Category Archives: Language

The last ones

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Where the omegas light
or the zebras graze
coming to a sundown at the end
of a day, with the hues just finishing
at the edge of the page.
Come what may.

Trek down to bottom
of the waterfall,
the pool that collects and swirls
and spalls. Shapes majestic rock
to a minor crawl.
You’ve seen it all.

Walk away from
blood and tears you’ve shed,
The memory maybe still fresh,
and living in your head. Not
worth the pain or the dread.
That’s what they said.

The last ones take
a moment to decide,
to conquer and reign in the now,
the meantime. It’s true what they implied,
yet often untried.

Alchemy

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Skimilvee this, and jorating us that
around the sculpting parapet.

Pleady, the cosmities open and close
and stars swim around in the bath.

Immanent, always the commuting desire
allaying our jittles and wrath-

turning lead into gold, then likewise is sold
and evaporates in a quintet.

So, jorate the statumly, conquer the reavenly
all you would want, or even empath

Turns back in a cyclic anomaly
and sculpts a new parapet.

contained

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she brought me words in ceramic
all polished and glistening,
language sauced and disheveled
and piled in this vessel.

she sent me themes in a crate
stacked edge upon edge,
corner and treatise
with motives alleged.

she carried her thoughts in a barrel
swirled and unmixable,
leaving me pondering
the whole thing was fictional.

when all that I managed was off-beat or bland
and all that I want, her true heart in hand.

A thaych from a hayd

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In a thaych from a hayd, in different seldia
sailing and sauntering, lengly along –
soutery pleasantry goes a lot farther
than fowling diameters and biling a cause.

A thaych on a hayd, though blonding or greyishing
is bankled and combed where it sits, where it lands
And enschewous decibels echo a singable
sound in the topost, the autory gland.

On thayches with hayds, so many to count among
wordansing, all the while twirling their ways.
Countermand into the idents and lipses
and give no more thought to unwreakable days.

Disbelief ( a Cento)

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Time does have mercy. But it doesn’t enumerate or wait.
A mother of course goes on setting the table, even if it’s with broken plate
lit with the fire of sighs, casts spells, burns sage,
sweats in a lodge, her own prayers flaming,

afraid to demand the right
to be afraid.
You’re trying very hard.
the sensation of anticipated
hearing close inside the ear
and the incipient murmur or cry

Ask and ask until nothing’s left to ask.

A hundred Cheerios, one by one, thinking,
bearing a slender cord for unseen hands.
The rims of wounds have wounds as well.
The memory- as the sole miracle hovering in the air-
Dreams. Time. Horizon. Farther from home than belief
of how your mother laid roses.

 

This Cento is comprised of lines from the following poets.

Chen Chen, Barbara Ras, Sheryl Luna, Robin Morgan, Ko Un, Alice B. Fogel, Carry Fountain, Edwin Markham, Lucie Brock-Broido, Arthur Davison Ficke, Simon J. Ortiz.

Real

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A real poem may awaken you before dawn
as you watch the shadows scrape away the dark
leaving pits and imperfections in the light,
things that trip or hide from you at night.

A real poem may drink coffee black or filled with cream
while watching rivers rise to meet the banks
and how it meets the line of trees, carrying debris,
then leaving it behind as water recedes.

Truest poems hear the second hand,
the sound of resonation in a quiet mind-
rememb’ring things you heard just yesterday
that click and talk, and will not go away.

And last about the poems that you feel
inside, the ones that cry or laugh or wince or smile,
Embrace them with your joy and gratitude,
caress them at the dawn and let them soothe.

A careless triolet

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A sudden silence in my wordless voice
that snared the rain and callous wind
and dripping eaves, by choice.
In sudden silence paused my wordless voice
with little notion to rejoice.
Between disdain and careless twinned
a sudden silence in my wordless voice
that snared both rain and callous wind.

Whither

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I wish in sounds that the wind makes
when rustling the leaves in rain, and
shakes, scattered and thrushed.

In a way, it is like breathing –
in another, waved and brushed.

I brace my frame against the chill
that stuns and stings,
and howls the shrill coil.
The fear that it brings,

headlong and brittle
into the wind.

I lose myself in those rushing moments
of burst and calm, the fate of limb
with a wandering unction.

Casting aside the lithe, cold grim
then writing in new script, a whim.

 

Puzzled

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The color is at least a brown,
though it shades a bit of red
with purple tones at corners
and the interlocking tab.

A protruding sense of purpose
it contours like jagged bone
meant to match in synchrony
maneuvering to its own.

And yet, uniqueness hems and flanks
the space, the opening it takes
and turning ’round the key
will not fill disparate gapes.

So left then, is a scenic -rude-
all unveiled and bit-by-bit
assembled there in lots and cast
and there one piece does not fit.

All solving will not cure the form
inside this pale, imperfect zone
of puzzle pieces. Looking close
a wealth of hues and shapes, its own.

Choice words (Cento)

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Under the wordless sky, come
with loveliness and the icy drouth
of hate –

The diverse forms of things, how can we learn?
Such is life’s trial, as old earth smiles and knows
We call things beautiful, not as such, but because of what they mean.

One moment rests my heart, to rend the next
with words alert and bold,
betrayals so long repeated
that they are taken for granted.

And passing on, smiled like a singing rainbow,
the sky too soon shall witness on your winter hill
as atoms dissipate, as chance sorts life.

*********
A Cento is a poem comprised of lines borrowed from other poets. This one owes is origins to the following poets:
Edward Albert Clements, Margaret Fraser,V.N. Wylde,John Creagh, Kathryn Worth, Joseph Stanley Pennell, John Davies, Robert Browning, Anthony Madrid, and W.S. Merwin.