Muscular Poetry 2020

By Kemo Chen

All years present challenges, but, none more than 2020. Everything seems frozen, danger and doubt prevailed over reason and civility. Finding your way, staying in touch with your essential being requiring all your energy and sapped your passion. This is where poetry enters, to offer humor, perspective and grit. And this, Muscular Poetry is not flowers, roses, sweet kisses and birds singing. It is about the bumps and curves of a life lived real, hard and honestly. It is all our lives, the unvarnished truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781663205308

Kemo Chen

Kemo Chen is a journalist, adventurer, contrarian, and endurance athlete. He has rubbed shoulders with America’s Cup winners, moguls, and fighting men from the Golan to Chechnya. He’s traveled from the caves of Qumran to the streets of Xinjiang. An advocate of men realizing their potential and encouraging them to find the poet within.

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Copyright © 2020 Kemo Chen.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-0524-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0530-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date:  07/23/2020

MUSCULAR POETRY

2020

I never met a man I didn’t like

Will Rogers 1926

I never met a man who wasn’t a poet.

All of us are inside. There are feelings, images, furies wanting to emerge, awaiting a creative spark that sets them afire.

Muscular Poetry is the expression, in writing, of those feelings. They are not of one nature, or one voice, but what any man might say, if given the opportunity to simply sit down and write it out.

It is not some magical pursuit or the words of some soft handed man. This is poetry of real life, and you will recognize the themes. Nothing far – fetched or out of any man’s intellectual reach from page to page. It is the grit of things, the grind of living a man’s life in the modern era.

And, this volume is composed in a classic year, where everything seems misplaced, unbalanced and right and wrong reversed, or so it appears.

2020 brings virus, riots, shouts for justice, for some, coercion for others. And, an election looms dividing all thoughts, allowing reason to exit our psyche, replaced by loathing and fear of what’s next.

A perfect year for poetry. Enough angst, storms, and ambiguity to generate hundreds of poems written as a therapy, so one can ever sleep.

The great beat poet, Michael McClure, who was a iterant tough guy of the beats famously remarked, Poetry is a muscular principal, there is no logic, but sequences of feelings

And, so these feelings are for you. You may share them, hate them, spit them out, and throw the damn book at someone. But, there are enough authentic feelings here to capture your whimsy.

Read through it as you will. Pick a title or two. Take a year or more to read them, and I hope it encourages you to write your own. Become a Muscular Poet, you certainly, can’t do any worse, and if it satisfies something rumbling inside you, you will be better for it.

There is a poet inside of you, exercise your right to express it.

Kemo Chen

2020

THE POEMS

RECOMMENDED DOSAGE: THREE A DAY WITH MEALS

MORE AT YOUR PERIL

Masked Nation

Where the Hell am I

Statue for an Assassin

Past Your Prime

Morning Comes Too Soon

Karen Has Lost Her Keys

Unkindest Cut of All

Tattoo and Lipstick

Mulatto Will, Died Free

The Big O

So You Want To Be 100

What is It About Sunsets in the Fall

And Then The Forces Come

Chin Down World

No Explanation Needed

He Painted Her In One Day

Between Spasms

On the Judgment of the Sun at a Feast of Saturn

Just Another Night at the 7 -11

Dust to Dust

A Life Undone

A Mean and Foul Mood

A Stand Up Guy

Thank You Queen Vashti

Is that the Mayor Masturbating?

Let’s Throw Pop’s on A Compost Heap

Where has all the Anger Gone

What Haji Hamid Knows

Drinking Piss at 5 am

57th and Lex

When Good Men Die

A Philosophy Student

So Self Assured at Five Foot Four

Nothing Left in Aisle 3

A Naked and Bloody Woman

Thermidor Always Comes

We are Not Alone

It Takes A Sofa

When I Go

What They Did to That Little Girl

Woman in the Short Black Dress

The Forces As They Are

Oh, You Can Wait In Line

On the Way to Emptiness

They Poach Rhino’s Don’t They

Sequoia

Abandoned but Not Forgotten

Coincidence Masquerading as Clairvoyance

The Big O Ain’t So Big Anymore

The Life You’re Living

The Last Time I Heard From Keyboard Johnny

Wanna Have a Catch

In The Rearview Mirror

Life without a Smile

Layoffs

Scorcese Can Direct

There are Crumbs on the Notepad

So This is Dystopia

Swimming in a Lake of Lye

Unintended Consequence

What Pain Have I

When the World Crashes In

Don’t Take Me In Spring

A Shed On A Pond

The Wooden Sword

Fanfare for The Common Man

An Afternoon at the Chestnut Tree Café

Desert Tower

I Remember Polio

Slipping Away

Scars

A First Date

The Duke’s Horse

One Finger Snap or Two Away

Conventional Wisdom

Is It Enough

Who Can Explain It

Lingulodinium Polyedra

What Tyrants Do

Petty Misery

Living the Impasto Life

Getting Laid in Frankfurt

Brother Muscato’s Dump

Setbacks

Life Between Spasms

What Tatiana Knows

Charles Atlas Days

Bare Naked Face

A Place to Hide

Three Gun Joe

Whittling Away

Tiger Mike

The Soap Knows

Hall of Mirrors

California Uprising

Where Has Silence Gone

Papa Joe

No More Bridges

You Are Not What You Do

Don’t Tell Me What to Fear

Acid Attack

Sometimes It is all You Can Take

Never Learned to Party

Turn The Red Lights On

No Legacy Here

May Ends

Riots Never End

8:46

Can’t Go with the Flow

Where’s Norgay

Where the Hell are they Taking Frank?

