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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.