316 million tons: Our weight on the world

Deadweight
Feels heavier
Without a light source

Emitting and casting off more than
Darkness which regenerates
On itself
Like a quiet tumor
Reaching

Look at Atlas,
His flexed muscles
Atop his torso
Showing his amassed
Strength and Dilemmas,
Symbolic

The woman is rounded
Into fetal position
Cradling her empty
Gut, where lead linings
Rust

She must endure
the pulseless womb
Internally,
Empty

He will never feel this weight
Carried
in her pit, shriveling up
Potential
Against will

She will take on more

Despite this moment
Wedged under a
Ticking clock

Like counting down
Our rock planet teeters
Without her brace

It would be wise of man to
Expect the Fall.



Painting by Adolph von Menzel (1815-1905), 'Sister Emily sleeping' c. 1848 in Public Domain. 

Time's up

The two women acted tough,
forgetting their lady-like roles,
trying to win a popularity contest
without a prize,
and as petty little ladies often do,
they threw a-round the word "Best"
like a dodgeball.
But women can jump in heels,
can see behind and see through
costumes.
Make-up is removable.
****************************

The gentleman was gifted but
he knew the charges were coming,
soon. He would owe more than he had.
Hands on the trigger.
His desk is packed up in a box
that sits dutifully like a dog
by his dull loafers. Emails erased,
trash emptied, a final scan a-round
a corner window office
formerly occupied by a-round peg
seeming to be a dull square. Any body
could hold his chair. Professional,
calculating and an all a-round good guy
with a giant fear of the female,
her articulation, his worst case
just dis-missed due to conflicting
interests in gender roles and their
unjust entitlement or oppression-
he wouldn't say.
*************************

The young boss man is full of vim,
vigor, rigor and righteousness.
Bless his greedy hands clutching the reins
of his tall steed. He tramples the herd,
whipping them into his desired geometry.
Only now he found,
there was nobody a-round to
blame for missed fortunes, for the gaping
holes, balls rolling, for getting in his way.
Elders eyed another path,
an alternate pace, a safe place to
participate without giving away
experience.
*******************

The company decided to set the price
as high as the bar
could be raised,
so the product always hovered
just out of reach.
The company did not discount
the value of free advertising,
disregarding all costs.
****************

The free world leader
traded his hefty income
for a chance to control
the immeasurable,
to push the ethereal agenda,
to take a title already under copy-
right, to hear himself proclaim,
denounce, hear his own voice
and believe the words
were enough to fill empty bellies
not just heads.
The leader chases his tail
and demands we follow a-long
the lines
what comes a-round
goes on to repeat itself,
itself, the same as
his 'huge' following.
***********

Insurance, like promises
does not provide tangible compensation
unless a claim has been made
on total losses.
We must be living
to learn.
The finest print
excludes all the
preceding liabilities.
******

A reaction is a result,
the equivalent of
a resolution.
***

The movement
already occurred.
**

We just witnessed-
A passive act.
*

Net wait

A blessing comes with a curse,

wait and good things will appear,

like whale spouts and comet tails bursting forth,

you will see-eventually.

And chances are 

choices awaiting a verb,

like the other side of the coin

what is tossed in the air,

must plummet to its lowest nadir.

We have seen this played out. Likewise,

such sweeping statements, proverbs and prophecies,

do little for everything-in-all-times, 

yet consistently, this movement tends to

strew the smallest fragments more widely 

distributed across the floor and

atop all the lowest planes, building up-

just as the feather duster spreads its wings,

the timepiece propels one to practice 

gathering oneself more

and in doing so, magnetism must assert 

its basic properties are acuter 

than our elemental bodies

behaving and obeying the laws.

Well, we can only collect our thoughts 

and arrange them in an orderly fashion 

so that they may be 

overlooked,

making more room to move around and since 

wisdom was a woman, things, like elimination, 

we tend to find 

liberating in corners.

Everything here, in a sense shows, 

entropy was a mirror image of 

this empty room, piling up with dunes of dust.

While waiting for change,

chaos was creating 

lines in the sand and

when the wind broke in for one last sweep,

there was nothing to weigh any of us down.

