The best criteria that I have come across for keeping a poem is whether it improves upon silence. Here is a poem on that theme. Feel free to read it silently…
Empty Page
The messenger delivered
I am
Caught short
Buy the world
Less than won
Word
Wholly silent
More than
Speechless
Some have noted that you need to speak a different language to understand my poetry. Here is a poem on that theme:
An Other: Language
He tolled it
Like it is
With respect to my write mined
You knead to know
An other
Language
To under stand
You’re poetry
Suns and knights
God daughters
Mother tongue
Rob her’s
By the dozens
Soully too fine
No less rich
Mirrorly uddering
O pun says me
In the presents of
This
Secrets cave
As life alight
Transcending a diction
This poem goes out to all of those whose recognition of climate existential crises is met with denial and minimalizing:
Suicidal?
Why due you
Home in
On Mother Earth
And existential cry seas
Passably reckoning sow
You know weigh too much
Are you suicidal?
No
Weigh less
Then humanity
As hole
Do you no who you are? I have found that art helps me resolve this question.
Author Author
The author of authors
In formed me
Right what you no
The story of you’re life
O pen
You’re art
I have found that one of the enemies of life is being clenched. Life needs space to flow. Forcing solutions often leads to a somewhat constipated life. Of course, this may be one of the most difficult things in the whirled to grasp. A pop reference to this poem could be the 1981 hit song, Hold on Loosely, by 38 Special. “Hold on loosely, but don’t let go.”
Clenched
The more
I grasped life
The more
Life ran through my fingers
Un-be-no’in to me
God clenched his fist
And awe the more
Life
Reigned
On the just and unjust
I have found great freedom in being de-institutionalized from a “regular” job, religion, and overly organized endeavors of all sorts. I see institutionalization as a process and infrastructure that routinely trades our highest humanity for stacks of lowest common denominations. This poem goes out to each and every singular unicorn human. May you be untamed.
A Veritable Zoo
There is know herding cats
There is no herding unicorns
As a soul creature untamed
In countering chiefly
As some fateful meet
As hows broken
Like a pro
Down with trading up
A singular unicorn
For a dozen workhorses
Perhaps a thousand
Bargained as a savvy genus
Or buy and large
A mettle manager
Inc to pen putting
Weather mirrorly institutional eyes
Some concentration camp
Or Three Stooges™ pokey
Every human
Institutionalized
Is a REAL zoo
Souls borne
Free
Razed in captivity
A mythical quest
Bar none
Each moment begs our attention.
That Infinite See Waving
Here ye
Here ye
The present calls
That infinite see
Waving
Just
For you
Sounding hi and lo
As awe hail breaks loose
And life surfs
The whirled over
Anchored in gentle tidings
A cautionary poem for those who think that they can write history writ large:
Realty Pushing Back
No won
Had
Taken
Boulder action
Than Sisyphus himself
Every won
Must be
Stoned
A poem for those stuck in traffic:
Trafficking
You are stuck
In traffic
Never quiet realizing
You
Aaaaargh
Traffic
A six word poem on what poetry is:
Poetry
Words
Word
Know words
No words
I have never been a big fan of normal. “Getting back to normal” strikes me as a somewhat low bar. Every “new” normal seems eerily similar to previous uninspiring states of normal. This sense of mine is similar to the sentiment expressed in the movie, Steel Magnolias: “I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.” May we dare to live a life full of wonder, even at great cost to a “normal” life.
Normal Eyes
Just a bunch
Of regular guise
I’ing
What peers
As normal eyes
In listing
The rank
And file scores
Ires
Looking to return
To earlier daze
In a bit of a craze
That grievance of being
Owed fashion
And awe the rage
Perhaps even a furor
They were desperate
For a mythical time
At best
Not so
Sow grate
Inquest for normal
More mine than yore
A true norm ill
They looked into the sole of US
Exhibit won of sow much soiled
Run US, run US
And the alleged ascent to we’ll
Throw awe others
Under the bussed
As condemn nation tired
Full of tread
On me and you
Living under the tales of elephants for gotten
Or living in such an illusive notion
Ass stable as won could ever be
Bequeathing US
On going retro grade
Of all F’s
Efficiency is highly overrated. The abundant life is not well defined by ultra-precise engineering.
