Poetry

Poetry: Too Much (NaPoWriMo) Day 4

Today, the challenge was to write my own sad poem. The sonnet form was to help me – its very compactness might compel me to be straightforward, using plain, small words.

My brother had retired from his job in the WTC North Tower, prior to 911. This reflects his return visit story as he told it to me.

Too Much

His world was changed. A forever new game.
A self that was gone, down with the rubble,
Friends dead, enemies too. Some with no name.
Few bodies found. Just tributes to trouble
Stacked like coffins, empty boxes at best.
One year sooner, this burden he’d have born.
Proud monoliths now dust, ashes and death,
Tombs now shrines to hate, religion, and war.

He stopped and looked up at an empty sky,
His identity lived in rejection.
Innocent of deed, so many had died.
He walked in the familiar direction,
Emotions unknown squeezed him to the bone.
His mind now gone. He turned – could not go on.

©Bill Reynolds 4/4/2019

Look both ways, but sometimes, you just cannot. Gaps can be huge.

 

Poetry: Someday (NaPoWriMo) Day Three

Today’s challenge is to write something (a poem) that involves a story or action that unfolds over an appreciable length of time. Furthermore, the poem might focus on imagery, sound, emotional content, or all three!

Someday

Single, more than a little confused,
too young to drink legally,
yet old enough to wear a uniform
and to carry a loaded gun and
to kill the right people.

Black and white memories flash
with Kodachrome images of the
the dismal rolling landscape of west Texas,
under cloudless skies loved
by jack rabbits, rattlesnakes, and other natives.

We stood side-by-side watching big silver
eight-engine birds pushing black smoke,
shaking concrete runways and buildings,
and digging into a young man’s bones and his soul,
calling me. “Come son. The sky will be ours.”

Dreamily I said, “I will fly those birds someday.”
His white teeth showed through a friendly grin
of disbelief. I didn’t know how or when,
or maybe I doubted it too. A dream too big?
Marriage and then college, and real life happened.

I let that dream die. My family was my life.
Mom was proud. My aunt bought me my ring.
Then waiting, sitting alone. Again, the sound.
“Come back to us. The skies are ours.”
My call to go where men find glory.

Again, wearing a uniform. Soon, months pass.
Then an officer and a gentleman.
My ups and downs, but then silver wings adorn.
My choices, Phantoms of glory, movers and shakers,
spinners and winners, or an old memory

of my friend’s doubtful smile. My dream.
The twenty-year-old lumbering big jet
called me “son” years back when I stood there
in younger man’s clothes. The sights and the smells,
sounds not so sweet as the memory of that day,

When I told the world and I saw the black smoke,
“Someday I’ll come back and together we’ll fly.”
One day we landed on that west Texas base,
I stood on the same spot as he and I had.
I smiled and said, “Today is my someday.”

©Bill Reynolds, 4/03/2019

‘Check six’ is flyboy for look both ways. The discipline is minding the gaps.

Poetry: What Do I Want? (NaPoWriMo) Day 2

Today’s challenge is to write a poem that resists closure by ending on a question, inviting the reader to continue the process of reading (and, in some ways, writing) the poem even after the poem ends. Did I?

What do I want?
And you, the same?

Everlasting life?
Perfect existence?

Is it happiness?
What exactly is that?

Heath and wealth
Both common goals

But is there more?
What is enough?

Love, perhaps, or
in my perfect world?

Let’s compare notes.
You show me yours

And I’ll show you mine,
In the balance it hangs

Every important thing
about life and time.

What do you want?
And, for me, the same?

©Bill Reynolds 4/2/2018

Look both ways for what you want. Mind things hidden in the gaps of life.

Poetry: Recovery (NaPoWriMo) Day One

The first prompt was to write a poem that provides the reader with instructions on how to do something. I am sick and recovering from a cold, so that’s my poem: how to recover from a cold.

Recovery

Illnesses, colds and flu and some others,
oddly part of a healthy life. It’s normal
for us to suffer. I never get sick.

Until I do, because some germ has taken
to my body as a nice B&B place for a week
or so, and my body begins evicting the visitors

causing displays and loss of sleep and feelings
for which miserable is the visible coughing,
sneezing, and blowing snot. Need more tissue.

Head and body aches and pains and all form
of physical and mental malady, but the torment
and discomforts are symptoms of recovery.

