Robin Helweg-Larsen's Blog

One day we’ll all be dead;
survival chances: slim.
So concentrate instead
on aspects you prefer:
“I’m winding down,“ he said,
“but not as fast as him.”
“Losing my looks,” she said,
“but not as fast as her.”

*****

Speaking as someone now in the 4th quadrant of my 1st century, what other options are there? Anyway, this was first published in the Asses of Parnassus – thanks, Brooke Clark!

“Old people party 2” by weldonwk is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

She drinks a bit more
she loves a bit less
she no longer fits
in her wedding dress.

She’s given up trying,
accepted her fate,
feels herself thinning
while she stacks on the hate.

Doesn’t feel like his partner
his mate or his wife,
all she feels is as hard
and as sharp as a knife.

She reels her mind back
but can’t seem to recall,
what she ever saw in him,
why she married at all.

It’s a dead man’s float,
face down on the bed,
they sleep separate, unsound
in their queen sized dread.

So she’ll tread bitter water
as she has done for years,
not so much married to him
as she is to her fears.

*****

Lindsay McLeod writes: “‘She’ was written in my head, wearing ear protection in a factory. It was about my (then) partner who had recently escaped a toxic relationship.” The poem was originally published in Fine Flu.

Lindsay McLeod is an Australian writer who lives quietly on the coast of the great southern penal colony with (yet another ferocious Aussie animal) his cattle dog,  Mary. Lindsay still drives a forklift to support his poetry habit.

Photo: “fulla-ocell / leave-bird ( Every little thing she does is magic )” by Jordi@photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

I fail at them, these scenes
where beauty is married to fear.
I have failed before with this one.
How can I make it clear

when the moment itself was a blur?
My son and I, that night,
stepped through the warm, wet air
that had magicked every light

to a wide, all-hallowing halo.
He said–I think he was ten,
still with his clear soprano–
It’s lovely out here.
And then

the edge of every nimbus,
pale gold through a fog scrim,
shivered, knowing that beauty soon
would be bullied out of him.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “This poem (first published in Mezzo Cammin) is indeed based on one of those indelible memories, the sort that lodge in a parent’s brain for decades. And I have in fact tried to write about it before without succeeding. I’ve never asked my very adult son whether he remembers this moment at all.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Photo: “Bright Lights of Quakers on a Wet Night” by Frank.Li is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Something there is that likes a wall,
that likes it spiked and likes it tall,

that likes its pikes’ sharp rows of teeth
and doesn’t mind its victims’ grief

(wherever they come from, far or wide)
as long as they fall on the other side.

*****

Michael R. Burch comments: “I wrote ‘Not Elves, Exactly‘ thinking of Trump’s border wall and Robert Frost’s mischievous elves in ‘Mending Wall‘.”

The poem was first published in Snakeskin.

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 23 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 78 times by 35 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.

Photo: “Spiked wall, Lewes” by ♔ Georgie R is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Form is a slippery seed to be grasped.
Free verse is form with its bra hook unclasped.
Blocked is me chewing my fanciest pens.
Pun is a test of my spouse and my friends.
Drunk is the poet who’s making a pass.
Prize is a unicorn chased by an ass.
Tome is Uranus-sized ego unbound.
Deep is the grave of my darlings I’ve drowned.
Rhyme is the hill where I’m willing to die.
Meh is the mic hog who sounds like AI.
Crit is a cig from a firing squad.
Light is the thirstiest verse. Please applaud.

*****

Nicole Caruso Garcia writes: “‘Po-Biz Ars Poetica‘ came about after I stumbled upon a metrical form Mary Meriam invented called the “Basic Me.” (I will include the link to its “rules” here.) Although Meriam says, “Basically, it means ‘what are your words and how would you define them?,” here I ascribed each trait to “po-biz” rather than to myself.”

‘Po-Biz Ars Poetica‘ was first published in the Winter/Spring 2025 issue of Light, where Nicole Caruso Garcia is the Featured Poet.

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s full-length debut OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Crab Orchard Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her poetry has received the Willow Review Award and won a 2021 Best New Poets honor. She is an associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as an executive board member at Poetry by the Sea, an annual poetry conference in Madison, CT. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Photo: “ENSACT Conference Social Action in Europe, Dubrovnik 2009” by sharon.schneider is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Suddenly the kids, the car,
the house, the spouse, the local bar,
the work, have made you what you are.
What doesn’t chill you makes you fonder.

Should you stay or should you go?
The thrill you’re looking for, you know,
could be right here at home, although
what doesn’t thrill you makes you wander.

