Space flavor

Swallowing photons

every breath man meanders

tastelessly obscene

Painting By Peter Graham (1836 - 1921) (Scottish) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Six Reasons to Never Try Poetry

They call them mockingbirds, some are nightingales, a few may be owls or ravens,

but all are really pretending to be the pursuers

while they are in fact the ideal prey.

All are moths-

of which there are more than 160,000.

Drawn to their own demise, despite the heat, they repeat the fire dance,

a Danse Macabre in verse.

In all fairness, one should be warned-

1. You will never be good. Or done. Or get there. Never, nevermore. It will always be wrong, could be better, you should have never tried, a waste of your time, a sacrifice for nothing. If you want to feel a sense of completion or accomplishment, this is not the way. You will never be able to make it go away. Get a drawer, carry a pen, try to forget. 

2. You have only copied others far better than you-who copied those that were far better than they. 

All the words that are strewn about and unsorted,

the ones you polished up and put together and

something spectacular, or smooth, or morbid,

were not yours to put your name on. 

You were not the first person

to make your bed.

3. Warning: Also-they All die beautiful, decrepit and anonymous, poor and misunderstood. They pass away, they are evoked and manipulated, worshiped for saying one thing-over and over-apropos to those who know how timeless interpretations remains. They keep their keys. They take thier fortunes with them. The published, finished, are boarded up, condemned-to looting, pillaging and squatting.

The moth never learns from others smoke. The moth must devour the leaves and petals from poets of other seasons if it is to survive famished and cleansed by morning dew. 

Some say violets capture a certain raw nature, many others pine over roses, and there are those of silk, that bare no resemblance to prose, without punctuation or stamen. 

4. The night is shared by good and bad voices, loudest to those who listen.

5. Color is not necessary for presenting a beautiful display. Light and heat are most attractive when removed.

6. A moth is a critical link in the food chain. 

Fake eyes, ink stains, shadow, ash and dirt colored, clicks and sonar are extra like lyricality. Both predator and prey are symbiotic as reader and writer, both flock to the light despite the smoke and despite the act of dying every night. 

Painting By Michel Bouillon, Vanitas c. 1668 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Golden hour

Bathed in sepia lamplight,
the skin tingled,
the spirit sighed in its sheath,
all was glimmering and gilded,
and the branched bars became
too much to bear,
when stacked so high.

Under their long skeleton boughs,
shadows shrunk and lost
their cool blue,
leaving exposed all the sheltered bodies
that dissipate through the hours, only dissolving
in the company of leaves,

until all gathered-close
in purple pools of night,
fanged beasts,
like dead languages,
creep out through the white pages,
now folded, and saved. A place
keep our warmth inside.



Painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Every thing

It used to be about Other Things
It was always about 'other things'.

The more you think about It,
the more It thinks about more.

Stare long enough at any thing
and you lose all light discrimination
inside those black-hole pupils.

It has been said things couldn't be worse-
something about change, smaller
but felt the same with more things
and blame.

It was cluttered with chatter,
static, white noise, white holes
and light bounces off rubber words.

If you blink now,
it will never change.
Time wiggles out of every thing.


Painting by Thomas Wijck (c. 17th century), Alchemist in his study with a woman making lace, uploaded by Chemical Heritage Foundation [Public domain or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

housing

Walls of light

Standing planes and panes

Like prisms akimbo to light

Have held me rapt here

With skin in the game

Comfort be confound in coy

Contrasted by temperate untouchables

Hot like colors

Never seen lightning linger long

Enough to picture

Over iron mountains, topped mesas,

Yet you can smell the rain too, can’t you?

Miles away, the ions spin colliding

Into calm air-

Fixed for change.

We were warned,

Senselessly.



Painting by Jasper Francis Cropsey, Catskill Mountain house, 1855 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Held

We carried decimal places in our pockets,

there was never enough change

to evenly distribute amongst us.

We put pennies under our tongue,

never noticing the green words growing out.

we nestled ourselves inside boxes like silverfish

swimming from page to page.

We wove blankets with blame and empathy for others

and died our thoughts of progress and peril

in complementary colors.

Our choice by natural selection never counted

on such a vast assortment of unparsed persons

holding onto everything in case the anchor 

dislodged and diluted by oxidation,
broken down into byte sized bits.

We will fill any holes with our fitting figures,

leaving no space for any one lone light to escape

in a flicker.




Painting by Charles Willson Peale, Portrait of David Rittenhouse, 1796 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Proof to feel

Exempt from Rule three
'Seeing is Believing',
poets have felt gravity waves for centuries
before proof,
evidenced in the condensed packet called
a 'moment', that hits him square in the numbers
chest-wise.

Arresting breath with bondage attention
the neck braces itself out there
nearly knocked into shadowed fear-
don't look here-
it seems safer to watch than feel.

Despite the blind faith and electric lights,
the poet reads the ultraviolet signs as liminal,
hairs will rise only to settle in an
oppressing scream. It thinks it is escaping in
reaching for its own echo, those
vibrations shake the sound loose
from source.

