snow falls
all night long,
silently piling.
i awaken
to a place
unrecognizable
as the one
in which i took to slumber:
the world's detail erased...
temporarily.
White-Out [Free Verse]
2
Tag Archives: Free Verse
Introduction to Myth Making [Free Verse]
From the hilltop,
one can watch nature reclaim:
green grows up the glass,
tufts sprout from each crevice
and the man-made world is crevice-laden,
one seed blown into a mortar crack
will become a wedge --
a sprout that splits stone.
Concrete and steel prove
digestible:
time, water, oxygen,
the enzymatic requirements are few.
Fungi blooms from a pile-full of dung.
I don't know whether it's a desirable meal,
whether our trappings & vestiges are
haute cuisine,
or merely a meal
of convenience.
This place was once with us.
Now, it's hidden so well
that it's become a myth,
a once firm and tangible thing --
now invisible & conceptual.
Nature swallowed our world
and farted our mythos.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
“O sweet spontaneous” by E.E. Cummings [w/ Audio]
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
Skittish Dreams [Free Verse]
I don't remember my dreams --
not in the middle of the night
and not in the morning.
But, sometimes, I catch a glimpse
at a random instant:
composing a poem,
reflecting on a passage
from a book,
eating a cracker...
But my dreams are like
frightened animals,
turning my attention
directly upon them,
makes them skitter off...,
vanishing into the thicket.
My dreams vanish like they
were never really there,
and I am left wondering
just what I saw.
The harder I try to remember,
the more severely I scrub
my mental hard drive,
purging all shapes and motions,
until my recollection is nothing
but a vague residue of feeling.
I don't KNOW that it was a dream.
I couldn't swear to it.
All I know is that it's an image
that I can't tie to my waking life,
can't tie to any person, place,
or thing I know to be real.
(And, often enough, it's an image
that couldn't exist in the real world.)
I couldn't remember it as a dream,
but - somehow - I intensely FEEL
that it was a dream,
but the Dream is deep down in its hole,
shaking like a critter that
was almost snatched up by
a monster too awful to
contemplate....
and, somehow, I am that monster.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman [w/ Audio]
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T.S. Eliot [w/ Audio]
Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, 'Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.'
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
'Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.'
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
'Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.'
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.
The lamp said,
'Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair;
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.'
The last twist of the knife.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
Crouching Tiger [Free Verse]
In a square hut -
beside a craggy pass -
lived a Crouching Tiger,
a man of spontaneity
who danced to no music,
staggered when sober,
rested in times of urgency,
& labored when there seemed
to be nothing in need of doing.
He was courted by Emperors,
but shunned them.
The only way the Emperor
could get him to visit was
to order his exile.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
Night Market [Free Verse]
Rains have come & gone.
Neon red shape-shifts
across the puddles,
and sparkles on glistening
roadways.
People converge
on those rain slick streets,
expecting to be fed.
Vendors work crinkling tarps,
trying to remove them without
sloshing standing water --
working with controlled haste.
Fires are lit and dialed in.
Soon plumes of aroma
from street food delicacies
will stretch down the street:
Silently calling & bewitching.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
Fugu Death [Free Verse]
What a moment!
When you realize
that your lips had been more numb
than from Szechwan peppercorns,
and that numbness
has slid into paralysis.
You are dying:
death by Fugu --
poison blowfish.
Your heart will stop.
You will keel over,
falling from your stool
at the sushi counter.
A booth-dweller,
seeing you bounce off
an adjacent patron,
wonders why you don't
bring your arms up to catch yourself,
but - of course - they're dangling
uselessly,
and so you land face first.
The booth-dweller cringes.
There's nothing to be done for you.
You had the nerve
to try the Fugu!
But, while Fugu life is exhilarating;
Fugu death is inglorious.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
Green Fairy [Free Verse]
Bohemians gathered around the absinthe bottles, the light hitting the bottles shone a radioactive shade of green. That green light threw blotches against walls & floors & people & anything else there was to illuminate. The more they drank, the less green the mottling -- not because the empty glass was clear, & didn't refract, or spray green, but because the splotches turned every color -- every color there is -- and the colors danced around the increasingly amorphous surfaces. Until, at last, everyone was asleep, and visions of Green Fairies danced in their dreams.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 