If, avoiding common truth,
you dye your hair and act uncouth,
will you find your misplaced youth –
really, will you if you’re blonder?

It doesn’t matter if you’re strong
or if you sing a pretty song,
something, and it won’t be long,
will come to kill you, here or yonder.

You’re human in the human fray,
and choose among the shades of grey.
No matter if you go or stay
what might fulfill you makes you ponder.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “This is a little more than a decade old, back when I still had a full time job. There is something looming in a life about a full time job that’s hard to escape entirely even when you’re determined to try. Must have been a bad day on the sales floor.

“This is one of those poems where a rhythm enters my mind and won’t go away until I put words to it. Of course it already HAD words to it, but I couldn’t use those. So after one quatrain it became a challenge to see how many of that refrain rhythm it was possible to make sense with. That’s actually sort of freeing, because once that becomes the challenge, it opens the poem, for me anyway, to using the randomness of the rhyme words, as they arise, to drive each stanza’s, and thus the whole poem’s, sensibility. This is a good example of how the aleatory dice of rhyme can be used to open up opportunities to say things I wouldn’t have thought of to say at all without having to work toward the rhyme word. This can be very bad for a poem, of course — one of the main ways to judge poems in meter and rhyme is on how hard it is to tell whether the poet was using the rhyme words that way or not. The goal, of course, in almost all rhyme, is to delicately decorate the poem rather than for it to be clear that the poet was merely chasing a rhyme. And when there’s a rhyming refrain line the danger is extreme.

“I remember being pretty happy with it at the time. I do like the way something seems to loom over the narrator, pressing him onward through his meditation, and providing, I hope, the reason that meditation is needed.”

‘Suddenly’ was first published in The Rotary Dial, which is now offline… but this issue, the Best of 2015, is at https://midnightlanegalleryii.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/7c8e9-december15.pdf

Not much is known about Marcus Bales, except he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and his work has not appeared in Poetry or The New Yorker. His latest book is 51 Poems; reviews and information at http://tinyurl.com/jo8ek3r

Photo: “Decisions decisions ..” by monkeywing is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I feel a kinship with those, never met,
who live, uncertain and displaced
in the wrong place on planet earth and sea:
with different languages at home and school,
without a passport from the place they’re raised,
their natural faith despoiled by pointless war,
their sex uncertain, orphaned from themselves,
poets of restlessness, pilots adrift,
obscure, uncertain in their rootlessness,
chameleons of constant camouflage,
and all the little that they know deep down
forever hidden from some foreign frown.

*****

My sense of being displaced is largely one of nationality: in every country I’ve lived in, I feel the closest connection to other expats; and there is no country in which I don’t feel like an expat myself. But that also gives me a sense of commonality with all others in all forms of insecurity and displacement. And maybe it is a natural part of being human… after all, all adults have been displaced from the very different world of childhood.

‘Kinship’ was originally published in the current Shot Glass Journal.

“Stand out, don’t blend in!” by partymonstrrrr is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

“Auden thought the triolet was too trivial a form to bother with…” –James Fenton

Practally dactally
W. H. Auden
Mastered his verse forms with
Scarcely a miss.

Some he found slight. There’s no
Abecedarius,
No triolet, and he
Didn’t write this.

*****

When I first started thinking about double dactyls I made a list of words and when I saw that James Fenton quote I knew I had a poem. I no longer recall what word got paired with Kevin E. Federline.

Reese Warner lives in Toronto and does things with computers for money. Reese’s poems have shown up in journals such as Asses of Parnassus, The Malahat Review, The Rotary Dial, The Dalhousie Review among others. For more information see http://pubs.reesewarner.com

Double Dactyl was first published in The Asses of Parnassus.

Photo: “W.H. Auden” by Cecil Beaton is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

1.

Clip clop
clip clop
steady up yon stuntgrass rise, boy,
long as low and stony-brown,
slow like weeks with nothing in them:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
privy-top and anchor-wires,
church-cross, store-spike, steady boy,
up yon one-street, just more-trodden dust:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
steady, boy, through sad wood civics,
rippled in yon saloon-glass store-side,
road-end, horses maybe leaving:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
rise, boy, steady, way ahead,
purple-white mountains, nothing in them
maybe, like weeks maybe:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

2.

My brother’s name was Crazy Sean.
They shot him in the head.
He rattled through the summer corn
and turned the green shucks red.

I laid him in the willowbrake.
I couldn’t stand to pray.
I kissed his cheek for pity’s sake,
and then I rode away.

