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Thank you to those who support me via my Paypal account: rikwrybac@yahoo.com. The government doesn't read my poetry. You do. Out of over 400 poems here on this blog by me, I hope you find one or more you like. Thank you for my readers. Thank you for your comments.

Monday, February 26, 2018

Upon Re-hearing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles


It was 20 years ago today
or more
since I heard
this music
My 66 years old ears
surprised how positive
and hopeful
this sounds.
Sparked by the Viet Nam war years
new recording techniques
a budding culture of self-awareness
wrought by drugs and meditation
Hindu Buddhist Christian
all religions and practices
this diamond joins
Jimi and the Airplane in my heavens

It was a time when youth
sat and listened to music and poetry
instead of dancing
to everything with a good beat
Music was splitting the world
cleaving it into facets
different diamonds for different people

Now,
there seems to be nothing positive
that sounds across the world
as bright as this was then
War and the murder of children
drains art into salt shakers
that season this bitter soup
while we wrinkled magicians
search out old rabbits
to revive our crushed top hats
Our moth-eaten capes
stuffed into the holes
where the tears get in
that keeps our minds wondering
where we are all going
without you
without everyone
the strings cut to our kites
that once anchored us
to the sky
now filled with
too many loose diamonds
a cacophony that strangely
appears in a final chord
that never ends
that never ends
that never ends


Barry G. Wick

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Dinner at 80

Barking thunder
from the dogs of heaven.
There is no help
behind the fence.
Don't stop,
it only upsets them.
Don't go in.
Pretend they're nice doggies.

It's the ability
to lie
that makes some
want to go in.

Whispering to the owner
won't help any.
Yelling, too.
The owner has these dogs
for a reason.
Their barking covers up
all the begging and pleading
believers manage to do
since they started walking
by the gate.,
It's the way
the owner wants it.
Glance, but never stare.

There is an invitation
though hard to get
when the owner
steps out to shop
only to run into someone
next to the frozen peas.

True applicants to heaven
have to be clever
about the package
or something they see
gODD is wearing.
If they only get a smile
it's failure.
Next time:
wait near the Jell-o,
gODD always needs Jell-o.
After all,
how many Jell-o salads
does one see at a large gathering
of religious ladies
from the circles?

Better still,
sit near the toys for dogs,
wear an unusual hat,
a cat skin,
and let a parrot
perch on your shoulder.
Let gODD start
the conversation.
It may be as simple as
“What do you think
of spaghetti
with your dog food?

Now we know
why religious Republicans
want the old
to eat what their government
serves them.
If you are old
and smell delicious to a dog,
the old won't get
to the front door
of heaven.


Barry G. Wick

Thursday, February 15, 2018

RADIO!!!



Several months of recording
my favorite radio
for the time of no internet.

Poems of life and death?
NO!
Poems of radio!
My friends and companion
with music,
classical and jazz,
as I write or read
to Mozart or Horace Silver.
Their emotions
of time and place
counterpoint to this moment.
Their genius in quavers,
passions in piano and forté.

There may be many
whose ears are stone,
but they weep for me,
who cannot fully see
minute expressions
in a person's face,
who has failed
to find someone closer
than a steel tower,
electrified and pulsating,
the waves undraping themselves
inside magic boxes,
pouring their nakedness
into my life
through boxy mouths:
their magnetic teeth
sculpting Beethoven's brain
beside that of Bill Evans.

From these vibrations
I am pounded
as if I were a piece of hot iron
that began in distant childhood
lying on a sofa
in the dark of night:
a lonely little boy
out of contact
with any babysitter,
with any parent,
neither interested
as I connected
with the Lone Ranger
or Sergeant Preston
and his dog, Yukon King.
I saw them all
in my imagination
that relays
these images to you,
my companions in the radio,
surrounding my body
with their love
no person has duplicated
in my presence.

So now,
you know the truth
why I can't connect
to anyone
why I'm unable to see the nuances
in the crevices of a face
in the creases beside the eyes.
It all passes through
my imagination
created years ago
in the living room
of a new house
in the 1950s
on a light, gray-green sofa,
that imagination of a world
no more real
than the fantasies
I lay before you now,
an emptiness,
a canyon with no walls,
a tundra with no snow,
characters both good and evil,
dog sleds and silver bullets,
word vibrating
through the memory
of a little boy
who never got up from the couch,
who stiffened with every gun shot,
who heard the wind
and the blowing snow,
the barking dogs,
horses hooves on the prairie,
and the crackling of a warm fire
that was never there
except as cellophane
in a sound man's fingers.

Nothing around me seems real;
it's all just radio
that I turn on and off.
Volume up.
Volume down.
Join us again next time
as boots break the ice
or stab a stirrup
and we're sent through
time and space
in waves of energy
pulsing through walls,
through bone,
through the intangible,
the unending
billows of a sofa


Barry G. Wick