
stemmed flowers walk along the cafes and shops for
coins and nods that admit, cars crumble along the roads beneath balconies.
*

Paraty

It's a good time in the evening,
early before the reserved tables are taken.
The house singer is happy to play, the bar staff are listening, claps are appreciated. I look up when there are two bars of Stairway to Heaven
in the Bossa Nova.

A wailing starts and it's Easter Friday.
A girl child, bent, in white and pale carries a cross, behind her the town follow, bar staff nod to passing bowed heads. The priest chants, from somewhere in the shoal of town’s people the wail, so in tune and pitched somewhere between the earth of house tops and heaven it goes from major to minor and back again.

Ave Maria fills the narrow streets.
There's a resonance, as the wood remembers the seasons of damp and warm, so the walls remember this presence going along, over and through streets.
A tottering Mother of God above the low roofs tops.
The bar staff cross themselves and nod, as if she knows them. Then music again, coffee and talk, like a distant impression had past.
*

Old City Lahore

Walking beneath ancient gates, stalls of locks
in solid iron, slipped open and closed, synapses,
and on into narrow connecting streets, peopled
grey, black, brown, rivers of cloth rolled off looms to
blow in the dust thickened wind, the constant pressing of
angels pushing back and sides, almost made definable by
air thick with powered dyes and spices.

Courtyards where poets would sit,tell stories of caravans and trade, hardship brings out poetry where there is none, always gathered up and moving.
Condense the facts and illustrate in cadence of travel and silence of men.

Other stories and few camels now but the
movement has stayed in the air.

Cutting and scraping hooves after Eid,
boys in alcoves chew and spit red juice and trade with hands and mouth, averted eyes, alleys so narrow light
fades after a few steps, eyes echo somewhere ahead,
a presence knowing behind white plastered stone.
Self-Perpetuating dynamic within redbrick walls and gates.
*

Billowed Sail

A billowed sail covers Lima
And through it’s tears and travel
Pulls in cross thatched threads,
Intricate stones and woods are cut
And balconies carved.
Masts unyielding to the force bitter wind,
Hulls rising and crushing the waves,
What good is water against wood,
Wood against steel,
And so people are owned,
Their mouths filled with strange words.
The sail may rot now in yellowed threads,
But it’s cast shadow is caught in the raised oil of mixed Indian-Spanish art on caorse canvas.
*

City of Stars - La Paz Bolivia

Chill from Illimani, silver metal smelting
taste that blows it’s waste onto valley walls
around the city of stars, woven in dark
reds and browns of shadows and mists in
narrow street nights, stop and listen to the sound of armour and steel on stone street flags.
*

Vitoria

Burying my head beneath the waves of surf there are boats in Armada off shore, waiting to collect iron ore in their bellies, the water that washed beneath their ribs and riveted skin is washing into shore in ride-able waves, the same boats will be see-able later with their unmoved,
unblinking beacon eyes.

The Armada herd is going south after feeding on ore, they go to winter in Cyprus or Greece, until new feet clamber aboard, scratching the calloused back, tickling the innermost places with hoses and brushes kicking and bullying the inner parts to give a thought of motion so vague covering oceans.
*

Rio

The sound of John Coltrtane’s searching
behind the early evening voices and the
long held notes quietened nerves in my mind.

Rain on Rio streets with wooden walled bars,
more tall, thin, long, searching people,
cigarette smoke from bent elbows with laughing, special family nights, elegant beautiful people, fussing waiters.

Violence, the fear of it,
the stories of resistance to it,
are relived and then onto beaches and apartments.

Rain on Rio streets and taxi,
a bubble in the foam swept along.

Rain on Rio streets and dark wood beds
with turned headrests for turned heads,
dark heads, but that old searching for
that long held note of safe.
*
Polis Cyprus

Everyone has been to sea,
Adonis, you hint at some terrible wrecking
That left you 'unwell'.
The rocks of villages where you have moored
For fifteen years with cigarettes and coffee
At card tables,
Male circles of rising and falling,
Currents of conversation
With the charcoal and the dying vine.

Small stone streets, channels of sun,
Dust and rain,
Familiar and well plotted by
The clear night stars,
Now it seems you stretch out your arms
To the walled sides
To guide your unresponsive cargo through
The constant threat of storm.

