Disillusionment

I am here.

And now, I begin, again,

With space and commas, breath and white

And see clearly how obsessed

With spacetime and specifics

With Here and Now-

I have been…

Have virtually

Erased all presence

Of mind

Or need for then,

Than,

I have made sense with time,

Grown with space

A sense of place

Within the hour,

Finds me.

I knew words,

I said it all

And after all this

Was settled

It dissolved…





Painting By William R. Leigh (born Falling Waters, WV 1866 - died New York City 1955) – Artist (American) Born in Falling Waters, West Virginia. Dead in New York, New York. Details of artist on Google Art Project [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Always enough

On their walk home after school,
the middle school kids foraged among green ankles
in a patch of sour grass,
Don't swallow-Just chew, says the boy with braces
who spotted the little cache and reported it.

A lone girl sits criss cross applesauce
on the sidewalk in the shade of a pepper tree,
she wipes her brow, a paperback book splayed
in her lap.
She has never heard of a broken spine.
She doesn't look up-her ride must be late.

At the bus stop
a  stubbled man asks a teen
for the Time,
then asks the youth why he is out early,

I go to the Academy.
I have to go to work, he
explains.
How I remember those days,
retorts gruff with derisive smirk
Not the same, I'm sure,
the man reassures-
Academy.
Is this bus always late?

A crow hops next to the bench
looking sideways
every so often, adjusting his position
on cracking a tough nut,
or breaking a date.

Either way they look
too little
too late.



Painting by Boris Kustodiev (1911) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Made in the shade

There are no words for this nowhere night...
The branches that lean on lusty air,
the mind that sways without care,
to This and back to That-without photosynthesis
or reason for process just in this dim moonlit
moment for rest and breath.

Steadfast in the breeze, and leaves too shiver
in a display of stirring resilience and transcendence
mocking me, I see. So-we still strive fruitlessly further
for naught and knots
where such difficulty and circularity
is always relevant at the root under foot...

Well, that is deep-
We being anew-acorn to oak; choking up
our symbiotic exchange of needs
and invisible nows, for want of more
foliage for later, lushness across a lifespan.

For Now, nothing is more than enough
to keep me here seeking a lone moment
to feel my place and lose it
all in the same breath.


Painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1819-1820) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Do, Rey, Me, My, I

I admit-

I hate poems that start with "I",

which means I also hate this poem.

I mean, there is no "i" in "poem".

There is though, in "poesis" and "meta-

morphosis", just one

I mean, the making of one into many

more I's and i's.

It is not as if I care

about bravely baring the skin or showing some soul,

a sweet tooth for eye candy, and me, me, me...

Besides your self 

what is important to the eye is not the you

others see, really. Not fooling anyone in that mask.

I know you smile when others look at you,

but fail to see your eyes,

really,

I see you mocking me, and I do too,

since it was never about you

only I and I hated it. 

 Photo of Norma Talmadge (c. 1919) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A Lee alee

The moan returned, and it always came at precisely the wrong time. 

In these conditions, concentration pulls away and tapered focus spreads

its photons in flooding streams of white thought.

The wind knows this and is relentless, always. Careless 

to human needs for calm and order, real food and clean water, it blows- 

every which away.

The rising whine coming in all corners should have reminded us, nothing

is sealed completely. Same never remains cremated-

change or would be by the same name. Ashes. Should anyone notice. 

It is justified, to claim not to hear, to feel no steam rise, to believe 

this arrangement is permanent or static. Hope is clean energy.

Electricity is not a friend.

Dear me. It could never end. A break, a breath, and shriek, 

its thick harmonic resonance extending its reach in waves. 

The breeze dances its heart out down in the valley. 

It will twirl itself out haphazardly and we will see 

no steps in the routine. This storm was not predicted. 

Every light word goes out the window. 

The pain sank through.

Painting by Jerônimo José Telles Júnior [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Spies like Us

Confess?
Yes, I made it all up.
All of me that is-
whom I thought others could see
who I was
supposed to be, it was all me.

I suppose I owe
a debt to society, hand
manmade anxieties, cultured milk, hormones
and other treated things thought to help
growth by imagination and fermentation.

I coincide with these memories relived anew, you know
dwelt on the detailed fantastical, adorning
all embroidery and embellishments, lacy
fine threads that make pretty.
We are all make believe
and under cover, ourselves in hiding.

The body still
occupies us.

Painting by John Downman, Robert, Duke of Normandy in prison (1779) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

echolocation

All the same words. All the same words in various orders.

All the same orders, word for word in so many words.

It all sounds the same. It was.

Are we saying the same thing?

Are you reading the same thing? We are saying the same,

reading the same things, so those are not mine?

If it is all the same to you too, it must be as disappointing to you too.

What is this maddening monotony, cacophony?

I am trying to say something original. Nothing was left.

No wonder none understands-meaning-deeper than face,

used all the same pretty words until threadbare, there,

two too many times. Make more!

Also, and Silence, I have said. I have changed for a mind,

momentarily in lieu of reverberating or reiterating more

echoes in empty rooms, pantries, and needs nearly nothing

for nourishment, nothing can be said hereto hear,

to hear only the same small words all lined up

in repoemed formation, loaded with an air of epiphany,

see, repetitive can be reflective, refractive, prismatic

mirror opposites 'true to scale'

said enough, with lips red

wardback

            ‘devil’

Painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, (c.1870) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.