The holes served their purpose. 

Image By A Stieglitz, c. 1899 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

We women watching under eye shadows

Seeing is believing.
Done through heavy sooted eye-
shadows.

New, meant come around 
all over 
again.
We noticed,
nothing new.

Women still paint their faces,

but abstain from powdering noses,

            and will travel as far and wide enough

to know a full revolution

            of the hips when she feels the need
to dance,

when hoops slip into too tight of spirals
we feel confined.

Given time

the stains come out

and by reduction to the lowest possible whole drop,

                        some flesh tones become singularities

condensed into specks, spread across any open faces

                        sunk into  black holes that may only escape 
as screams.
There was a trace. 

What progress we felt on our burning skin,

blurs as age rounds off soft female edges,

                        yet the spine protrudes, more

and gums get back up in order

to suck out the ivory scene
leaving a chalk outline.

All life in circles, women come around.

Known for orbit and making

headway

            by the expansion of ego and 

squeezing in equilateral points, the men did
squares and wrecked tangles.

Forward was no direction-

to give 
away.

And finding this Now, Here,

           was terrifying.

There were unseen toxins in the air.

The smog-always Over There.

The disease thrived in another suffocating body.

Would we feel less,

we would ever know

if we were in it

or it was in us.

Knowing not 

why we came or why we remain,

heavy, 
we carry on a stench 
wrapped around our glacial shoulders.

A few were inoculated against such

vertiginous long views, like standing up-
right

where Up was no place

for land lubbers.

Women won't follow 

directions. 

Most felt the calamities rising,

considered the unreasonable temperatures,

and the harshness of storms as personal 
lashings, mis-behaving as
the judged and jurried.

From overhead,

sensed the shifting clime,

and sought sources

                        backward, by untangling those wires,

going on invisible signals.

We find the Current that carries us. 


Painting By Marion Boyd Allen (1862–1941) (http://the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=49019) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Glass making

All over the place

pour, poor women and wine,

overflown lips,

she sees her particulates

in liquid stains

held over old flames.

There is no innocent steam,

the trees that finally fell to timber

under scurrying winds collecting

clay clouds, pulling out roots

by the palmful in a disintegration of states.

She seemed mad.

That insistent sun rose its entitled torch,

humming, ho-hum-mums-the-blue iris to day, to

dew, and do the birds hone a tone in

one place, canary, and crow

cemetery or church, middle C

night and gale mocking us.

She giggles at others tripping over

stone heads

and bumping toes on crosses;

no body ever saw her,

smiling some where upon

she cried upon recognizing herself

as naked truth.

It hurts to linger too long

exposed against acclimation.

We shatter in the cold.

We were always restructuring and stacking

cardboard and compressing pixels

over old times, keeping alive,

ashes and splashes

mixing and folding us back in.

This con-trap-she's in,

clearly cracking

from such extremes

of rising and falling

body temperature.

Such is life.

Photo By SMU Central University Libraries [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.

All (of us) men

All men equally;
She is just a he
that is many more than one.







Painting by By Gretchen Woodman Rogers, 1915 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Femme

Lips for licking words
sweet and sour said to taste, tongue
buds roses and thorns.




Image of painting by Władysław Czachórski [Public domain], First Roses (1891) via Wikimedia Commons.

De mure De moon

She walks in the open at night
wrapped in white sheets wet from sweat
that darken in every crevasse
by her movement

She speaks in shapes of words
by the phase of the moonglow
and knows she is watched, barely
as she pulls the threads closer

lightly, it was the way she cast
down her eyes
dutifully does not speak
until spoken at

The careless sashay,
the way her hips open
to accommodate the frame
that holds her

Embellished, a facade
shiny with optimism,
buffed and presentable as
Potemkin villages
de mure

But the light from
her being
there shifted and softened
features receptively

In decent she saunters
the skies, timidly taking her place
outside public walls
where no artificial light falls

She sees purely, clearly
she is not needed to light the way
for others to see, but every so often
she brightly becomes
full of herself.



Image by Luis Ricardo Falero [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.