"Godzilla Beneath The Lamppost"

By Richard Ilnicki

"Godzilla Beneath The Lamppost" deals with a variety of subjects that surround us, we are surrounded by or are systemic and manifest themselves based on our five senses. The poetry can best be understood by those of us who are struggling with our identity, not necessarily sexual orientation although that is occasionally implied. Many of the poems require the reader to dig deeply into their understanding of what the writer is saying, not about himself, but about the reader. It's what's inside that counts based on one's understanding of the complexity of thought. if there is a disconnect it will be because the poem is being directed by an extracorporeal being, the poet's muse, who is communicating in a language known only to the writer; this is not,
however, what the poet intends. Most, if not all, of the poems dealing with love, will easily be understood; so, likewise, will most of the poems dealing with God, as the poet knows Him. Some of the poems will easily be found to be too long and somewhat laborious and/or tedious, but the poet just got carried away with the love of words; love is frequently blind, but love should never be boring. It is obvious that a lot of the poetry is self-centered, but that is what can happen when the poet gets caught between the lines and is expected to write from that mysterious vantage point.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun writing these poems, and I don't regret having published even one. I don't think I will have embarrassed myself too badly, but I am prepared for the ridicule when it comes. I've done what I love, and I am, by and large, happy with the result.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098318840

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Richard Ilnicki

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or

used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the

publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover art design by Stephen Kahrs

Owner of Stephen Kahrs Photography

www.stephenkahrs.com

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-09831-883-3 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-09831-884-0 (eBook)

This book is dedicated to The Unknown Poet,

Whether dead or alive.

The only gift better than a book is time enough to read it

R.A. Ilnicki

Your body follows your mind. Where are you taking yours?

R.A. Ilnicki

"You can make God be whatever you want him to be,

But you cannot make him be what he is not."

R.A. Ilnicki

Table of Contents

A Daughter’s Suicide

A Spontaneous Human Combustion

A cloud has fallen

Unheard of

A vocabulary of the dead

After they laid me in the ground

Amputated psychological dispositions

April

Ashes to ashes…to ashes

Barking up the wrong tree

My complex

Carbon Dated Man

A Solemn Responsibility

Cheered-up

Your Trojan Horse

Dog day afternoon with Jimmy

Drained of blood

dredging up the past

Far Be It From Me

Free A Last

Gifted

God dropped the bomb

Godzilla Beneath The Lamp Post

Grave digger

I beat dead horses

My ears see her

I hear voices

If You Are Not Near Me

If you want to read to me

In the arena of language

Incarcerated thoughts

Jimmy

Just when you thought it was safe

Language?

Left holding the skin of my wife

Literary Evacuation

Love in the age of psychiatry

Manslaughter

Mary Frances Joyce

Mary, My Mary

Mary, Queen of Ireland

May 14, 1948-Medinat Yisrael (Zechariah: 2:8)

First strike/June 1967

Mike Webster (Smash-Mouth Football)

My body is breaking

My Broca’s Aphasia

My Deaf Voice

My bark

My depressed bones

My Words

No Man’s Land

One Man’s Garbage

Our feminine side

Oxygen Debt

Paper thin love

Persona Non Grata

Poems read after my death

Primordial congealed fossilized cries (Tommy’s Voice)

The Quintessential Poem

Reading between the lines

Today I Feel Like Samson

Semitic Man

Sometimes Dreams Come True (She Is My Child)

She, looking over

She broke my sound barrier.

Should we have our heads periodically examined?

Some kind of accident

Something about my poetry

Swallowed alive

Take Me To St. Bernard’s Hospital

Trench warfare

The blade of suicide

The bread of tears

The cast iron dictum

The celestial embrace of the bridegroom

The chunk of skull in the belly

The Einsatzgruppen Doppelganger Crisis

The Lobotomy

The Lost Thought

The prodigious weight of love

The Revisionists (Butz/Chomsky et.al )

The closed casket

The Corpse of Poetry

The doctor said

The Incalculable

The muzzle

The problem with my poetry

The punk

The sewer of self

The silent treatment

The sound of soul (Motown)

The suicide

The Thoracotomy

The trust before the slaughter

The Unfather

The unidentifiable

My Dark Side

The Test

The wine has become vinegar

THEY CAME IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

They flattened my tongue.

