Belated Words

Write On!

Tag: poem

  • Ambushed

    Just an old man on a fast, healthful walk,

    I was ambushed on quiet Magnolia Street;

    my assailants, two boys, seven or eight,

    flaunted their plastic guns from their dead yard.

    One sprayed me from the hip, old-gangster style,

    the other, took careful head and chest shots,

    leering at me with deliberate calm.

    Refusing to ordain their murder play,

    the chest/clutching drama/death of feigned pain

    on a twisted face, which they demanded;

    I threw them my pain and a snubbing of

    their killing fields, a dam/you/glare as only

    an old man tired of rote/learning/games can.

    Incessant perforations of the air

    by forced/breathe bullets pursued me far past

    my escape around the corner to Oak.

    Their muddled voicings of derisive taunts

    rent the air for my refusal to die.

  • The Winds Lament

    The leaves are fallen and the wind laments

    their leaving for they mark his passage

    painting visibility on the ethereal.

    My face and ears feel a cold breath

    face/on as our directions collide

    on this sunny yet cold, empty street.

    A chime to my right sings winds intent,

    his hope to fly till the tumult of his birth

    dissipates to calm, allowing him to lie

    and rest quietly as a wreath on a grave.

  • Rose Box

    Oak and Cedar Box

    Natural, unstained, just shaped by my hand;

    every so gently, my fingers caress

    your lustrous, polished surfaces.

    Is it your innate beauty I cherish,

    or my own creation I so admire?

  • To the mirror

    Listen! I’m talking to you, he said to the mirror.

    Help me decipher these fragmented thoughts:

    From the very beginning…..we are locked

    in isolated minds…..simmering hot

    fibrous solutions arcing sparks like a

    grinding wheel dumb of its rotating self

    throwing holograms of tricky, bland light

    for billions of pied elucidations

    by flawed, chemical collusions painted

    by chances’ whims of perception, fated

    to pursue that umbilical link …that

    elusive oneness to the flow of life

    from which I was lovingly, sadly torn.

    And we all know it exist….doesn’t it?

    It’s so simple: allow me nirvana,

    that whispered agreement, “Yes, yes, I know!”

    from some entity divine or simple

    as skin touch, hand clap or burning leaves smell.

    Place your fingers on your temples: it’s all

    just biology.  Did you feel it?  There,

    that repulsive hairy rodent bumping

    burrowing stifling muddle-headedness

    that dead fullness……is it a corruption

    in the spasmodic spark shower itself?

    Are capillaries constricted, neurons

    lacking sufficient flint to strike words……thoughts?

    I do know ideas are snagged in transit,

    wedged in dead-end deformities, bouncing

    off walls, flinging echoes of frustration.

    Those random un-sensed possibilities

    struggling to permeate my consciousness;

    who knows what brilliance never surfaces?

    Is our hard hunger only the seeking

    of what’s trapped below; god or peace only

    those stifled sparks sending S.O.S. calls?

    A logical progression of thought was

    just chopped, (I felt the dull blade; my throat aches)

    severed just behind the tongue an instant

    before a flash of fluency rose up.

    Listen I’m talking to you!  he said to the mirror.

  • dusk

    Coming at twilight…..

    unprotected by incandescent glare,

    techno drone or numbing, sitcom silly,

    caught outside by unfinished task,

    imminent darkness compacts still air

    with golden, thick light…light so thick,

    you can twirl it with your finger.

    Only an owl dare perturb about,

    —who-who–whoo…..who-who-whoo—

    such an amorphous loneliness.

    Dusk envelopes and gently whacks

    me, gently but firmly…whack!

    and I, compressed to a singularity,

    wonder at my condition of choice;

    my solitude, my isolation worn boldly;

    amulet or albatross?

  • For Malala

    It seems they revel in being reviled;

    those who want to be hated will always

    relish the atrocious, seek our disgust.

    That is why they provoke us to attack;

    our outrage caresses their ecstasy.

    Some call them animals but the only

    creatures demeaned is the wolf and the fowl.

  • place

    Context can not exist without place
    but even an airless nothing is place
    humm…you would be dead in such a place.

    But you are still there, your remains, right?
    You can tell I don’t do philosophy
    my head’s not in the right place.

    When my wife berates a spider or fly
    for being in the same room as herself
    I proffer an ill-considered smirk

    “Everybody has got to be someplace”.
    She eyes me as the fool I am coolly
    commanding I kill the poor thing.

    Forced to choose between one or the other
    insecticide or disobedience
    puts me between a rock and a hard place.

    This is not going the way I had planned
    I had foreseen a gloriously drawn
    depiction of the natural world and

    of the need of awareness of man’s place
    in the flow of things toward perfection.
    (whether created by the roll of dice

    or by a divine is irrelevant)
    but no my muse has put me in my place.
    Perhaps another day another place.

  • Let me go…three times

    Haiku:

    Let me go gently,

    like a welcomed breeze at dusk;

    a graceful exit.

    Let me go..

    Let me go….

    Between pulses of pain,

    frozen in a paralytic millisecond of bliss;

    like a mammoth in ice,

    mouth immovable in mid syllable,

    forever

    about to say something memorable.

    Caregiver’s Lament:

    Let me go after you are gone

    if only for a little while;

    when you are gone I will revert,

    with little regret, even joy,

    to indulgences I postponed

    that I might be here to sooth you.

    “You are my reason for living.”

    a cliché so misunderstood,

    has more to do with love and sad

    obligation undertaken

     almost unnoticed ….but freely

    and that wears, tears and can break will.

    I crave to sniff, sip and savor

    my hot, old bliss, irregardless

    of how fleeting or injurious.

    I give you all the world I have:

    my true love without resentment;

    I have your gratitude and love….

    which barely suffices at times.

           

                

  • In other people’s hands

    We’re forced to place the ones we love

    in other people’s hands; we swear

    we love with our languid smile

    on lips drawn thin by telling haste.

    A fat-faced, name-tagged enigma

    led you away to join others

    for the help and time we can’t give.

    You went away clutching your purse,

    soon to be taken from your hands,

    held for safety reasons…. like you;

    held safe with all your delusions,

    memories, visions, conspiracies….

    and those demons that set that fire;

    those tiny gelatinous creatures

    that taunted you from your closet

    forcing you to toss a flaming

    match in…. to send them back to hell.

  • an anniversary

           In front of the liquor store…

    Rain darts in jagged shots across the glass

    between weary swipes of squeaking, tired blades.

    The defroster stifles….but I leave it;

    let it fight the haze.  Maybe, it can sweat out

    this demon locked to my melancholy,

    my known genetic predisposition;

    this twinned self–tarred skin of me, entwined tight

    within and steeped in remembrance of bliss

    now forsaken.  For what….a longer life

    to be reminded of a craving want;

    of my own sad winter of discontent?

    This meninges, membranous bag for

    every muscle and bone and nerve and cell,

    every spark of thought, every common urge

    of me is immune to time’s cheap cure.

    Time is not a healer for everything.

    My eyes in the rearview beseech themselves

    and, stared down, blink a hard resolve….today,

    to pass on the easy and drive away.