Entanglement matters most
to poets without deflecting further penetration,
those background noises were called white
for lack of definition.

The poet lights his metaphor,
inhaling all that remains too minute
to make time.


Painting By Charles Furneaux (Hawaii Volcanoes National Park archive) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

First love, then night

The son

searches blindly in the thick shadows,

timid and thin, his alabaster skin 

fingering rays for warmth

where matters with heat may penetrate,

he lingered along

to feel the shapes and qualities

worth illuminating.

The son

gives off too much

light of himself,

but cools his burning core when worn

down from spinning out ideas, worries like water

for clouds.

Grey lightens the pressure of beauty in shades

of dilution.

The son

sets his gaze on the fine line,

balanced between now and then

an emerald spark, sometimes called Epiphany

flashes forward before

the embers burn themselves out

and all that fixation

loosens the belt of Venus

able to breath aloof in dusk.

The son

becomes sure

of being risen and having been 

roused, only to be caught 

in a brief glare, he spots 

glimmers of where love

lies and may be

beyond her dissolution. 

The son

will to morrow, who is

peaking at noon,

falls warmer than 

any moon who wanes

when the world was said 

to be done. 

Painting by Cornelis Lieste [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The breaking of day

Start here,

Where it is new and all fear, trepidation and caution

We called it

A scream it is untranslatable.

Symbols show

More than scars softened over imperfections

Below we know

It feels more than numb, sealed memories to tote.

Foretold in light

In eight minute increment’s, sentiments sent somewhere

Between now and then to pretend de ja vu wanted to remind you

Nothing new better than you to rise

Lightly.

Painting by Nicolas Poussin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The sylvan man grows in light

After watching what you say

In the way

of change

concentration

cures

our severed taste buds and

need for salvation is mis-

taken for thirst of knowledge.

Flavorless is so often

Distasteful.

With the impressions all-ready made,

castes cracks to make like-ness, best selves,

come rise to the occasion or surface,

holding up the sky for the stragglers,

last ones out-

So beauty is the last thing any-body sees.

Rather-build an experience stacking up

of extrapolated theories, compacted clumps,

we build like dutiful doozers

busy before the Fraggle ruins it all

over again.

A variation of pattern provides for knots,

gathering spaces and pulls punches with curves

unfit for naked kings.

There can be all or nothing

theoretically and answer is not the source,

it is a question of directed desire, of

questions and may-bes.

Fear and famine are inadequate seeds

of inspiration for a fish to continue to grow on

and on immersed in its own currents.

The air is different amidst change and chaos,

at the same time, it was always happening,

never staying the same-

except the way you speak

of change.  

I accept the way change 

speaks of you.

Artwork by Jusepe de Ribera [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Gravitas

It was never about our dumb thumbs.
It was the way we stood up
to gravity
without needing to know what we have
pushed up against, the faceless force
of resistance that throws its weight in waves
that crash out of sight and none mind this weakness
the stacking of back bones.

The clock, the book, ape our names with a smirk and a stick
shows you his ant collections, meanwhile, the snake swallows its tail.

Pounds and heartbeats resist this ethereal oppression
that taunts us to compete with what we have,
as though a winner was ever chosen,
as if hope had more than clipped wings with whimsical wants
and rings only of brass cages,

only light easily escapes our local prisons,
with motion detectors triggered we creep
like suspicion
reflection and persistence and say we are seekers

what gathers as cumulous clouds all comes
back down to dirt before clay
this way something is from nothing

the spinal column rachets and secures its connections
between inside out, an idea, a step in the right foot first
direction of brave, giants leaps of grace
loss of place

higher than vertigo knows
makes me think
there was nowhere to grow
up is out.

I doubt our thumbs
gave us a free ride.
Gravity takes no sides.




Painting by Claude Monet, Heavy Seas at Pourville (1897) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

(little lumens)

Brilliant (by that)

Bright (as in)

Light, like illumination

Or observation of Other

part and particulars

Also, astronomical atomic accumulations

where we may wonder 

what does the whole say?

Who’s to say-

Brilliance may be,

by relay, a reflection, the radiation

of you in the light,

letting colors concentrate

on more than themselves.

Bountiful or beautiful

from where i

stand

under-

awed and auroral.

Painting By Anna Boberg, Northern lights from North Norway in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Harmonic Anthropic Principality

Obviously,

the world around us demonstrates consistency so beautifully,

at least, that is what we prefer to see.

Moderation, enough and contentment and some

conservation of raw necessities and bare dirigibles.

This perfect white light can be too bright to look upon directly,

as when the sunlight dives too deep in

behind your eyes.

You may see empty spots being eaten by black holes bouncing

off magenta frazzled strings-maybe...

some hear C, some do not see (not heresy),

some say this in synesthesia,

most are cured from this disorder

by adulthood through normal amnesia.

Not to worry, what is out of sight does not mind.

What is behind is aftermath,

Insistent remainders which prove

expansion is true and mostly

more lies, well

beyond our view-There is more.

