Cause and effect

                                                  (I never meant to be the cause,
                                                    but I know
                                                          I too
                                                                   shall pass)
Because I am here now
because now never was
because I was a mistake
because my children were perfection
because knots can untie
because I have thumbs.
Because we are all smarter
because we learn from the past
because the past is a leash
because we can escape
because we try to avoid death
because hurting is feeling too much
because healing is a miracle enough.
Because nobody will ever know
Why we are here.


Image By not stated (FBI Photos image source) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. FBI Laboratory scientist. 

Finding one self conscious (in a back-pack)

High school can be so cruel,
horrible not to mention
adding a new bright
canary yellow back-pack
cheery to a fault, a tweet assault
and glowing it seems from afar
a beacon, a candle,
or the sun.

She said she wasn't ashamed
before the first day
of sophomore year.
She said she had no fear,
she loved her bright
yellow book bag.

Rich and poor are both so brutish.

I was right,
she said.
They made strange faces
sneered up and down and
around her stylish lemon
fresh attache.
She didn't bend, or bow.
She was stubborn too.
Soon enough, "They all asked
where'd I get it," she smiled
radiantly,
stepping out of the mold
and into her sunny warm self.

Image By Molku (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Pre-recorded: The following is not a Live poem

It's not like it used to be...
We used to dream about making robots
do our menial work, not our magical works-
those things only humans can do:
like cry, create
and ideate
ways to make life easier on us
less of us needed
participation nonessential.
(human auto-pilots)
A sweet serenade
became a re-mix, betwixt by
the sound, dubbed for deaf ears.
A vocal scale made smooth
by the synthesizer, equalizer
(humanizer).
An actor feels no butterflies
when he appears on the inside
of the idiot box,
he's no cracker jack.
Legs are not broken on blue-ray
slipped discs, but no risks.
It's bare (bones) entertainment.
Pictures say many things, it's said
about what is no longer true
they cut a slice of time, etched
on mirrored paper.
Once around
the fire, stories were told
yarns knitted
and lore was learned.
This was way before the plague
of plagiarism, words were invented
and tailored to suit.
Reproduce en mass,
a photo, a note, striking a chord
a player piano
knows your tune
pre-recorded originality
plays on repeated loops
serenading us
out of our own mortality.

“Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

-Virginia Woolf

Image By New York : Broadway Music Corp., publisher. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, sheet music cover. 

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.