Sanctum or Asylum?
Refuge comes
at great cost.
This oasis shades no reality.
Sanctuary offers
only twisted truth.
Each prison is of my making.
I must move on.
I’ll never be free
of my past.
Change
or paranoia will hand me
fearful death.
Look both ways for any port in a storm
but learn to dance in the rain.
Mind the gaps as you seek the road less traveled.
A forty-four word poem (plus title) written for dverse prompt of stream.
Pluvial Passion
Let me feel your kiss.
May your wet tongue lick.
Run into my eyes, down my face,
under my clothes,
over my body.
My passion, you pour copious streams
of love upon me.
Touch me where you can.
Where are you, my sweet Rain?
Look both ways for summer showers.
Mind the gaps between the drops.
Bukowski said
he dedicated much of his life
to avoiding people.
Humanity, he said.
Yet he wrote about people.
So, I assume he failed,
or he lied.
An allegedly unwilling celebrity
bemoaning attention,
lambasting unlively banality,
complaining constantly
about women. His ladies.
Many men, too.
I understand the blessing
of being alone.
I like many fine souls, yet I confess
to not always being kind
(yet not exactly cruel) to
undeserving deplorables.
Hank asks; is he ugly,
unkind (sometimes),
misanthropic, or misogynist?
Some thought so. Maybe he was.
I really don’t know.
Crackpot, with no hope of love?
Bitter and unfair?
Did he put glass in our sandbox?
Was he without morals or mercy?
(Maybe he was.)
Is he my phantom’s mask?
or am I his? Or yours?
What is truth? What love?
I neither know nor care
what most others thought
of Charles Bukowski.
He’s long dead. But
I read and re-read his poetry and prose.
I must have some reason.
Do I want to know my reason?
Do I care?
Or, is this one of those things?
His paradigm, or mine?
Look both ways when considering and discerning humanity.
Mind the gaps. Every day is judgment day.
Geometric Memory
It’s one of those words,
comforting to hear and speak.
To say as tongues touch teeth,
not lips, a fun word to think.
Fifty years since projected
mosaics, as she asked,
“Does this tessellate?” We
learned patterned meanings.
No use for the word, till now.
Yet, I remember the day and teacher
who taught me how polygons tessellate.
Look both ways teaching and learning lessons.
Memories are forever but mind the gaps for irretrievable loses.
Tread At Your Own Risk
American men and women at war,
fighters. May I call them warriors?
For their military service
we want to thank them.
Combatants
share experiences
only they understand.
Only they feel it.
Requisites are hated enemies,
courage, weapons, desire for glory, fear,
comrades, pride; and a cause
to die for, one worth killing for.
There’s more.
Much more.
They carry much.
To fear death, or not? To love
and despise simultaneously?
Is war forever part of humanity?
Are we the only creatures
that kill our own for no reason? Just to kill.
To cause death unnecessarily?
Is that combat?
Look both ways for glory and dishonor.
Mind the gaps between mind, heart, and soul.
That so-called stone surface facial of
sedimentary calcium composition
of old fossils, fragments, and ancient scree;
rocks of gray, white, yellow, or brown.
Ubiquitous to trails I hike,
fine for stepping over hazards
or tripping face-first onto hard rocks,
or into some mud puddle or other.
Soft and effervescent in any acid,
yet porous enough to spawn tree or shrub
growth or provide unlimited grot hiding places
for so many critters of the Texas wild.
In a metamorphism of glory,
stones ugly and pitted,
covered with algae, moss, and mold;
magically recrystallizing into fine marble,
given enough time.
Fittingly, oxymoronic as soft rock
used as stones for walls,
or as naturally difficult primitive paths,
or cliffs to climb,
or pathways to find,
so many new trails to blaze.
So much staining, like inked tattoos,
painted with organic rust;
constantly crumbling, chipping,
peeling, spalling, weathering,
and eroding away;
just like me.
A stone-cold darkness arising from dampness,
striving to save archaeological history,
the professional province of geoscience,
ignored by hikers and walkers, but not
missed by the conceit of poets.
We seem to see it all.
Look both ways and watch your step,
for real and with a metaphor.
Mind all the gaps. Trip at your own peril.
I never really had a favorite color,
but I lied and claimed blue, then green.
It changes. I never claimed yellow.
I hate, “what’s your favorite…?”
I am starting to like the orange colors,
that red halfway to yellow, t-sip
burnt orange wheels closer to yellow.
I try not to lie awake at night over this.
I don’t have much yellow stuff. Wouldn’t
have a yellow car. Might a motorcycle.
I think it’s because lemons are yellow.
Honestly, sometimes I like yellow a lot.
Maroon, that old chestnut, is a brownish
crimson (hey, `bama) or a dark reddish-purple
horney-frog, Cowtown kinda color just south
of burgundy. Maroon is a French-ish word.
Color words are cool, warm, primary,
and secondary, or tertiary. Some value,
hue intensity with a tint of tone, and neutral.
But gray they say has fifty shades. Maybe.
There’s monochromatic some say is dull,
analogous begins with anal, but a double
complimentary can split a tetrad, even primes,
I suppose. But who cares besides me?
This business with our fondness for colors
may explain something about human nature.
Like long yellow argyle socks and brown sandals.
I like red shoes and sandals (no socks). I wonder why.
Look up and down and both ways for the color of love.
Mind the gaps and forget the French tuck. Let it all hang out.
What a wonderful little word and inventive subject. I’ve written of pens and paints, but not of ink, before now. I even read the history of ink and how it was and is made. Forgive me brother and sister writers. I got so excited—I wrote two twenty-two-word poems. Like money and sex, only too much poetry is enough.
5K Years Since
Inks. Invisible,
permanent. India’s art.
Printing or pens.
Words on paper,
not electronically;
ink, a catalyst to creativity,
with words and art.
Lines of Magic
See the flow on paper,
watch lines, curves, and shapes
appear in history, law, art;
even in silent music on a page.
Look both ways for waves of imaginative creations.
Mind the gaps for innovation’s utility and art’s beauty.
Turning Into the Wind
I wish
I didn’t know now
what I didn’t know then,
back when my lost
happiness was
still unknown.
Before I won these emotional
and physical scars;
blissfully, foolishly ignorant;
lucky, privileged;
without foible; free to be me;
a self-centered fool
with a college degree.
Now a recovered lover
of painful truths I never sought.
But I’m proud of our past.
Look both ways,
to the earth and into the heavens,
into the night and through each day’s light.
Mind the gaps and face the facts. It was what it was, and so were we.
My brain
or is it my mind?
Whatever. It’s rebelling.
Just for today,
as they say in AA.
It will not allow
even a crumb
of creative thought
to come in,
much less,
fall
to the page.
“No, no, no,” it says,
“I will not go!”
As I sit here.
(Ever have this?)
It feels like fear,
but otherwise,
I’m empty
of emotion and purpose.
Where to start?
Much less, any thought
of how to finish.
Just this silence.
The sleep that disallows
doing the exercise,
I’m unprompted
with lines pulled too tight.
I feel stymied
by an overworked
empty whiteness.
Sometimes,
it simply does not
work for me. I’m sorry.
I have ED of the mind.
I should leave.
Take a nap. Wane a bit.
They call it “block.”
I’m sure it’s temporary.
But what a shitty
suffocating feeling.
I feel museless.
Look both ways for the walls of chaos.
Mind the gaps, gasps, and gyps. And this…
“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.” – Margaret Chittenden
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