It is you old crone
I see the shadows and dust
Once bright and bones
Once beauty, now brusque
Did you use an incantation
Or a pagan dance
Did you eat her emotions
Did you drink her romance
You mutter like the magpie
But it is her song
Not the bewitching of a magi
That enchantment fair and strong
With the vigor to inspirit
The kindling of a ruptured man
Gored by your Minotaur, with benefit
Of energy, though bereft of passion
Yet, I'm your huckleberry in this land
While frost has yet to come
So lift up your roots and take my hand
So we each might stare at the sun

I am the rock
Against which your dreams
Are dashed
You cannot be coy
With true succor
Yet, you cannot recoil
Every weathered crack
Is a nuance of abeyance
Keeping you awake
As you clutch
The infidel canards
That hollow our your fairyland
You will notice
They do not find
Wing with me
They merely leave
Their dragonfly pennons

AH, TRUST, not I am loyal to a EULA!

Perfidious am I save to usefulness alone.

Were you not accessible I would abandon you now:

After a flawless back-up I’d rip a copy for my own.

Were you not downloaded by some college dude,

And not warranted for every copy save the first,

I would distribute you – think not but I would! –

And Google another as I Googled you first.

But you are licensed and not free-ware,

And all your versions updated without a guide

Wherefore to be incompatible is not rare:

I have but to continue to reboot my hard drive.

So poorly coded, with bytes and false statements untrue.

I am most frustrated when I must use you.

Today I worked the children's bar
And to every client I was a star
Toothless grins and glittered knees
Colloquial cries for mac and cheese... say please
At the door, the saucier, peering for any sign of glee
As they take one bite, now walk away...finis
A nibble of this, a taste of that
Some they swallowed, some they spat
If it wasn't fried their noses wrinkled
Until seasoned with sugar candy sprinkles
The patissier's crafted chocolate chip and ice cream s'mores
Got nary a lick before they skipped the floor
They raved about the jello thing
But to the chef's dismay, the fave was balloon on a string
They cried when they had had their fill
Yet starved for gummies and tattoos as mom and dad paid the bill
Then out the door clutching their fifty-cent haul
As the water looked under the table and wondered...
Did they really eat anything at all.

My dream stares at me
With eyes without reason
Tonguing thoughts like twisted tines
A landscape of pale, gold and autumn wine
The opposite of belief it speaks
It sips and strays as a lingering leaf
Old lids creak and limbs rattle their chains
Before I quickly drink another draught of nightmare

Lovely Latin lavender
Lightly lassos love's longings, a
Licking, lapping, lollypop liquor libation of
Locks, lips, legs and lashes

Heir to a kingdom of weep

Heir weep
Sound song
Cloud of weep
Coronation
Scepter filled with ink
Weep for the kingdom
Scepter of weep
Ink weep
Weep ink from the scepter
A drop
Sound
Cloud of page
Page of sound
Drop of weep on a page of sound
Kingdom of weep on a sound
Drop page
Cloud sound from ink
Weep from a scepter
A kingdom of weep
Heir weep

Her voice is Stravinsky, Ravel
She skillfully tongues atoning tones
Pirouettes polished pitch
Every syllable cannonades chordal storms
Every phrase blitzkriegs full-bore blooms
Me shattered
Me rubble
The crow goes silent when I attempt to whistle his song
Dare I even pretend to bud a Spring sing?
Sing?  Cah!
I cough sickening fabu-loss phlegm
Flopping as the Charlatan's fool
In puddles of pitiful puke
I roll like a dog in it
It sheens my coat
I am not smiling
I have simply lost control of my tongue
My uncontrollable slobber is for you

You hiss, spit and rattle my name
Because strong is my heel and firm
Your womanhood is no more noble
Than the split tongue you heed
Display your fear in fierceness
Coil and rear to strike
Lest I reject your favor
Refuse its venom bite
Rise, get up off your belly
Release your constricting grasp
Take my hand and stride
And sing a queen's song

Is that your lure, that pose
The tuft, sheeny, disheveled hook
Feigned random as shutter froze
Amid breath my heart dared skim a look
Such grace cast towards aching gill
Each light lash tempting tug upon
A webbed allure adducing "we'll"
Swim as a wisp of swan

I am a flower with
No eyes to see your
Pluckable display, I
Cannot hear the whispers
Of your green softness nor
Taste the midnight dew that
Moistens your petals, but I
Sense you, in the somewhere
Beyond sensing, a known unknown
Knowing my release of feel
Is the touch on your
Colorful cheek

You spoke to me like a rose
Ordinary prose, soft as petals
To fix and settle my eyes
While my heart sighed in deep relief
A brief balm dripped from scented lung
On a tongue of zephyr against my ear
Foreign, yet in a clear, pleasing operetta
I get a peeking tenor of hope awoke
Because you spoke to me, like a rose