The plains are full of buffalo.
The woods are red and gold.
The mountaintops are white with snow.
His memory keeps me cold.

I’ve rode through Hope and Whisky Creek.
I’ve rode through Faith and Love.
I’ve laid in Hate and Hide-and-Seek,
and run from God-Above.

The prairie shines, the buckdeer cry.
The hawks hang in the heat.
Clipclop clipclop, the world rolls by.
They say revenge is sweet.

3.

Somewhere still, stark as an afternoon;
Ached in long planks of sunshine;
Like a gambler’s card dropped on an empty land;
Vauntsquare, the nailed-up main street creaks
Against the air. Clipclop – hotel, laundry, saddles,
Telegraph, clap-houses, guns. The horse stops.
Into this hollow spine of fellowship blows a slow
O of wind. Three men clatter at a boardwalk:
Nacarat boots, sharktooth mojos – oh my brother.

4.

I shot one on the shithouse board. His head
smashed like a squash and sprayed the backboards red.
He pissed his boots and died. The stinking hole
spit up a fat, black fly, which was his soul.
I shot one in the barbershop. The chair
caught fire, and ate his o-colonied hair.
He fell out like a slice of spitroast meat.
The duster wrapped him in its winding-sheet.
I shot one in the cornfield. Larks of blood
flew off his skull and twittered in the mud.
He rattled through the stalks. His mashy head
threw up its brain and turned the green shucks red.
I took a bath and threw away my gun.
I rode away wherever. I was done.

5.

drizzle pops on his hatbrim,
cord and wool and steam-sodden,
saddleticks like an empty stomach.

windpump wires and tin-dump,
like horizon-drowning, horse, then man,
hat, gone, clipclop, dusk drips in.

paraffin lamplight pricks the town,
glo-worms, night hunched above,
coyotes carry their eyes like stars.

6.

reckoning
done
how will he ever be warm

purpose
gone
how will he outrun the storm

bearings
none
how will he find another

riding
alone
how will he tell his brother

*****

John Gallas writes: “‘Western Man’ is a weird one: I have a quite spooky love of Westerns, jogging as they do some very deep links with Old En Zed, remnants (many remnants!) of which I grew up with and in. Those old wooden towns, the dim General Stores, the slightly grim and mostly silent (mostly) men, the cheek-by-jowlness of town and bush. It means quite a lot to me. I find the end of most Clint Eastwood films, and especially ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’, as the hero says ‘I gotta go now’, and rides away into lonliness after some bloody vengeance or other, inexpressibly moving.”

(“Old En Zed” = old New Zealand. – RHL)

‘Western Man’ is collected in ‘Star City‘.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see http://www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.

Photo: “lone cowboy” by GarrettRiffal is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Baby you’re the Reichstag
I’m setting you on fire
You no longer represent me
I’m immediate desire
Our constitution is suspended
on a fence of barbed wire
Baby you’re the Reichstag
I’m setting you on fire

I’ve cancelled your election
I’ve exposed your fatal flaw
Trapped in your reflection
we argued to a draw
The people want perfection
they love to be in awe
Baby you’re the Reichstag
my will is the law

Our union needs annulment
our wedding was a sham
The preacher stole the word of God
now he’s on the lam
He said he’d bless the devil
he didn’t give a damn
Baby you’re the Reichstag
who do you think I am

Like lightning this befell me
not you but I self-crowned
No court can now compel me
my power is unbound
I dare you try to tell me
my methods are unsound
Baby you’re the Reichstag
I’ll burn you to the ground

I’m rounding up your lovers
each one of them a liar
They tell me they don’t know you
say it’s me they most admire
Now I alone can save them
or throw them on the pyre
Baby you’re the Reichstag
I’m setting you on fire

*****

Matthew King writes: “Many, not on only one side of the political divide, have been watching for a “Reichstag Fire moment.” The thing about historical echoes is you’re never sure what you’re hearing is exactly what it sounds like, but with some things sounding like them at all is bad enough. A hat tip to Leonard Cohen, whose shade I seem to be channelling in this poem, and who would have turned 91 on Sept. 21. Leonard! thou shouldst be living at this hour; lucky for you you’re not, I guess.”

‘Incendiary Song’ was first published in New Verse News.

Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto; he now lives in what Al Purdy called “the country north of Belleville,” where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighboring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. His photos and links to his poems can be found at birdsandbeesandblooms.com.

Photo: Reichstag Fire, 27 February 1933, public domain.