We talk of the 60's and 70's,
Decades slip through fingers with quick phrases,
So many hard mornings and unending nights working boats,
Two months from Southampton to Australia,
To work to live and now in the night you retravel retrawl
The moving hours for all their motion and expanse.

Broken away from the twisted olive branch,
It was still standing swamped by
An ocean space and emptiness,
The oncoming wave on wave of mountains
Crested with mists.
And the sea gives up it's dead.

Liverpool

Throwing Mosaic Floors

The sun is different in the city, walk out and past the moving animated faces, muscles shaping to thoughts, the timbre of words. Out along the street of stalls and boxes, arguing prices, carved Buddas on crates in body warmers look down in meditation.

The chant of repetition, each day the same, pacifies their mind, displacing people, a rock in the stream, into the traffic that picks and carries along. Turning into the street, it’s quieter now and the half silence billows up from the streets each side. Sat on steps mothers pull at children and thin girls in pyjamas lean and talk, moving mouths in the heat haze in front of tied back hair.

Lifting my head, straightening my neck in the direction to go, so many people, closure and conclusion seems so hard,
too many moving parts to contain, to discern a rhythm,
it's cracked mosaic floors, too close to live, to find a voice, needing distance. A cold rain falls in the returning lives of evening, it carries the turmoil scream of gulls up from the docks, with screaming kids running off the schoolday passivity of learning, the frustration of earning merit through silences. Watch the striving evening move back, iron claw and dust grey arm is taut as the street lights dim.

There is comfort in the organic process of planting flowers in the walled garden of the mind, and the mind has no square edges, not that come from within, evening is covering the floor with cracked coloured clay pieces arranged in the pattern of the soul.

Now

Sanctification of the Ordinary

The sideways light on the sandstone of a leaving city, tied cigarette smoke on the bus queue, the exhaling city changing mood with the rising street caves. Thin student on thin bike is the backbone of a knife, people so familiar with the street they sit on steps like the lounge sofa, scratching the dog laid out at their feet. Violent kingfisher blue is washed out and the edges darken, the city shift changes, those running to leave and the night shift coming in like sun starved ghosts.

I heard a voice in a language I didn’t understand say:
This is Man who wont respect mystery,
This is Man who wont learn from history.

Outside the city walls a hawk sent out from the raised fist to make what it can of it’s life, keeps flying with shouts from the Fist it doesn’t understand, signs it can’t translate, to go around the circuit and in moments of meaning fall on the meat with fur, anger and claw, falling over the sending glove with the jesses caught in a blooded wounded hand broken open, a spread rose pieced by it’s own thorns. Then with folded wings, with the promise that they wont unfurl again, give up the flight.

I heard a voice in a language I didn’t understand say:
This is Man who wont respect mystery,
This is Man who wont learn from history.

Rejecting the sanctification of the ordinary, he goes to old places to feel the years, picking up pieces of painted glass to build diffusing, distorting, beautifying windows. Touching time-porous stone it’s a sad man who looks for meaning in things to to make other things meaningless.

I heard a voice in a language I didn’t understand say:
Man who wont respect mystery,
Man who wont learn from history.

Moon Ferry

As the moon ferry left to collect me,
I flung my arms around you,
Ropes around a rock to meet and lock the other side,
Looking for an anchor in the force and the rush.

As the moon ferry moves through
The seas of reflected stars,
From floating in shallow waters
I throw my arm over the side and pull myself in.
The heavy boat not moved by mood
Collects and carries me out,
Not through the presence of darkness,
But the absence of light.

Obedient to the tides, the moon ferry
Returns me each day by a
Closed door, framed by the arch of the day,
Faint voices of things
Come through from the other side.
The first fragile glass blown thoughts
While thoughts still matter,
Cool in the dawn air,
Some find form and spherical strength,
Others don’t shatter but exhale,
A dying planet in a universe of new thoughts.

The moon ferry leaves in its
Timetabled cycle from the earth’s coast,
Gone before sight can define it,
Sight can hold it back,
Consciousness looses it pace
*

Me, My Heart and I

Me my heart and I , sit by the river trying to find words for things
that don’t have words, trying to find movement for things
that don’t have bone, muscle, lungs and heart, me my heart and I
until rubies line the corridor of the sun and pearls the tracks of the moon.
And we sit in rivers of jade grass, bent in the wake of the ever falling sun, me my heart and I push the paper thin, damp paper thin, edges of my senses, smoke from the fire gives more shape than the thoughts can find, I am holding me as a baby struggling to utter or form words, because
I live amongst languages I do not understand.

