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WAY OF THE SEVEN STARS


Response To That Final Question:

Ignorance is the Bane of Man.
At a distance removed,
Dimly remembered, and
Still not seen distinct,
But yet somehow felt;
What we do sense
Is not reality; is not the Real Thing.
This World is hologram.
Then; for lucid sleep;
For it's just a dream
Within another dream
And we are not awake.

Seven Stars' Song of Revelation

Ignorance is a jail where no escape
Is possible but through knowledge.
Don't fear nor spurn. Dare to learn:

Assent to and accept this world as it is
Before attempting ascent to any world
Aspired to or wished for. Life's glorious!

That That Is can be known but by few.
Not space, not time, not gravity exists;
But as Extension from Field of Thought.

Be subject to neither church nor crown.

Dread naught. Disdain none: Not One!
Absent That That Is, there's Nothing.

That That Is, IS. That That's Not, IS, too.
That That's Not makes That That Is: IS.
That That Is makes That That's Not BE.

By rowing to That That Is, I become "I."
Wind + Water = Wave. As THOUGHT is
The Heart and The Nave of The Wheel.

Worlds are created from Thought alone.
That which we will do is because of that
What we are. We'll become who we are.

Charity, courtesy, civility, compassion,
Are cardinal spokes making civilization;
Chivalry forms center, hub's circle core.

IS is! Be not the slave of some other's I.
This, Creed of our Seven Stars Society;
This, The Teaching of the Seven Stars:

No man can be happy if he should choose
To be exile from his own nature and soul.
ALL IS THOUGHT ILLUMINATING BEING

Precognitive Prescient Prophetic Poetry by WILLIAM O'CONNOR

Monday, December 27, 2010

Aorta

Weakened avenues of blood,
Arteries clogged and choked,
Blocked barricades; so caked
In fat, they've lost elasticity:
Shriveled, shrink, tighten, die.


Stillness and silence made this separation
A division; thick barrier between thought
And action, dead-end closure for defeat.


Seeming different, but is everywhere the same,
Deep slush of indecision stops aorta of the soul.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Grey Speckled Bird

By the sea, behind a stump of rock,
A hidden nest. Big waves crash in.
An undertow sucks out relentless,
Gravel rattling through the cracks;
In it a grey speckled bird calls out.

The Craft

The craft consists of precise expression of emotion
Transformed into common vernacular of the street.


So


What was felt, suppressed and feared stated aloud,
Is made acceptable by art and softened articulation.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Crystal Clear

Send a letter, scented in verbena,
On lavender paper. Make it short:
No.

Red Moon Rising

Midnight-rider, you far traveler,
Speed under this Moon of Blood.
Roll your bike's bars far forward.
Hammer down.  Know these big
Spaces and wide eastern plains
Were shortened to grey gardens
Long ago.  Escape that red Moon
Rising in the East and head West.


What's heard here is awful sound
Of little mosquito men sucking life
From independence; foul brokers
Of subjugation, they're who've made
Submission virtue. Flee to declare
Your soul free from all of them.
Ride hard away and seek out
West a Montana of the Mind.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Short-Sellers

So soon comes night. For you devourers of pricing
Are in the meanest occupation, employing device
For fixing worth and for the speculation of value;
Stunted libels: this shorting against advancement.


Night-travelers, you wallowers in the deep workings
Of adversity, takers of advantage of those troubled
By debt and default. You'll be a cause of recessions
And depression; all done for gain and spiteful profit.


Live in dark night.  No Moon nor Sun shines for you.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Acorn

Sealed securely within its copper setting,
Burred cone flared slim to burrow down,
Flanges of tiny serrated teeth screwing;
Dies; is buried. By death is born an oak.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

The Coming Storm

Bands of pink and purple slotted throughout with black
Show contours of crevices and crevasses in the clouds:
Thundering herd of roiling, boiling, blue-white, coming
To unfurl ominous flags of animosity, stripes and stars;
In lightning barred, advancing across the sodden plane.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Hologram

Broken lights, beamed in splitting parallel lines;
Twined accelerations, slowed into a stimulatory.


