Listen Up: A Poem a Day Keeps Vazambam’s Publisher at Bay
VazamBam
By Vassilis Zambaras
“To My Heart, Dead Set in Its Ways”
Hear me out, however late
Or hard it may be—
Do not let my crime of not listening
Make you an accessory.
“Moot”
The inexplicit
Light comes and changes
Everything
When it leaves
For crying out loud, don’t
Think about it.
“Homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940”
What is it
That makes this man, knife in hand
Getting ready to cut a head of cabbage
More than the sum of his parts?
I don’t pretend to know the full answer
But I can see that look
Of reverence towards that lowly
Head he is about to sacrifice
Gives me part of it:
Here is a man thankful
For all the simple things
That make up a life, even when
He has to part with them.
“Earth Angel on the Horizon”
Suspended
Between the sensible
And the celestial,
I wait for that animated miracle
That will keep me from falling
Out of the sky.
“Scum Bag”
Not having anything wholesome
To offer the hoi polloi,
I’ll just give them
The benefit of the doubt
And give myself
Wholly away.
“First Time at Bat: Advice to the Slugger”
Son, you just
keep your eye
on the ball
and stay away
from slimebags
as you touch
all three bases
on your way
back home.
“For the Last Time, I’m Telling You All I Know”
Say it was translated
Into intelligible speech,
This poet’s sibyllic
Song would still sound
Like no song ever
Heard before.
Meligalas, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—09/26/11—Great Ceasar’s Ghost—the seven poems here were written one after the other in reverse chronological over the last seven days!
Now if only some crazy doctor disguised as a not so mild-mannered publisher of a great netopolitan newspaper could prescribe some medication to fit the bill, perhaps yours truly could get rid of this insane hubristic itch to write something every day.
And make the ghost of Perry White pay.
Vassilis Zambaras
Vassilis Zambaras According to such reliable inside sources as The Weekly Hubris’s Publishing-Editor, VazamBam aka Vassilis Zambaras is all of the following, and more, in an order no one can vouchsafe as definitive: a publishing poet who writes every day of his life; a hugely successful father (and a not-so-very-successful local political candidate); a professor of English as a Foreign Language, with portfolio; a Renaissance Man of many skills, useful and not-so; a fount of information about his particular corner of his birth country; an unstable and utterly unique mix of Greek and American, American and Greek; and the man fortunate and wily enough to have made off with Messenia’s loveliest and most talented local daughter as his child bride. Besides being all the aforementioned, other more dubious sources have also reported seeing him hanging out at the corner of vazambam.blogspot.com—in the guise of a “new old kid on the blog, with an occasional old or new poem written off the old writer’s block.” Author Photo: Pericles Boutos