Poetricity: Beginnings

Beginnings. Must come from somewhere. Do come from somewhere. A coffin cradle housing the sacred dead and undead respectively. All else is straw. Reindeer games or wooden stages or giant clanging marble worlds. Visceral violet sobs with loss. Hopeful copper sobs with gain. A choice to amputate a dying arm wedged in a mountain or to engage in armchair quarterbacking on sunny Sundays. The latter, stupidly safer. And brilliantly less perilous.

I see a beginning. A bright, hot white glow on the not too distant horizon beckoning me to join in this stacked hand of five-card stud. In whose favor I can’t say. In my past remain emerald, mint memories drizzling on a few patches of dying grass. A road I discovered belonged to me only for a time. A road now lost somewhere behind white-capped mountains. Another era transformed. I see the tombstone. It is time. For endings.

Poetricity: Silence

I came seeking a respite from honking, blood curdling hot orange cacophony. The perpendicular pillars and pews greeted me graciously smiling in their wooden way. There was a momentary silence caught between the cityscape, an almost hesitation in the urban drawl. Then the pack of five teens arrived, besot at once by the necessity of ritual. With the fat clothman supplement, a holy buzz banished the momentary silence into a catacomb. Black thoughts of whys in what should be. I laughed at the should in a house of God. And the anger abated like a vapid vampire from his bloody prey. The pre-pubescent voices echoed sparking glimmers of reticent hope for a limping institution. The fat man and five concluded with a customery whimper all in a fragile agreement that the status quo, like virtue, is good for its own sake. I spied another moment trapped between oblivions just then, and silence pierced my side. It remained inifinitely or until the jackhammers wafted through the stained glass.

Sunday Scribblings (Me) - Hot Days

I sit half naked, cold and melancholy
In a cardboard box
Half shredded by Hemingway cats.
I make decisions
As well as impotent rabbits breed,
And live a life
Greeting death with a water hose.
I spray at it,
Watch it dissipate and fail into nothing.

It’s not all bad;
I’m at least somewhat cool on hot days.

It's Personal: Mentors

born, whatever that means.
there are people around
speaking in foreign languages,
telling me what to do
and how to act and where to be.
they say it lovingly,
all of those mentors.
whether in english
or financial speak
or catholic speak.
i listen, more than listen.
i am enthralled, amazed.
i believe all they say.
they speak with such confidence.
they teach the basics
but not all their tricks
of subtle nuance.
i follow where they lead.
i trumpet their arrival.
i proclaim their great deeds from memory.
and then there comes a sad day
when i have learned the nuance,
when i see the subtle tricks
as clearly as through a clean window.
the mentor transforms
from demigod to demagogue.
and i break a little.
a piece of me falls into the ocean,
corrodes from the creeping salt.
all is not as i once believed.
i grope for meaning, understanding.
i find none, only imperfection.
i think i have failed in my contemplation.
it is when we are weakest that we are strong.
failure breeds humility;
humanity wields its noble sword.
mentors are human.
there is a birth around me;
my word suddenly becomes law.
i am telling people what to do.
i am telling people how to act.
i am telling people where to be.
lovingly, of course.
doomed to fail on my path as a mentor,
which means i will succeed.

3WW (Caustic, Hunch, Sacrifice): In Vain

Roses as red
As the crimson blood
Pouring from the knife wound
To your stomach.

Violets as blue
As your cherub face
Choked from the withered hands
Around your neck.

Sugar as sweet
As the honeyed words
Poured from your caustic lips
When I depart.

As for you
As for your hunches
And your sacrifices
They were in vain.

Indifference

It’s the wheezing of a fat man,
The lion gutting the young wildebeest,
A leg not broken but shattered under the weight of a Harley.

It’s the merlot and angel hair vomit,
The thud of the dropping body,
A chilled pint of Tabasco with warm lemonade and whole milk.

It’s the pang in the pit of your stomach
The feeling of utter and bitter disgust,
A need to ogle mixed with a need to run until your feet bleed.

I am staring at the face of indifference.

3WW (Generate, Meager, Tease): Sometime Again

i sit in the rain showered sun;
its meager rays barely touch
my skin, cold with platitudes.
the cobwebs of disbelief stick to me
like a promiscuous virgin
who with a rusty comb teases raven hair.
i want the purple of deep eggplant
or the brown at the center of your eyes
to generate the longing for sometime again.

Sunday Scribblings: The Now Dead Flowers

Howdy all...

I know I said I'd be writing stories more often. But Sunday Scribblings challenged me to write poetry this week. It's been a long time since I wrote anything resembling poetry - with the exception of American Sentences and a few haiku. I have therefore attempted to write some. I cheated only a little... For whatever reason, Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow was on my mind today. I therefore tried my own hand at a similar styled poem...

so little care
is shown
to now dead
flowers
once with pink
petals
beside the gray
tombstone