Bifurcation comes together, united in single spasm;
A twining stimulation that produces coherent sight:


Our universe floats unaided imprinted on The Mind.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Sources

Not from the poor and not from the dispossessed,
Nor the displaced, the homeless and the indigent;
But from the educated elite, does terrorism come.


Too often, public education is deceptive instruction;
A propaganda, propagated for a deceitful purpose:
To enslave minds of youth to be servants of State.


One objective of education is sophisticated expression.
It's never a fawning sycophancy of supinely deferring
To the trite phrases and the tired speech of politicians.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Sword and Shield

Your Jesus and Jehovah and your Allah too,
Whimpering deities, beggars for obeisance;
These are not the gods for men born free.


There's a thunder in the hills, steps of old gods.
I hear their foot-falls, and they resonate in me.


Credit and debit, you who've ledgered your bleak
Lives away; you shall not speak for we hard men.
We've our own voice and it shouts harsh and loud.


They that cover heads in the presence of the Sun
Cannot know what they're swaying or praying to.


After a long imposed silence, a prolonged absence;
Just a memory, a fading hope, barely remembered 
Of what happened when we lived in caves of cliffs.


Smothering, sucking, light-less caverns, robbed of air
When the fire-rocks fell from out of blackening skies.


Stones of Heaven, catapulting down, tumbled at Man
By an angry Sun; beginning an inception of a religion,
Of trembling awe and fear, a sword and shield of God.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Keeled

The world tips sideways and is upset;
Bottom-keeled, drawing sails in seas.


An amazement awaits us; a surprise,
And the world becomes amusement,


When things are seen upside-down.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Sleety Days

Sleety days, slippery and wet, December brings
An abdication; a rest, a taking back of ambition.


For modern sensibilities, sheared of long desires;
Betrayed by banks, by governments, by church:
Bureaucrats are ferrets sharpening their teeth.


Speculators and grafters, those users of others,
Control the courts and the high offices of state; 
Only misfortune and misery are sole employed:


Sleety days have come again to a sleazy nation.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Frost

With morning frost is a coming of the folding within,
A compression, an inwards sliding of the Self inside;
A carapace forms against the chill, cocooning cares.


The Sun shorts itself; limits its light in colder months,
And Nature lessens with it: Winter is a small season;
Ivy turning to a brittle, bitter burgundy on the walls.


Whole world is folding itself in flannel now for Winter.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Piercing Wind

Late Autumn's piercing wind angles to penetrate
Every eave and tiny opening in house and heart;
Sharpening cold that whimpers Winter's coming.


Gray conquering blue, over coat of chilling cloud
Intimidates the cowering sky, threatening snow;
Dew crackles into frost as the grass grows hard. 


In this slated space, slack time before an avalanche
Of Fate dams up our drown world in frozen destiny;
Vow to make history, not be one on whom it's made.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Marble Halls

Last night I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls;
White columns deep veined red and green,
Stained yellow with age to a soft shimmer.


Soaring impression of freely floating suspension.


Groin of iron girdles the mellowed masonry;
Unseen ugliness firms integrity of structure,
Gray rays of steel bending flawless surface.


Satin stone leans upon metal beneath for strength.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Horn of Winter

The trains of winter horn warnings inconsolable;
They whistle plurals in doubling sign of dangers,
Torn voices divided into plaintive sheets of pain.


Winds of winter bear complaint of heavy sinking shapes;
Of cold mud and bones and of slogging boots of soldiers,
Mission unknown, pledging to uncomprehending deaths.


Sails of winter heavy-bellied with unknown destinies;
Bow of providence plowing beneath waves of chance,
Traveling on, fighting on, sailing on, to what grim port?