Me my heart and I, carried along amongst the banners and the shouting as two nation plates collide, helicopter gunships wasp and spit, farmers picking peaches pick bombs, tectonic shifts where no one is held responsible like God is for earth quakes, and are stars just the neurons firing in the mind of God? Are we just random bio engineering that forgot to be recalled?

We get troubled, me my heart and I, can we bring a memory?
Pretend poetry is just remembered memories, over Rio on Pao de Acucar,
being waved at by a flying Christ, ahead of an ever falling moon, lightening probing the city, just because it can. People applauding, cheering, searing the air until the taste of electricity enters me, me my heart and I put these things away to taste in the blood each day.


Pigments

Standing by the breached fence where
the field runs in undamed, almost unseeable, drawn up from broken woad, indigo mixed in the porous air makes it heavy.

The enclosing storm forces on the blossom bud, opening petals and lighting the pink wick exposed inside,
washing the paper with violet blue light.

Under the insistent pestle of the sky,
cobalt chloride is crushed and heated from beneath in the Spring earth, the mortar of the bowled garden spills
cobalt green to run along the grass veins and stems to thicken at the bladed tip.

Vivid, raised and penetrating senses,
the pigment on the canvas of the enclosed garden is softened and forced out by the storm approaching, heightened by the closeness of charge.
*

Anytown

Each heart of the living beats, who can deny that?
We all want to feel the beat, it comes down to the muscle contracting and releasing in our chest, our own beat, in the womb our first conscious sound was the heart of our mother, whatever happened later, that was close, as close as anyone could get. We love the rhythm through our eyes where patterns run in symmetry, things in proportion we call beauty. We love repetition because we live on a revolving world.

I only want to say that all the unheard voices of the world are deafening me, all the coulda been poets, woulda been poets, shoulda been poets, thinkers and speakers drawing in breath like a heart draws in blood, speak with a voice like a heart pushes out. When is the time to try, is education the relaxation for the mind, the time to paint, the time when someone gives you paints and brush. What if no one gives you paint or brush? What if carrying a paint and brush will get you stamped on in the street, not all have the luxury not to be scared of sensitivity or vulnerability and to see it as a jewel. Education is showing someone what to do and how, and what if the someone, somewhere never got to have their say?

What if you were too busy being alive to think about being alive?

All the unheard voices of the world are deafening me, I was troubled and I carried it to sleep. In a dream I was in Anytown, bent women moved through the walking straight women, thin men with stick legs cleaned the fat man’s shoes. And you think I’m going to say one could talk and the other not, you want me to say that one had a noble voice and the other not, you want some revolution in another man’s dream, you want me to pull down the straight and the fat and raise up the bent and the thin. In my dream that rose through the troubled foaming sleep all were dumb but talking constantly, hearing their heart in their ears, rushing through their veins beside the inner ear.

And then, and then in my dream in Anytown, the evening came with the faster leaving cars, and then enter the slower walkers, lovers, and like the heat rich scent of bowed blood poppies and the oil in the grain of the heavy swaying wheat head, there was space and a heat haze of talking rose up in Anytown. As the chambers of the heart are different to each, the ventricles, our caves shaped by our running under skin streams, our inner life, so each voice had different echoes, and somewhere two voices together.
*

Kite

Surprised by the intensity of her own solitude she knows that if she whistles when her soul is the right side facing and the mood is strong, she can call the heron to the clearing, over the trees to fall...

Falling, heron’s angular arched wings are inches from the ground, over damp grass the legs trail, the kite strings from a taught frame of hollow bone and stretched skin.

She remembers the falling beat of her father’s
fists on her mother, the want to be somewhere else, put part of herself somewhere else.

The sky is grey with light at it’s tips, at it’s wing span’s end, the sun. Heron cups the air to stop and swing it’s weight to ground, listening to the voice of breeze and to the voice
of leaves, for danger, listening for a craggy path of currents to climb out of the wood, up the sheer face to lower heaven.

