Monday, March 11, 2024

: Distance :

 






: Distance :


I just stumbled across another colon;

Didn’t see it. Did not even think of it.

Even though its presence is the distance

Where time separates her incremental

Reign of the costly hour

Against the casual minute… 


Why! Oh, why is life stolen?

Didn’t see it. Did not want to speak of it.

What miser chose such a remittance

When no second remains; is it transcendental;

Are sixty spaces spent to own one hour;

Is that : placed to keep right every minute?


We must be humbled by the distance

Between the two dates and the one final dash;

How can that line speak of life’s rhyme?

Our place apart is not a world but a breath.

Didn’t see it. Did not understand it.

And now this : stages the final act.


Look to the watchtower for an existence;

As the bells sound out their keep - in clash

Exulting our congruent nature with time

When mortality and immortality meet at death.

Did not see it. Did not wait for it.

And thus, the colon disappears from the tract. 








Monday, February 19, 2024

Ides of March

 






Ides of March


What does one do on a cold and snowy path

After the sun’s warmth has left and the reindeer 

Must follow the flocks of geese flying to the southern hemisphere.


There are reasons to believe that there is an aftermath

To be found beneath the blankets of snow

Where the ground is swollen with life and limb;


There is beauty, even in the decaying process,  ‘though so grim.

Praying at the row and to names that no one really knows

And then, one moves away quietly and ever so gently


With and through the detritus of age - in tow.

The path there and back obscured by fog.

Now and then the woods rail so intently.


The wolves gather at the edge of the bog

Sniffing – smelling the air for a scent 

Beware of the calling scritch of bete-noire dogs!


They will howl and snarl for life to relent.

Hide - be very still or flee; set in flight

For this day is not the time to carry on the fight.


Why does one walk alone on a cold and snowy day;

Is there some untold truth in the love of honey?

Some touching moments before the wintry bite slays.


The silent forest where the woods hold pray

For sacrifices and forgiveness by djinnis 

While Delphyne songs enchant all into a final rend. 


The long dark tree lines glimmer under the winter’s moon

It is uncertain whether all his poems were lost there - too soon

Before they were understood to portend


How phantasmic beasts track him by the light of the moon

Across the clearing of vagueness;

And confront him with the starken face of death; 


A maquillage lineament of heinousness.

His heart slowed with each deep breath

As his mind twisted and retwisted in harrow;


His incongruent senses were lost in the narrow

Glen of mystery and of a vanishing point

Where the timpani sounds faintly as their last resound.


For the handsome prince is but a thin vagabond

Lost again to the vail of wonder;

Still seeking a place to rest and sleep.    


Why does one wonder out on a cold snowy path?

After prayers are said at the gravesite of strangeness;

While mordant halos spin in counter of the antithetical arrow.


And the tracking eyes, along the tree line, follow

Closely - waiting patiently; their hunger will speak the final say

Of where his soul’s flight and repertory will be found.


The appall is not that one may fall or crawl

But more a fear that one may not be near or here at all;

The plight is to fight or take flight from the dying of the light.


Are life and death nothing more than perceptions;

Ideas formed in a cave and painted into images of rhyme.

The old sundial, at the entrance, a hyperbola in time?


The dark universe reformed by Kafkaesque inceptions

Plasmonic deviations; ephemeral and ephemera of pretensions.

The latent edges of fear slowly emersed from stolid eyes:


Livid skies loom quietly across the vale waiting the storm front

To consume life; as hungry wolves howl for their brotherly ties. 


Why does one never return from a cold and snowy day?











  


Sunday, January 21, 2024

Essence of Tomorrow

 








 


When the Colossus knows your name

there is infinity in the voice

asking, “Was that the choice?”


Shall I reply “In what frame

is there left

where fortune is bereft?”


That cosmic promises are deft

when reality encounters mortality

and ends immortality.


Tomorrow will be the only infinity

to complete the story;

To write the poem of life’s glory.







Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Cosmic Understatement

 







Don’t look to find meiosis

in the eternity

there is nothing that is lost.

 

What you may understand

is, at the moment,

Understatement.


There were never

any senses; no matter

how common.








Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Framework

 






Find the pieces broken

From thy face -


For the fragments, compositions

Form levity-

Fanciful or frightful they are ridiculous

Fables within the human framework.







Sunday, January 7, 2024

Disposition of Hydrogen

 








The travails of being elemental,

When the church of allotment calls,

Are both reductive and extravagant

Arguments for the circumspect

Balance between hydrogen molecules

And the universe of all reason

That states - value is abundance of utility.


Let the waters of life flow

To their source – 

A toast to the goldfish In the bowl.









Thursday, January 4, 2024

Ruing of the Anemoi

 








Why do you live so carelessly

In endless holler and scream;

Flowing from the behemoth granites,

Across the snow-covered plains,

and to my front door.


Why can you not feel the silence

Beneath our baren canopies

and understand the deep sleep

of regeneration.


Your roars may humble the beasts

But these woods –

These ancient woods will come alive

Long after you have passed.









The Ruing of Bianca







The figure sits alone by the window

Upstairs in the house by the bay.


Day after day with nothing to say

To the closing horizon with a drowning sun;

The empty frigates and the tall ships -

They each follow along with silent lips.


As the daily procession of each morning

Pleads with the sky to reason with sign:

“Why! Oh, why has the sea

made a widow out of me!”


If she could only take back time

And return her wanderer’s rhyme.








The Ruing of Dorothy

 








With the first two notes, the heart fluttered

At the thought of that Summer of ’42 -

When death sought comfort in my arms.

And your heart lay on the floor -broken

Like so many glimmering seashells along the shore.


Telling stories of a lifetime that never lived

That now walks in, with a tattered book of poems.

A phantom of lost love

That resides in a book of verse

In cold reticence;

And I, in warmth, holding a book of poems.









Sunday, December 31, 2023

The Revelry of Stardust

 






The Revelry of Stardust


Where pools of lucidity

Swirl - the undercurrents of opacity

And the senses are deplete -

Empty. 


The sails of joy lay still

in voids of movement and will

time and place abandoned; incomplete -

Idle.


The store of barrels – dry!

At long year’s end more rye

And barley spirits are need'd -

Full.


The albatross curse forgiven by a gust;

The ship’s company is blessed by stardust.

Let the consumption sparkle with hope;

Cheer.












 


Friday, December 29, 2023

Together

 


 




Even if I could give you everything

it could never be lovelier

than each day full of flowers

from your garden’s keep.

A day filled with butterflies

flittering upon your heart;

A day when gentle breezes

caress your pretty face

and play the magic of chimes

rambling their notes across the woodland

where there is so much to share

because there is unending love there.

And yet, each day is a precious gift

that we are together.








Friday, December 22, 2023

Jill's Joys

 







What does an artist do when there are empty walls?

She paints. She brushes. She carves and sculpts her forms.

She pours and dabs her stories into their frames

and the room empties of all empty;

Never-ever to be bare 

because an artist lives there.




Dedicated to my friend Jill.