Drop Out

The nefarious you, the ogred they:
Quarantine that vile mechanical creation,
Isolate it unto silence and coarse mud -
Away from my sullied soul.

Your unadorned cubicle, their musty cell,

This is not my home,
this is not my desire.
It is not my noetic clochan of meditation and salvation.

I have left the vulgar race behind,
Jumped off the unsteady ladder,
Bailed from this careening bus.

I don’t want your life,

Your expectations,
Your thumbs.

 

I‘ve chased money and it gets further,

I’ve chased success and it drops behind the racing horizon.

I’ve never walked toward joy purely.

 

So now I’m dropping out.

I‘ve had it with your denigrations,

With the flesh failures.

 

I shall be seen moving on the streets

And in the communities,

But I am gone.  

Seen, yet removed.

Industrious, yet returned to high purpose.

 

Raised to the intended new life,

No longer begging to be the rich man.

Appearing sick to festered eyes,

But reclaiming the agricultural spirituality.

 

Where do our expectations from from? With in? With out?

Who do they serve?

Should they remain?

They are found in the clay of creation.

And my freedom turns toward digging for truth.

 

There is recoverable freedom somewhere.  

It is the substance of being of human.  

And it can not be imparted from the inhuman.

My center, my joy, my heart’s true desire.

Three Wisps

Three wisps of clouds travel the hazy heavens.  

The dome of the sky containing the cool of the day 

for a bit longer this morning. 

The sparrow has left the nest for his rounds. 

The mouse is off on some errand. 

This voyeurism is made under shade, 

on a porch, 

in a sorta comfy chair.

The suburban wildlife is wandering,

as the derelict house stands here.  

Slowly sinking; slowly yellow to greening. 

The cedar leans to threaten with inevitability 

Of a cleansing crash from a supersubstantial sabine. 

 

There is a night shade to this moment. 

Crickets keep their evening routine within shadows. 

The coolness of the day dismissive of the intruding sun.

 

Three wisps.  

The dome of creation containing all that can be. 

The cedar portending all that will be. 

And I, in an alley, flaccidly placidly watching.

 

Thrown at the Lake

The neophytes washing-urn,

Watched over by that eternal fire,

Each instant a harbor for my cold clipper’s driftwood.

 

The very one receives the deceit of the damaging heart.

Miles of laver,

Gallons of ejected streams:

Fear of immutable damage received.

Written February 18, 2019

Endurance Retold

I gave you a song about those two trees over there.

Surviving just beyond their precarious adolescence,

Soaring to see beyond our crumbling buildings. 

And I told you a limb had splintered on one tree

While the other grew strong and proud.

I told you that I stood there and watched it happen. 

Though I did not tell you the rest. 

Restrained by the form, I was short of time

To tell you about the moments I spent watching.

Moments, and perhaps even hours -

Time spent on important matters of soul. 

Hands on my hips and I surveyed nature. 

(Nature is often my poetic subject, and by that I am most surprised). 

Looking to juice meaning from the mundane. 

I stepped out of my shelter and breathed the succulent air. 

Those two oaks opening the leaves of their pages 

And unraveling timeless theology. 

I read the icons to the ceiling of their vaunted vault.

The vengeful sky roiled with porphyric percolations. 

Their dark bloated billows eviscerated themselves

And pummeled the earth with sheets of damaging and deifying water. 

I stood motionless, planted as the trees,

A reader of their lessons and revelations. 

Washed by the deluge and ignorant of the thunder crash,

I planted myself in obedience to the bucolic cathedrals’ example. 

The width and breadth of the storm hurtled west to east

Though I stayed in my place to see what would be. 

Remaining steadfast until the shower ceased, I spied a new world out there. 

The world had the two oaks as their regnant lords. 

Under their protective span remains (even now) a bistro table. 

One chair remains as it was before the winds. 

The other toppled on its back with no agency of its own. 

And my time of contemplation was completed. 

Returning to the menial tasks of occupation

The second chair remains defeated for another contemplative surviving another storm.  

Slogan Away

My slogan is better than

your slogan

because your slogan

isn’t my slogan.

Nothing else rhymes

So this poem is broken.

I’ve got nothings else to say

because my point is here to stay.

Now I’ll put this away.

Endurance

Two oaks rooted deeply in a green field
In a countryside a mere mile from you. 
I approach their ancient stand, my needs sealed. 
And the blanketed sky yields its blue hue.

Motionless by the oaks waiting for change. 