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Medals and Ribbons

Medals and ribbons are smeared across the chests of uniforms
In praise of war.  The salary for killing is paid in gaudy badges.


A pride of patches across the breast makes of no man a knight
If the cause he serves and those deeds he does have no glory.


America was begun in refusal; in the statement of shouted No.
Laughter at the ridiculous crown of regency primed its origins. 


To speak truth to power has always been the province of poets;
Not of soldiers.  We swear allegiance to nothing but our own art.


Poetry forms an island nation, separate and distinct from others.
Soldiers obey, poets can't and won't; that's the real shield of life.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Afterward

Neither red nor blue, something in between;
A purple mist descends, transcending grasses
That lay below into soft shades of silvery gray;
A patchwork of shadows humped against trees.


Wars between the children of Moses and Muhammad
Have made many graves and ghosts.  They lie there.


Together.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Patriots of Bureaucracy

They were long dead long before they died.
Empty houses with darken windows drawn.
Boarded storefronts amongst silent streets.


Speak against power and be done with life.
You high officials, the dark veil of your laws
Gravities the heart; binds it down in statute.


Black letters enacted throttles enterprise;
Chokes commerce, and strangles synergy.
Bureaucrats ride us with their regulations.


These are patriots of particulars; critics of
Citizens, living lives of consensus and debt.
Resist. Barricade them in any way you can.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Drones

Once we were explorers of oceans and rivers:
Oars dipped into waters beneath a copper sky; 
Back-push of strokes on fan-splayed paddles;
Skulls pulling forwards, lapping of the waves.


But now our only adventures are all electronic:
Distant vistas brought close by one-way tunnels, 
An internet of social sets, and of safe romances;
Viewed but not visited, spied but never touched.


Here is the land of avatar and symbiont:
Wasting away with every new-born day,
Despiration usurps: overthrows knowledge,
Rules and laws, leaving nothing to fight for.


Starving, the sole commodity still available
To trade is despair; here dictators assume
Robes of priests and guns become the tools
Of barter.  Violence is left the only mediator,
A supreme court, in the settling of disputes.


Distance makes men cruel, robbing them of
Feeling; murdering drones from far away.
Philosophy ought not to trump humanity; 
Far better always to be kind than right.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Streets

Stretched sideways into a slow slide,
A descending curve, thinned at its end,
Scarfing notes drum sidewalks of the city.


Pearl grey pavements tap to the high heels
Of desire pounding riffs from hurried steps.


Resounding in the blurred morning: Streets.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Autumn Leaves

Crush that crisp dyed leaf curled beneath the heel.
Splinter its colors; prism them and parse them out
To spell sensuous yesterdays trampled underfoot.


Dampen it in Fall's rains; spin it with wintry winds
So the thin spine of its veins is sickened and dies;
Danger swirls of destruction, dissolved to shreds.


Autumn leave.  Let the cold of coming Winter in.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Tent of Stars

Turned to red low, oil fired light
Of a kerosene lamp sheds gold
Into the bent canopy of its top.


Sitting at opened flap, stare above
A-swim with suns in that vastness;
Seas of space, streams of beams.


Rivers of delight, flooding,
Blanketing night to sleep;
Floating in a tent of stars.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Day Dream

To save ourselves, we've made ourselves invisible,
Deliberately hid away our talents and our abilities,
For poverty has come from diminishment of days;
Herds of humanity thunder towards cliffs of war.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Infinity

The name for God is number;
Not a single digit or decimal,
But a ratio and a relationship
Of what is and of what's not:
Infinity

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Celebrity

Bound and fettered as they are;
Yet still think themselves at liberty
While a forest of eyes constrains,
Closes in, to capture their freedom;
They'll not notice they're in prison.


Those who parade their identities.


Subtract, empty the void within
From which all sacred numbers
Flow, and the greater cavern
Of identity is left a wasteland;
Desolate, devoid of limitation.


