I always thought there was something innately good about Cleveland Tech Czar Michael DeAloia but didn't know why or what, and then I learned he's a poet, who has published a book of his work and is now participating in area poetry reading for good causes. That enough tells me he is special, but no way to tell how without reading or hearing the poetry. So I asked him to send over a few works to post with him as this Poet of the Day, for us all to preview... and tomorrow, September 7, we all can experience the complete poet Michael DeAloia as he reads more of his work at a fundraiser for Meet the Bloggers. Thanks for the good words for Cleveland, Michael. Read on, and be there, you all!

 

The Jazz Influenza

The high sounds of strings

Are teased by petite one-sixteenths

Infecting my soul,

Making me want to dance.

A whole note engulfs my sense of style.

My fingers snap!

Sweat rains on my forehead.

I perish under blue fever.

There rests my anger

On a lofty quarter note.

High….

Buzzing sounds of life

Are being played by a maestro,

By a drug addict,

By a man with a matter-of-fact life.

Ready your souls for cheap brass.

Rich men play money.

Poor men drums.

And I fly away riding on an eighth-note, waving.

 

 

Dijon

Back in my summer fields of slumber,

Yellow as far as the eye can see,

Rests my dreams

The dreams of me becoming greater than who I am,

In the warm resting fields of mustard.

 

 

Post-Kennedy

(So He Hung.)

I see the clock striking twelve

And it’s time for me to talk with

The boys,

The little boys,

Out of the idea of hanging me

From my prized Joshua Tree

Captured during the Good War.

“The good war that started other good wars,

and helped our economy except for

inflationary measures,” quotes the Times,

and madcap capitalists, socialists, communists,

as well as fundamentalists.

Crazy “I like Allah a lot you dig” fundamentalists.

Who smoke hash, not weed, unlike American hippies,

“Bell-bottom, wide belt, Birkenstock kind of hippies,”

who were hunted out of existence

After Kennedy,

Posthumously Kennedy,

Post-Kennedy.

Post modern, like furniture.

But my furniture was destroyed

During the flood.

“The great big huge monstrosity of a flood of

early century Post-Kennedy.”

So I had no furniture, but I had a tree,

A tree named Joshua.

Joshua the warrior,

Joshua the prophet,

Joshua the ‘60’s radical,

Who has since been hunted for sport,

After the war, but before the flood

Yet sometime during my marriage.

“My gosh, I wish I could have had pre-marital

sex with someone else type of marriage.”

I endured her.

Lea, a woman, a Sagittarius.

A “I have a very serious attitude problem, type of woman,”

You know – that kind of woman.

Sexy though.

Sex.

Which is something I do not get enough of.

Hot sex.

Steamy gratuitous filthy smutty perverted kind of sex.

The kind that clears the sinuses,

But leaves a wet spot on the bed,

The very bed that was lost in the flood.

“The flood that was typical of Noah’s flood,”

Quote the Herald,

And the pompous popes, true believers,

And mock shepherds of the lord,

Who have no sheep,

But lots of dough

Though not phyllo-dough.

The Evangelists,

The “Say a prayer, hallelujah, hoop holler and amen,

Give me a dollar” evangelists.

Glad I am not an Evangelist.

Glad I am not a Kennedy.

Posthumously maybe I would.

But if I keep talking nonsense,

I’ll have nothing to say

To those little boys

Who want to hang me.

So he hung.

 

 

Sex

(The Salvador Dali View)

A tart.

A tit.

A piece of ass.

Orange marmalade.

Then the cock crows.

Vanilla.

Sleep.