Another time away, a wilderness Where you alone are writhing, fiercely touched In broaching infinite bewilderedness; And all the parties search, but nothing much Turns up. We brothers in arms march the road, I wish it lightened or removed the load. O pray, I say, when you have disappeared; It's seldom someone vanishes but once. I many times went up in smoke and neared The ultimate undoing of a dunce; None other than my shame which shamefully Appraised me of my friends disdainfully. Along the promontory where you walk, How distant do the mighty waves appear? Its sparkling vastness, does it make you balk Like me? Does its immediacy hear Your frantic self-calumniations in Compulsive condemnation of a sin? If only it sufficed for one to wear, Like wretched martyrs to obscure our dreck, A bramble and a tunic made of hair To be a martyr with no background check. Though I should like to have some saintliness, I'm more than blessed to miss ungainliness. Alight on water and the ripples pulse. In certain soils and trails one leaves a trace To varying degrees; it still results In leaving an impression on the place, But since imperfect the residual It's often wished to be invisible. Aloneness keeps perfection as its goal, Its prized possession is a furtive show Where it can be itself without the role It self-assigns; it wants someone to know Its substance, but for fear of what that means It keeps its sordid details out-of-scene. The tight-lipped tyrant in the citadel Of self-abasement locks in bonds and chains, Pronounces any thought as infidel Which holds compassion for the human brain. Those doubts and flaws it hates beyond compare; All small shortcomings are beyond repair. Proclaimed a little insect, just a bug On fragile wings of chance and charity, And is it instinct or a lucky tug Outside the many mirrors, clarity Of insignificance how they avoid The means through otherwise they'd be destroyed? Peregrinating bones beneath the domes Of holy cities who were left unnamed, The penetrating moans that no one homes From gutters emamate in curse of fame Who made them or waylaid them, or the worst, Left them ignored completely from the first. A future time with its magnetic eyes Looks back into our own, and swiftly snaps Its lids and so have caught the poor, dumb flies. It closes on a present tossed like craps. When real life deviates the mask slips down; A demon whispers of a fated crown. The absolutist instinct overcasts The gentle flaws of gems aflame on night's Horizon, and the blackened cloud outlasts Perception as the eminent un-light. The lust for an elusive fact in mist, Ideals are petrified and actions list. The eye of indecision is afraid. The ears that fear derision sensitize. The hand of visions grand is stayed, And in real life is disincentivized. Their less-than-perfect is a less-than-whole, And they beholden to a stillborn goal. What can I say to praise imperfect things? I cannot add or take from what they are. What I could add more value doesn't bring; If I detract it's not a further scar. So I shall sing that greatest virtue sees Their value is that they exist with me.
Author: Nick
Dayjob Sestina
An hour away from one more hour away From freedom, when the melancholy gray Will surreptitiously become serene As though our autumn traveled back to green To grant a weary head a respite soft While zephyrs bear their leisure up, aloft. The songbirds' twittering outside, aloft On waves unheard by one who works away Their Sunday afternoon partake in soft Imaginary ballads over gray Delays, or so they feel; like Time's gone green With jealousy to lend to states serene. Though Time is changeless to the true serene, To harbor this one's soul would float aloft, Be big enough to then contain the green Outside from which it feels so far away; To pacify the soul, then all the gray Of concrete as of clouds would feel as soft. The hours continue to expire, a soft, Inviting bed on which to lay serene And careless waits. The schedule on the gray Old page fulfilled and folded, sent aloft Transformed into an airplane, flies away And bucks before descending on the green. One nearly sees the day in all its green Excitement, like a beautiful dress soft And elegant. If one could go away With her forever, could enjoy serene, Unlabored moments that are held aloft Above necessity ignoring gray Reality, who wouldn't trade the gray To go eternally with lovely green? What offering would one not hold aloft Exclaiming, Here! if one were granted soft Sensation in exchange? Alas, serene Experience could carry one away. Well, finally that time has slipped away, The golden day reclines to tender gray. Fatigue gives way or comes to feel serene As one imagines lush and downy green That soon their head will rest upon, as soft As earlier thoughts they had held aloft. The gray of labor wends its way to soft Green pleasures in due time. To glean serene Composure one might fly aloft, away.