Nothing of Self remains to see.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Promise

In keeping it, it was destroyed and lost;
For any promise worth the performing 
Is also worthy of the breaking.  An end
Then to all these oaths.  Only contracts
Of the heart have validity.  Those made
To the state and to society have none.


What we would keep are the promises
Made sacred to ourselves when young:
To fulfill our destinies despite authority.
No freedoms survive absent rebellions.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Guitar

Fast fingering, that sudden chord jumps out,
Bites the air, and shatters it in a dissonance;
A dying disturbance of sharp squiggle notes. 


Straining strings sing stinging stroke of doubt,
An end and stop.  The question hovers there, 
Stays, slows, dissolves into sepia satin tones;


Forgiven, forgotten in downward final strum!

Backwards

With each half-turning of the head,
New worlds swinging large to view,
Old worlds gradually making small;
While riding backwards on trains.


Frontwards people see a coming
Fastness, rushing upon to strike;
Overtaking them in sudden now.


Backwards people see a leaving
Sadness, receding in a slowness;
Pulling them to motionless away.


Which are you? 

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Trust

Fear in their faces and dread in their heads,
One headlight bright and the other broken,
Canes and cudgels may splinter the bones
Of promises.  Not so wrong we're after all
When driving down on lonesome highways,
Relying on a single lamp playing on a road,
With yellow divider and a white center line;
For deception is signalling us at every turn.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Birthdays

A shame and a sorrow and a bereavement of days;
Desperate stutter for some consciousness to come:
Birth-Daze.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Hail!

Crystal rains of snow crashing from gray clouds;
Pale, baleful, bone white, grinding down ground. 


For all of those who can act in the quantum way,
Connected to dimensions and rooted to no place,
Worlds await.  Remainder are already replaced;
Made obsolete by newer and far better species.


The coming wars are the catastrophes of religions.
Hear: hail of clans commanded by cleric chieftains.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Beam of the Sun

Our tainted nature's solitary boast:
Refusal to be subject to anything;
Even to the authority of mortality,
To Death; to gravity of the grave.


Light, lensed through inspiration,
Fills our skulls with a limitless fire;
Flames, eternal and unquenchable,
Beam of the Sun, glow of the Moon.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Gold

The silks and satins of indolence
Smothers action with addiction.


Eyes that see but this world
Are born blind to true sight.


Hammer out that tin of timidity.
Meek gain but dirt of the grave.
Only the brave deserve the fair.


The saddest epitaph of any man:
He made money.  For no shroud
Has pocket nor holds a sporran.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Constitution

Breached parapet of patriots;
Parchment stabbed by thieves;
Knifed by rapiers and daggers
Of bankers and bureaucrats;
Shredded by lawyers' frauds;
Stormed by mendacious greed;


The Contract engine of the U.S. State revs.
Then stalls over.  It's lost its spark to start.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Soft Step September

Shoving summer's heat aside come stride September days
To sweeten yesterdays' hot memories with sugared sighs.
Nostalgia for seasons gone is crimson tinged, tainted with
Saccharine hue; with rose-red textures, on time's tongue. 


In her lost smile does blossom of past brightness dim.
Soft-step September on embers of passion's remains.

Ambition

Splash the seas of time and make a universe.
Caution against tomorrow was the hesitation
Of doubt.  An awareness comes, which when
It's slapped awake, engenders Art.  No need
No more to question fate, or seek an answer
From some faith. Now is time to go. Create!

Monday, September 6, 2010

Moon-Struck Prayer

Boats be small; seas be big.
O fierce shield of imagining,
Golden emblem of The Art,
Proudest of gibbous hours,
Wide pregnant of the Sun;
Spare us in times of peril!

Politicians

Black horns of mouths, slash spiting spite;
Those politicians, who do so trumpet fear.


Such is a spectral horror of alien intransigence,
A self's severed separation from nature's song;
That we've allowed these soft strident thieves,
Bereft of any harmony and absent of all honor,
To steal our sacred voices and let speak for us.


