The Cool-Aid™

The president watches too much TV
They tell us.
We all do. True
TV keeps us
company,
in a community property kind of way,
like a park-
My cat, ask any dog, they would all agree,
likely
TV is showing something for every one of
Us
Right-

Now,
social media, via the lower channels,
seem more real than virtual-
to many.
Too many
say, there is
something, someone, somewhere,
for every body there too.
And there too
it was always
only you and you.

Then,
TV and the like
asked what We liked-
and we shrugged our stringed shoulders,
some said-I dunno,
You tell Us,
and they did.

Now, the president has found
company,
and there too,
two stringed shoulders
shrug,
I dunno.


Image credit By DonkeyHotey (Donald Trump - Caricature) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Masonic

Not angelic, nor demonic,
it was likeness to life,
in a liberated angel
hiding her alabaster feathers
in columns of strata.
A marvelous made thing
it became, a mass to marvel,
an icon only outlined to invoke awe
from the stony faces, whose eyes hollow
pink granite and glisten in
a miraculous crust
that makes a life
out of our dust.



Photo By Smithsonian Institution from United States of Betty Richard, American sculptor B. 1916 [No restrictions], 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.

Stone's throw

When the words dislodged
and came hailing down,
as an avalanche seeking the comforting
earth below
in free fall, the lege, a paragraph
or precipice gives itself away,

all the dense granite words,
could never be shale, not fall apart
nor could any illumination find light
after the full weight suddenly shifted,
to be mined. It was only words that the
mountains rose to meet at
The End.




Painting by Carl Schuch [Public domain], 'Mountain stream with boulders' (c.1888) via Wikimedia Commons.

Making magma

I’d like to draw a map of you

for perspective,

for options,

for borders, both imaginary &

reactionary.

Your vellum,

I now know like the belly of my palm.

And our lines converge, overlap, and seal off

familiar territories, provincial islands of natives,

like Us where

there is a sense of belonging,

lining up and finding places 

specific to our likeness and 
locale is in a sense

relative to distance to each other

within our limited spheres

flattened as Atlas can get
and remain.

Two souls collide Here, two bodies melt,

there two souls trapped, 
surrounded bodies of turbid water 

that become brackish by exchange.

This is all I can do 
with nothing else to make

but more magma

in these uncharted lands
and move on. 

Painting by D. Howard Hitchcock (1914) 'Moon and stars over Diamond Head' in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Tenacity

The air being pulled
from the right to the left,
lets up only to adjust and
regrip its hold
on hills.

The ants do not recede,
do not retreat in holes.
Armies have assembled
along the walls, there is no
start, no end, like this wind
no safe seal.

The papers pile up under the
evenings in red and
drip down for later.
Ideas fly out the window
lifting hairs, touching
elsewhere,
never landing as said.






Painting By Antonio Parreiras (1860 - 1937) – Painter (Brazilian) Born in Niterói, Brazil. Dead in Niterói, Brazil. Details of artist on Google Art Project [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Pale whale

Call me Moby,
he moaned, I am
the white whale with the
golden ambergris,
a blue sheep in a green sea
the tilting eyes
that unfathomably see
and do not forget
breaking glass
and all the colors
not needed.

I have left
footprints, where I have no feet.
Though I manage to move by strokes, I tell
the surface by light in weight bars, falsetto
where exposure to so much blue and grey
was too much to separate species.
It makes one sink
and red
and takes one's breath away
making fountains
without gills.

It is my special skill,
Moby would say.

Five-thousand leagues later,
all blues went grey,
and all green
settled for sheep.



Photo credit By Commander John Bortniak, NOAA Corps (NOAA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.