For

for the love,
forward:
forlorn foreground
forgotten for years--
a forbidden forehead kiss;
fortunately,
forever forgives
our forsaken forms.
forge forth new
forceful, fortressed
memories:
now-foreign forebears
long foregone.




August 2015
just kidding around, bored by creative lapse.  "i get my creative juices by watching people," i told Andrew yesterday, sitting on the porch feeding the bugs our flesh.  "so i wouldn't mind riding the Metro to work."

Coarse

The coarsening of our society is a direct response to our well-financed and heavily advertised pursuit of unmerited thrills. Modern Man sees far more murders splayed out across his hundred-inch plasma screen than ever Medieval Man saw across his mudded fields or even battlements. And these are murders full of action, story, horror, surprise--but not of blood spilled across our own shoes and mixed with our own morning air. These are murders meant to thrill; meant to tease; meant to move the story on and pass us through our convincingly boring lives.








And so we callously become the very crowd that shocks us still: the mob who saunters by the body in the street, the trampled child in our way. We, the un-thrilled masses, unfeeling and unfelt, no mercy tender to our brethren Man: for what money is there in that?













July 2015

Memory (XIII)

The silence of expectance, a paltry tale slowly scrolled across unread banners, chides the parched and uninspired soul: no artist ever was, who lived unforced as their own images portrayed.

Resting as I do at the foot of massive walls and heavy furniture, I hopelessly recall the genius of my youth. In laying prostrate upon my bedroom floor, I held a baseball in my hands and suddenly understood Size--the horrifying, helpless enormity of Earth and our own insignificant molecularity. I shuddered then in terror and now regret I have not since.

And yet I do become aware as well of the parallel design of Time--the slow quickness with which our many years unpromised pass. A child is born who wears his father's smile, and a joy-filled face looks out upon a newborn world as it has not for thirty years; a tree is felled five decades hence and warms the brick-lined fireplace all bitter winter long.

And I remember, too, a time before I knew Poetry, a time of baseballs and the gravity of high-branched trees. I recall, too, she for whom I met dear Poetry, and she for whom I tried to chain her down.

All History, this, I suppose: my darkened, aging eyes weakly piercing fog that's long accrued. And: the smell of Sea, his salted wind in California eucalyptus trees, felt in the cool damp sand of my earliest childhood, a playground by the beach with a young mother I then barely knew--and to History I tender the whispered hope that someday the inheritor of my childhood grin will also carry some similar, morning-cooled memory and scent in his different soul.

July 2015

hate

"why?
because,
amidst the off-tope swirl
of helplessness
i found
hate.
within the blood-taste
of being used,
i found
hate.
underneath your pearl-crusted
iron heel, i--
crushed porcelain that i am
--can still hate
you."

but only for this fleeting moment:
grace ("that bitter taste!") floods my
bitter-crusted soul.

what crimes i've been forgiven!
how i've been loved!
the many gifts i've been given--
the breaths i've breathed, painlessly.

this hate--my hate for you--it ties my tongue,
it breaks my hands
and leaves me numb;
then, love
received as Earth receives her rains
reminds my heart
to live again.



June 2015

this one is pretty incomplete: basically, it looks somewhat like a poem without actually being one.  that said, i don't really want to do any more work on it and i think it's just a failed idea, so i'm posting it with an eye roll to get it out of the drafts folder.  deal with it, dear reader.

Ceiling Cloud

It was a sky that lured one in: up and along its endless parade of low-hanging clouds, sunk beneath a warehouse ceiling of that vast suspended ocean, enshrouding us all in the light of an unseen Sun.

May 2015