Where Did My Id Go?

Black Power

The Beast of Kavos is Free

Far From Where You Thought You’d Be

Woke A Topia

Nihilists Need Cowards to Survive

They Topple Statues Don’t They?

Where can You Go?

Chazocracy

M87 and the Shore

Shame Patrol

Prescription for a Deep Sleep

Who Cries for Sarah

So Far Away from Whoever You Really Are

It’s all Horseshit

A Virus was Not the Contagion

Let’s Not Forget Jesus

This Ain’t Anarchy

You Must See The World Through A Poet’s Eyes

MASKED NATION

36272.png

I have masks everywhere

Glove compartment, under the pillow,

Office drawers, near the bloody razor,

In the trunk by the shotgun, by the night light,

Hung over a burned out Xmas candle

Of all hues

Light green mostly

Serious black and Navy blue

A green one made by the girl down the hall

Cowboy bandanas of assorted prints

Black and white

my favorite desperado style

Red, white and blue, patriotic too

And an old Hawaiian shirt I cut up just to

Make do

Never wore one

Before to keep out microns,

droplets, spiked molecules, common spit

and exotic spores

pulled up scarfs in deserts, on long hikes to

distant oasis

had an olive drab one hiked up to my goggles

in the Sinai on a half -track with the IDF

now here we all are, in this horror film

of a Wuhan creation, nation masked

halted without solution, cowering,

praying for the day the masks can all come

off

There are people with fright masks who have a conceit

they are unlike the rest of us

pretending that they are only about equality and

justice, after years of inequity

laudable, masque

then there is the mask of fright

as they scream

about only our masque of racism, they say we wear

the mask of tolerance we don, even as they intone

our society is to blame and ultimately doomed

take off the masks of equality and of majority rule

be bare faced before a new masked mob

who studies Karl, and Cleaver, loves Farrakhan

and Palestinians too

and please take off that masque that pretends it is not the

Jews

No one who is sane is bold

Forward thinking behind one

Angry men, fuming women,

Unloved, misbegotten, violent

Unrepentant delinquents

Find the mask a shield,

reinforcing

anonymity

I have no mask of play to discard

Sammy Davis’ way

Still flawed in my own way

With no more shadows that surround me than

Any other man

Perhaps the masks provide a unity

of purpose, without them we go about

our day to day, isolated, atomized, disconnected

from what must be next

behind the barriers

we are all a bit afraid

hoping for some good news

that the virus will just go away or

there is a Dr. Salk somewhere who has the

cure

and we can speak out again without being

coerced into keeping our opinions deep inside and

let the world see us for what we are

WHERE THE HELL AM I

36272.png

Yo, Cosmo

Is this Oceania, is that Big Brother over there?

or am I dreaming with Alice just the moment before

she falls through the rabbit hole?

Louise at the 7-11 is screaming at a really rangy desperado

To put on mask, and he is not yelling back, just tapping

on a looking glass at a pick six, and pointing to a pack

of Cools…

I want the green ones, bitch

A Sikh comes out from the back and drags him out of the place

Louise cries

Manny is out for a bagel, some schmear and two eggs, sunny side up

Had it every morning at 10:30 at Cantor’s for twelve years

Man with a bullhorn and a black and silver Louisville slugger

Yells at Manny

you racist white, pig, you white scum

All Manny wants are his damn eggs

A cop takes the black protestor outside and is taunted by a crowd

of megaphone man’s buddies taking photos for their phones

No justice No deli

Wacko health experts shut down Amerika all of it

So 5% die, won’t overwhelm the system

Everybody else who gets the virus scourge, lives

Some get nothing, others a bad flu

So given the choice of grandma dies, or going on welfare?

You choose?

Let’s put 60 million out of work, tube the economy,

And print a few trillion dollars to save the people,

they just put out of work

can you get away with that normally

in 1968, a million or so died globally

call it 200 thousand here at home

but nothing stopped, life went on

Of course we had a full plate of things

Vietnam, MLK and JFK murdered, and

the riots in Chicago, marches in the streets for justice

that was not ambiguous, get out of Vietnam

nothing stopped, everyone knew the docs had no clue

until a vaccine showed up of stemming the tide

and we got used to people dying

tell me I’m not a character on page 193 of a dystopian novel

people carry signs down Fifth Avenue,

Defund the Police Abolish the Police

And knucklehead politicians think it’s a fine notion to cut

Half a billion

as a six year old is shot dead in Chicago and a 17 year old

Is murdered in Washington Heights, by other folks of the same race

Not a cop in sight

And who chants

No cops no Safety, No cops no peace

Nobody

Big Brother is not invented, by a false decree

He is the cognoscenti, a lib, radical coalition that demands

You adopt their ways or else

Coercion reigns, free speech decayed

The constitution rearranged until it does not matter

What rights you have today, unless they are

Syncopated