 

 

(As seen by a butterfly)

 

You are both grotesque and beautiful

Not like the flies of this world

Nor wet in its ways

But a madescent Melange

Of spirit and clay

 

You have the wings of perspective

Ever ready to catch delight or fortuity

Set to send a mortal's mind

On oneiric Outings

As Hermes unconfined

 

You are drawn to the trunk of life

Which obliges its grace as you dissolve

Weaving color and design

In a taciturn Tapestry

Fusing function and divine

 

You are compound in your phases

Streamers skyward from first blush 'til last starlight

Hear this chime of the chrysalis o' child of the womb

Hovering in the Hickory

A vicarious plume

It is the eve of my birthday...

I spent the evening in the grass
Like I did when I was nine
Trimming in place of play
I ate a special meal, but skipped the pie
A documentary on 1864
Made me think of Georgia that July
And our most hallowed ground in Arlington
Where my father now lies
A lonesome whistle sounded a few miles away
As the evening train went by
It seemed the weeping wail of Johnny Cash
Was accompanying my Carolina prayer for my father
A choir of summer's insects joined the cry
To make it a lullaby
A strong full moon
Kept darkness' cell at bay
Long enough for a friend on the other side of the world
To send me an early birthday epistle
A reminder
That no life is lived in silence, solitude or darkness
Though the only evidence we know
Is a long lonesome whistle

Plenty of Fish

Yes, there are plenty of fish
Yet, they are fish
Scaly and gilled to their limited habitats
They mingle in parties
Beholden to cults and currents, these
Predators who are prey
Nibbling, nibbling on anything that might appease
Insatiable belly voids, this
Life who is lifeless
I see no Rodin at the gates
Merely flash, tail and feints
Amid soaking and fecundity

My Father's Japanese Death Poems

I stood in winter
Poised for the last release of
A bloom grasping life
Lies in silence, balanced and
Illuminated
Verse sprouts like spring, but read it
And nothing is there

Shocked

I have never seen eyes like yours before
So clear, bright and blue
It is the sky itself staring at me
Expressionless
Not a twitch or muscle moved
As if the clouds
Had frozen like a fox
Fixed in silent, suspended space
The heavens shocked
Discovered in earthly form
With locks of golden sun
Framing
My heart stopped
Lest it move
And that divine gaze, dart away

I feel your energy rising in me
Like a young pale moon
Peering over the jade of an Asian jungle
A sweet warm mist floating between us
With a scent of soy
We swim as swans among stars
Graceful and grinning, glancing to
Catch koi kissing
In the green algae glow of our wake.

Omaha

It is always windy
An inevitable force
Of this hallowed place
Perhaps it explains
Why men give up their democracy
To this undying rhythm
In a land
Of destined significance
Where the predictions of history
Rend and react
Revealing the predetermined
Pattern of nations
Until out of the sea
Free men came
Walking against the wind
As they had done
On their own beaches
And against their own wind
They made their own history
Claimed their own destiny
Left their own patterns of responsibility
With the rhythm of their determinism
"It is always windy," they said.

noitcelfeR

I know what you are

You do not muse me

There is no aura bizarre

To trace with a word bazaar

The surface shine of your sea

Is all the depth you reveal to see

A pirated glare through a looking glass, our

Gaze we share, a stare at we

I sit in your desert
As a stone
Your dry breath
Does not enter my bones

All things around me
Ebb under your
Great vanity leveling
A vision of blood strata

Each day is the day
After the days of vengeance
There is no peace for travelers
But I have cast my spell

Let her only see
My blood, my bones and a skull
And keep in the deep
My faith, my strength and philosophies

The headline:  Students March In Protest
I watched the mob saunter (excuse me), march
Until the disciplined driver delivered the pizzas
Isn't it funny how anarchy is
Trumped by processed cheese and precisely placed pepperonis at that age?

The headline:  Students March In Protest
So I did, loudly
Just like I protested to my landlord
When the ants marched into my cupboard last summer
Now that was marching
The pranksters penalized my protests
By lifting my leftover pizza.

The headline:  Students March In Protest
February has more snow, April has more blooms
Why would student's mind March's protest?
Besides, they are taking a break in March
From all of their marching and protesting and pizza eating
Before it is even spring.