How, having given to them abject dominion,
Can we secure our rights without rebellion?

Friday, September 3, 2010

Cycles and Crutches

What made us rich has made us poor again,
A barren people in a broken, blighted land.


Dry leaves crackled by worn thin soled feet,
Cold, wrinkled, hardened, crevices of flesh.


No longer can legs support trunk to stand,
Decayed to a state of cycles and crutches.


Fat giant, leaning, swaying, tottering to fall:
America.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Hazard of Suites

Hazarding truth in attesting depositions,
Faith falls away with each spoken word.
They lawyer life who've made brief of it;
An argument of boring weeks and days.


A searing comet, cleaving old static states
Was America.  But the drone and chanter,
Dull cadence talk of courts, extinguished it;
Made it foul with drudgeries of disputation


To leave a nation fearful of any innovation
And the delights proceeding from invention.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Autumn

Knowing our ends, we'll drum upon beginnings;
What memory does keep close within its grasp,
Held tight locked in a bounded ark of thoughts,
Those hurtling planets circling pasts' far stars,
Vast profusion amid galaxies of remembrance;
To beat in time to that sole, single melodic line:


Fall.


Give me but a hinted theme and I shall sing to it.
Violin of summer is segue to the cello of autumn.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Place of Strangers

My country is a land of morning mists and cloud;
Jade, indigo, silver, show true their colors there,
When Ur was young, twas then already ancient.
Noon's late light shimmers tints in aqua greens;
Its bay, butter yellow beneath cottons of blue-
Blurred grey, darks under the summer's storm.


When my name is numbered in the ledger of death
And my tomb added amongst the gardens of stone,
Let me not lie alone in a gaunt grave place of aliens.
Bleak, sinister and bitter is the common end of man;
So to be sequestered, squeezed between strangers,
Buried outside my nation is to be more abandoned still.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Ambush

Ambushed by beauty,


Hawks hanging, rouge tails flashing, high-hunting in the skies.
Their drops so fast, so steep, so quick; elevators of falling air.


This is not my nation nor my people.  This is a strange land;
A home not my own and one to which I was exiled by birth.


They that hunt me seek with a red vengeance my downfall,
Having found out my places of dwelling and my occupation. 


The ribbons tying this world together make strings of equations;
Taught strings vibrating, throwing off more numbers and words


And I've made a bow of them.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Tears

Boughs, beaming green, dazzled by sun-break, sit.
Motes, spiring white mites, spin swirls in sunshine.
Day brightens.  Tears tear to tatters my heart away.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Summer Smoke

For to catch yon fleeting clouds
Fling wide and far mental nets.


Haze, in golden tawny hues, pervades.
Trees drip foliage of grays and greens.
An ancient, antique light suffuses leaves.


In the vast complaint that's life,
Hops of bitter doubt give flavor;
Incisor bites of sudden insights,
Into hidden truths behind it all:


Summer smoke.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

War

Lilies, moving within many emerald multitudes,
Flaring trumpets wearing cloaks of whiteness,
Blend.  Their fair leaning battalions sounding
Capture by sudden explosions in grass-filled
Fields; for far a slender stridency strives
To blare among these common squares.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Summer Storm

Thin slices of silence sandwiched inside heat,
As sharp as words unstated and never said;
Bitter thorns of discourse, hung in stifled air.


Then


Beaten, broken, screaming sentences steam hate:
Summer is a shouted storm on streets in the City.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

One of Us

Tattoo genius are most proud to display
Is rebellion; for subject to no sovereign
Are we, nor to any doctrine or decree;
But to our laws alone are we, birthed
In slavery, who've made ourself free.


Satellite to obese others is that fat rest;
Prisoned in narrow orbit of sycophancy.
Repeaters, parroting the public opinion;
Ditto to whatever banality already said,
With no new thoughts to be expressed.