Wash hands often, save others from you, take
meds to dry, less coffee and no beer or wine,
this medication and that – take them all

as directed by a bottle or doctor, but mostly
drink water, juice, tea, and ask doctor Google,
the answer is always the same. Wait.

Like most problems in life, illness will pass,
but another will replace it someday, a cold
or allergy from pollen, or some flu. Make feelings less bad,

medicate and wait, be miserable for days or weeks,
but recover you will. And the tiny viruses in you
will leave you only to return one day to the B&B.

©Bill Reynolds 4/1/2019

Look both ways for avoiding sickness. But mind the gaps of the already ill.

Personal Poetry: Monthly Status Report – March Poems

March is supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb — not this year. It’s reversed. It started pleasant enough, but now I am cold (I think I have one, or allergies due to pollen all over), it is cold and windy outside. When I finish all my reading and writing for today, I think I’ll take a sick day. Do retired folks get those, especially on Sundays? I feel the need to heal.

I posted a few of the poems I wrote during March. In addition to the 31 for each day, I wrote about 10 others simply because one does not refuse when one’s muse presents a poem. I also managed to write a few essays, but this month my poetry muse has been more active.

Poem titles for March included:

    • March (posted)
    • Rock and Roll Will Never Die
    • Now What I Was
    • A Touch of Cold (maybe it was cold in early March)
    • The Fire Down Below (posted)
    • Toys
    • At the Beginning of the Day
    • There Was a Time
    • Why We Can’t Be Friends (I can’t love/like everyone)
    • Late Bloomer (that would be me)
    • I Might Be
    • Me Too
    • Stinks (the smell, not the poem)
    • Hear Ye Me and Thee
    • The Dance (what we all want to do)
    • Bacon (the meat)
    • The Irish in Me (Must have been the 17th)
    • Too Much (of what?)
    • Losing It (crazy)
    • The Priest (a man I knew who died in prison)
    • Tank Hill
    • It’s Just Me
    • Handwriting from the Past
    • Confusing Transitions
    • Stability
    • Starting Short
    • Mari Zone II
    • Men Kill
    • Broken Sadness
    • Rouquin (French word)
    • Self Portrait as Poe

Beginning tomorrow (1 April 2019), I’ll continue to write at least one poem each day, but instead of writing to my muse’s ideas, I will write to whatever the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) challenge prompts suggest. My source will be that website where each day’s assignments are posted around midnight. I’ll write and post the poem before giving up the day to Mister Sandman.

I expect to travel during the final days of the month, so I will be writing on the road (again—now I have Willie whining in my good ear). The world is rich with characters and topics, so I anticipate no lack of subjects (think small towns in west Texas).

Unlike my others, I feel challenged (obliged) to post these. That’s what NaPo is all about. Don’t say no pressure. Yes there is, and you know it.

As for prose, who knows?

Look both ways for opportunity and danger.
An inspiration need not be the creative juggernaut of the day.
Mind well gaps within the gaps.

Poetry: Searching for Nothing

wandering the halls, pacing, here,
then there, this way and that – in
corridors between over-decorated
rooms of the hopeless romantic lover
and the stark stripped-bare
reality of a stinking nihilist’s
hopeless shit-house of oblivion,
with its dullness and pointless obscurity

looking for answers in pain
where
too many unreal illusions
are at one end,
and silent nothingness
at the other,
just the bitter taste
of death
following me – chasing me

divining into these closets of insanity,
the brutality of life pounding
and raping each victim as one
reaches for love to taste
no eternal bliss or to miss –
eternal silence, quiet, peace.

©Bill Reynolds 3/28/2019

Look both ways. You need to know what’s coming and going.
Look again to mind the gap.

Poetry: Cat Tight Transforms

 

With a stretch of transition,
I transform night into day
body and soul awaken so slow,
to the bitter sweetness of life
which is so heavenly sensed.

Time means nothing to me.
Cats care and have not, you see,
clocks or alarms or times to be
places like here or there,
or anywhere.

We lions have no closets to open,
no purpose but life, but to hunt and to live.
No worries outside my litter box,
which, by the way, clean it, slave!

To awaken tight sleepers
A king must be fed,
before he hunts and stalks
to eat a fresh breakfast
prepared by my slaves.
And maybe a spot of milk,
but not too cold, and my milk must never
be given too old.