Dry air cedes the world to the droplets massed.
And I the witness planting pedals upon the range
The storm washes me, I stay, 'til ire past.

For the great length of the divine drenching, 
I remain still in that place while the rage raged.
Tranquility in my heart enduring
Each storm fails to uproot while life goes aged. 

And one oak limb splintered and fell to earth. 
The other nourished, adding to its girth. 

Reclamation

Derelict house

Dancing mouse

Crook of tree

Through you I see

Sparrow quest

Building nest

Love is Essential

Loving is essence and essential.

Yet who can maintain it for their mortal dash?

To love is to give 

And to give is to sacrifice.

Love and life will require it all.

Your essence dashed upon the rocks.

Your life scrubbed raw. 

All that is built,

All that is gained,

All that serves,

Shall be required of you at the dread tribunal

Stripping you of pride and glory.

O man, it is not yours to take to your cave.

To give and to love for the dash is the command.

And life’s failure is assured -

As much as the yearly cracking of crooked manacles

Maniacally parades through the shortened days.

To love is to die.

To die is to be stripped.

To be stripped is to be freed so Janus may return.

O man, O people, can you love?

Can you love for your narrowly chiseled moment?

The granite void upon which we hang

It is failure.

To fail in gain is to sacrifice to love.

I could give in to the anarchy

I could give in to the anarchy

And have it all

A fetid it

Diminishing returns

Nothing

Gone

But now

Aged and wise

Calling for peace

Freedom and love.

My Queen, my compass

I am awash in joy.

Save for God

Save by God 

Ceaseless Peripatetic

Walking, joyously contemplating proactive habits.

I’ve been an evangelist for so many things -

Vocationally held beliefs,

Occupationally instilled processes,

Coerced beliefs acquiesced to for expediency.

The death of death is the beginning of life and

Fear of punishment a limp cudgel.

And I place myself under its obedience.

For ill.

For ease that repeats its smarting blows.

And when on the road the mind grows

Boundless out of the six walls of society.

To the distant past, the fogged future,

The soul may ascend into the

Pillar of kiln-smoke wrapping the quaking flame.

On the blacktop runway, a foe arises.

Newly arrived, this minivan affronts my mindful reverie

Some parent urged by social tyranny of choice

Pilots this convention of chattel life.

And now it is directed at me.

And my course never errs,

Though it may be a foolish decision.

My focus is on the headlight – I only ever look in one eye.

I approach, the beacon grows. 

Background still as foreground quivers.

The peaceful primordial pull of thoughts

Beckons the return to simple contemplation –

Simplicity interfacing with the world is the first casualty.

Long leg strides unabated.

The orbits of my body focused in their line.

I approach, the vehicle draws closer.

From within, the desire to maintain course of the psyche.

From without, danger at the rush of the earthen elements danger.

Ground recedes at an unnatural rate

As I ease to one side or the other.

The vehicle is next to me and there was no driver at all.

It wasn’t moving, I was,

And I stepped to the side, and the obstacle was no more.

I was moving on,

Safe and returning inward to receive the law of the noetic mind.

Contemplations from a Warm Room

Yesterday.

I saw a blackbird

on the lowest branch of an older sapling.

He was flirting between several branches.

A handsome crow stood right below him,

just moving his head

and regarded the bird much smaller than he

as it was moving around.

Tonight.

I walked down a street

Five blocks away, though I’d never been on it before.

A warm house had a clean porch

and a rainbow drawn in childish finger paints on the window.

Inside was a woman in ankle socks and a red sweatshirt

changing a lightbulb,

and there was no sound coming out of the house.

The moment.

I am now in my brown chair

Mulling how sticky humid nights

with a hint of dew, or relief, or odor

are the right environment for the mind.

The air is heavy, the atmosphere is active

- yet still.

It carries the live music from the clamoring restaurant,

amplifies the waves of the river

which is below the town with its nightlife.

It is timeless,

stuck in a moment and eternal

yet always breaking at the unrelenting astringent daylight.

Dirty things, hidden things,

and deliciously powerful things

happen when nothing else is happening or stealing;
Pointing contemplatives to ever shorter phrases.

The instant of the habitation of music is the back drop to all of it.

I’d like to make it.

A resonant note that lasts

as long as the string has the will.

But the beauty of the moment - the now

that is all.

Is this another potential poem?  Maybe.

Isn’t a poem just the transcription of a few heartbeats anyway?  We are joined, present and future in one word. 

The great momént.




The stunning photograph above is from the amazing collection at thedailyportsmouth.com.