Be than one of us and not one of them!

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Fallen Idol

In ascendancy, arrogance was profound.
But in descent, it turns towards nostalgia
For a false past; one that never did exist,
Nor ever could: The Fate of every nation.


Shadows morphing into night fade away;
As its substance, together with its reason
For existence, dissolved.  The People had
No loyalty to the government that's failed.


An opiate of routine smothered renewal.
Hope died and the law of laxity prevailed.
Refusal to fight came naturally to the idle.
A State, once strong, stumbled into decay.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Waiting Room

Though differently arranged,
The destitute and diseased,
Sit here.  They've deserved
To die has said their society.


They're detritus of the nation,
Lost, forgotten so disposable;
Patient in their dispossession.
A canon of despair rules here.


Dementia reigns on white heads,
By angry incomprehension and a
Regency of confusion, crowned;
For this is the terror of the aged.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Fourth of July

These would have us live
In their rubric of venality;
Lead rigid vegetable lives,
Loyal to opportunity only. 


A state which pushes its worse
To multiply and to prosper has
Produced a country of bankers
Who bite, snap, snarl for profit:


Zombies who eat the flesh
From off their fellow man.
So no flags will we salute;
Leave fireworks for fools.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Whiskey Dreams

The moon held in a glass suspended;
Vast, luminous and large, she shines.


Spilled light spelled to amber vapor,
Breath of yellow smoke surrender;


Whiskey dreams.

USA

An ash-pit of sleaze is this America;
As those many who know the least
Are so shrilling of their ignorance.


This is its common man: the duller
They be, the more vocal they are;
The louder they'll shout in a crowd.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Down Below

Off high porches of indifference, seen
Down below the stairs of insouciance,
People passing on windswept streets;
Needful nation of lost souls walking by.


For them, a bending cross of compassion
Shan't bow, for they're the already dead.


From verandas of our nothingness we spy
Those, strung-in-line, stranded, shrunken,
Statues of the street, gaunt-thin, shuffling;
Mouths gasping open, grimaces of oblivion.


Nature, both adamant and free, imposes
On her subjects symmetry and economy.


From our lofty balconies, dead as they below
We'll be, dead which'll be watching the dead;
For we are but marching memories, mirrored
In minds of those soon joining death's parade.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Critics

Screeching jays blaring against trees,
Screen of tall conifers and short elms;
Baleful blast, strident abuse so angry;
Animosity dressing in adversity blues:
Critics.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Lost Loves

That which was in anger parted
Cannot be joined by an apology.
Words lack all indemnity in spite.
Once said, they are forever lost;
Not to be returned and redeemed.


Furious sounding bells, fulsome of desire,
Circle clappers formed for despondency
Designed to ring out at every snippet
Of simple satire and at small-spirited
Wit, and no remorse prevents a crack.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Sunk Hearts

Those who question the agony
Of love know nothing of desire.
The moon that melts the nights
Of summer is full in circle phase.

Its shuddering beam spilling seasons
Of yellow on limbs of standing trees;
On oaks, on yews; its seas of silver
Imprinting dimpled veins on leaves.


Quieter and quieter a mind sinks away;
Slipping into the somnolent senescence
Of senility; shrinking size in every hour,
For what a terror is lost memory in age.


The black robe of heaven hems a sacral place.
Moon-bright; its lines of beauty softly drawn
In amber, an ocher of delight, paints perfect
Shadows on walls and floors: blues and golds.


Sunk hearts, drowning in the rivers of time,
Sucked down in smothering seas of regret,
Are drawn upwards into the saffron night
By a saving strand of memory of beauty.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Deflation

And so they fall away, fall away:
The people.  For this fetid nation
Has forsaken them.  Has lost fair
Value, as well all enterprise; has
Lost sacred honor; squandered
Dignity.  Has become a burden;
A dead weight upon the World. 


