Making Love to the 50 Ft. Woman: Poems 1998-2015
With a foreword by Brendan Constantine
Rick Lupert’s seventeenth poetry collection, Making Love to the 50 Ft. Woman (Rothco Press, May 2015), is the long awaited follow up to, and first collection of Lupert’s selected works since, 1997’s I am My Own Orange County. Lupert’s poetry exists at the intersections of the wise and the ridiculous, the spectacular and the mundane. The humor and deeper themes throughout his work will win over the generations of people who’ve come to regard poetry as an inaccessible literary art. These poems, written over the last two decades, have been widely published in dozens of journals, zines, and anthologies from all over the world. They’re rooted in the every day Los Angeles experience and take you through fatherhood, traffic, love, death, and the inevitable experience of finding a wrapped sausage on the sidewalk. You’ll learn how to kiss, you’ll meet the cutest leaf in the world, you’ll say goodbye to Pete Seeger and Robin Williams, you may even relive your own childhood. Get ready to Make Love to the Fifty Ft. Woman. Don’t wear anything complicated.
Poetry from Making Love to the 50 Ft. Woman
The Mystery of the Hole in My Pants
There’s a whole in the crotch of my pants
that keeps getting bigger.
Like my pants are Alcatraz and
something is tunneling its way out
a little bit every night.
I could get new pants but
I’d like to see how this plays out.
Japanese Day
Today at the Japanese American
National Museum, we were served
expensive tea and complained
that the other table had chocolate
dessert instead of the banana walnut
we were brought.
Today in Japan a wave washed a house away
ten thousand times.
Making Love to the Fifty Foot Woman
Foreplay takes a week
and you have to buy a ladder
When she says just a little to the left
you have to get there by car
You can have her
in two different neighborhoods at once
Mood music
takes an orchestra
Her bed
a forest
Protection…let’s just say
you can get lost in the options
When she finishes
it makes the news
items fall off shelves
bridges collapse
When you finish
she doesn’t notice
With a woman so large
Feeling inadequate is normal
but she is sweet
makes you comfortable
looks down at you with her eyes
like two Hubble Telescopes
says to you
with open mouth and legs
Don’t worry sweetie
You’re just the right size
This Thought, Too many Syllables for Haiku
The biscuits didn’t
turn out as I’d hoped because
too much baking sod
How To Drive to Eagle Rock
At seven thirty in the morning
every morning, when I am
asleep like an eagle rock
you come to wake me
to say goodbye, to say
you love me. Every morning
your smile at seven thirty
is more awake than
I’ll ever be
I drift back to sleep
your love covering me
like freshly washed sheets