This short poem critique on monarchy and aristocracy, as well as the mental and moral gymnastics that the nameless rabble often go through to justify such an unjust spectacle.
The Flimsiest of Throngs
A mist
A throng of onlookers
A boy called out
The king has no clothes
And from then on
The flimsiest throng
Held
That the king must be really good
Looking
This poem is a reflection on the proposition of “you don’t have to live like a refugee” and living simply so others may simply live. May no one have to live like a refugee.
Awe for One, and Won For All
I got
Over
Herd him
Just saying
You don’t halve two
Live like a refugee
Fore you
Were too
Slaves
In the land of he gypped
Some wear
Between black and white
Deep shit no’ing
First command meant
Soully buy the grays of gods
Go I
In the world
Stop
Nein more
Enough
Awe ready
Only just wanting
Too live
Like everybody ails
Here is an intentionally ambiguous poem about life and after life. Meditate on it as you like, or not.
After Life
Like an unforeseen canon
He was blown away
At the tunnel alight
Having passed
Through the medium of ER
The calling
Of next of kin
What comes next?
What prospects after life?
An unexpected homecoming
A wake
The disbelieving trauma surgeon
Calls time
Here is some poetic justice for Donald Trump, aka The Don, an unworthy political icon. May we learn from his massive cautionary tail.
Political I con
From Fifth Avenue
He shot
Too star dumb
All tolled
Knot exactly a reality magnate
Preaching only to acquire
Making America
Grate agin
At his lyin’ eyes
As far as a Republic can
Seize
And halving won nation
Razed him up
As the epitome of political
I con
On premises of chump change
Graft
Onto the dark psyche of America
In loo of character
Countless characters
His dogmatic whistle
The despot calling
The kettle black
The nuance of a troll
As some covert photo op
Inexplicably bought
And what due
We get
Fore free
An upside down Bible
And shredded Constitution
Awe hell the chief
A testing to US
Best rectitude ever
Missin’ accomplished
Like knowing
Jack of won trade
A country banged
Soully craven to be
Un-presi-dented
As soon as passable
This poem is yet another tribute to the unfathomable, infinitely ineffable muse calling up new words and word plays to manifest her unending nature.
Not Enough Knew Words
Sew
What’s up
I can’t seam
Too get my fill
In this hole wide whirled
Even with awe the knew words
Odd as my singular soul
Is there knot enough
In the English language
Sew-sew tongue
Twisting
Brain melding
Enjoining hearts
Weather
Kraken me up
Down with vocabulary
Or digging my favorite dinosaur
Thesaurus
Extincts to hi heaven
Sew beyond pros
Countenance yourself lucky
To suck the morrow
Of awe that can be uddered (or knot)
Of an outspoken unspoken word artist
Except it
Fore what is
Just
A moment
Fore English
As a second language
And perhaps ours
Here is a poem about one of my longstanding pet peeves, the moral laziness of “necessary” evil. Evil happens. Evil is unavoidable. Still, if evil is an ethical choice made by moral agents, it cannot be necessary. None the less, “necessary” evil is immensely popular, even endemic, and hugely profitable, at least in sum cents. We can do better.
The Devil Made Me – Due It
Feel free
Too due evil
Just
Make sure
It’s “necessary” evil
And when giving
The heir quotes
Make
Sure they know
It only comes in won color
Blood red
Today’s short, funny poem:
Giving a Flock
Have you herd
The won
A bout
A vegan saying
No harm
No fowl
Ever wonder what is the sound of a cynic being borne?
Knot Sound: Owed to the Sound of a Cynic Being Borne
When an angel gets their wings
A bell rings
You may have been tolled
Sow harmless in a sense
I am
At a loss
As another chide of God
Won over
Buy sum bankrupt sediment
Con tending
Buy awe rights
What you due
Doesn’t madder
How might this be
The farther of anything sound
What kind of adore
Goes bust
In efface of
That udder most silent
That small
Still
Voice
What sound
Be made
Sow precarious a ledge
Per chance
The clanging of false profits
Posedly moving
From idealism to I-deal-ism
When in realty
More like arsonists
Lighting a fuse
Using
The Bailey wick of wise guise
As if
Riddled with truth
A company the stupe-faction
When sound is knot sound
And the applausibility
Is won hand clapping
This poem, weather a dream or a nightmare, plays with that often thin line in life between terror and hope.
Ghost Writer in the Sky
What was this?
