‘The Ears of Spring’, ‘On the Village Green’, ‘A Tangible Sum That Doesn’t Add Up’ & ‘It Used to be so Easy, Back in School–’

Breanna Martins

The Ears of Spring

Around the Ides of March 

a flock of swooping

fleet-wing-sheen’d 

Violet-

green 

swallows

roller-coaster-in

glimmering

aerialists 

from Guatemala

ever-far away

returning to the eaves

above the back/front door

of our Hodeo

facing the brow-mind 

of the wilds 

of White’s 

Hill 

now & then they will alight 

& cock their heads 

& listen––

with the poise of one 

wholly

present

Buddha’s

Ear

buddies 

I call them

half in 

jest.

On the Village Green

Apple tree leaves are tongued-under with spring down. 

Not yet blotched with aphid mould or cobbled by moths.

On the town diamond, the pitcher winds up and cranks 

the grass-stained ball––thwack! into the catcher’s mitt. Full 

count! In the stands, sweaty-T Joe pumps two meaty fists,

(his kid’s in the game). How can Joe know that each pitch is a wind-up 

for the consumptions of  full, fat, endless summer? 

In the Big Leagues, boardrooms of the Fortune 5—, 

there aren’t any seasons, just business quarters. 

The field isn’t game with townies, it’s global. 

Between Big Leagues and the bush leagues, 

there’s no contest––Junk Bonds eat corndogs alive, 

Scorched Earth torches burgers, Shark Repellents 

bite beer. The Big Board keeps score. Maybe we should 

grandstand-it. Picnic in the bleachers above the deficit-

littered field. But heck … show me a VIP who wouldn’t risk 

a crypto’s bit of hit for leaving his rot in the Big/ly Apple. 

Come fiscal/fire or legal/flood or bank/ruptcy,

they’ll jet-out on golden parachute & scoop up a mega-yacht…

On that day, baseball’s more ballsy fans will spit tobacco and jeer.

A Tangible Sum That Doesn’t Add Up

Over coffee at Malvina’s, Joshua and I 

deliberated on whether petty death or daft 

allegiance to blobfish-faced kleptocrats

were all they were cracked-up to be; 

and whether hoary power player dicta 

like seeking ‘just and moral retribution’ 

could be more than green screen window dressing 

behind which craggy-cheek magnates 

settled accounts. (No way did we resolve it), 

but when I saw him next, all hell had broken 

loose; from husky blocks of Klamath granite 

he’d been sculpting bold, fetching monoliths, 

obelisks and gravid funerary monuments, 

in a raw, no-holds-barred, neo-Palladian 

style. They made me quite queasy, to be honest. 

On packed fairgrounds at CAL EXPO, Josh said, 

The orders, like fools, rushed in. Money talks–– 

nobody walks. Success could be due to his moral 

critique on (yet sensual indulgence of) the zero-sum. 

Death is good for business, I thought––always will be 

when you know how. The pom-pom’d Walmart

casket with Dear Deceased, primped and proper;

epitaph in purple prose laser’d into marble, 

copycat Clydesdales to bear the coffin.

For the ilk of Undertakers––these temporary sums, 

these quiet, buried profits, are bulwarks 

against fear, scarcity, against the mute cries 

and stasis of death, the indifference

of an eternity without premium pick-ups, 

buxom babes, gold vaults––or, maybe, 

without even God! But the bad/good news is––

they’ll be none the wiser for the lack of Bud. 

Betelgeuse! Oh Betelgeuse!

Tonight––star light, star bright, 

said Hank––up there’s Betelgeuse!––

(falling star) I see tonight, 

on Orion’s eastern, blue, wise ‘shoulder’ 

of the fair hunter … 

        and should I say this––

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”––

then we who play 

faire 

will be seen by villagers of Mormon Bar

as standing on the shoulders of giants, 

against men with cudgels 

who promise us kernels 

of the -isms of capital––

  which works now as it always has–– 

(By Beetlejuice’d rules:

“These aren’t my rules. Come to think of it, I don’t have any rules!”) 

To the mad, shrill voices of M.A.G.A., we say:

Muck-thistle, muck-thistle, muck-thistle!––you

M/aniacal A/ntagonists––G/ulag’s A/nus.

We swat-away your thought-gremlins, troll-speak 

and gizz of toxic-bubbling Weasel-mousse.

It Used to be so Easy, Back in School––

Just rock it:  “I wanna be your back door man!”

But there is no back door in the labyrinth–– 

in the feral maze of life choices, there is 

only one entrance, the way we came in … 

and now … I could be lost between 

the center, where the Minotaur hunkers, 

he who is my forbidden self, he

whom I fear to find yet irresistibly seek–– 

and the outside, beyond the labyrinth, 

where the world is evidential, existential, 

where the world is a chaos of quasi-

sentient surfaces that don’t reflect me, 

and chicanery gaming to devalue me

just to enrich the gotchas ever more…

There must be an allée trouvé, a path 

of doing well by doing good, a way 

of trailing by the thread of my breath 

through the labyrinth of noesis, 

slipping the noose of strictures, shaking-off 

the taint of grappling hands that once slapped, 

belted and hair-brushed me, my wounded 

child. There must be a way of speaking 

I can find to trick, by acts of ventriloquism, 

that voice that issues from my face, that voice 

that reasons away childhood’s end.

William Binzen's expressive medium of choice is words. The elements in this poetic process include: narrative invention, emergent theme, intentional structure and sound crafting. He tries to make every line a meaningful moment and one that corresponds to how both individual words and whole lines unfold across a page. His poetry and photography were featured in the anthology, Beside the Sleeping Maiden, and are forthcoming in the winter issue of the Banyan Review.