Belated Words

Write On!

Tag: poem

  • Abandonment

    The nest, eloquently laid of brittle twigs, holds
    a knitted cup of coffee/color pine needles mingled
    with wispy leaves and lies in the branching Y
    of Pyracantha, framed by Aprils’ white corymbs
    and shielded by the tan brick wall of my home.

    Four blue/gray air-brushed eggs glow a tinge
    of brown speckling. All has been abandoned.
    They lie, lovingly deprived of apprehensions,
    of ever wondering why; what forced their mother
    to be to flee one instinct for another.

    Perhaps, our prying eyes or the cat crouching,
    or the bullying gang of jays flaunting
    their colors; threatening hate crimes.
    Perhaps, it was only a roving eye, a perceived
    greener tree…an inexplicable unease.

  • Gardening 101: Attitude

    cracked ice 005

    On damaged knees in wet and sweet dark dirt,

    the gardener in his plot mumbles:

    his soul is singing songs of friable decay,

    of tingling life through fingers’ sifting touch.

    .

    He presents his face, unashamed and

    divinity anoints him priest, seer, Adam’s son

    with sacred smudge of sweat and primal dust.

    All joy is not in bloom but in seeding.

  • 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.

  • Yellowstone: 1989

    IMG_20170713_154708194

    Bison moseyed nonchalantly huge

    among our tents, hushing with awe,

    on their way down to the Yellowstone

    to drink in saffron, morning light.

    The kids, dumbstruck, pointed in glee

    as one mountainous beast halted

    and glared; signing with oracle eyes:

    “Today I will be your token beast.

    Tomorrow you will be mine; locked

    in amber, stone and layered time.

     

    I will hoove your useless remains;

    eating grasses from cranial urns 

    recalling nothing of your holocaust.”

    Can beast, once a coveted commodity

    slaughtered for trophy, flesh or skin,

    mimic disdain? I know I saw it there.

    Guilt mandates we heap self-accolades

    for our forbearance against a token few

    free, yet still, goods for our pleasure.

    Will we be allotted a token few to roam?

  • 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.