We be but pawns to others' kings;
Owing debtors to greedy creditors.
Birch and cedar hide seas of iron
Under Siberia.  Power shifts north
To tundra regions, while peoples
Of the south steam in complacency.
America dies, a desert of indecency.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Bald Bankers

Bald bankers:


Savage still, this busy buzz of business
Has taken from you thuggery of youth.
No longer young, within your skulls pool
Awful spaces flooded in arcane symbols;
Seductive charts; algorithms of finance.


Bald bankers:


You've killed dreams of freedom dead,
Bald bankers; sucking sordid numbers
Quantified; bald bankers, blue screens
Blinking, blinding, stealing souls away.
Blood's been marked on heads today, 


Bald bankers.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Cuckoo

With every bow of a covered head,
With every muttered prayer, Man
Is marching on to his own oblivion.


Snow covered them and the cold.
In cliffs, in caves, formed in many
Ages past, are stored stone skulls;
Faces from the long-lost dead; fossils
Of forgotten ancestors:  before-men;
The predecessors of our new species.


Each skull portrays the hair-line cracks
Of limb-delivered violence; these blows
Delivered on them by their fellow men.


Evolution has not carried us so very far;
For blighted brood-parasitism of religions
Has cracked the consciences of far more
Than did flailing limbs of angry ancestors.
Bad beliefs have shouldered Compassion
And Reason outside reaches of the heart. 


Doctrine and rubric are the twin cancers
Consuming; tainted rivals and devourers,
Crowding chivalry's nest upon limb of life. 

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Flames

Pearl light peeks from backs of pink-flamed clouds.
Spindling rays, spewing forth from the setting sun
Meet flames from new suns, heated in burnt cities
Of the Earth; a roast-red angry answer of all flesh.


It begins this way and so it ends this way: unspoken;
The space of its stasis struck sideways, spirit leveled
Inside light and shadow. The World stuck suspended,
The soundless silence sighing, between lips and teeth.


States ought do and act better than the meanness
Of their peoples, of their smallest base depravities,
And not give stupidity reward by acknowledgment;
As stone silence is sufficient enough for ignorance.

Worth

One's worth is determined by the quality
Of one's enemies.  Meek and weak may
Have no foes, but have no honor either. 


Be rest assured:  Genius, when left alone
Shall grow, shall thrive.  The interference
of governments and of temples are soon
brushed aside; burned away by the dual
Suns of intelligence and by its companion:


Creation. 

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Earth

Drums of war when beaten so loud; so hard
Grounds reason down in the drowning song: 
All that lives dies and Life itself shall die too,
For that that's now will be as nothing soon.


The stupid and the sleazy obey the dictates
Of religion, while the wise and the just only
The stirrings and desires of their own good
Hearts:  Earth hangs in a balance between.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Summer

An astonishment is Man; what a wonder is he;
A compendium of confusion; a contradiction
Even to himself.  There's an argument that's
Contained within his every conflicting boast:
Rejection of that beast so center to our nature.


In Spring, Summer is a story waiting to be told.
The weeping cherry tree bursts with pink buds.
The death beat of winter's song is transformed.
Float away then those heavy cares of yesterday.
Bees of summer buzz at butterflies on the wing.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Parade

The palm upon the heart has shown to be
Fake reverie; remembrance of false past.


Bass thumps of heavy boots on macadam;
Thunder fall of high shoe on cobblestone;
Hammer of hooves of horses proceeding,
Slow-stepping the leaning, prancing flags
Flapping, flaming red, in the afternoon's
Boiling heat rising up the asphalt street. 


With each successive, occasional, stride,
Staggering, stumbling in remains of rags,
Flying flags, emblems of former nations;
In formation, skeletons to lock-step march
Together, mixed uniforms of former foes,
To unmarked graves, silent and forgotten. 


Among men there's natural ascendancy;
A refusal to be in-step: March with them.

WILLIAM O'CONNOR

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