A Few Ragged Words

By Marty Price

This collection includes much of my poetry written between 2000 and 2013 and a selection of my short fiction. Many of the poems are short, including a section of haiku.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387871797

Book preview

A Few Ragged Words

A Few Ragged Words:

Poems and  Short Fiction

By  Marty Price

Copyright © 2013 by Marty Price

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 or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2017

ISBN 978-1-387-87179-7

Windword Press

106 Dunbrook Dr.

Starkville, Mississippi  39759

Dedication

To Carolyn, Rob, Allison Levon, and Nessie

(the original dedication; Levon has since crossed the Rainbow Bridge, but that is okay; that is the cycle of life)

Contents

Poems

A Fable

Haiku (many)

Other Shorts

Other Poems

The Tarot as 78 Brief Poems

Prose

Infinity BookShoppe

The Road Back

Safe Passage

The Trailer Ghost

The Sauropod

Snow

Closing Poem: The Unkempt Spiral

A Fable

Once upon a time, in the tiny sphere of infinity humans call the Universe, all was dark.

That which was was not even aware of itself.

Then, behold, a tiny spark of light appeared – and another – and another – and finally millions or billions or numbers unknown.

The sparks, tiny and separate as they were, discovered themselves to be beyond huge in constituents.

The sparks, which we call Quasars, declared themselves White Holes and began emitting all the tiny constituents of the Universe.

The weighty of these children began spiraling around their mothers, turning into dust clouds and stars, and creating the pattern of Galaxies.

The energetic of these children voyaged outward, lighting the weighty children whenever they collided.

The weighty children learned how to create their own energetic children; they called themselves Stars as they lit the Universe.

Stars begat Planets.

On the Planets, weighty children called elements held hands to become molecules.

The Universe reveled in its growing complexity; Starlight danced in the molecules of the planetary gasses.

On many, many planets, creatures who called themselves life-forms danced in the light of their mother Star.

Within the Universe, each element danced on with the rhythm humans liken to a heart-beat.

In realms without and beyond, other hearts are likely beating.

Humans do not know; this Universe is far, far bigger than we can dream.

Yet we each dream our little part of it.

We live; we dance.

Some incorporeal part of each of us predates that first spark.

Some incorporeal part of each of us will survive the last spark, the moment when the Soul of this Universe chooses to live a new life.

And it will all be good, for there is always more to live and more to dream.

2010

Unkempt Sonnets

Gatherings

Gathering

Things we’ve lost:

Island colonies of dwarf wooly mammoths;

A thousand thousand diaries

And photographs of unknown people;

Most of the substance

Of every night of dreams;

Last week’s sunlight and yesterday’s stars.

I’ll put them all in a cardboard box,

A small one

-- No, a tiny one –

They won’t take up space

-- Being lost, you know.

3/16/2013

In Service to Words

Poets, the young man claimed,

"Must be heartless as revolutionaries,

Slaying friends and building enemies

That Truth may be served."

When younger I cast words

Like poorly directed lightning bolts,

Imagining myself Prometheus

And aiming like Zeus on a three-day drunk.

I learned I was not heartless

For it was not my digestion

That flamed within my chest

And rose to redden my ears with shame.

Angry men, I replied, "Both old and young,

Make poor poetry and evil politics."

7/5/2013

Books!!!

"I have too many books

That fail to move the mind,

Prick the conscience,

Let the soul take flight.

"I have too many books

That my students fail to read,

Or do not read deeply,

Or are afraid to cry over.

"I have too many books

That wait, unread,

Carrying dreams undreampt,

Leaving worlds untouched.

"I need more books,

I need so many more books."

7/27/2013

(It’s  Just the) White Hair & Beard

After reading a suggestion that I

Am coming to look like Walt Whitman,

My first thought was better he than

St. Nicholas, who was de-sainted,

Though I suspect I am a very different

Leaf of grass, different root, other seed.

I am a tree-soul, loving countryside

And fearing city streets.

I suppose I might share soul-stuff

With Thoreau, but I rather think myself

Someone quietly forgotten many times over,

My heart and bones from some farmwife

As imagined by Thomas Gray, or, more likely,

From the tree who shaded his meditative form.

6-1-2013

The Road

The barefoot, ragged traveler,

His face lit as by a thousand suns,

Turned to me and explained,

"There is no road to Peace;

Peace is the road

-- Rutted, rocky and crossed

By more brambles than can be counted --

It is the only road worth walking."

I heard, though I found it hard

To listen amid the bombs

And the marching songs.

He forgot to mention the trees

Which shaded it, or the flowers,

Or the clear stream beside.

4/22/2013

50 Years of ‘Progress’

In my sometimes-hungry little industrial town

Bordering West Virginia’s northern mines,

I lived a perfectly idyllic childhood

Of bicycles and whiffle ball,

Safety and security unchallenged

As I lobbed coal slag into a blood-orange creek,

Breathed sometimes-polluted air,

And heard adults mention distant missiles.

Doors could be left unlocked – they were --

Bicycles remained where we parked them,

Shots were fired only in hunting season,

And only at squirrels and deer.

In this so much richer Brave New World

Our children shoot each other’s children.

7/20/2013

Building

One particular spring day in 1977,

I recall shoveling sand, ripping open

A 72-pound bag of mortar, adding water,

And having at it with a long-handled hoe

-- Sixteen times, for sixteen batches of ‘mud.’

By quitting time, my sweat-stained body

Sang an exhausted harmony – life was sweet.

Vikings, I’m told, imagined a heaven

Where they spend days swirling a battle-axe

The way I worked that hoe,

Carrying themselves to sweet fatigue

-- Forever safe from consequences.

My day had consequences -- the foundation

Of a house; I was not a gore-stained Sisyphus.

5/17/2013

August 28, 2013

While the nation celebrates with a sigh and a whimper

A universal retreat from the Promised Land,

I can chuckle over ‘black’ students paler than tanning-bed blondes,

I can smile at a partly South Asian ‘other’ plunging into

An extended in-class discussion of race and identity

With African-Americans and redheads

That swept across my ‘diversity’ literature unit, a flood-tide of welcome dreams.

I was a child when Dr. King spoke, never expecting

America white and black and brown and yellow and rainbow bold

Would climb the Mountain amid a stench

Of economic decay,  xenophobic militarism,

And an all-too-justified fear of retribution for forgotten foreign crimes.

Yet, in the bright sun of a Mississippi university campus,

My students, some of them, live in the Promised Land.

8/18/2013

In (plain) Sight

My friends do not claim to hide in plain sight

As though they were praying mantises and pythons;

Neither do my enemies, if enemies I have,

For all they are accused of deception.

We lost that ability, said one who claimed to know,

When we became herders instead of hunters,

"Hiding from one’s own cows is a very bad thing,

And hiding from a cornfield is just useless."

I hide from my cows – regularly –

I practice and work very hard concealing

More parts of myself from myself

Than even I conceal from neighbors

As I carefully present left profile to one,

Right to another, full-frontal to none.

6-5/2013

Capitalism (Thy Name is Mammon)

I have, in distant days,

Seen the Promised Land,

Some mingled maze of

Illusions, good intentions,

And sparkly mottled sunlight.

Had my vision been dimmed