Book Burning

Today I feel like Oskar Werner

(Poetry in the 3rd Degree)

Unbelief

Unconventional magic

Undesirable

Virtual reality

Voices of ashes

Watch God

What a shame

When not in the bell tower

When they cut me off

When I jumped from the moving train

When I pulled the plug

When I slit my wrists

When least expected

When love decomposes

When she cut me open

When they dragged me out of my grave

When they told me

Where were you on 02-25-1945?

Where to find me

Whose Throne Is It?

Without rising to stand

Years and years and years ago

You who have come to me

Your Bed

Your boots

Your Next Breath

A Daughter’s Suicide

Love in the balance

often hangs by a thread.

Frequently we can watch love hang

as a dangling innocent

swinging precariously above a fire,

but we cannot see the thread

by which love hangs.

It is attached invisibly to a nebulous

dancing star just out of human reach.

If we could only see the future of love

we would embrace love with love.

We would hold love tightly to our breast,

its silhouetted baby pink toes

just high enough above the flame

safe and secure in our strong arms.

At all costs to our proud immutable selves

we would set a vigilant watch

and attend closely to love.

We would willingly wait on love

hand and foot in delightful sacrifice

lest some untoward harm would come to love.

Sometimes the thread by which love hangs is thin

representing a tenuous line strung across a lonely universe,

a world slowly closing like an invisible noose.

This expanse is far too broad

to accommodate the young thread’s limitations.

In this self-imposed imploding vacuum

fear cannot co-exist with love.

Thus, the thread breaks

because love’s unknown is much too heavy a weight

to be held in the brittle clay of human hands.

So, we can cut love down,

and we can drag it through the city of guilt and doubt

behind the wild horses of our (if only) finite minds,

but true love, though it can be ridden hard,

brought to its knees humiliated and broken,

can never be buried,

because when the fragile thread of despair breaks

the infinite dimension of love in the balance

will land safely into our outstretched arms,

and we will carry it in our hearts forever.

A Spontaneous Human Combustion

Spontaneous human combustion, that evacuating scream,

erupts suddenly without a trace of fire.

The necessary conditions for combustion don’t exist.

This confirmed metaphysical phenomenon

is a mysterious conflagration of exhausted flesh,

dry bones, and an unholy spirit in search of an exorcist.

No scientific explanation supports the conclusion.

Something must have happened from the inside out

the heart cannot contain. In other words,

some silent deaf and dumb ischemic attack without a voice

is about to scream at the top of its congested lungs,

Fire! Infarction! Fire! Infarction. Burn baby burn!

Taken to hell by absolute zero (-459.67),

frigid, naked and unbearably hot,

the determinate counsel of thermogenesis

backs introspection into a dry tinderbox corner.

This pyromaniac is a bulimic soul

that cannot keep the taste of love down.

Exasperated, frustrated, depressed, and helpless,

This poor soul becomes engaged in a wave of silent protest;

something malignant within is rebelling.

Hail, fire and brimstone don’t help; they produce unquenchable guilt.

The last protective nerve ending is unsheathed

exposing the squirming convoluted subconscious.

This raw familial exposure sends you through the roof

of your mouth, and you must obey the voice inside your swollen head,

a clear directive that says,

Emerge! Touch the sky or die!

Red sky, red flag, red herring, red badge of courage

bring you to a new high, and your veins begin to smoke

with the smell of an undetected electrical fire.

The pain shifts back and forth across the international dateline

until you have no idea what day it is.

Frustration gift-wrapped as uncertainty takes root as bitterness

beneath the tree of abuse and shame.

In this jealous garden

tentacles fertilized with anger produce the lush fruit of hatred.