An exhilarating dream
Or night mare
Taking my breath away
Life suspended
Abridge to wear
A taut rope
In spire
Before me
Behind me
Frayed the win blow
As plumb it
My feat
Measured in time, not distance
Seconds from heaven
With no safety net
Stretching my neck
Could knot
Free me
In the end
Much too my relief
And pants for heir
A wake
My feet on the ground
Just
My head in the sky
The tallest tell
If I’ve ever seen won
Ghost writer in the sky
This poem draws on a couple of personal experiences that fill out this narrative poem. First, a tip of the hat to ghost riders in the sky; that is not “mine,” except culturally in some sense. Also, the image of a tight rope walk is driven by the movie, “Man on a wire,” about Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, an almost unbelievable stunt.
The “hanging” narrative in this mixed metaphor comes from a short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce. I read this story for a college English class, where we were discussing possible endings for stories. This story is told in first person by a man being hung on a bridge by soldiers. The man vividly envisions an escape…but is ultimately hung. Such is life…and death. The professor, in a routine setup I imagine, asked, “Could a first person story truly be written by someone who dies at the end of the story.” Unbeknownst to her literal mind, she had walked into my trap. I said, in cool, deadpan equanimity: “Yes, of course.” She predictably said, “How could that be, he was dead?” Stating the soon too be obvious, I said, “He was a ghost writer.” The palpable groan this elicited was priceless. Yep, a gem from Top Pun’s early career.
Lastly, in my ponderings upon high ideals in efface of brutal, on-the-ground realities, I have said that it takes a big man to have your feet on the ground and your head in the sky. The wrest is history [this applies to women as well; except in this case, it is herstory].
While I like sleep as much as the next person, probably more, I don’t really get why “woke” is so scary. Perhaps the unconscious should dictate our lives?! I, for won (and all), pray that I am ever open to new realities and their implications. May we live in a reality shared with conscious equality and ever-widening equity, a burgeoning common good.
WOKE
I due battle with
Sexism
Racism
Heterosexism
Ableism
And a wide variety
Of elite –isms
And in suing genuses
Bidding array of hope
Put aside your stupe-faction
I have no hidden agenda
Fore
I AM
WOKE
With a capital ism
Knot asking you to buy it
With won red assent
Just saying
Before getting it
Some shut eye
Taking
Forty winks
As hitting
The snooze
Be for some dozer does
Running over your comatose
Impressing an unfortunate lessen
Shard bye all
In the same bout
And not uncommon fate
This poem is a tribute to the unstoppable spirit of the muse immersing me in whimsy.
Juggernaut of Whimsy
It came out
Of know wear
As if
The whirled was over
Flowing
With hi spirits
An immense see
Giving me a tidal wave
Only to land
Shoring up a mountain
Of mirth
An indestructible berth
Flowering
With grave pass ability
From under won’s feat
Or lookout
Above
Teeming with aside weighs
As wheel turn
Into awe things new
Creation made write
One of my recent pet peeves is cable TV news in what seems to be am over-focus on Donald Trump, to the exclusion of the rest of the many intriguing and important things going on in the world. Ironically, these self-fulfilling prophets are concerned about him sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. I grow weary of the endless hand-wringing over whether “the base” will ever change. Thus, this poem:
Base Squared
We here too much
A bout “the base”
Immutable
The libs frayed
Of the buy and buy
Utterly owned
Hapless to square that circle
The won wring
Too rule them
Awe
Could it really be sow simple?
Artlessly square
In efface of
Base base
Fooly comfortable
Digging that bedrock
And when the bed is rocking
Don’t come knocking
Oh Oh
Desperately tempting
To replenish
That Oh²
In the room
With know room
When really awe
It takes
Realizing
Change happens
Just like shit
I am heartened to see the DOJ open a federal civil rights investigation into the murder of Tyree Nichols in Memphis months ago.
Five Cops – a Plea
Five police officers
Killed Tyree Nichols
In Memphis
Making traffic stop
And still
They could not
In good conscience
Plead guilty
To second degree murder
As they know in their hearts
They are guilty of first degree murder
Have you ever wandered a bout a whirled where brutishness is rewarded and kindness forsaken?
