An Ode to Ge (Geode)

Just a rock
not smooth but rough
around the non edges of
its intrinsic spheric
nature, structure.

No pebble-but a rock-
that can be concealed in a fist,
hiding inside;
taunting in the turtles way,
tucking, sucking inside
its plated prehistoric shell.

But you can feel this fragment
disintegrate, perish and dissolve;
volcanic cryptocrystalline quartz,
sprinkling its sedimentary exterior
unsentimentaly and silty in my hand.

A rock is a terrestrial fragment made from
dust and sand, compressed and forged,
carrying and holding its inert unstable state,
and insignificant weight,
posing inanimate and dormant.

Lightly, lacking meat in the middle
empty unlike the turtle, hollow,
wallowing in carbonate bubbles.

Listen-inside
as agate bands,
jasper whispers,
and amethysts get kissed...
Stacking up of crystal spears
on corroding foundations;
earth from the inside out.

This little lava rock
life forgets, brushes aside
unless something special is hiding
inside. We, tools, crack
down the middle
to see the little
beauty, chaos, surprise
Lies
inside
a lone little
living stone.



Image from Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain. Pictured interior of amethyst geode.

Emancipation of empathy

The father leaves
the delivery room
unable to wrap his grey brain
around her bloody pain.
The mother knows now
she is alone,
responsible for their survival.

The baby opossum,
smiling and listless,
lays still blinking away flies
from his glassy black eyes.
Rejected by his mother,
he dies alone
in the fresh cut grass.

A mother sits with her grown son,
worry lines her face connecting
the years between them.
Pain wrenches his body,
suffering they endure it side by side;
one will live,
one will die.

Salvation is a single passenger of deliverance
traveling through the tortuous view
arriving as a vicarious vacancy
forgetting and letting the suffering go,
anothers pain, one and the same.


Image By Correggio (Antonio Allegri) (Italy, Parma, circa 1489-1534) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The disaster in me

Gasp

gusty winds aloft

Tremble

strings of faulty nerves

Flooded

emotional levee buckles

damned

storm

surges

Quaking knees

collapse

Heat waves

carried by ripping currents

that pull me deeper

nearer

the purple flame

Fire

accelerated

I am a natural disaster.

Image by Leonardo da Vinci, 1517-1518, Natural Disaster [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Light cycle

The scalding star
                      bursting in beams
gives way, in due time
                      Tho not without a heated conflict
our only satellite set on high
                     sending signals where no one
can hide from the wrath and the aftermath

Both positions be known
                      observed and heeded
the dynamic cycle, black and white
                      from day to night
the changing of Our guards

who compose the length of our sentence                    
wardens we watch back.




Image by Henri Théophile Hildibrand [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The dragonflies of August

And yet
how quickly we forget
that which are not ours
suspended outside of us
that snare our sound
held steady by a spell
we dutifully await
notice, complimenting
the color red.

Remembering something splendid
August by name, summer sprawlers
when warriorflies meet damselflies
nymphs and naiads
jolt in the sun propelling
in omnidirectional ambivalence
the hunted pauses in quiescence.

A blue clasher notes
royalty indigo with glints
of visual vibrations
that absorb you whole
by natural odonate order
of kindred carnivore.

In prismatic charisma
of holographic hovering
a resurrection of still
Sublime observers
primal movers of seasons
they have valid reasons
survival breeds
tellurian tenerals
that travel through time
unnoticed
by worm hole
defining translucence
to trapped terrestrials
helping us
recollect
our defected
their perfected
Augustine animus.



Image by By Jon Sullivan [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Collecting words from the bone pile

The Three Oddest Words

By Wislawa Szymborska

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
Copyright © Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh,

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1996

__________________________________________________________________________________

 Italo Calvino on Quickness-

"Words, words that make me think. Because I am not devoted to aimless wandering, I'd rather say that I prefer to entrust myself to the straight line, in the hope that the line will continue into infinity, making me unreachable. I prefer to calculate at length the trajectory of my flight, expecting that I will be able to launch myself like an arrow and disappear over the horizon. Or else, if too many obstacles bar my way, to calculate the series of rectilinear segments that will lead me out of the labyrinth as quickly as possible."

From Six Memos for the Next Six Memos for the next Millennium

 

Imagine words being 

disembodied

from their inky chambers

in confinement

of a stroke on whim

Words set free from

the constriction

of definition

trapped 

by convictions

Language as folk lore

posing as apparitions

opaque and outside

ourselves

a resemblance

While we wrestle with gravity

Here

Words are grappling with reality

Now

Set against 

the woven fabric canvas

of our chance encounters

in perpetuity

strokes on a whim

I get the impression

of vibrant color on a white day

either way

A container to store ecstasy

dripping down

and running

to meaning 

we para phrase

artfully appraise

Concentrate as you read

these words you may need

inside your head

with your minds i

while standing beside

ourselves

in

nirvana

projecting 

maniacal mana

Leaning on clouds

we rely

on coming to a compromise

in order to see 

shapes as symbols, like these

metaphors

thirsty for more

than thin air

An impression

a sense 

of being

with words

we try to share

interchangeable

synonyms

thereby

invoking and provoking

a sense of continuity

An encyclopedic

orthopedic

selfsame essence

Words are the

people pith

that make-up

our masterful myth.

Image by Gerard de Lairesse, 1690 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The early bird on the horizon line

A line
           is thrown out...there
A line is
           connection of the dots
           summarized by stretching spheres
lined up
like ducks
cluck clucking
in a row
Row,
row your boat by
                            parallel plotter
                                                   navigating the stream
                                                 
Tow the line
                    holding by a lifeline
                                                    hiking the EKG
Wait
        in line
wait for it
               carried down the line
               a vibration
               a sensation
                                 The Ripple-
                                    -r-i-p-p-l-e-
                                         effect
a lure lingers on the line
                                  barbed edges await
                                                                 an inevitable lineal fate
a direction
                 to take
                 to make
out side the lines
                            a circle of infinity
keeps out
               traps in, depending on where you begin
a snap is shot,
                     tracing the trajectory
                                                     tightening the arrow
in array
A line
          a single point of origin
                                              genetically tangled
entwined in limpid lineage
by dates and fates
                             times arrow
                                               on a string
A line we follow to the T
A line we cannot see
A line we fall for
hook
line
and
sinker
The line is cast
we are the worm.



Image by William Blake [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, from Jerusalem-Plate 78.