Category Archives: poems

Come To The Reading!

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Please remember you are invited to attend Fused Realities. In case you missed, or were insufficiently annoyed by, postings on my blog and Facebook, and notices in the Independent, Daily Sound, and Noozhawk, here’s the information:

Reading by two local poets & writers

When: Sunday, October 4, 4:00 pm.
Where: Presidio Springs, 721 Laguna St., Santa Barbara [Map]

Two accomplished local poets & writers, J. Kyle Kimberlin & Joseph Gallo, will be reading from their collective works.

Mr. Kimberlin is the author of a collection of poetry called, Finding Oakland. His work has appeared in Pembroke Magazine, Art/Life, Cafe Solo, Rivertalk, Collage, Retooling For Renaissance, The Third Millennium, and Red Tiles, Blue Skies.

Mr. Gallo is the author of a collection of poetry called, The Shredded Mettle of the Heart. He has won numerous awards and has taught poetry & creative writing for California Poets In The Schools, Academy of Healing Arts, SB Music & Arts Conservatory, Artists In Corrections, UCSB summer writing programs, and numerous other venues and workshops.

His work has appeared in The Harrow, BOCA Magazine, The Brautigan Bibliography, The Eldorado Sun, Art/LIFE, Shared Sightings, Earthwords, SOLO, Santa Barbara Independent, Rivertalk and several other literary journals.

This event is FREE to the public.
We hope you can make it!

If You Dream

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Nothing makes sense like sleep.
If you dream, the girl will come
and lie by you, as she was
at twenty, voice like a bird
just below the salt line
of the cognitive. In a yellow
pavilion on a field of deep grass.

Creative Commons License
If You Dream by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Yes, it’s a picture of a small stone. My nephew got a handful of them from a kind docent at the LA County Museum of Natural History, and he gave this one to me. You were expecting maybe a yellow pavilion on a field? Video capture in my subconscious is on the fritz. It’s called g-Dream, and it’s still in Beta. 

songs to fill the air

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A view from Goleta Pier, 2006. Click to enlarge.

DOLPHINS AND THE DEAD

Remember San Francisco,
windy sunny hillside
and your hair floating
with the grass.
Your back to me
in black leather.
The sun so bright
I moved
into the shade of your body.

It was different on Goleta
pier. The sunset ignited
the sea, rose and gold.
The dolphins danced and cried,
the whales turned to see
the trees bow down
where the mountains knelt.
Then there were songs
to fill the air.

 As I mentioned over the weekend, I’ve posted my chapbook, Finding Oakland online, something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. The delay was just that there was no digital expression of it; the computer files had been lost. And who wants to spend hours typing poems, trying to make the thing come out just as it was? That’s what I finally did. So if you read the book, you’re seeing it exactly as it was published, except for page dimensions.

And as I said, I thought it might be interesting to go over some of those poems, to see what they mean to me now. This is the first of such efforts.

Dolphins And The Dead was not the first poem in the chapbook, but I chose it to be reexamined first because it inspired the cover illustration. The cover was drawn in pen by a friend of mine, Sasha Bergman. I told her what I saw in my mind, and she drew it; nicely, I think.

The poem is simply a case of a poet looking for words to capture strong memories and feelings for another person. In this case, two short times I spent with my brother in about 1990. He was living in San Francisco at the time, and I went up to visit him.

We went to a Grateful Dead show, in Oakland or Sacramento, I’m not sure.We went to a number of Grateful Dead shows over several years.

We went to the top of a high hill of forgotten name and looked down at the city. Another time, probably that same year, we went to Goleta Pier west of Santa Barbara.

I think I remember how I felt as I wrote this. Our lives felt so fragile, so mortal, and amazing. The mundane was infused with sanctity, as life so often is.

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung,
Would you hear my voice come thru the music,
Would you hold it near as it were your own?

Its a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken,
Perhaps theyre better left unsung.
I dont know, dont really care
Let there be songs to fill the air.

[Ripple, by The Grateful Dead]

Related posts:

Finding Oakland Online

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I’m pleased to say, in the spirit of digital storytelling, that my my ancient and venerable book of poems, Finding Oakland is now online. It’s posted in .pdf format, so all you need to read it is Acrobat Reader. Both the book and the reader for it are free.

The book is also free from the anachronistic and persnickety constraints of traditional copyright. I want to get it into people’s hands again, or at least in front of their eyes. And no more trees need to die in the process. So it’s covered by a Creative Commons license.

Read it in your browser, download it to your hard drive, pass it along to your friends, as attachment or link.

You will be seeing more of this little book here on Metaphor. My plan is to share one of the poems, individually, every few days over the coming month or so, to examine and discuss its creation, and the changes in poetics for me since that time.

The reason for this, other than I think I would find it interesting, is that I’m editing newer work in preparation for a public reading in the near future. So a redux of this old stuff might make a nice creative harmony.

More on that reading, very soon.


Click on the book cover, here or in the right column. If that gives you trouble, here’s a little URL:

http://tinyurl.com/m2k9vj

Finding Oakland Online

Posted on by

I’m pleased to say, in the spirit of digital storytelling, that my my ancient and venerable book of poems, Finding Oakland is now online. It’s posted in .pdf format, so all you need to read it is Acrobat Reader. Both the book and the reader for it are free.