Then off to my stalking, to warm up the day.
After a check on the birds I see in the yard,
a brief hiss aimed at the dog
so he knows his place, as least of my slaves,
then onto my perch, high above my kingdom.
You’re lucky to have me, that’s what they say.

On to the work of annoying the human
who is trying to write without
my permission, cajole her I will,
surely, she knows the importance of kill.
King cat is awake, all bow down so humbly
in homage to him. I’m sure that you will.

©Bill Reynolds 3/18/2019

Look both ways. The king wears fur. Mind the gaps and claws.

The Greatest Gift

It cannot speak
cannot see or hear
No feeling or form
It moves through the universe,
But it never leaves my soul

It has no name
but knows me well
it makes no sound,
But explodes in every human heart,
it is the beginning and the end
the lost and the found
the discovery and burn.

It is in every thought of every day,
It crosses and straightens,
It eats nothing but feeds everything
It curses not but many swear upon it
It sticks like glue and slips too easily away
Without cost it is the dearest of all
Giving strength to the weak, it
brings the powerful to their knees.

To give love,
To take love. The love of life,
The sights and the sounds and the smells
the feels and the tastes of love.
The least and the greatest of all gifts

Both taken and given.

© Bill Reynolds

Let your love look both ways, to what is and what might have been.
Fill the gaps with the time we have, as precious as it is.

Poetry: The Tractor

The tractor rests, over near the barn
she’s not minding the cold, snow, and ice of winters
nor the dry pounding heat of summers,
a little rust, peeling paint, heavy worn tires,
little more than time causes the hulk any harm.

Made to plough and cumber a heavy beam, this ox
of steel and rubber carried men to the work
of sowing seeds with a seeder and a drill,
for tilling of soil with tiller and rotary box.

This mammoth hand of farm and ranch alike
pushes and pulls all kind of cultivator and harrow,
she drags wagons full of fertilizer to make
bull and cow shit fly over ditch and burrow.

Pulling mowers and rakes for the gathering of hay,
with bailers in tow bringing seed in to feed,
with tires made heavy with water in and mud out,
that tough old tractor stands ready for more work.

The Case International, the Massy Ferg’ and the old Ford;
the John Deere and the New Holland or Caterpillar rig.
Germany’s Fendt and Japan’s Kubota.
Canada has a claim with Cockshutt tractors.

Maker of the world’s finest cars will not be omitted,
As Italians lay claim to the craft for the harvest
with a Lamborghini (seriously) trattori pulling that shit.

This old boy was just a wee lad
when he grabbed hold of the wheel
for learning to drive in the only front seat
of a farmer named Dixon and his old Massy Ferguson
we all had great fun in the summer’s hot sun
as the day’s work of the land got done,
for the wheat and the hay (and a little play).

©Bill Reynolds 3/11/2019

Poetry: The Fire Down Below

The miserable hot last days of summer
back in sixty-four, back at basic, back
before when in green uniform we all wore
black polished brogans, the boots of
airmen basics who were third-class to be
who walked and marched so perfectly in step
to the deep voice and beat of Jody calls
of some long forgotten TI keeping pace,
and cadence with forward; yer left, right,
aeyyepp, heft, leey-eft, sing-it – Basic!

Long ill-fit pants and button starched
shirts and hard desert pith helmets
moving and drilling into hot sticky
sweat dripped-on drill-pad black tar
as rainbows watched and wished
and wondered as we did it with smooth
cool rhythms and rhymes marches
on without red-flag days with a pill of salt
‘smoke ‘em if ya’ got ‘em cigs in socks’
breaks; then drill, drill, drill old rock and roll.

The soft rumble of boots on feet make
the beat of quiet cadence on walk or road,
‘There she was just a-walkin’ down the street’
dress right-dress, road guards out – troops
always marching, walking not talking no-
thinking waiting for me was mo’ kay-pee, not
some “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do,”
just hot sweat; sun turning boys to beets
in boxers where scalded butts and balls felt
the pain of the bloody red crotch-rot grow.

Every step became a new miserable pain,
working KP was to waddle legs spread,
just do and do well, never complain,
Save me sergeant from this misery below
down south will never again be all the same,
to march and to walk, maybe to never again go.
Cookie, gimme some nice corn starch, a powder
to bring calm love and peace of thee unto me,
to my family jays, my centering soul,
ending for another day, the fire down below.

Back in the Day

Look both ways, but looking back may be best.
Mind the gaps and smoke ’em if ya got ’em.