#passion #poetry #art #my words #soapbox
The rain came down
Torrent
Rivulets off metal and shingled roofing
Cascading
Turbulent
Over every surface
A glass sheen
Thick an sinewous
Elastic
Everything within it’s grasp
Lay frozen beneath a mirrored plane
Separated from air
Unable to gasp
Drowning
Sealed by the thickness of a thought
It wasn’t that long ago for me
I still remember
Summer fields fresh plowed
Planted with seed
Green tips slipping upwards
Little fingers grasping for sun
Watchful of the blackbirds
Grey-brown grasshoppers slowly grazing
Very much like an errant cow
Turned into the wrong field
Yes
I remember tripping over the tilled furrow
Clumsily wandering about my chores
Daydreaming about some other life
The future
Now here I am
Oddly wandering in my golden years
Picking through each furrow of my mind
One moment I am the locust
Next the slow grazing cow
Searching out each savory grain
Every tender green wisp
Until reality wakens me
And the startled crow
Nimble and quick
Takes flight
Gleaning away another memory
Forgotten
Distant hills and ridge lines fade into the hazy grey of hot humidity
White clover edges out the crimson in their number
The yellow-black stripping of the bees competes quietly with the hummingbird for nectar
Lost among the slender tubes of honeysuckle and trumpeter vine
I find myself content to watch the pale lime green of buds transform from winters brown nodules into verdant colors of hand sized leaf
Even the constant change of sky
First downcast in early morning fog
Then radiant golden as sun blazes through
Only to once again darken by the approach of rain
These bring me happiness
All the while measuring the width and height of the labor to come
Angel wings flutter above and devils claw up from below
No tomorrow just today
Raging hard on testosterone
Anger and adrenaline addiction
Early morning light trickles in. It’s magic how the rays of light bend around the heavy curtains. They press their way in between hard plaster wall and the softer weave of cloth.
I watch the silence. Slow lines form into faded shapes. I wait. Eventually from the broken gray and dappled shades the day outside will find your picture set upon the shelf. Then your voice will call to me.
Past and future find me here. Lost alone with you, my love. A ghost upon the shelf.
Watching a young black snake slow gliding across leaf and rock.
She stands out against the brown and yellows of coming fall.
Silent and quick, and as long as a kitchen broom. Coiling up and then straightening out she threads her way along.
I often loose sight of her amongst the fennel an goldenrod. It’s only after a mad dash and leap of a surprised frog that I find her again.
The soft shimmer of black scale gliding along betwixt and between the plants helps idle the last of summer away…
Long before I was born
Man decided what was wrong and what was right
And yet they left in question their reasoning why
So came lesser men writing words they called law
Still they could not explain
The simply stated punishment for those things their words did not like
Things like love and freedom their words could not comprehend
But still they tried to cage them in
And still greater men try to fix what they began
Adding lines to words with no end
Calling it ethics or calling them morals
As long as they themselves did not need to heed the very words we were forced to read
So to you I have added this chore
I have in good concourse added more
Will you understand or will this too become banned
Freedom of Speech
Protect it!
Thinking about spring
I find it all described with words an old man would use
The cool crisp air mixing softly with the early morning mist
Each petal of the paperwhite daffodil
Contrasts solid and hard with it’s yellow cousin
Here and there a bumble bee prowls
Tiny droplets of pollen and dew cling to her sides
Even as busy buzzing wings brush back the careless hand
Distracted by the beauty of the rising sun
I am …
The rustling of the autumn leaves
which hang tight for now amongst the maple and oak
The borderland at the far edge
A small stack of stone piled up along the imaginary lines of a map
Even the rill filled trickling down between root and rock
Sparking gentle reflection beneath half shadows of this wilderness before seeping down
Disappearing into the land
No one cosmopolitan will understand this simple satisfaction of a season
And the acceptance of the passage of life
Before we go our way
To what value do I set the scale
With incremental movement a clock measures out moment by moment
But that has no existence
The vapor and steam of things unseen
Passively touch then dissolve
And yet you and I watch it’s coming pass us by
Left in the wake that follows
We reach out as if to hold invisible threads of thought
Something unattained in the passage of life
And burdened by our own purpose
Feel fulfilled or utterly emptied by the experience
False Promises Nouveau 