Overland: Fight the Poet, Love the Master

Morning brings a clearer vision
as the sun makes its assent
And dwells in the blue
Before it’s journey overland.
Under one God,
Our small animations
approximate gestures
of lives arranged
by a benevolent hand.
How gentle their hearts beat
that resound overland.
Charged with the blessing
For every last man.
That rage in our dreams
And to close the abyss;
Conflict along the Ring of fire.
Love binds souls that blend to conspire.
What is that conspires within us
to create events and then ask why?
I’m fighting the poet,
So, who is loving the master.

Poems in Pieces

(April 23, 2013)

The explosion, the cloud, the light.
Love is an explosion...we are shrapnel.

I am able to see so clearly…

those who drive the cold steel pitons

into the splendid cracks of my being,

so they might safely ascend to realizations

at the summit of my aging symbol. 

Abandoned spikes,

sparkle in the seams of the rock face

to which they clung,

My visage, streaked with chalk

from the clinging hands of … love. 

These are the young, the fickle,

who exalt love into a tyrant…

love’s hand is like that of a hidebound father. 

It whips us into shape, so they say…

Lo, merrily we take its sternness. 

My guilt grows like dandelion

for those whom I embrace –

that they never know when to turn from this lifecycle.

They grasp at rays from heaven,

and oh do they see light everywhere raining down…
it’s all for them. 

Such hope and wonder flourishes,
and I till the soils; in a blind and hazy fury

…and then from the soil,
I bring blades of buttercup
and such a flavor for love gathers.   

They stretch beneath my saffron umbrella
and laugh at the bees,

but for we that shine-out like yellow flowers,

yet never shined upon,

we weary of these morning dandelion parades.  

Turning out the beasts

I remember turning my horses out to pasture…and they’d light out to the furthest corners as fast as milkweed fairies on the wind.    These beasts of burden are stubborn like my heart is resolved at times.  But so beautiful to watch – power suspended in the tender grace of whatever wild things dream.  And you’ve flung open the gates of wonderment, and I’m casting prose like wildflower seeds into soulful winds…and they fly like confetti foil into the sky and disappear to the west.  So when you next see blinking stars on a field of cobalt blue, or scintillation on the surface of a stream, know that it’s my poems, chased to the furthest corners of your mind by the whip snap sound of my mighty pen.  I’m just resting on the high fences, watching my words grazing in the solace of your heart which catches tears from almondine eyes.

Life slips through these open hands

To a fallow path that slowly fades,

Trembling as my faith is turning,

to distant skies of cobalt blue,

winking stars and quiet yearning.

Dreamers casting seeds of hope

into the winds of fertile love

and off they fly to times gone by

Lost, with no one there.

I’m suspended in your animation,

But seeds left in the ground I cover

grow to obscure my past.

Who am I

I am the contents that has no container.  A sinner when I do right and a saint when I do wrong.  I am the feeling that you’re not alone and the reminder that you are.  

There is the world we desire and the world we are in, and then there's the world we choose... only the third matters...

Some people make a living outta dyin' - i'm just dyin' to start livin'

And sometimes being lost long enough makes you more familiar with where you're not, than where you are.  That's when you know it's time to change where you're not, to where you should be....which is where you're least familiar.  And that's place is somewhere else altogether.

exists

Hairpin Turns through the Ages

I once held the whole of time in the tiniest hands of a child and then my hands grew.  But the abundance of time did not.  It is not the amount of time before us or behind us, it is simply the openness of a hand to hold what we have - now.

I traced lemniscates with my finger, following a mobile over my bed.  I marveled how a superball could bounce so high; how one man with an axe could take down a 60 year old tree.  Yet all the while – eternity was held there in the darkness like a headboard of hope.  I learned about arguing by listening to those closest to me, through the walls – I didn’t like it, so I grew up listening less and found that was the cause of even more arguments than my parents had.  Sex education didn’t exist outside of episodes of I Dream of Jeanie – as a high level thinking pre-adolescent, I toiled with explanations thereby minimizing a monumental sensation that has existed since the dawn of man.  I deferred understanding any of this through an emerging adolescent logic – faith had it in for me that one day, a girl would drop from the sky and land on the erection that first caused so much alarm.  It would all become clear then.   Everyone was tormented with the significance of a recent past because at such an age, we’d never fathomed the rest of our lives.

Yes, now my hand is large and calloused and holds but the tiniest remains of time. My palms are etched with age like the crystal of my grandfather’s watch.  Time is almost up, so why do I feel a mounting kinship with youth.  

Life’s little hairpin turns down the slippery slope of irony.