Awake at night, alone in bed, Like many other nights ahead. There are some lovers who must wait, And though they often curse their fate, More often they rejoice instead. Their sighs like smoke hang overhead And feed the darkling night, but red And hot their blood within relates Their love does not have long to wait. And soon that long-awaited date Will have no choice, it takes its state As every day, once Time has said, As every drop of passion bled Has fertilized the patient gate, Their love does not have long to wait.
Month: July 2021
Oh storm cloud fair, you storm cloud there
Oh storm cloud fair, you storm cloud there, Atlantic child of dancing air, Wreak havoc with your trills of foam And devastating winds that comb The coastal settlers' ragged hair. Come in from sea, to me, and share The winds of change to let me dare. Destroy my plans, destroy my home, And fly me into the unknown. Unleash your gusts and flood the fares, Upend the trees and leave them where You most desire, I'll sow the loam. Uplift me on your winds that roam Beyond the sandswept beaches bare; Fly with me into the unknown.
The Prayer of Love
Discard your solitude a bit, And lift your spirits from the pit Of worn-down home life close-confined; And send yourself on maritime Adventures where the spirit sits. Beyond where matter does permit, Come sail the waves where love acquits And recompenses any crimes. The prayer of love combines all split. For love makes one unlimited; The air above may forecast it. It joins us in the song sublime, The vessel of the soul so fine; When known you're loved the rhyme is lit, The prayer of love combines all split.
Passion
How many days can seem the same? The storm that never leaves had came And swallowed whole my plaintive cry And danced around me in its eye, Yet never even got a name. These whipping winds, is this the game? Or maybe I'm the one to blame? If not too late to name you, why, I might just name you Passion. You swallowed me and overcame The placid skies that left me lame. And though you bend and rend on high, And vie with reason and real life; No fitter name is right to claim, No better name than Passion.
Rivers on bridges over the Hillsborough
Rivers on bridges over the Hillsborough,
Gray above and below gray
And below that grayer still.
Rivers that over eons of prayer waiting
Surf upon the stormy swell.
Anger, impatience, traffic is deadlocked on
Small Memorial Highway.
Crawling time and memory,
Neither of which will take me to you nearly
Quick enough to give me strength.
Rivers cascading out of an eye seeing
Only stalling, allayed love,
Majesty below the ground–
Water alike is dancing there. Yet waiting.
Waiting through and to the air.
Out of the gray and into the same gray of
Time, a torrent or slow leak,
There is longing on the bank
Should you be wont to stop; you can watch as it
Washes all the cars away.
Afternoon Walk
Once, upon a depressing afternoon Spent absorbing myself in tumults wrought Of sorrows belonging to others And pleas I am helpless to succor, I decided to take a walk, though soon Rumination would dominate my thoughts. I had known that I wouldn't cease or stem My despairing, not just for them of course, My friend who was told that the next year He wouldn’t return, wouldn’t teach there At his school; nor my friend's aunt dying from Hashimoto's disease, so on, so forth; But I felt for myself, so impotent, Barely able to keep myself alive, And inward I turned my concern, and Felt shameful and always returned in Thoughts recoiling upon my shame; they rent Me apart. I felt alien, aside. There downstairs the indifferent world in green Seething life held luxuriating court, And I with my hat pulled low entered The summer environment's tender Air, on edge underneath the graying mien Of the sky; there I tried my sad disport. Stepping down to the sidewalk I had felt So displayed to the windows, and below The hedges around the near corner I stayed for a moment or more for Refuge both from the sun and those who knelt Maybe watching, perhaps someone who knows? As I passed by the pond, the ducks had left; Nothing there, but in that, the entropy I knew I was not up to facing; I then would continue my pacing Not within just the summer heat but cleft Both the heats: that and my iniquity. Tennis courts and the parking lots, alone, So embarrassed, ventriloquizing all Indictments against me to every Particular thing that could levy Condemnations, be that an empty home, Animal or the humid breeze's sprawl. Then I froze in the hazy midday heat Once I saw that another walked ahead Of me to the parking lot, turning Away from my path; but the burning Fear of eyes, the dimension of deceit. He could never have seen me, still the dread. Omnipresent beholder of my life Lurking deep in the terror held within Reflections a passer-by's eyes are Observing with searing surmise or Scrutiny, and so ruthlessly the strife Presses me with my weakness as a sin. Solipsistic annihilator of Human race, it replaced with avatars For my paranoia and shame their Existence; and I feel my blame there And among the aspects afar, above: All of life might denounce me, leering hard. Glowering at myself from inside-out, Once I came to the lot I made my choice. Withdrawing towards my apartment, Withdrawing back into myself, and I, creating a looking-glass of doubt, Traveled in the miasma of that voice.