We turn around, another face is shown
We turn around, another face is shown That differs on the die we cast before. They say it's all the same old shit y'know. I traveled down to where the brownleaf, flown From bough to gutter back to gust to soar, Has turned around, another face is shown. We walk in winds which menacingly blow Cascades of leaves and slam the open door; They say it's all the same old shit y'know. But when the wrath of transience is sown And the crescendo stoops to subtle roar We turn around, another face is shown. The tendency of energy to go Towards creative ways up off the floor, We say it's all the same old shit y'know. I go to work like everyone unknown And in community commune, once more I turn around, another face is shown. They say it's all the same old shit y'know.
Adelphopoiesis
If Love is that which casts the shroud upon The mindful eye that sees the Cloud in pain; If Love or his the name which focusing On blinds the eye, but then awoke to song The spirit hears the Word of excellence, Then praise be heaped upon this gentle sense. If steadier the loaded pillar's held When two more hands enclasp, fulfilled or healed By how the bountiful creation lives; To see a soul of beauty's face in Love Allows them the Forgetting benefice, So may we sanctify those sentences. This affirmation in that Lordly Word That turns one to a path affording wide Acceptance that envalues every sod, And felt alighting just as He had said, "If Love is held between thee in my name, There I reside as well the holy flame." May we in loving love all things as much, And see the ways the spirits' springs are matched; Call it agape, happiness, or what You may, we feel it when we’re blessed to wait. A beacon though it's not beatitude, May we accept it with due gratitude.
Villanelle for stars
What did it take for the experience Of seeing eye-to-eye the shining Moon? And if it differed so why goes it thence? We know the firmament had once been dense Beyond the eye's conception in its swoon, What did it take for the experience? To see her golden beauty, the immense Madonna in full cosmic plenilune; Say, if it differed so why goes it thence? Was human nature those days just as tense, A grain of sand within the greater dune? What did they take for their experience? Were they preoccupied as I am since I feel my self and worldview so jejune? And if it differed so why went it thence? Did all the stars above give them a sense, Connection or a somehow secret tune? What did it take for the experience, And if it differed so why goes it thence?
Pictures of a Room
In lethargy I turn my head toward The corner of the room, the dry remains, The shriveled carcass of the roach nearby, And sigh for energy that never was. The carpet holds the choking, scattered light; The coffee table buried under ash. And now, the fuel all burned, there's only ash Addressed to time itself; the chair toward The sill sits vacant in the shafts of light. And though some portion of my mind remains Inside my torpid self, what really was Was held within the galaxy nearby. A spirit hovered in the beams nearby, The motes of dust descended to the ash And mixed in grays like lovers' hair. What was It that you told me when you turned toward The door? That only happenstance remains That somehow renders all decisions light. The heaviness of being in a light Malaised, although akin to those nearby, Is that when others move it still remains In yesterday's interrogating ash. Inside itself, the soul contorts toward A feedback loop: not what it is but was. The testament of Earth without one was Cicadas whitening the lower light Of evening. Stirring on the couch toward The open door, the pen has slept nearby Among receipts and splintered stems and ash; Perhaps a greener world there yet remains. The agency of effort still remains The jewel of human life. Among what was The generations now reduced to ash Is all the richness of the purest light; Millennia now past are still nearby, The same bright star as us they turned toward. Remains of oeuvres derelict in light; Ah, that was when the future was nearby: A present not of ash to turn toward.
In you my wanting love finds its encircling
In you my wanting love finds its encircling Desire, and blissfully requests the tether Be ever tighter, you be ever closer. However I must always fail to render Whatever the elusive touch expanding An individual within another. You crave the novelty that keeps another Obscure experience in the encircling, Encroaching days from you, a bore expanding Throughout your life, a modern serfdom's tether. I know the craftsman's poverty will render His dreams a fleeting fantasy; no closer. The intimate monotony is closer To death; the Silents' span from one another Is further far than voices that must render Immeasurable distances encircling Creation's whole. The pauper's life's a tether It orbits with the world around expanding. The passing days that find your doubt expanding Are huddled ever colder, ever closer Together; and domestic life the tether Does not permit your projects. So another Ennui consumes you, on and on, encircling The tight demands of human life we render. My ignorant heart weeps, it cannot render The means that you require; there's no expanding Garage or atelier I have, in which, encircling Our home from inside comes to be much closer Than all the rest of it. The dismal tether Reality insists on is another. Although you fear it will be just another Abstraction to approximately render Those gross machines, I say to grasp the tether; For if you quit you'll be adrift, expanding So far away from what you were, no closer To being happy, lassitude encircling. I pray the tether, clutching now, expanding May render all the distance from you closer With one another in an art encircling.
