Glowering Junkies

A glowering beat junkie
shuffles frayed hems over avenue
I, propped up preened,
through the door he trips,
to find a pew
All this, I watch with a dour view

Down in a beanery where souls are served
coffee with a shot consciousness,
who nibble on curated cakes of turd

Awaiting liberation from these surroundings
It’s a cacophony of diatribe, cackles,
Disenfranchised, dim-witted opining.
Counting,
quarter time of a song I’d sing to myself
if this woman before me would just
stop talking
over the music in my headphones;
she’s talking to me from a bag of bones

You resemble my brother at Microsoft.”
I asked, “well, is that good?”
And then she asks if I too work at Microsoft –
I detach one earplug, and spit at her feet,
“I can’t imagine why I would.”

Crazy. We, those, who dare to thrive
like dew clung to a thin thread of spider silk;
and how we slide
down, in a moment, a little more
when the breeze of our prey,
quivers the chord

My deeper thoughts ride out
on the tip of a swordfish
dipped in fine finned fears;
from the undercurrents of this vicious tide,
to throttle the banshee that screams with eyes
filled with crystal tears,
that fall into my coffee mug
and sweeten the slake
of our bitter drug.

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in character sketch, poetry, vignette | Leave a comment

A Seed Found Furrow in My Brow (Seaberg/Phosphorimental)

Image Alchemy by Diana Matisz  Find her at :  http://about.me/diana_matisz

Image Alchemy by Diana Matisz
Find her at : http://about.me/diana_matisz

A seed found furrow in my brow
Awaiting harvest, hungers now

Through my fertile mind’s palimpsest
A vine breaks soil where memories nest

Pushing on with a writhing stem
From deep brown earth toward blue welkin

With nostalgic rays, a star unfolds
a leaf, a story, yet untold

Each bud a poem that’s yet to bloom
In flowered couplets for the moon

awaiting dawn, for petals pleat
to release a blossom’s fragrance sweet

And from one strand a spider weaves
a gossamer web on trembling leaves

to capture prey that seeks to read
Poetic verse among the weeds.

Plant and spider thus conspire
conscripting minds of like, inspired,

to sew words of thorns, that never wilt
till every bough, a bookshelf built

 

(a Collaboration by Maureen Seaberg and Phosphorimental)

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in poetry | 4 Comments

Oh Icarus, what have you done?

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO ORIGINAL COLLABORATION SITE:
Oh Icarus, what have you done?
Image alchemy by “Life Through Blue Eyes” (Diana Matisz)
Poet accompaniment by Phosphorimental

______

Up here, hollering winds unsettle dust
softening on Empyrean
rising thermals graze cloud meadows
Up here, those who dress in shadows
dare not enter dreams of men.

Upon my brow this nimbus glows
Bestowed on my ascent
I bow in flight, on wings wraithlike
eschew the day to chase the night,
in bolts across the firmament.

Surrender brings lightness to a leaf
Behold my feather, the freer’s blade
Time is but it’s morrows thief,
A bounty box of verdant leaves
Released before the ransom’s paid.

Oh Icarus, what have you done?
Our escape was not your calling
Through life we sleep and death we rise
Yet vanity undreamt your vaster skies
Into an ocean, woken, falling.

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in photo, poetry | 1 Comment

Last Nights “Best Used By” Date

These days, the “sell by” date
dictates the menu for my morning meal.
The next torpedo through the torpor
will be the sound of last nights unfinished dinner
scraped into the centrifuge of my garbage disposal;
separating hardened gruel into densities of curiosity.

The absinthe must have done our cooking
as I’m not familiar with the remains
and I can’t even boil water.

Damning the torpedoes
I ponder my death
and my whirring mind,
as it spins apart the densities of a girl
still passed out in the crevices of my couch,
spun-out shards of cold, pungent, pulp.

I need something for the pain
… instructions on the label read,

“take two pills on an empty soul and
call your publisher in the morning.”

Writing on an empty stomach
only exacerbates this unfulfilled addiction.
My motivation is a hope that one day
I’ll overdose on literary completion
and die quietly in the dawn
beside my “best use by” date.

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in character sketch, essay | Leave a comment

Love Ballad of My Generation

bruce

Those days recall less colors
and even less sense
With longer hair like Jackson Browne,
Pensively reeling in half rhymed ballads
walkin’ like Dylan and shredding our voices
like Springsteen.
“walkin’ real loud…”

When poets sang and singers
Listened, from a freight car door
Waiting on an old white fence
Anything that made an album cover.

My crew was meticulously unkempt,
one day shy of a much needed shampoo
but okay –
we were just okay then.
…Surely for another day.

Our moms were old with
thick rimmed glasses and smoked
and our fathers,
they were smoking men too
wearing two shades of gray
tucked in all the way… around
And around, my dad and I went.

We spoke with twisted lips
Groomed our eyes and looked out
From behind narrow poles
and dirty brick walls
That gave, what we knew of our souls,
This, sorta clandestine refuge.

And our pockets
Were empty, our wallets –
were empty .
Except a beer cap and a phone number,
Scribbled and torn from the corner of
a Houghton Mifflin textbook.
“I’ll call her when I get home.”
Let’s go home.

