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By Purdy, Director of Publicity

We are already half way to May and it just dawned on me that April is National Poetry Month. Last year you may remember the OUP blog featured the Buffalo Poets (an unruly band of anarchists and beer swillin’ poets, i.e. friends of mine). and while I adore the Buffalo Poets and their continuing mission to bring poetry to the masses with their NYC area readings, I have decided it might be nice to hear from another one of my poet friends who has a completely different style of writing this year. Michael Manner and I were English majors in a state school in Upstate NY before the days of email, before the days of the fax. Indeed, the modern technology of the time was floppy disk computers, and the CD was quickly replacing the cassette tape.

Manner and I have kept in touch through the years and when we are together we often argue and bicker like a married couple about love, fear, greed, envy, lust, hypocrisy, music, cats v. dogs, words et al. I think the only thing we ever seem to agree on is that chocolate milk is the greatest invention ever. But enough about me, Manner is a freelance computer consultant living with his mangy, blind cat in Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY. His love of poetry dates back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth and he first heard the words “ugga bugga” uttered by a passing Neanderthal woman. He’s been writing verse since the Iron Age and one day hopes to be cited in the OED. His fave comic book hero is Batman. Despite all this I think is is a truly talented poet and have asked him to post some poems on this blog. You be his judge.

Lust

It seminates from the chill of dawn.
Cast from bell buoy to shore
Through an otherwise silent fog.

Boil, Breach and Boom
Between the fetch and shiver.
We pant in the swell
And melt into sand and spume.

Candle-bloom dusk coils into night.
Settling into tranquil certainty, drifting
in the after flash –

when clouds hide in November and
raindrops fall like parachutes.

This immortal lightning –
only a plangent echo.

This reprieve from decay only hollow.

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