Finally, after all is said and done, swallowed alive and whole,

desperation engenders a sense of hopelessness.

You’ve spent your last emotional dime, and you can only watch

psychologically motivated memories arise

like a gaggle of gestalt geese gagging.

They are inviting you to join them south of the border.

Your hyper introspection irradiates flammable despair.

It burns your X-Ray to the nth degree.

Bonfire flames of vanity smoke and pepper

the blue sky with imploding black holes.

You are now caught red-handed,

an incendiary who is immolating his carcinogenic self,

And vengeance is yours,

until the definitive intransigence of your meditative posture

brings you to a new high

just one degree above the highest.

A cloud has fallen

A cloud has been violently torn from its sockets.

Painfully detached from the safety of the sky, it has fallen

Directly onto my head.

Its bloody flailing dangling orphaned limbs

Have wrapped my head like the tentacles of a squid.

It didn’t hurt, but it did clothe me in mystery,

And it changed my voice.

This new voice filled my pants’ pockets

With romantic fluffy poems,

Sugary verses that tickled the ears of innocent bystanders,

Fans wrapped in cotton candy and salt water taffy.

I also cut my first cute rhyming record

That produced platinum warm fuzzies.

My once nondescript autograph was now worth something,

And, furthermore, I didn’t need to read

In smoke-filled, nearly vacant, run down coffee shops

Off the beaten path.

Coincidentally, this new voice filled my pockets

With lots of money,

And, of course, those things that only money could buy.

Use your imagination.

.

At about the very same time

In this previously unfamiliar hemisphere,

Pulchritudinous pedestrians, the same bystanders,

Filled to the gills with blue blood,

Who never had to punch a clock,

Were developing cloudy dispositions

Based on the deplorable state of the economy.

Stress was playing havoc with their neurotransmitters.

They were losing their hair and their balance.

Their succulent lives saturated by fat

Had become silently ischemic. In the process, however,

They had also grown ears

Worthy of hearing the truth.

A ‘changing of the guard’ seemed to have taken place,

An absolute Copernican paradigm shift

From haughty ivory towers to blue collar cellars.

It appeared as if these same blind entitled mice

could now see through, not only with, their eyes.

The next time they saw me without my bodyguards

They had a thing or two to say.

They said I had suddenly begun to behave

In a rather puffed-up manner,

And that even when I walked

I seemed to be floating above the huddled masses.

My former fiancé said she thought

I had become rather billowy,

Not just in conversation, but in appearance also.

I had that inflated cheeky look of indifference.

My newly found, suddenly extrasensory, admirers

Accused me of disseminating verses like a plague

Spread by fluffy baby lambs dripping molasses

From their innocent pink tongues.

They said I looked like a powdered sugary shadow

With honeycombed lips. My shape had no substance,

And my voice that once could fracture the wind

Sounded like a barely detectable subtle gas leak.

Before long they were determined

To get my head out of the clouds

To bring me back down to earth,

Where they hoped my mouth would be filled with fertilizer.

They hoped I would germinate the starving populace,

Beanstalks reaching for wisdom in the sky.

They demanded nutritional verses, words to live by,

The crude rotation of crops by the blade of truth.

So, they pummeled

My Pillsbury Dough Boy body like a punching bag

And they drove their furious bodies into me

As if I were a tackling dummy.

One way or another they would

Bring me back down to earth and back to my senses,

Down to a place where they could

Latch onto my mouth like starved leeches

Short of the blood of truth.

Aside from killing me, they tried everything.

Even their emotionally charged poetic innuendos

Proved ineffective; they had the distinct ring of impotence.

I never lost my composure or powers of resumption,

And I was, therefore, able to maintain my newly found puffy form.

I felt comfortable, kinda like on cloud 9.

Soon enough they discovered

That they couldn’t change my mind

Nor restore my former voice.

Nothing seemed to hurt me,

Not even their meaningful metaphors,

No one ever shattered syllables like he did.

Slings and arrows just seemed to bounce