Efficient Love
An award no one yearned for:
Most efficient love
Weather child or mate
Strikingly spare
That scant do attitude
Eager for meager
Barren awe
With foreboding forbidding
Know abundance chaste
In accessible bounty
That largesse prize possible
Paid
The minimum
I have had this awareness that any direction we run, we run into the arms of God. Off course, the staggeringly long run peers quite vexing.
To Arms
I was annoyed
By an atheist
And his militancy
Of inept God herd
And God intimated
Quiet pleas
As a dove on won’s shoulder
I am
Well
Pleased
My child
No madder
Even the serpentine route
Awe leading
To arms
Violence begets violence. Violence begs violence. Violence gets violence.
The Problem with Violence
To every axing
There is an equal
And opposite axing
It only takes
A wile
When light and dark clash…
In Sighting a Right
The light shone on
Their misdeeds
ON fool display
OFF to the razes
Tripping and flipping
That awe im-potent switch
Tempting too turn off
Soully to be disconnected
In their desperation
Closing their I’s
Groping that lifeless switch
Soully lashing out
Their dim mines
Effacing the light
More sow like cockroaches
Scuttling in the shadows
Temping to void the light
Flailing miserably
Won buy land
To bye see
Jousting lyin’s in the sand
A horizon
They cannot cross
Sun rise
The inevitable a rival
Round and round
Dark daze and new mournings
Blessedly give
Way too
Radiant futures
Beyond just
Sight
I wrote this poem for the Toledo Museum of Art poetry contest this year. I didn’t win, so my status as an amateur poet is intact. This poem is a love poem beyond the grave, mourning a lost lover.
This is an ekphratic poem, a poem based on a work of art. This is the work of art, of 10 selected by the museum, that I chose to write about:
Here is the Toledo Museum of Art’s description:
Egypt, New Kingdom, Dynasty 18 (about 1479–1298 BCE), Pair of Hand Wands, wood with inlaid wood decoration
Pairs of clappers in the form of human arms and hands were popular musical instruments. They were tied together and played by shaking them so that they clacked together. Also called clap sticks or hand wands, clappers were often tomb gifts because their form and the noise they made were believed to drive away harmful spirits in this life and the next. This pair’s elongated, graceful lines and elegant craftsmanship are typical of New Kingdom Egyptian art.
I’d Give My Write Arm for the Sound of You
What wood I give
To remedy a life without
A body
Of music
That sweet song of your being
Now in that cryptic dwelling
Of eternity’s embrace
Fare well two arms
Given awe that is sow right
And that only left
Rattled
Only hoping to transcend
That perplexing realm
Of one hand clapping
And halve the tomb of our life
Our soul escape
In treating us to be
An instrument
Of ceaseless song
Oh happy day
To be more than
Lyric without note
Are you tapped? There is an inexhaustible reservoir of awe.
Awe is Not Lost
Awe is not lost
Awe is the soul compass
Of true-hearted folks
The antidote
To narrow mined view points
Teeming with succors of all kinds
And throwing balms wildly
In awe directions
Today is another good day to end the U.S.-Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This poem goes out to the Palestinian people.
Unentitle Fight
U.S.-Israeli genocide
Round nein!
The bell
He of the beast
Verses people of awe kinds
Refusing to be boxed
Proffering to dance
What might
Have a ring to it
Preferring weddings
Over funerals
And just
Married to life
Here is a simple poem reflecting on my deinstitutionalization from church about a dozen years a go.
I a Door
I don’t go to church anymore
Church comes to me
Of course, I do find myself
In church on rare occasions
It is just
That I fine
More and more occasions
Are simply rare
And I a door
This morning as I left the house, on a grungy fall day, I almost forgot my usual survey of my beautiful front yard, albeit with denuded trees and a carpet of wet leaves. As I walked away, I remembered, turned left, and over my shoulder I saw a single white rose blooming. The rose blooms this year were as scant as I can recall. Still, this bloom arose, after being touched, by the first snow. In recent years, I have come to believe that in God’s want ads there are innumerable job openings for humans to witness nature, often unwitnessed by human eyes. These job openings are largely unfilled, and these openings re-present countless opportunities for an opening of human hearts. Prophets are arising. May we see the signs and respond with open hearts.
Arose
The land had been snowed
Again
Deep in
The fall
Froze
Still
There a peer
A single white rose
Arose
By any other name
Arose
NOTE: for another layer of meaning, The White Rose was a German resistance movement in Nazi Germany.