Listen does not change the sound that comes out.

It is answer. It is not your answer. It is hidden in harmony.

We can only

Here

what is most touching (outside).

Painting by Willem Cornelisz Duyster [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

At most, Fear

When one notes

the Atmosphere,

I wonder

what do You
conjure, in imagery?

A mood, light,

aura, ambiance, affect,

air, Up, There,

Ascent?

Dare we 

try to touch the ceiling, 

thusly tempted terrestrials?

We determine to defy 

our own manmade heavy Laws.

We break barriers, sound out loud, 

maximums

as axioms. 

We try to fly, defy gravity,
soar for more

throw wishes at stars

and hold our breath.

At this inclination

drops dew hover insight,
and we called it Fog,

blurring dezephyr

into

at-mos(t)-phere.

Background muzak soothes

voluminous volatiles

(i.e. such as) we hear. 

Image of Earth atmosphere taken from the space shuttle Atlantis in May 2010. Photo Credit: By NASA, STS132 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Captains Log: February 9th 21st century

Marine fog has come

and gone all day, it is similar, the same,
the way Gaston B was obsessed with this very mist

I muse over its movements in particulate.

Blue skies peek through,

a thin cloud rolling by,

and it has settled, for Now

rested thick, wet and multiple times

it is a clear day, others say, just on the other side…

It does stop us, coordinately 

from believing what we see. See evidently

I am most grateful for our limited scope,
as far as hope floats

it is the certainty we would choke
on the very air we need

if only we could see how Primo Levi detects the miasma
that hovers above all smoky cities. 

A gritty plume, caustic and lye, and lie like

light always gets to you.

No machete necessary, under a chenille throw of clouds.

No doubt it always will get through to someone,
as it has always done,
before the big banging and seed sowing.

Before the smoke there must be fire,

Before we could relate to the sky speaking in sea,

Collecting the mood in glimmers and vapors

The fog finally makes it all clear.

It was something in the air, where the light broke in

And scattered array.

Image credit by Tuxyso / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons.

Writing it right while the house was quiet

The duplex dreamt and the tenant typed

The reader was making a book; and not

Unlike emulation, was editing generously.

The building in the barrio with a tiny yellow light.

Worlds were created in near silence,

and destroyed even quieter still. The writer wrestles,

with choices and stalled situations, corners 

and trap doors until stuck no more, after all was imaginary.

The darkness provided the right light.

The writer made galaxies with aether.

Contrast and focus, like noise easier to see

when the dimness has long nestled in.

And the scrivener muffles scribbles, while snores and strokes 

of keys alleviate worries, working while the rest slept.

The word wizard cast spells, swept up by sunrise. 

The writer reads what the reader rights, a better ending after all.

*This poem was inspired by the famous Wallace Stevens poem, The House was quiet and the world was calm, featured (also a recorded reading) on the Poetry Foundation website.

Painting by Rembrandt [Public domain], 'A Hermit Reading (c. 1630) via Wikimedia Commons.

Stress test

Can you tell it's right if you hold it up to the light?
Do you know if it is better than good
if it can be completely understood?
Is it the ideal size-target market wise?
Does it truly sound like all the others that abound?
Is it flammable, is it like the animal
in us-
indigenous?
Is it harmonious or relevant, erroneous and malevolent?
Does it make you dance in some clandestine way
Does it have something significant to say?
Then-
is it worthy
to be called poetry?



Painting by Marie Spartali Stillman, Love Sonnets (1894) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

No need for alarm

At 5 am I have already lost it.
And though it is quiet
still never came...

I feel strong coming on
and blunt edges fading away,
the light is too heavy to lift...

I leave it be-
as though I could pause the suns rise
and unsee what lies today

Ahead of time and out of tune-
Too late
to say anything new...



Photo credit By kallerna (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Lackluster

You will know
                           by the light
and somehow     confidence flickers...

They all said This-let the light
guide you
Briskly.

It is just
when the winds pick-up
and the leaves begin to dance
                                       a show
of envy-
in longing for the limelight
Strewn
and Plain.
Watch and listen,
                            while the scenery changes.
Tears beget laughter-
                                  save your breath,
you will need to hold it
                                   yourself.
Without a word-

Do not seek
just go.

It is near.




Painting by Shigeru Aoki (青木繁) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Obfuscation

You never asked-
but I like the cool honesty
that the steel blue fractured light
throws against the walls of an empty room.

Your preference of warmth
makes me flush,
a bit hot
and rash.

As you know,
astrophysicists and amateur astronomers
use both spectrums
to learn about light
and discover new worlds
neither real blue nor red.

Me-I liked to walk in the woods in the dark
just to see or feel
my way.

I also rested in my closed
toy chest, inside the closet
with the bones and Barbie heads,
with my eyes closed tight-
yet could still see red.

You see,
I find
the absence of light briskly
more welcoming to me,
but it is just tepid white to you
I thought.

Painting By Abbott Handerson Thayer (Princeton University Art Museum) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.