Sitting on the hood of my Torino
I scanned the streets, smelled the tar
Of our last summers burning.

These girls hugged their diaries to their chest
and we’d gaze
we’d gaze through Sunlit dust and dandelion fairies
eager to unbutton their secret stories about us,
always about us,
and our eyes made such nimble fingers.

We were outward bound on inward glory…
always thinking about love
hoping on plans that’ll get us “laid” by
a girl who wears daisies in her hair.

Big sweet flowers for the butterflies
Stirring in our stomachs
Fluttering to land softly at the entrance
of her big – sweet – flower.
My generation loved love.

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in character sketch, essay, love poems | 2 Comments

By this Poems End

autumwritten

By the end of this poem, those, once vibrant
shall slough off in horizons of necrosis.
As I tap out completion,
their summer cedes to countless performances;
actors bow before the closing curtain of Autumn.
The maelstrom of summer-lovers lulls to a murmur
And the great Mevlana’s couplets and Khayyam’s quatrains
Float away on the formations of down-bound geese.
You’ll hear the Doppler shift of devotion’s goodbye
On the whines of the locomotive’s whistle.

By the end of this poem, the thistle fades
from heliotrope to gun metal gray.
The clandestine scent of “once-whens”
Wafts into a future of “now-agains.”
Yet, this new Fall is bittersweet.
Before another undressing of trees,
a red rose blushes in reminiscence.

By this poems end, I’ll be in love
with the chill of an approaching season
wearing the brightest flower in my garden of poetry
One last choke on the rising smoke
as the last painful stanza goes
Into the solemn procession
toward the sacred pyre of leaves.

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in poetry | 1 Comment

Hibiscus Dreams

hibiscusShe’s underhand throwing words with her mouth
The boy leans in past natural borders, to study the agenda in her eyes
He is built like a bent paperclip,
with bottlebrush forelocks, a barracuda jaw.

Between her bare legs, she gently squeezes
a cup of iced hibiscus tea.
She reaches down and lifting it to her lips,
I feel mine part, in thirsting sympathy…

Her upper thighs blush wet with condensation as
The boys eager fingers click on her knee,
like ice cubes in her sweating berry hibiscus,
floral melt cascades down her throat.

Fairy breath lands on my shoulders – my silk overcoat
It makes me dissolve with memory
of my beloved tea picker,
a cocoa skinned Sudanese girl
traveling the road to market in Al-Junaynah,
swaying in the truck bed under a warm sun,
dreaming of red karkadeh flowers
and a paper clip boy.

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in character sketch, essay, Short Stuff, vignette | 5 Comments

Glowing is like falling out of darkness

An old friend Carl Richardson) posted this quote by apparently an unknown author,

“…you see the true color of a person when you are no longer beneficial in their life…”

Rather than traipsing through the jaded past, this set me off to thinking (as I do), I asked myself…am I beneficial? What color am I, what color are you…or am I blind to both?

We create the fiction of another’s life within our own and we walk around our own world as if it was theirs too. We imagine the ghost on an empty stage is real…and that we are real to them. People do not step out of their own lives and into ours, nor do we leave our own; we are slow moving satellites in orbits which take forever to cross again. Why are we such puzzled star gazers?

If we feel lost, confused or alone on the journey, it is only because we let our own lights go dim… we become colorless IF the colors of others is all we seek. We are of no benefit to others EVER, if not to ourselves ALWAYS. You don’t need a “mirror” to see your own reflection; the former is the illusion – your reflection is your self-consciousness. You need only light.

Why so much time with the ghost, than ourselves, with the mirror and not the reflection, why do we romantics toil with non-fictionalizing fiction? You’re in a human world, it’s okay, so’s everyone else – who’s not human to say differently?

Love is a victimless crime, and as repeat offenders it’s inevitably a life sentence. No chance of rehabilitation and those with an attitude find themselves in long spells of solitary confinement. So, I’m amused how we spend more time falling out of love, rather than in.

How futile…Looking for other human colors, when the light of our own life is off.

Glowing is like… falling out of darkness.

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in character sketch, essay, Short Stuff, vignette | Leave a comment

In Vino Veritas

Do not look for revelation in an event,
look inward at the sum of your experiences…
then exhale –
blow them away like a fine powder
into the abyss of space. 
Emptiness, silence…dissolution –
the unspeakable, un-hearable happens. 
Your message finds you in the inhale –
and for a moment, you cannot move…
the next words you speak
are the truth.

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in Poems Beyond Their Words, poetry | 3 Comments

Your Damascene Sword

steel

You’re too used to your blunted ways
Worn habits of reason is why you stay
So tired of hearing the same arcane
From a heart that cashes in on pain
Grab your Sufi sluicing pan,
Ya Allah, let’s pull the gold of soul by hand
From this parched and grinning desert creek
Sift the dust and graveled speech
Unlearn the ways you understood
Mine the vein, the pay is good.
Trade the bone china we can’t afford
For tin cans, wool, and a Damascene sword. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHrLPs3_1Fs

tis nothing if not heardShare on email
Email
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on facebook
Facebook
0
Share on print
Print
Share on google
Google
Posted in Poems Beyond Their Words, poetry | Tagged , , | Leave a comment