Maybe there’s no moving mountains,
but blow out the clouds and one may appear.
Out of the wall of white comes a rocky shoulder,
clad in spiky pines and stony protrusions.
POEM: Mountain Magic
4
Tag Archives: Free Verse
POEM: Clifftop Flowers
Saffron-hued flowers huddle on a wind-whipped clifftop.
Sea breezes toss and twirl pollen,
eddies send some back down to the beach.
Land breezes feed pollen to the dark waters far below.
The flowers are ever-tousled by the wind’s rough hand.
What must they love, in their sightless stance,
that matches my sighted stare at sea and sky?
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POEM: Agents of Change
They took the Moral High Ground,
commanding its lofty heights.
And never bombed trespassers,
but let them fail on their own.
Some wanted to let their anger show,
to know that they’d struck back.
Those few tumbled from the high ground,
landing in the scree of despot lackeys.
In the end, the powerless, that Juggernaut,
could not be defeated.
For every step usurpers made
shone a harsh light on their souls,
and all the world saw the gruesome image
that was reflected back.
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POEM: City Noir
Neon-fired
Rippling lights,
churning & flashing,
colors dancing off the walls,
pooling & spinning into each other
Oh, how the colors glisten on wet pavement
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POEM: Little-e Epiphany
The little “e” epiphany
strikes me in
the middle of the night.
Enveloped in darkness, I lie,
contemplating
the bold stories the world has told.
I think upon slapped cheeks
and
grand strategy
and
the universe outside my door.
I wonder whether one can
be change
and
change one’s being,
or
whether there’s a choice to be made.
I feel at peace —
though not enough
to drift back to sleep.
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POEM: Invisible World
The clouds are on the mountain.
The world feels faint and fading.
I look out in the distance,
but my eyes can’t focus.
I believe the world is out there,
but I can never say for sure.
What’s beyond the shape of
that distant line of trees, there?
Is it something good, or
nothing of the kind?
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POEM: Seed of a Scream
The seed of a scream sits somewhere behind my sternum.
It writhed, crawled, or (maybe) floated there with great stealth.
It’s the spark that fires the powder keg.
There’s no old-fashioned fuse,
slowly burning like a sparkler.
You never see the rippling shockwaves,
just the debris —
that detritus that begs,
“What happened here?”
Scream stifling
requires walking around with no air to gasp —
no air to scream.
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POEM: Grace & Beauty at a Distance
As I wade through tall grass,
it seems to be a hodge-podge of random heights,
randomly spaced,
and drooping in random directions,
but when I look out at a distance,
that tall grass smooths the world
into soft rounded shapes.
I guess a lot of things are like that.
Imperfections and differences seen near at hand
vanish into grace and beauty at a distance.
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POEM: Epistemic Hungry Ghost
blocks of knowledge
sit in rubble piles,
having been coveted, hunted, and horded,
they sit in rubble piles
the Epistemic Hungry Ghost
is too busy gathering blocks
to shove and nudge
them into load-bearing
structural integrity
that takes patience & a plan
&
there are too many blocks,
so many blocks —
ripe for the picking —
so many blocks
Who’d have thought learning could be a drug —
a crack-rock addition
with a prettier face
and prettier fidgets?
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POEM: Confessions of a Closet Luddite
Some people dream of shoving a boss in front of an inbound train. My own fantasies run to the smashing of computers and phones into a fine — if toxic — dust.
I don’t know what it says about me that:
-I equate these machines with the boss from that first scenario,
and, also,
-(like the aforementioned people) I’m too scared to go through with it.
I realize that these devices make life much easier…
except when they don’t, and it’s only then that I want to murder destroy them. Of course, the person who wants to murder her boss doesn’t want to do it when there is cake in the breakroom or when an unexpectedly generous bonus comes through — just, you know, the other times.
Unlike the original Luddites, I don’t hate machines out of a fear that they will replace me.
They already make a better economist than I ever did.
And even if the machines pick up their poetry-writing game,
that’s why I have the yoga instructor gig to fall back on…
[Because I’m convinced it will be decades before humans feel comfortable learning backbends from an entity that can twist rebar like a bendy-straw.]
No, I detest our silicon brethren because I have been sold a line that they can (and do) only do what I ask of them. [Hence the reason I don’t get so enraged by humans; anytime a person does something I ask is an unadulterated victory.] Instead, sometimes the computer does what I ask, but the next time something else entirely may happen. If the machines were consistently unable to complete the task, I would chalk that up to my failure to understand them. As it is, I’m left with a landscape of disturbing possibilities:
One, the machines are pranking me. (If this turns out to be the case, I think we can, eventually, be friends.)
Two, my computer’s desolate existence is causing it to try to commit “suicide by user.”
Three, we live in a glitching universe, and at any given moment the machine may produce a random unexpected result.
I don’t want to go back to the Stone Age, but I do have a newfound understanding of the allure of Steampunk. Contrary to the name, no one ever got punked by a steam engine. (Scalded and blown up, yes, but never punked.) The same cannot be said of a smartphone.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 