Hatchling

An open invitation,
gilt in possibility
lures the timid beast from its musty cavern

The cacophy of air rushing around the
least resistant, matters are pushed and pulled upon
Certainties, tossed about

Potentials

The sudden hail defies the timid pleas
to unfold and stretch into
a solid lain beam of radiant heat

How could the mortal help himself anymore:
Gather, hunt, peck and reorder survival skills
Such as Love and Hate

Coming down

In various degrees of murder and rebirth
Springs forth
Colorful codes saturated with noise
and clashing heads with tails

The now bleeding ink pools
and blurs your name
craddled under ashen light,
limp and holding onto remorse
absorbed into pulp and grain limbs.

The sky showed no where
Safe
Welcoming
these evolutions
without debate thy will has been
done.

Spring inflates its toll
on the feral sheltered soul
Whose i's have been gouged out in disbelief,
and now blinded by the most elemental
Considerations.

The beast grows
weary and anxious
trying to stand upright
under these conditions,
dissuasion and doom
overshadows the occasion
to fear or be feared.



Artwork by William Blake, 'The great red dragon and the beast from the Sea' c. 1805 in Public Domain. 

Pass the looking glass

Face your fears,
is always more than
a dare,
underlying there is
the resurgence and recurrence
brought back by time and tide

Heavy in the air
inoculable preoccupation
to reflect
the return
a long lost relative redness
in the cheeks,
the submarine crystal eyes,
tiny peeks in a clouded
mirror

and there stares
back the terror of truth,
thicker than mist
draining all the same
Vain
by surface shine
in a spectacle
she sees a blind slave
whose never seen herself
anything but brave.

Painting By Tarbell, Edmund Charles (1862 - 1938) – Artist (American) Details of artist on Google Art Project [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Nerve-us

Nobody has the nerve

to go against all odds

even when winning
If
certain

is only the beginning

and defeat is destined
postdated

(sometime too soon)

in the end-

before it all starts

to get really good,

would you try
to be
Brave?

Image of painting by Alfred Stevens [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 
Details & History: The Psyché (My Studio)
Trained in Brussels, Stevens finished his studies in Paris and made his career there. During the Second Empire (1852–70), he pioneered and perfected the domestic interior scene, which the Impressionists then adopted. He was inspired by Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch and often painted on wood panel. This painting, which once belonged to the poet Robert de Montesquiou, is one of several by Stevens of his studio with a model and sometimes the artist; its title refers to the mirror at the left. A full-length mirror with chassis was invented in the late eighteenth century and took its name, psyché, from the legend of Cupid and ­Psyche, a story that thematizes looking. Yet this is not an actual psyché but an easel with a mirror where the canvas would normally be, an analogue to a psyché suggesting that art is a reflection of life. A cloth partially covers the mirror, hiding the reflections of the studio. Focus instead is on the model, who may have interrupted her posing session to peer around the edge of the mirror, which reflects her head and hand. The artist hints at his own presence with the cigarette butt, ash, and match in the lower right corner. Nearby struts a small parrot, seemingly a reference to art’s mimetic function. The backs of canvases and portfolios of prints or drawings represent some of Stevens’s working materials. On a chair are Japanese prints, reminders of his love of objects and collecting; with his friends the Goncourt Brothers, Bracquemond, and Whistler, he was one of the earliest collectors of Japanese art in Paris. Among the small paintings on the wall is a sketch for his Salon picture What They Call Vagrancy (1854; Musée d’Orsay), a picture of social protest.