Strike the bell again! Invoke the winds, and when That highest soaring note Pierces the most remote There'll be no need to pretend. When every word of pen With its song ascends To life from writing's rote, Strike the bell again! Gods of music, cleanse Our worried brows with zen, Make the bags we tote Light enough to float. Laugh once more my friend; Strike the bell again!
Latest
Clouds at Sunset
My lover called me to the riverside Where the breeze dances in the humid heat Mercurially, not for him or me, But a power far greater to decide. In the heat where cycles of sweating dried, He requested I witness this conceit— Towering higher than being can be, A dark, cloud-crafted fortress amplified. What glorious court was held there inside, With godly deliberations replete; Can one down here imagine the decree Their sovereign thunders which these great walls hide? Beyond the grasp of where the seagulls glide, The summer castle flickers at the feet Of heat lightning sprinting its circuitry, Lighting each parapet like distant guides. Then he bade me view the other side, And there was amassed a force to meet The stronghold of the clouds: far as can see An equally dark but blazing host skied. A haughty army of luminous pride, Or the pitted face of magmatic sheet; A cloud wide as the other vertically Inclined, burns an orange sunset-supplied. They seemed two worlds preparing to collide, Drawn for more than life or death to compete In a great clash that fulfills sanctity Between sunlight and night when it's complied. Golden, gleaming besiegers far off ride. The brilliant armor and shafts of elite Soldiers gathered up in resplendently Obscuring light in their rows multiplied. The chateau sat across dark, dignified, Feeling no fear, thinking not of defeat Or even its own magnanimity, Stoically on its dusky sky undyed. We inconsequential observers spied A bit of something senses can't entreat. A grand mirage of scale and majesty, Gawked at but not fully identified. Theorizing and projecting we slide To many a fantasy indiscrete, But even a beauty's simplicity Evokes different truths for each eye applied. Some find beauty in brief things that subside Like rainclouds that fade when their stores deplete, Or an interaction of amity With a complete stranger who leaves untied. Things that will survive after we have died And things that we'll outlive, though bittersweet, We love; and with their mutability We stretch them in thoughts kaleidoscope-eyed. And by stages our analogies plied Obvious things into things less concrete, Metaphors and symbols, perhaps a plan We ourselves could be also magnified. So far away, so huge, titans bestride Their cycles; which we can never complete As micro pieces of infinity, Yearning for more than our portions divide. The greatest minds where genius can confide Carry the weight of learning, which they beat Into the DNA of progeny, Making the best of what they can provide. To know the world not just through what we've tried, But experience things as more than meat, More than myself existing chemically; To know the reasons why so many cried, To understand how disparate forces vied In enigmatic epochs to delete What was, which for most ends in tragedy, And after all this to not have shied. What is dismantled and what's fructified In how many patterns repeat The machinations of life's mystery; Can all these things by clouds be belied?
The color of fire in this creature’s lungs
The color of fire in this creature's lungs
Is the token of truth that escapes his tongue,
The deepest majesty of existence;
All good flows from this source, for instance
His energy on the ladder's rungs.
For quite some time the fact has stung,
Despite his best attempts he's wrung
The smallest bit of the richness's semblance,
The color of fire in this creature's lungs.
Burning still in torches hung
Within his innard halls, far-flung
His sorrows are cast by the persistence
Of love enveloping like incense;
Envision how it shines when swung,
The color of fire in this creature's lungs.
2/3 Roundelay
Ever seen an anomaly, A form or figure of pure shock? Something with a quality Mundane existence can't unlock; The harpists cranial of Dalí Or the lip nipples of Georges Braque. Something with a quality Mundane existence can't unlock: The most exalted psalmistry And the Priapean cock; The harpists cranial of Dalí Or the lip nipples of Georges Braque. The most exalted psalmistry And the Priapean cock; So alien a colony, Cyclopeans of titan stock. The harpists cranial of Dalí Or the lip nipples of Georges Braque. So alien a colony, Cyclopeans of titan stock Reach out to us slalomly, Emerging from a sky of rock: The harpists cranial of Dalí Or the lip nipples of Georges Braque.
Sestina
What's an ineffable feeling, Since it can never be in a poem; What's concrete in happiness With an ever-changing I Is temporary; identify With a question. Who can answer? I wonder if there can be an answer To sculpt the phenomena of feeling From a doubt to what we identify. The fellowship of an errant poem, The spirit of its making, and I Quest to define happiness. There was a horse named Happiness. I suppose that's the only answer One's arms could fit around, but I Can't shake into that vibing feeling That conjures joy in an evening's poem, Needing no land to identify. If only I could identify Trees better, then happiness Could form a chain of songs, a poem That could operate as answer Aroused to existence by a vagrant feeling; Ever insularly I. My little spies that hide in, I Struggle here to identify Whether as art or blood, a feeling Stripped of senses, have happiness As their doorman's secret answer When he recites his half of the poem. As the structure, or lack thereof, in a poem, Life is freely constrained by I- Attachments, -desires, an I-dealt answer Of an other to identify. My self-contentment-happiness Ponders the mirror's estranged feeling. Feeling my way inside a poem, The happiness in crying I Identify as some kind of answer.
All my unintentional misdoings
All my unintentional misdoings Are so eminently preventable If each action perfectly, intently Eschewed things that I reduce to fractions. Urgently manhandling reviewings Mentally; they remain untenable. Ever these distractions keep renewing By tracts incensed and undependable. They're queueing up, ready to force entry. The ensuing chaos of reactions And their extendable propensity Is spent in full by folly's protractions.
Why do I hesitate
Why do I hesitate; Slabs of lead and slate. No one buries curses With my name inscribed. The hand that waits rehearses The clock's gait; who's bribed? And who will hear them crepitate, These pages, my poor verses; All that I cry imbibed Like all that time disperses.
Nobody really knows who is wearing their face
Nobody really knows who is wearing their face; And mostly a face is an incognito space, A nexus between two semipermeable Worlds. The secret corridor of intimacy Seems somewhat open, though never traversible Wholly, and some steps taken unreturnable Which I-feeling egos snatch impetuously. Even in memory we toil to retrace Infatuation, which leads along impishly Via the blown kisses that we wish to see. We can but trust the data our instruments seize, Though we know people's facets interminable With fluid, perhaps capricious, intricacy.
Bloody wend of fate
Bloody wend of fate Teacher in suffering Absentee parent in boredom If I can't love you You will crush me And if I love you you will crush me Unseeable prod Empirically unfeelable How do I learn its lesson Powerlessness has taught me My heart can love my body's destruction Not so for those I love Can acceptance edify me Enough that my self could Edify loved ones without Where's a hermit-shaped niche Individualshaped For one's contribution
Behind the clouds does light emerge
Behind the clouds does light emerge Casting burgeoning gold shapes In welkin chiaroscuro O'er dead, obscure, cured, or chaste. All generative rains beget Set forgetting in their seed. The deep condition, where saltsea Surfeits with its solute's speed. With these penultimate remains, Changes jettison in time A race before they are deranged, Altered for a danger's dime. Invisibly their fuel destroys, Poisons future lives whose dooms They're unaware of, of peril Decades after petrol plumes. And as below is it above, Of a change so subtle eye Cannot discern nor can suspect Acid from a spectral sky. There's concrete with the roots beneath Teeth of infrastructure. Growth, Conditioned and evolved, belied By the two, and blithe as both; Which interstructure since contorts, Torques askance the psyche's clime. Its gaseous hand distorts terrain Of mind, body, taints with time. The consequences we invent Seven hundred million years Hence still will reach to each foxhole. We'll have been gone. Fossils, fears.
A place for my poems 