Largesse, and aims are high perhaps but not so high
That all the world concedes the call
To extremes as must soon wane and not at all
So generously ordained as reach the loftiness of lies.
But weighed on level grounds prepared
To live and die within a tapestry
That may or may not be cause for apathy
And ecstasy in swelling ranks on alabaster stairs
To banks of realms we cannot yet see. Not first
Nor last among all are those who line
The avenues, the pedestrian mists, a teeming mankind
Spread as swarms in clouds throughout the world. Minds
And hearts cannot address themselves to what will
Out in time that every man deserves this sterling word,
This honour due to he who lives in spite of the absurd.
Posted in Age, Aging, Antithesis, Cycles, Lyric Poetry, Sonn3t
Tagged Age, Aging, Delusion, Lies, Lyric Poetry, Sonnet
“He Sits Another Monday”
He sits another Monday…only smiles tonight. His words are glass,
Illumined, yes,…but no light strikes him and he can no longer see the page.
His hours leased over years yield nothing in eternity but sardonic age,
Invisible, a painted thought distracted by what’s been asked
Of him, years of cold neglect, and all those miles.
Still it’s not enough. If not tonight, then, when?
No doubt in time, but wait! the breezes grow to winds again,
And, where there are currents, other images, other trials.
…the summer’s wounds have found their mark…
Is this the time for words? a second poem? a signatory fire
Lit to get it said, perhaps to induce a faint desire,
Another phrase–there are so many–another cigarette’s arc, a spark
So much to feel, so much to taste when once the sap begins to seep?
Nature’s not so conjured, the outcome’s sealed and in time all thought will cease.
Philosophical principles daily posted pass
Me by; I can see nothing. I thrill to what I sense
In worlds beyond the simple physical; I have no defense
For case. The economics of the street come hard and fast
As I am walled out or worse, within. Relationships
Quite simply, cast doubt; I am alone. The trick is in the chip;
I am become obsolete. Psychics set my soul on edge, their tips
Much greater than the check; I get no reading. Doctors seal my lips;
Somehow, the Ph balance in the aquarium is wrong; my fish
Have died and husbandry’s beyond me; I tend to use
A bankcard. Thoughts elect to the elusive next to
Tarot cards there upon the shelf, perhaps a shade above a wish
And whisper, far beyond the random tea leaves that interrupt
My golden mile, and so I drain the coffee, and throw away the cup.
Posted in Age, Aging, All or nothing, Antithesis, Chaos, Detachment, Sonnet
Tagged Age, Aging, Certitude, Character, Detachment, Lyric Poetry, Sonnet
“There’s the Simple Intelligence”
There’s the simple intelligence of the thing, the weight
Of common sense told in an instant blessed and in good time. Hearts
And minds, judgments weighted solely on the flattery of the arts
And sciences and beyond mere annual Disney harvests
de temps en temps of maudlin myth in escrow. A state
Of mind, a cosmic frieze born of worlds allied
Within the sanctity of sanity seeks the safer corner
Of anonymity and the warmth of former
Aphorisms mouthed, perhaps, but never really qualified
Till now. They will say, “Come hither, pull the trigger,
Garner nothing less than what is guessed
And leave the rest!” and, yes, they see it at its best
Because its freshly minted, postage paid
For anyone who’s never been there or knows no history;
To the wise, simplicity; to the ignorant, one more misery.
“A Pilot’s Flame”
A pilot’s flame and ambergris, fire and smoke, these privy orizons
As dews appear upon the sight of buds along an early summer’s talk
In the blind behind the backfields; still there is the chill,
a brief Nebraska morning’s walk
Through the shadows’ tides’ abiding shallows
in the breath of dawn; the garden
Path because we share so little
of the masters’ growth in blossoms’ bargains’
Fruits within us both and spare none, no idle chatter,
indeed a pittance of a fee for angels; pillars, cornstalks,
Arm in arm—so much can lead the way to joy within a cosmic room—locked
To one to yet another and another in the repetitious staid negotiation
of noxious clouds and dark but sterile clods, the feeble vain
Attempt to mask indignity in stride until desire’s destination’s
Reached—we know by stealth to find a symmetry in solutions,
Solace in respite from the others at the solstice
of that brief but potent spot.
A proper pole to pierce the continent,
a place we’ve never seen and always sought;
I need nothing more to see your face, to read your book
to savour proctors for procrastination
For the sake of pleasures found in greater prisms
for a lighter thought than pure imagination.
Posted in Affirmation, Angels, Antithesis, Clods, Cornstalks, Dawn, Imagism, Lyric Poetry, Midsummer, Nebraska, Poetry, Prism, Procrastination, Pyrrhic Victory, Relationships, Respite, Shadows, Sonnet, Stealth, Synthesis, Thesis
Tagged Ambergris, Double Sonnet, Emotion, Existence, Imagism, Love, Lyric Poetry, Nature, Nebraska, poetry, Relationships, Sonnet, Sonnets
“Two of Them”
Two of them apprised will rise while only one survives;
The first, a germ like any other, in the second,
Excellence as loving makes it so. She reckons
Life in paragraphs and chapters, derives
Pleasure in the phrase, itself–in leisure lies
The notion of posterity, the fecund
Last and lonely station of a book—the legend
More important than the fact, the spies
Than what is spied upon. Where there are three
The Chinese say, some one of them must be a teacher.
Let both in compromise find refuge in the third
That one may truly love, the other form the words
Recording signs and sighs of mystery
And ritual and yet another sermon for the preacher.
