If (Then)

Then it happened to you,
then you knew it too,
then came the little white lies,
then the hate began abating.

Then you decided who is slave and master
then as a victim under wrath of disaster
then the words were the same
then the expected was spoken
then gather the fools
who brandish their philosophy with blunt tools.

If you rely on random winnings,
the future is a loss, a simple toss
of chance, dicey beginnings
are a safer bet, planning for loss
is real, skin and bones, muscles and sinew.

If ever you feel all hope is gone-
If you
manage to keep holding on,
remaining strong in each individual virtue
you
define for yourself, yet don't be too harsh much.
Each second of every minute
is your life, not a race, do not run.
Then if only you can forgive me for all I didn't
and did give you, my only son.

Image of Rudyard Kipling by Elliott & Fry [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The above poem was an exercise in composing a poem utilizing the same last words of each line (feet) from another poem. For this poem, I used Rudyard Kipling's very famous poem “If”.

The fork of desire

Primal hunger pangs taunt
and flaunt past senses.
Penetrating dimensions,
the jaw clenches.
Unrelenting thirst
pinched cheeks; pursing lips
cracked and trembling.
Pining for a sharp tool-
as an axe would wield
extracting the will.
Determined to fulfill
and sate the craving
unabating, excruciating
gnaw and growl
at a plate that is full
and still that dull
pull for more.
All mine-
stuck on the tine
pierced and tenderized,
penetrating and salivating
at the carnal need,
an insatiable greed.
Ravenous utensil by design
the heart, glutted and gored
a small spade, an aspiring apparatus
an ideal instrument of implementing
a stab through the chest.

Delighted and possessed,
past deprived, I digest-
admiring the architecture
of the fiercely savage fork.


Image of cannibal fork from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, HI by Ergosum88.

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.