Category: Uncategorized

Memorial Morning

Mists are memories of the lake,
shrouded ghosts breathing their cold sighs,
a silent sermon for dawn’s wake—
but the mists fade, soon, from our eyes.

A heron walks the water’s pane,
stepping lightly in the shallows
like a priest with perfect refrain
midst the holies and the hallows.

Birdsong trickles from the oak trees
and the hot sun hastens all play,
leaves stir with a warm-blooded breeze;
today moves on from yesterday.

The cold looking-glass of the lake
shows gold and green and white and blue;
a catfish leaps and colors break—
old memories give way to new.

A Simple Song

Love, where have you gone?
(With the dawn, on and on).
Bed bedecked with dew,
tears for you,
old and new.

The noonday burns bright
(blinding light, golden white),
Eyes closed can still ache,
wide awake
as lids shake.

Dark becomes the dusk
(twilight’s husk, moon a tusk).
Moth nears candleflame.
What’s your aim?
Who’s to blame?

Lonely as a star,
(falling far, where none are).
Gleaming on the sea,
You and me…
Let it be,
let it be.

Wanderer

You train-jumping vagabond tramp,
only home you know is a camp,
ashen-shoed as you move on through
sidestreets, foot trails, Route 62.

Roaming spirit, you’re a rumor,
haint with a whiskey-flask humor,
orphan from the carnival glow,
dressed for jazz, but a geek sideshow.

Sometimes you hum low to yourself,
or sing aloud like a drunk elf,
voice like a shovelful of slate,
heavy and coarse, yet free from weight.

Will you find what you’re looking for,
rambling state to state, door to floor?
Or is it the walk you’re after?
Hounding moonlight, girls, and laughter.

The horizon rolls to meet you
like a stray dog slow to greet you
and though you do not pet its brow
the world wags its tail—take a bow.

Fury

A molten marble, the amygdala,
like a neutron star in density,
hotter than the sun, the third eye
blinded by the radiating white-hot light,
and should I somehow think a clear thought
amidst that centrifocal gravity of hatred
it shall be no more than the anticipation
of my revenge,
fists clenched like the claws
of a crow perched on the ribcage
of a corpse
in a battlefield littered
with the disemboweled dead,
the head of Reason eyeless
and the world itself an eviscerated wasteland.
Ask me not to parley
nor speak any words;
such peace talks are the trifles
which ignite the gunpowder
and blacken the bitter battlements with
cascading cannonades.
Were I a mountain long gone quiet
through eons of silence and solitude
I would burst open with a hemorrhage
of inundating lava
and girdle Eden with a Pyrrhic victory,
and be at peace,
at long last,
as all the magma-embosomed earth
cooled alike to Mars,
quiet, and still, forevermore.

Bottom

Would that I could find
that pacifying panacea,
dumb beast that I am
trampling clumsily through the Heal-alls
and crushing underfoot the purification
I seek so blindly,
the fulsome fragrant flowers
so close within reach
were I but brave enough
and sure enough
for the spread-petaled trespass,
but as the donkey with idiotic hooves
I cannot clutch at this garden’s bounty,
though caressed by Titania’s fond fingers
and dying as a fool in the arbor of Love.

Devourer

Through the cold, dead ages
with nebulas aswarm,
past long-agone stages
and the cosmic dust storm,
came a writhing terror
within the wombed vacuum
of a headless bearer,
an amniotic bloom,
its tentacles reaching,
thrusting out through the Void,
seeking, grasping, leaching
from passing asteroid—
not quite a parasite,
no more than beast, or Man–
feeding in endless night
on any thing it can.

Schopenhauer On The Shore

I saw Schopenhauer on the shore
kneeling down in the frothy brine,
grunting and groaning at a chore
in the shallows along the shoreline.

I ventured closer and heard him gloat,
though his face was twisted and wroth
as he clutched a man by the throat—
a statue of Buddha in the froth.

Arthur sneered into the Buddha’s face
and proclaimed, “Mein Lehrer ist tot!”
He then walked away from that place
while the wood idol began to rot.