Fairness

Why should I give you immortality

When you've repaid my love with loss and lies.

My interest in you's given me no gain.

When I'd invested in you, I'd the sense

That you had wanted me, to spend your life

With me, no matter, through all gain and cost.

An irony that my poetic art

Should find a use to lease eternity

To one creating all this darkness coined

In such a soul creating, making due

The dividend of all my poetry

That I wrote since the time that I lost you. 

You should be banished from the city, not

Be given immortality by me. What? Mercy?

I sit in black-robed judgement over you--

You have repaid my love with lies and such

Indifference. The promised blossom wilted

Despite what I invested in us two. 

Would priests dare grant that God would give

What I now give you here? No light would enter

Through rainbow windows coloring the church

You entered in. You're blind behind the veil

Of bitter blue you choose--life without gold

Sea shells, sunflowers bringing life your value. 

You left me and the only way I'm paid

Is by my constant balance on this bridge

Between my past with you and some far future

Finally free of this, my memory

Of how I felt and feel and spent on you.

For that, I grant you immortality? 

Barren Desert Cliffs

Go swing, swallows--sudden arcs up in the sky,

Away, cliffs with nests they hid from wind--They fly,

They dip, fly up, eating insects in the dry,

Barren desert cliffs.

Yes, once people lived here on these cliffs-they dwell

Among ancient ruins still. The stones that fell

From hand-fashioned places decorating well

Barren desert cliffs.

They graze barren land, the desert bighorn sheep--

They're cliff-canyon fleet, and knowingly they leap

Along ledges--desert residents, they keep

Barren desert cliffs.

When great Nebuchadnezzar's beautiful wife

Began feeling homesick, he made come to life

A great garden that transformed out of the strife

Barren desert cliffs.

Returned, condors soar above the desert places

They once winged above--they fly in ancient spaces

They once vanished from--now each dark shadow graces

Barren desert cliffs.

Now, man built his own high cliffs, and he assembles

In them numbers such that earth herself now trembles.

Transformed land is raised, and now our home resembles

Barren desert cliffs. 

Reaching Essence

The sage scholar that intimidates (or so

I've been told) so many I have met with all

I know--art and science and philosophy.

I've carved out this mask.

A small part of me, I reckon's still up in

The green hills--Kentucky where I'm still laid back,

Where jokes jump more freely, friendly from my tongue.

The South made this mask.

Can you not see I am right? I argue with

And quick-question people who I know and meet--

This love lives in me, unpleasant though it seems.

My least pleasant mask.

My brain's wired autistically--do not expect

A good memory to shop or for a name--

I can't feel the same as you--the world's intense.

My gene/brain-made mask.

My art aims for beauty--All my poetry,

And plays, novels--I transform to beauty words

Through sounds, rhythms, symbols, and in images.

Descent gave this mask. 

A dark hermit here in my library-cave.

I read, study, write, and think--alone. I make

In home-quiet spaces, decompress from life.

A need-daily mask.

I love, think of, love to spoil the ones I love--

My wife, children--I make them feel all the love

I feel--more than anyone could ever love.

Why not see this mask?

The Key to the Temple

Do you what to know how I worship?

This is how I worship--

This, here, what you read, with words, words

With rhythms, words making meaning through metaphor--

Connecting time up and down, up and down

The same, a circle, but not a circle, too simple.

I worship the word--In the beginning was the Word--

I worship the most human in man, the word, the logos--

In the beginning was the Logos.

in the beginning of man was the thing that made man--man--

I worship  the thing that makes the rocks sing--

I worship the creator--

The Word that is with God--

The Word that was--and is--God--

Words in natural rhythms--the rhythms of nature--

Words winding around my mind--

Words a west wind carrying pregnant clouds on the horizon--

I am pregnant with the word--

The words flow out and through me--

The words that sing and dance and make me--me!--

I am my words--the best part of me plays upon the page--

What is left of me will be my words--when I go

Only words will be left--

The Word that is in my is the Word on the page--

The best of all words, the best of all worlds--

I have learned to become the best part of me--

I have learned to be and become--me!--

Here is what I worship--the Word--the word

Is what I worship--words in rhythms--

Skipping across the page

Like stones skipping across a shallow pond.