#frankstanford

[makebelievewaterbeds]

[sowingseedsandshootinghoops]

The Wisdom of Idiots

Note on the text: I used The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford as published in 2000 by Long Road Publishers.

This is one long stream of consciousness epic poem (it’s literally one big run on sentence with no punctuation or line breaks) from the perspective of an unnamed narrator. It is his reflection on the world around him. 

He is a person who has gotten written off by the people around him, yet he knows more about the world than people give him credit for. At one point he mentions getting a zero on a test regarding current events: “A big F with a red circle around it” (6). He responds to this by then listing everything he about everything, including current events, and the end of which he says that he knows that “Hammurabi’s code was broken by lawyers” (8). In other words, although other people don’t think he knows anything, he knows exactly what is happening. He doesn’t just know what Hammurabi’s code is, he knows that the people around him are actively breaking it. He knows what is actually going on here. 

People are not often as blind as we think they are. Or maybe we are not as smart as we think we are. Either way the point is the same: beware of “the idiot”, he might know more about the world than you think he does. 

[newyorkisdead]

A butterfly inside on this page of Frank Stanford’s ‘BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU’ at Fayetteville, Arkansas Public Library

[romancastilleja]

#FrankStanford #Southernpoet #poem #poetry #poet #poems #freedom #writing #words #wordsmith #warrior #truth #life #spirit #spiritual #spirituality #spilledink #writer #relationships #love #lovequotes #death https://www.instagram.com/p/B20-jDMlJw3/?igshid=113ks1zzdw8nb

[revel8tor]

#frankstanford @thirdmanrecords (at Nashville, Tennessee) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsYpJEvlsap/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=md38qpahknfg

[subsuelo]

“I’ll just bleed so the stars can have something dark to shine in.” #FrankStanford #poetryporn #ricohgr2 #ricohimaging

[perseverancecreek]

From "Liason" #whataboutthis #frankstanford #coppercanyon #poems

[efiku]

Blue Yodel of Her Feet

Times I can’t look at you

In the face you’re a wolf

That’s killed things I once loved

So I look at your feet

Dark from summer like paws

Soft as buds

Hard as branches they hold

The weight of your body

Cold naked statue I like to frighten

Your waist is a place of solitude

Briars in the forest

Your chest gives ground

Like an island on a river

And as they yodel in the song of songs

Your nipples taught as raisins

Killdeers try to fly from your eyes

I wish I could nail your shoes to the floor

And lose your socks

Good plants bearing in bad soil

So hard to raise my eyes

Over the rest of you

So I look at your feet

They walked over the ground when you found me

They’ll cover the same terrain

When I lose you

By: Frank Stanford