Category Archives: Free Verse

The City Sees [Free Verse]

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The city sees like Santa Claus.

Every misdeed is captured.

Every lost soul is whereabouts known --
   known but not shared.

The city sees all,
    but it does keep secrets...
    
    sometimes.

Spared the Human Curse [Free Verse]

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Seven Sages were spared the sickness
 of perceiving the possibility of perfection,
  a "perception" of the patently impossible --
   in truth, just dim and flimsy imaginings of mind,

   and, so, they didn't mind the inevitable
     flaws of the human world.

Language Liquidity [Free Verse]

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language is liquid;
 meaning meanders.

 in the long-run,
  meanings are meaningless,
    untethered and adrift 
      in an ocean of possibility.

[political words' meanings 
   don't drift, but tumble with
      whiplash violence through
         a desert of the possible.

 But, predictably, the first variation
    of a political word is the exact
      opposite of its original meaning.]

Reciprocal Gods [Free Verse]

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Be my god
   and I'll be yours,

 and we can make
    each other miracles.

We Are Makers [Free Verse]

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Are we Makers?
     Yes. We are!

And damn good ones at that.

We can turn a planet
      into plastic trinkets.

We can use every last morsel
      to make stuff:
           bright & shiny
                     or
            loud & colorful. 

We can even make ideas:
       good or bad,
       true or false,
 but always 100% believable.

We're the ones who invented Evil.

Yes, that whole toxic notion 
       is brought to you by us.

And Left-Wing & Right-Wing...

It used to be just a bunch of people
       trying their best to understand
       and to get by. 

But we built mental / conceptual corrals,
        corrals good enough that we 
        could no longer recognize each other 
        as part of the same species. 

We are Makers.

Hit by a Hard Word [Free Verse]

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How is being hit by a hard word
 different from being hit by 
  a brick or a bat?

To burn, the spark of a hard word
  must find some kindling inside
   the recipient, elsewise it can't ignite. 

If someone points at me and screams:

"YOU ARE SUBPAR AT ALGEBRA!"

I remain unwounded.

[I'd like to say that it doesn't burn
  simply because it's true, 
   but the truth or falsity of hard words 
   is -- perhaps sadly -- not a major
   ignition factor.

 The kindling is a thing that sits inside one --
  something that makes one care,
   probably a complex mélange of factors.

 The truth of hard words? 
   That is an outside factor.]

Even if I were to discover that,
  to the person who issued the insult,
   there is no greater disparagement 
   than to cast aspersions upon a 
   person's middle school-level
   mathematics competency, 

I would remain unwounded. 

If I were to feel any sort of way
  about uncovering that knowledge,
   it would be to feel sort of bad 
   for the person who issued the taunt.

Now, how to burnproof one's soul,
  that is the question?

Scarecrow [Free Verse]

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Scarecrow, n. - that which exists 
                         solely to evoke fear.

There are so many scarecrows:
   global - the end of the world
                    as we know it.
   societal - the end of the tribe
                    as we know it.
   individual - scarecrows of the soul.

Scarecrows lead us into the worst
        versions of ourselves: 
 The one who's stressed, and mean
        because of it.
 The one who imagines conspiracy
        around every corner.
 The one who sees threat in every
        change & in every difference.
 The one who wants an orderly world
        of people just like themselves -
        familiar, cozy, and lacking surprises.

Scarecrows even march us off to war,
        and war should be the scariest state
              imaginable --
        death doled out on a random basis.
 
War should be the scariest, but terrible certainties
         spur less fear than any old uncertainty.

Exit Wound [Free Verse]

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What tears away in leaving,
  when one has grown into:
         - a person?
         - a place?

Can one grow into someone
      (or somewhere) such that 
      one is fused in a way that
      won't allow separation 
      without leaving a sacrifice?

Maybe one can't help but be
       webbed into some wider world,
       and can't help but leave
       pieces of oneself littering the Earth.

Metaphor & Misnomer [Free Verse]

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"in the trenches"

what a circuit 
 that phrase has taken:

from the Western Front 
 of World War I, where the trenches 
 were cold, claustrophobic places
 of mud and creeping mustard gas;
 harbor & prison for shell-shocked
 souls at wit's end

to become used by businesspeople &
 politicians to describe metaphorical fights...

but there are no metaphorical fights,
 they should be called metaphorical games

games have winners & losers,
 but not the living & the dead
 & the dying & the disabled &
 the permanently disturbed

it feels like a frivolous bit
 of linguistic creep as fighters
 now stand on cold, wet feet 
 in muddy trenches
 in Eastern Ukraine

talk of salespeople or 
 grassroots political organizers
 as "in the trenches" 
 misses the point that everyone
 in trenches is a soldier --
 be they a salesperson
 in the metaphorical "trenches"
 of calmer days.

Poetic Absorption [Free Verse]

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Read at the speed 
  of absorption,
   (not consumption.)

Sit with the ephemera
  that boils off upon
   each read.

It will be different
  the next time.

Don't memorize.
 
That hammers it into
   some dark, heavy pit
    that it was never meant to be --

a thing that sinks in water
   and plummets from the air. 

Hammering cleaves its wings,
   and it becomes hopeless in the flow --
    staggering like a deranged drunk
     in the dark. 

When you read it,
    only read it. 

Don't anticipate.

Be surprised.