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
Gabriel José de la Concordia Garcia Márquez [1927 — 2014 ]
Love in the Time of Cholera
Posted in Affirmation, Age, Aging, Antithesis, Change, Chaos, Creativity, Evolution, Love, Lyric Poetry, Numinosum, Poetry, Preacher, Pyrrhic Victory, Relationships, Selflessness, Sonnet, Stations, Synthesis, Teacher, Thesis, Writing
Tagged Age, Aging, Existence, Gabriel José de la Concordia Garcia Márquez, Lyric Poetry, poetry, Sonnet
“He’s Competent Enough”
He’s competent enough,
His purposes, deception; to lure, to entice;
His blessings’ victims savour His advice;
His beauteous summons–roughly
Marked behind a phrase; everywhere
A preposition–redundant, simple superstition,
Hired, inspired, peerless in its erudition.
His words herald neither faith nor certitude, declare
His recusal from all beginnings which
Have no memory to ends that
Bear no fruit. His tapestries, exquisite,
Hung like Grendel’s arm upon the great oak door, each brilliant stitch
Hangs limpid there, its stench a hint of the silent letter of blasphemy
And all that raises Heorot here where mortals live and death is immortality.
…photograph by Saija Lehtonen…
Posted in All or nothing, Anagnorisis, Antithesis, Apposition, Beginnings and ends, Blasphemy, Grendel, Lyric Poetry, Poetry, Samsara, Sonnet
Tagged Delusion, End Times, Grendel, Illusion, Immortality, Lyric Poetry, Mortality, poetry, Sonnet, Tragic Flaw
“Just Another Evening’s Fast”
Just another evening’s fast,
By chance, a simple dinner, happenstance within the seams
And lining of sidling sibling intercourse that satisfies or possibly redeems
The thing that leaves its fossils free for future scavengers, no past
To contemplate, a coroner’s delight from the proceeds of a centrifuge.
Cleverness of movement mounts in moments somehow cleft
And processed as lesions in the lard of what’s been left
To marinate or age. Discharge, wastes from the deluge
Along the banquet boards, but dammed provide
A watershed, the simple servant to all cardinal sins
To celebrate with sufficient zeal a subtrahend
That will not be outgrown nor decompose and cannot break its stride
With backdoor vipers or ill-used garden snakes. At harm’s length
Visitations of the witnesses can only grow in strength.
Posted in Abel, Angels, Antithesis, Cain, Comedy, Congress, Negation, Parliament, Peace, Poetry, Pyrrhic Victory, Samsara, Sycophants, Synthesis, Thesis, Zeitgeist
Tagged Double Sonnet, Lyric Poetry, Sonnet, Sonnets
…a revision of the poem…
Swept aside, all moments and celestial mementos collide
And waste no never-mind on credence and retention
In the wake of greater cosmic rinds and supine celestial reflection.
Mortality by definition lies; not so through what histories imply
But in the daily interaction of missives from the Goal
And penultimate ilunga * of the Source or
Sanctions of interaction in the triumphant triad of the coarsest
Ores of time, of space, and all that matters. Time, the cosmic linen folds
Of space and active order; space, the theatre of experience at the heart
Of the observer; matter, but an audience, a phenomena in passive
Active shadows of Creation and its nemesis. Simplicity is massive,
Complexity but a word; a question’s languages are art
And science while the answers form the pathos and the abstract.
What is more pathetic than to be and yet be nothing in the act?
Simplicity in the classic form requires
The prefects of a perfect vacuum
Combined in such a way as compliments the acumen
Of a strident meme, the jealous zeitgeist, tests that to the whole inspire
An urgent need to pause, to linger over bodies no longer really there,
A little more than a half a generation’s substance in a given time.
So granted this, so beautifully and tragically resigned,
Aloud comes the elegies of episodes to “Move along!”or “Retire!”
With such a cry inscribed, there was and always is
A here and there in rapid profit worshipped, fierce
As gallstones of desperation: “This, our chosen age, rehearsed
Upon a cross of memories little more than lyrics of an ancient tryst!”
And, equally, the many crowned and catalogued, remain aloof
Through symmetries of perfection in a sacred dynasty of embroidered truth.
*The word is ilunga, from the Bantu language of Tshiluba, and means a person ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.
When there is this, that is.
With the arising of this, that arises.
When this is not, neither is that.
With the cessation of this, that ceases.
His Holiness The Buddha
Posted in Affirmation, Age, Aging, Antithesis, Arts, Buddhism, Change, Classic, Cycles, Double Sonnet, Elegies, End Times, Ends, Generations, Hubris, Hustlers, Hyperbole, Idolatry, Matrix, Meme, Memory, Negation, Nostalgia, Numinosum, Pathos, Poetry, Posterity, Pragmatism, Pyrrhic Victory, Relativity, Retirement, Samsara, Sciences, Seasons, State of Being, Stations, Synthesis, Thesis, To be or not to be, Tragic Flaw, Tshiluba, Yearning, Zeitgeist
Tagged Double Sonnet, Lyric Poetry, Sonnet, Sonnets
“Too Cynical for a Child”
Too cynical for a child, too innocent for a man,
But then, what did you expect? I asked
Enough in all the opening years to empty the trash
And throw out the sash of operations in the half-light; I ran
From the womb when it was required. I am
An eternity born in and out of time, the last,
The penultimate of a line that survives–the cast,
My mother’s hopes, my father’s hand–
Beyond all thoughts of redress or retribution.
Within their sometime august and rhyming rôles,
The median in ancient paradigms and genes
Has faithfully rewarded patents in a pre-recorded dream
Of glory in the seeds but with a difference, a resurrection
Common to the seasons, divinely timed within my soul.
Posted in Antithesis, Childbirth, Childhood, Cynicism, Innocence, Poetry, Seed, Synthesis, Thesis
Tagged Immortality, Lyric Poetry, Sonnet, Sonnets