Gnarling, fomenting, and terrifying was she
Gnarling, fomenting, and terrifying was she; Screaming the wrath of Poseidon's doom was the sea. Drowning was Panic's cacophony in the blasts Down from above and below which shattered the masts. Crying, just crying and fear. All courage destroyed; Thought, in its vacuum, disintegrates in the void Realization has carved out. Only despair, Only despair and anxiety of the snared. Iron and liquid, the sky is hard yet it melts; Torrents from Heaven in syncopation with Hell. Clutching in darkness below the deck while the bolts Flash in the chaos without, all struggle to hold. Crashers rebound on the hull and toss us around, Piercing a hole in our side like running aground. Light spills in almost as fast as water, and sight, Fouler than blindness, itself impresses on night. People unfathomably bereft in the lands All of us left, that will never see of those sands Where we return; it is never now for the forts Cannot espy us, and nonexistent the port. Always awaiting, the ones surviving us poor Souls of the wreck; we were gone the same as before, Then it was final. The sea in silence responds; All that she offers are marching waves from beyond.
Where in the islands northwest of devotion
Where in the islands northwest of devotion Utters that voice that is sweetly deceitful, Dark but serene in its haunting erosion Deep in the mind? All my pieces the ocean Washes away, who can find them? They people Thoughts and ideas in the eddies and breakers Wide of the safety of lanes, in the wake surge. Green was the isle, and the hair of the maidens Freely exulted in breezes from seaward. There in contentment for just one occasion Spent I a morning; the sands then were weighed in Human retention; one-nature. The leeward Wind would remind me. The salt; the enchantment. Lost is that land; who could seek its revanchment? Green was supplanted, and greener but darker Rose the approaching domain of the tidal Ocean, outside of all time with no marker. Deep in the being unconscious, no ark or Lifeboat surmounting a solemn requital. Death is a sailor unmatched. And a singer Silent encircles in vapor and lingers. Somewhere an echo of wanting ascended Out from the foam of a distant embankment Born of the fog—the horizon that ended Roiling beyond all my senses, all flanked in Luster's mystique which all reason has sank in. Hissing and spraying, it beckoned me forward, Out to the vista where sunlight is cornered. Sing me the song that my wits will recoil from, Menace of men who, unwilling, must listen. Rapture cognition; my muscles, embroil them; Cast off exhaustion, the waters! They glisten! Only that song will be fit for my mission. Madness or passion is fueling my rowing, Swimming if oars will refuse where I'm going. Millions of chopping collisions a-cresting, Hacking away at the tendons of reason. None but a manic bereavement, and testing Any exception to fancy as treason. Always unknowing my heart which believes in What? Will it soon be discovered, why waits these Visions of countries on waves that my fate sees?
The rain falls on the pond of Avion
The rain falls on the pond of Avion; The turtles' armor shimmers black like glass; And softly does the egret trace beyond The surface, then at once without a splash It pierces down to plumb the algal cache, To fish for flies, to skewer and to poke Around the sparkling mirror on its pass Where it evaporates in midnight's cloak. And ever little ripples there respond In quietest alarm to breaching mass, Alert to anything that enters on Its small domain. Beside its ebb the grass Is pointing from its soily hilts en masse Amidst the rain, the verdant warmth awoke A misty cloud that shields the low morass Which then evaporates in midnight's cloak. The tree's patina'd leaves the wind absconds With for a moment, then the next it casts Them down upon the fissures of the pond; And on the bank they anchor next the class Of ducks with plumage darkly flashing brass Beneath the scattered moonlight where the croaks Of frogs disperse in every droplet's flash And then evaporate in midnight's cloak. A waking dream that plays out past the ash My cherry grows while on my nighttime smoke; Our gloaming glows together til the last When I evaporate in midnight's cloak.
A place for my poems 