Genuflecting On: Power
Demagogues and brutes
Are marred to espouse
Moral gravity
A moral farce
A raze to the bottom
The principle of simpletons
That is
Easier to destroy than build
Unless it’s their own
Then it’s awe about billed
And such power brandish
The might of hostage taking
Where the only soul peeping
Is to aggrandize terror eyes
Their only exorcise is ransom
In habiting bottomless pits
True moral power
Works in efface of such entropy and decadence
Laboring to give berth
To anew world
Lifting up what is
Lo
Besting every lessen
An undying invitation
Every our second to none
No’ing know limits
Every border a guest
Oddly even
When awe hail brakes lose
A veritable symphony
A mist cacophony
Won man’s remains
Is an other man’s garden
A deferent kind
Of winned
Like breath
Into whatever thou dust
A poem for summer daze.
Sidewalk Poetry
In creation
Where spirit and earth meet
Life sprouts
In the city
Neighbors, homes,
And every kind
Of busyness
Are connected
Where the concrete meets souls
Where will your feat take you?
Today and eternity meet
Weather chalk
Or written in stone
Hour lives matter
This poem is about the difficult prospecting in life for goaled. There are many treasures to be discovered and re-discovered, even as life occasionally collapses upon us. Of course, each time we get through to the other side, however grizzled, we may just realize that the wrest is awe, as miraculously mine.
Grizzled Prospector
To live
A lured journey
As win some peeks
And mystifying bluffs
Of coursing through
Rocky rapids
And tamed brook
That uninterrupted colander
As if
Combing for a nest egg
In veritable nit picking
And in undating vagary
To lay hand on
A soul hoard
Only too mete
Impassable passes
Impressing one two
Decamping deeper
In too
Mountains of pain
Only to uncover and recover
Falling earth
Reining heaven
Soully to dig
That which is empty
There’s gold in them thar hells
The grizzled prospector decries
Even as long the weigh
Giving up whatever they halve
For a hole
Lot more
As heavens re-peer
From under
The wait of earth
To what can never be
The same place
Ever again
Making it back
In spades
To that tiffany perch
With standing
In sheer possession
In deed
Of awe that is mine
This poem is a tip of the hat to indigenous peoples’ supremely wise practice of considering every decision in the light of how it will affect people seven generations down the road. I wrote this during the dark of the Trump regime. Still, this Mother Earth poem is as timeless now as ever. May such wisdom fuel us out of the current age of foolish, short-term profit.
A Seventh Generation Fuel
She had her eye on the prize
Pain know tension
Too the 24 hour news cycle
Quarterly prophets
Annual deports
Terminal terms
Compounding eras of history repeating
As if
She was knot that kind
Of fool
Rather every member empowered
By the seventh generation
A fuel of the highest order
Knowing the deference
Between
Would
And might
This poem plays with the intrinsically obscure interior nature of subjective experience. While one may want to speak of potentially mystical or God experiences, there is an irreducible aspect that cannot be reliably verified, at least in the typical scientific meaning. This is sometimes referred to as a “veil.” Of course this certain inscrutability of our interior experience doesn’t mean that our inner experiences are not valid or subject to meaning. This poem leaves open any precise meaning about whether or what nature might be of a “secret quest” or whether the writer (me) is fantasizing/imagining and wandering/wondering about it. I must confess, I experience powerful inner callings that could easily be taken as secret quests, from God or elsewhere you be the judge, or not.
Secret Quest
One eve
God stopped bye
Just letting me no
That I have a secret quest
To which I simply rejoined
What might
That be
As God carry on
If I were liable
I may very well screw it up
And still
It would remain sow
As our secret keep
If by seaming chance
You are bound to wander
A bout this avail
As sure as you are reading this
I have
This poem regarding simple living and simply living is about simply valuing people over things. Such an anti-consumerist lifestyle recognizes that increasing materialism edges out, and often runs roughshod over, our shared humanity. May we live ever aware and valuing our priceless humanity.
Simply Living
They lived
Simple lives
No’ing that consumerism
The weigh of capitalism
Freely trading
People for things
That awe-consuming cynicism
A greed upon
Things souled
For coveted properties
Yet they lived
In that awkward abundance
Of awe that can
Not be bought
Ensouled
This poem is a tribute to that parent of us awe, oddly making us sort of bastards, yet siblings to all. Feel free to join this family of virtues.
Bastard Won and Awe
I am
A bastard
Fodder to none
Yet assure as heir
I know who my father is
As oft spring
In the forum of hope
Mother patience
Brother generosity
Cistern faith
Kin to love
As children of awe
