A bit of patefaction,
The knights of paravant
Afire in their presenium
While old pneumatics haunt.
A brief polemic for a start,
A beverage poculent,
A precatory kind of thing
Just palaver —
For rent
Tag: Abstractions
Alicia at the Fountain
She placed her lips upon a stream
Of pure and crystal water;
That kids behind might push and shove,
Experience had taught her.
And so, she looked back as she drank,
The marble walls, a spectrum —
Then stepped off carefully, to better
Make room for the next one.
She studied, then, the walls up close,
As others tried the fountain;
The pair of steps, for some of them,
Were more or less a mountain.
Though I was seven, like the rest,
My memory can see them —
Alicia at the fountain on
A trip to the
Museum
To share is human:
a holiday scherzo
how much the merit sought unfound
a way across the habit formed
to seek a somewhere sunny ground
where head and heart and health are warmed
and yet no complicated thing
but easy is as simple spins
the tune that each and all can sing
the nothings that are really wins
for we do not need pristine stuff
when new to us is new enough
how far the lassitude has spread
how deep vexation fans its roots
the pillow on the same old bed
the decor that no longer suits
and yet no barrier so high
that we can’t scale with just a boost
and breathe again a different sky
and shake off what the world’s produced
for the times are hard and rough
some good can still be good enough
To share is human:
A Relationship Story
Relationships are easy to fix
When you aren’t in them.
They, however, were: and life
And character and circumstance
Had not been kind to their intentions.
Life almost invariably frustrates expectations,
Even when we aren’t entirely sure
Where our expectations came from, in the first place.
For them, each had an image of marriage
Formed before either of them really knew
Exactly what it meant to be ‘married’.
So the struggle goes on.
Life involves so much change;
But the hardest changes are the ones
We have to initiate.
They are faced with having to make changes,
Either internally, to save the relationship,
Or externally, to start new lives apart.
Relationships aren’t easy to fix
When you are in them, and they
Still are…
… for now
To share is human:
The Only One
I sometimes have to sit and think
Who all they were, and when they were;
A kind of map of who I’ve been
Or GPS, if you prefer —
But there’s a difference with the one,
She always with me, wake or sleep;
I tell myself I’ll move along,
But it’s a promise I can’t keep
And so I go my lying way,
A person seen, but incomplete:
I always have these hidden thoughts,
A waking garden — thick, replete —
It’s strange. I should be wiser now,
But this, at least, spells out no doom:
The only one I can’t forget
Is here, but in
The other room
To share is human:
carbonated persiflage
to drink one’s fill of trash and scorn
in carbonated persiflage
is like a bit of bantering
inside a trippy motor lodge
with everyone you’ve ever met
and some few you don’t know —
it may not sound like much, but still,
just go.
to spend your life in waste and want
and elevated camouflage
is just a form of muttering,
like mumbling in decoupage:
you’d maybe do it on a bet
or just to take a blow —
it may sound foolish, and it is,
but go.
for though the paint gets everywhere
is worth the time to spatter
and if we waste our energy,
how can it really matter?
it’s all a kind of allemande,
a ritual, a rite:
so some small bit of foolishness
might bring a few
some light
To share is human:
All the Things I’ve Never Been
For all the things I’ve never been,
There are a few that can’t be said,
Like that I do not overthink
Or spend enough time in my head
But on the good days, I can see
The worlds of both what is and was
With some impartiality,
Away from all the spin and buzz,
Where each of us is what we are.
No filter, neither word nor pen
To fool unwary readers, that
I’m all the things I’ve never been
To share is human:
Shadows of Our Yesterdays
By the corner store, down an empty street,
Lay shadows of our yesterdays;
Where memory stretches and frays like knots
Through musty doors, and passageways,
And the tumbling years flow through like air
Of a different time, with a different “clean” —
But the jacked-up, high-up cannot know
What they’ve never read about, or seen.
Past the laundromat and the hardware store
There’s an empty slot where the tailor was,
With an old Singer left to gather dust,
And the Open sign still in view, because
He never had meant to stop doing his work.
But the shadows came, so he drifted home
In the calm of the night, in a peaceful sleep,
With nobody else left, his store to keep.
Small town or large, every life is the same:
The change we expect, or the one without name
Will find us, and touch us, like new sun’s first rays,
And leave us mid shadows of our
Yesterdays
To share is human:
you knew
the sky-red in his bloodshot eyes
the smell that meant a certain bar
the haven you could never find
the swing of headlights from a car
and all the things i know you knew
the pain of bone and flesh and soul
which keeps you always separate
and’s left you wholly scarred, and
partly whole