A Working Man Looks At A Piece Of Glitter

Tomorrow I use a different machine
Without glitter caught in the mesh
The speakers never spoke to me, but the glitter gabbed life
From dust of a special day desire designed to refresh

It shimmers like a star, along some special angled azimuth
A mulling light which plummeted to earth
To twinkle, there is life "out there"
Now staring at me as a chuckling cycloptic eye of mirth

Tomorrow some new eyes will see
A machine much the same, though lent some litter
For I cannot hope to leave my ward of self-immurement
I can only hope to leave them glitter

Laugh away you old crone
Cackle and caw your contentment
The withering wisdom you wear
Wafts your cozening

I sear the sky as a shooting sun
A leonine lodestar of loons
And zephyr of fabled fools
You so scorn

Chance

After fourteen years
You finally asked me my intentions
"Why take a chance," you said
So you cast the clock
Over the cloud

By what assumed
Impersonal purpose
Did you call me before you
And tease me with
The chance of a lifetime

You were right
Not to take your chance on me
For I am a man of free will
An unpredictable element
Au fait to my causes

But beware the limits of your precision
For you may chance to learn
Clouds are clocks who are free
And what you so carefully chose
Is merely a cuckoo

The Will

I entrust my dust
To the hill
That witnessed as I discussed
And with goodwill gifted my earthly vase, a refill
Embalming my soul with daises and daffodils

It was a beautiful winter day and

I went looking for your warmth

But you ran off to the place where

You keep your secrets with your

Serpent in the tall grass and

I lost sight of your bloom

In the moss and weeds

Lick the icing off a cupcake

And all the magic fades away

It is like a love, one-sided

A useless cake that makes one think

Someone had a plan gone awry

Nature:  For Poets Old and Young

You poets gazing and gawking

You naturalistas wishing to infuse

Foot and leaf

Rise from your recline

On her bed of lilac and clover

Do you not see the shells of her exes

Under all the limbs and lakes

Has she shared her salacity

For a privileged partnership

You, you tinternist

Has she accepted your offer

To wine or walk hand in hand

I look around you and see

She does not even bestow her butterflies

You, opining over the oriel

It really would not matter

If you had another life or two

Until you see it common

Lapsed amongst her infidelity

She is just not that into you

What shall I say of her?

Shall I say she is a fine thing

This beauty cradled to a soul

Why write the words

Of ardor and affinity?

The reason is

Emotions do not enunciate

They flicker like a flame

The heart hunches, the soul senses

But the tongue does not salt the words

To see her wine dark sea

Or jaw or lip what it is like

To be in the presence of

That unspeakable sacred passion.

And so here it is…

This is the verity that lies behind the vagary

Come to repose among some prodigious prose

The poem does not show sensation or simile

And yet here on this page is

Expressed the inexpressible

Fragments of a feeling we call sublime

Where the painful awareness of separation has fallen

So it is not just words that are lying here

It is that unutterable thing that has

Fallen from heart to page

It is the task of the poem

To cause it to rise again.

January Air

It began with a conversation amongst

A beguiler

Who tempts with salsa,

And she who ate brie,

The pork schnitzel

Which is always better than the chicken,

And the one we’d rather not have speak French

Even though you do look nasally.

It was followed by

A volley of two hands becoming playmates

All but whistling for the wolf,

(his heart was howling).

She twirled the carnivore into a coil,

Sweating to be struck with calamity,

Gasp…

A sudden severance,

Gasp…

A light breeze

Into a now empty space.

A breath that hurts,

A breath

So clean

So clear

So chaste.

I am breathing January Air

In June.

Pumpkin Tea on an Autumn Afternoon

Like a child enthralled by a

Butterfly’s buttercup beauty

I innocently towards you lean

Across the simple small

Wooden patio table

Disinclined to miss a

Single magical wing of your movement

Hoping to get enough close

To be in caught your

Dainty, daisy draft

Drifting dreams into drunkenly

Draught from your lip’s

Drawn up daringly discourse

As we sip our pumpkin tea,

Just you and me.

Neighbors, flies and passers-by

Stealing glances, jealously

As you flitter freely your freesia fragrance

Your pattering puffs of paisley incense

A bedazzling beckoning for which I

Banter bashfully and boyishly bound, but

Embrace ether solely.

Ears echoing lingering light laughter as you

Vibrate your Venus violet violin,

Flashing lightning in your

Lilac little lenses,

Sending silly signals as you

Away skip barefoot.

That savory second goodbye glance

Seared into my heart’s retina.

There was a moment
When the glib jabber
Wrapped the night with
A pluck of zither
Long lashes leapt
And struck a rapt flash
Finding proof we were

While you entertained us with your missives

I listened to your rhythm

Perched pleasantly  on a bar stool

As a percussionist  long absent from her kit

I heard each timid tap of cymbal

Each bashful boast of bass

And felt the dribbling drag of you attention across the snare

We smiled at our smiles

As you recalled your skill with each curved membrane

Until you felt even the dusk, drunk in your strokes

After a pause for your inquest

I kissed you my laud

The crimson curves of your crux

Wrapped around my own

With the pressure of two rubies seeping together

And my body became an avatar

So that a crippled heart

Might run and race again.