Monday, July 25, 2022

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? 

Monday, July 18, 2022

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. 

Monday, July 11, 2022

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?

Monday, July 4, 2022

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.