The mirror lies,
pretending to be a window.
Through the looking-glass?
My ass!
It presents a prison
in fine detail
&
with a glossy coating,
but it can’t be escaped.
Its truth is overbearing.
That’s how it lies.
Mirror [Free Verse]
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Category Archives: Free Verse
Storm Front [Free Verse]
Rain is coming. I can smell its sweet whiff on the breeze. A storm prowls out there beyond my eyes power to see. But dark clouds hunker in the fore: the storm's vanguard. The birds know it's coming. They've vacated the skies to... I know not where.
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Many Worlds [Free Verse]
Fictional cities pile upon each other, spreading like blood puddles until they spill into yet others at their amorphous edges. And distinction is lost -- homogeneity wins -- but that lysergic sadness remains.
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Westward Run [Free Verse]
Put the sun at your back and run headlong toward the darkness. Killing days at record speed, leaning into the terminus, and you wake up in the light and prepare for another westward run.
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Possibilities [Free Verse]
Possibility. That which is not, but could be: in the future, or in a world as feasible as our own. (perhaps more so?) When is a possibility a reality? It may not be a reality unless - and until - it comes to be, and, yet, might be a basis of reality, decisions are made on assumptions that a possibility has high probability of becoming reality. I see kids playing and feel the expanding field of possibility, and wonder when it starts to shrink, to collapse? When & why does possibility die?
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Elephantine Baobab [Free Verse]
It's called Hatiyan-ka-Jhad because it looks like a huddled herd of elephants -- not only in its corpulence but also with its rough, gray skin. So rotund at its base that it's hard to figure how its slowly slimming upward taper can come to twiggy ends, and not be a mile tall. The branches are overly muscular, like a bodybuilder who got carried away, moving from strong and vigorous into the domain of science fiction mishap. It has its own mythology -- multiple creation tales about how its seed got from Madagascar to the middle of India half a millennium ago: tales of fakirs and royal envoys. It's even been said that the Forty Thieves, the ones who tormented Ali Baba, used its hollow as their cache cave. But it refuses to respond to "Open Sesame" -- so I guess we'll never know.
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Tree of a Thousand Twigs [Free Verse]
When monsoon rains soaked the soil, that old tree toppled. They cut it out of the roadway, & I went out to count its rings, but found it not with hundreds of rings, but hundreds of trunks -- many no more than twigs. What a mighty tree a pile of twigs pressed together can make, & now it's gone.
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Into the Light [Free Verse]
crawling from the cave, like Plato's untethered shadow man a portal to perfection, as perfect as anyplace can be: meaning, it has depth & credibility the day is cloudy, and yet it's blinding, blinding to eyes attuned to the light of dancing orange flames, flames seen secondhand -- bounced off a wall, a dark, dank wall what amazing sights must there be - out there don't disappoint me now
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Deep in the Forest [Free Verse]
What happens in the strange, nearsighted isolation of the forest? -- sounds dulled by thick, soft moss and masked by burbling water, and insect buzz, and bird song What happens to the rude mechanicals who venture too deep into those soft but terminal lands? -- where the last stand of life plays out
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Mythic Love [Free Verse]
Myths cheapen love with potions & pointy passion projectiles, pansies squeezed over the eyes of cold souls [when paired with a proper incantation] can make love from naught or turn love on its head, but that which can be turned on its head is not love -- & never was love.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 