She is trained to sense moods and tensions, over trained to avoid the coming storm and all that can discharge between two people. More than the electric pulses across her heart, pushing the blood, pulling at threads of atmosphere she is aware heron listens to her breath so close.

As the tide of wind across the clearing changes she holds the knurled dangling strings, with the falling beat of the wings Heron lifts them through the soft grey damp into the gentle half light.Tattooed bruises on her arms pull out of shape with her swinging weight as they scale the path of currents, steps cut into the side of sky.

There is always the thought to let go, be consumed by the falling, enveloped in the violence of speed, breath taken in the rush with each blow of wings penetrates deeper than what she has seen before, what she has been before.

On the ground she feels her own weight again but strengthened by the sense of otherness, a thing only she can do, she lets Heron go, hard strings running through her hands. Her voice, her sounds let him rise, she called the kite and they flew, they knew and when her soul is the right side facing and the mood is strong, she can call the heron to the clearing, over the trees to fall.
*

Wind

I went out into the wind and bowed my head and showed the nape of my neck for the wind to blow across my nerves like a reed, and I became wind.

I went out into the rain and cupped my hands and in the waiting, and the wanting, I became rain.

I went out into the stars, and caught their piercing highsong, the moon's bass drum hum,
I caught the falling moondust in my lungs.

The place where dreams are gave me space.
Leaving footprints, I'm moving and changing shape to these things, bending, bending, bending the back, cupping the hands, hearing the stars in my dance, the bass drum hum .

If I push the rhythm can I stay?
if I push the rhythm can I stay?

If I say the word can I stay? here where dreams give me space, where space gives me dreams.

Ditton

Men with their straight backs starting to bend under a fruit- weight of years.Worn check shirts and thick boughs of forearms, thick jointed, ridged hands turning cigarettes between two hard finger clamps, tubes of white paper with pinches of damp tobacco, engraved metal tins that snapped shut. In the orchard the air was sweet from the heat on the apples, the green dust on the grey wood. Manhood was sowing and reaping, respecting nature but overpowering it, training trees in the way to grow, cutting and bleeding the nipples of growth to bring more fruit. Red plastic shot gun shells with shinny brass caps, thick to hold heavy guns with large tubes running along the top, cannons men carried in the dark looking for fox. The skip held a ton of apples and each day each person’s needed to be filled. Fruit made of water and paper skin were poured into the boxes, their unequal shapes fitting awkwardly stacking on top of each other. The tractor of an engine hung between four monster wheels beat through the orchard, the tyres so old the rubber was cracked, sweet damp diesel stuck to the air.

You could travel if you wanted to.
There was a narrow straight path
Walled on both sides by wire fences,
Forbidding access to the fields,
The flat managed fields, the copses, trees,
Ditches couldn’t be seen.
The rabbits knew that too.
At the end of the path,
Through the lorry yard, were the estates.

The grey ground was hard, house upon house. People’s horizon was a week, if it ever got longer the slim fathers moved the family up the hill, the houses there were different shapes, plastic window frames. Most of the children from these passed through the school before moving on. Manhood was deciding whether to pull yourself up off the car park floor outside the Friday night disco, pulling yourself up even if you knew you might go down again with Mad Dog and Mad Pup and their friends, clothes smelling of new sofas on the new estate, the new trainers around your head. Violence is an escape for the lacking if they are giving it but adrenaline makes heroes of the least likely. Nothing green could push up through the concrete, and if it did it would be alien and outsider. It would have been more welcome on the estate at the bottom of the hill, not so much welcome but not noticed. People just seemed to be getting on by getting by. Danny’s mum seemed strangely peaceful when we met, like she was somewhere else although everything about her said stress. Her straight hair, her eyes perfectly framed and bespectacled by rings and lines.

Going back, the night always re-inking the press for the next day, each person going to take their impression from it. Always vixen’s screams sounded like murdered women, then relief at the second shout when you heard it for what it was. The trees still grew with no-one around at night. Not all things could come out of books of text in square class rooms. It all left a taste that Adam’s apple had fallen into Newton’s hand who then pierced it with callipers giving all things a formula, sitting there under his apple tree.

Some G S Buss MP3s

Slamidol
Cloudy Day Art
Uglydogpoetry