So heavy with its own wetness, the vine
So heavy with its own wetness, the vine
Upon my window sagged, toiling beneath
Its glut; the leaves, their rainwater, the fine
Array of passion: green, clenching its teeth
Showing how it struggles, living
Painfully luxuriantly,
Haughty with the storm's gift given.
It wavered, suffered with so much to drink,
And gleefully it swayed under the weight
As though to hoard it all, never to think
About the other earth watered, the taste
Of the rain before the evening
Had erased all else, surpassed it,
Leaving what I thought was longing.
The Sun was setting. I saw it become
A solitary thing verdant against
The orange sky, the blue night that now shone
Throughout its crystal dew; yearning, I sensed
It become a lover, leaving
Life for love and diving under
To the threshold of that needing.
Its greens grew rich in low twilight; I knew
Its deepest heart belonged now to the rain.
And should the sky become sea, and what grew
On Earth be flooded too, how it would fain
Cry for joy to then be taken
Off, be washed away delighted
And forever unforsaken.
I saw it leaning once daylight was through.
It faded into night, how it retired
Beneath its blanket of moonlighted dew
To wake again and wait for its desired.
Then I saw my eyes reflected
In the glass, and trusting lovers
Will survive for love, I left it.
Laundry Quatrains
1 The washer's water rushes as it soaks The same as ever–droning, eddying Then whistling when it drains, as though it spoke With just the dryer; me: said not a thing. And nothing said to me seemed fittingly Displaced among this lonely night; so pure It flowed and washed so unremittingly I thought myself upon the river's shore. So tell me does the river carry names Along if lovers bundle them with tears, Or like my washer is it all the same– Awash downstream with nothing more to hear? 2 My dryer roars and rumbles fissure-like In heated animation; nothing more In my apartment makes a sound, unlike My heart which pounds and turns inside my core. So like a quake and like my dryer, this My heart is shaking too; and warm, alone, But warm because of you; and though I miss You how it jumps, excited to be known.
And there are you, across the continent, the void
And there are you, across the continent, the void In my domain of sad renunciation: far Away beyond my touch but closer than a thought. A teacher sterner than self-hatred by your love; Reality more true than matter, knowledge kept Integral–closer even to my core than all The lessons tragedy had scrimshawed on my bones. A joyous cross! An awful separation that I wish to end immediately, yet it's shown Me, graced me with a love my body cannot taint, An adoration that my mind can never paint In its diseased hues, something that my petty fears Are powerless to reach. The obverse of my woes, The worth within my suffering, the cause to be Made strong by struggle, more than all of these by far. It's edified beyond the edifice of Earth My understanding of illusion: where I once Was sickened for I knew how fake the planet is, I now have something real–a value finally Apart from every worldly trinket, every false Enjoyment and duress the flesh was made to bow To seen for what they are, the half-truths recognized, Accepted; all the dross of sorrow stripped aside, And though it must remain, aggrandized is the rest! A feeling of epiphany to have this whole Of love connecting all the misery of life, A formula that squares the circle: everything: The gnashing and the mutilation, the disease And abnegation, every tear that's wrung from blood: It all makes sense, or is at least become a sea Of sorrow for my ship to sail upon. This love That's more than me and more than misery has filled The dearth of life. Invisible, untouchable, Not unfulfillable, beyond the gravity Of life it turns my eyes and heart toward the sky.
How strange to recognize within the prison wrapped
How strange to recognize within the prison wrapped In flesh the key that is the fruit of love; alone I find myself lamenting constantly this form, This Protean existence powered into change By whirlwinds of mirages raging through my mind; A sickness, an eternal unawareness of A part of my own being. So I know that I Do not know, cannot know about this body mine. The liability of my perception is A curious thing, I and others in this house Of glass: dysmorphia; in friends appearing as The madness, to beholders though as life in death. I very often wonder what aversion those Ascetics felt within their skin, aversion for Their own skin, life, the denigration they endure To fall just short of their ideal. The bitter fruit: Assumption that a closer perfect form exists But not assumption of it. Never. Likelier As well to languish in the gulf between the dream And harshest existential recognition of Reality, distorted and deranged by the Proximity to that desire. The ones who lived Impossibly, did they receive their vision in The madness of their need for that perfection? Did They find escape from their contempt for life that's less Than it in fantasy or flawed existence? Did They live? And did they find the seedling of that dream That's buried in our waking world; could they have found The key of love that flesh and mind prostrate themselves Before? And living in its love dissolve the deep Impossibility of reconciling those Two worlds: the one of ever wretched almost; and The other: wholeness, a gestalt acceptance that Its worth is not defined by sum, and as such loved. Some surely did; if they could do it, then could I?
A place for my poems 