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    Smoking the Bees
    Smoking the Bees
    Smoking the Bees
    Ebook78 pages23 minutes

    Smoking the Bees

    By Robert E. Rhodes

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Poets do not keep diaries; rather they keep poems. A few are coded but the code for my poems is easy to break. Usually there's a tongue in my poetic cheek. I love to write when it works and I love to read my poetry. I invite you to join me.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateNov 13, 2006
    ISBN9780595859979
    Smoking the Bees
    Author

    Robert E. Rhodes

    Robert Rhodes has been an educator, a managing editor of a publishing company, a translator and a director of a museum. He was born in the Great Smokies, graduated from the University of Florida and has an MA and PhD from the University of New Mexico. He is married, has five children, lives in Santa Fe, writes poems and walks his little dog.

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      Book preview

      Smoking the Bees - Robert E. Rhodes

      Being Nice 

      Learn from this girl of kindest intention

      Who when old men lust gives it no mention,

      But when she thinks more ways than one

      The shapes a bright inventor can invent

      Of this high virtue let us plainly speak

      Though form perversely clings like metered Greek

      (I’ve read such naked lying. Oh what cheek!)

      Hear her wickedness improve—she calls me nice

      Nice! What terrible tameness in the word

      I smile nicely and take her lump of ice

      Made hot by spurning I’m greatly spurred

      See me thus reduced, an old fashioned cad

      I fondle her nicely like a loving dad

      (I wonder if she thinks that incest’s bad)

      I see her sitting naked on a bed

      Her notebook open to record desire

      And here come I, a dancing naked Ned

      To toast her loins over my raging fire

      Here a hip is getting brown, there a nose

      I nibble an ear while counting toes

      (However many poses burn—a pose)

      Poets perish, poems return to lie

      We’re victim to emotions not our own

      There’s nothing kind in how our bodies die

      And melted flesh leaves but enduring bone

      All that’s natural mind overturns

      Laughter’s the only grace a sane man earns

      (In every hungry eye a good friend burns).

      José In Mexico 

      Joe in Mexico is José

      And owes the US Government

      Three million bucks plus interest

      For a radar set he somehow lost

      During a practice invasion

      In a war that never took place

      He also had to pay for a jeep

      He drove into the back of a truck

      During a typhoon in Japan

      For that they took his separation pay

      For the radar set he gets a monthly bill

      From an IBM machine in Kansas City

      Sent to his address in Mexico

      Where he goes to school on the G. I. Bill

      Supporting a wife and three kids

      Surviving because his wife makes carrot cakes

      She sells to students at the school

      «They’ve got a nerve,» she always says

      When the bill for the radar comes

      Before putting it away

      In the pages of her

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