The book is also free from the anachronistic and persnickety constraints of traditional copyright. I want to get it into people’s hands again, or at least in front of their eyes. And no more trees need to die in the process. So it’s covered by a Creative Commons license.

Read it in your browser, download it to your hard drive, pass it along to your friends, as attachment or link. 

You will be seeing more of this little book here on Metaphor. My plan is to share one of the poems, individually, every few days over the coming month or so, to examine and discuss its creation, and the changes in poetics for me since that time.

The reason for this, other than I think I would find it interesting, is that I’m editing newer work in preparation for a public reading in the near future. So a redux of this old stuff might make a nice creative harmony.

More on that reading, very soon.


Click on the book cover, here or in the right column. If that gives you trouble, here’s a little URL:  

http://tinyurl.com/m2k9vj

Vapor Trails

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1.

Harvest moon tonight.
It will be cooler, and grow
cooler still as each night
falls away.
I live upstairs you know,
so standing by the silent
piano I can see the vapor
trails curved and stretched
among the clouds, bound
for San Francisco.
Even at night, the moon
will catch them, bring
them down for me.
The dog doesn’t mind
a contrail in the house;
the ghost of a journey
not our own.
She sleeps.

sky for vapor trails 20090903

2.

I could make supper
and watch TV. Or stand
in the center of the room
and kill the lights, bend
the darkness around me
like a coat, an iron
maiden of my loneliness,
my unmusical, unhappy
self. The dog shifts
to a new plot of carpet;
fresh ground for her dreaming.

sunset for vapor trails20090903

3.

It is all well. The crows
are down in orchards
to the east, their vespers
done. I made spaghetti
and watched the evening news.
We learn so little of each
other, even if God gives us
months. So you’ve returned
our coarse, untangled
distance, and my bathroom
drawers. The dog
wakes up, and looks around
for you.

I wrote this piece in the fall of 2004 and first
presented it publicly at the reading for
Cafe Solo Press in Ventura in August 2006.
Creative Commons License

Vapor Trails

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1.

Harvest moon tonight.
It will be cooler, and grow
cooler still as each night
falls away.
I live upstairs you know,
so standing by the silent
piano I can see the vapor
trails curved and stretched
among the clouds, bound
for San Francisco.
Even at night, the moon
will catch them, bring
them down for me.
The dog doesn’t mind
a contrail in the house;
the ghost of a journey
not our own.
She sleeps.

2.

I could make supper
and watch TV. Or stand
in the center of the room
and kill the lights, bend
the darkness around me
like a coat, an iron
maiden of my loneliness,
my unmusical, unhappy
self. The dog shifts
to a new plot of carpet;
fresh ground for her dreaming.

3.

It is all well. The crows
are down in orchards
to the east, their vespers
done. I made spaghetti
and watched the evening news.
We learn so little of each
other, even if God gives us
months. So you’ve returned
our coarse, untangled
distance, and my bathroom
drawers. The dog
wakes up, and looks around
for you.

I wrote this piece in the fall of 2004 and first
presented it publicly at the reading for
Cafe Solo Press in Ventura in August 2006.

Creative Commons License

Looking for Words

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Restless

I should stand up
and move about the house
looking for words.
I could, and leave you here
among the books,
but I know I would find
as always, clock, glass, rag,
wood, window, hot night
glowing with trouble.
Oh, that one is new.

I ought to remain, alone,
drinking water, worried
about weather, street, darkness,
madness, fuel,
because in moving,
stirring air, shifting light,
waking shadow,
I might never find peace.

Second Draft
8.30.2009

Creative Commons License
Restless by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a

Digging Up Words

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cemetery20051012a
An old poem from 1998, just to prime the pump, seed the clouds …

I have a terrible need to find words,
to hunt them out from underground
with the help of a good cadaver dog,
to root them up from their caverns
and tombs and stack them –
femur, backbone, ribcage, skull –
into the body of this passing day.

Tomorrow I could build another form;
Tuesday another, and on and on.
One day, I would build a thing that speaks:
I want nothing from you, nothing more…
Bodies enough for the rest of my life,
all hung on wires through the knobby spine
like tattered coats. All swinging
in a gentle breeze, all turning
then to watch me walk away.

Here’s the same poem, on it’s own Web page.


Creative Commons License
Digging Up Words by J, Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Capacity

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If you stand by the well day by day
and let your bucket slowly down
and each day it rises
with a little less water
you might after time let a black
bird build a nest in your heart.

 

I mention this problem to a friend
as he stands under a plum tree
eating fruit, letting the juice stain
his shirt, watching a dog sniff grass,
and he sends me back
to the well with a smaller bucket.

8.23.2009

Creative Commons License
Capacity by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Not A Man

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This is a draft. Feedback welcome. Click Comments at the end of the post, or send me an e-mail.


Sometimes under the paling sky
of false dawn, under his threadbare tree,
his tarpaper roof, under his faded
blue blanket, he dreams he is not a man.
He is a creature – an afterthought
of God – made of light and the awareness
only of its own motion, flying over
deep water, casting itself into the ditches
between waves.

Creative Commons License
Not a Man by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.