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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Rebellion

The cause is great and the hour late.
Disappearing light, severed fraction
From the day, slides to early evening
With nothing done but talk and delay.


Rough cut are the gardens of stone;
Graves of rebels long gone to bones.
Rise up you rebel dead, as nothing of
Life so honors you as having well left.

Slavery

To raise the head and not to bend the knee
Gives each reason for existence of humanity.
Squeezed on every side by the safe slavery 
Of repetition, of motions endless iteration;
Eyes are lowered and never might gaze up.

Where are gone the dreams of yester year;
The hopes that filled young heads with plans
And gave purpose to rising in the mornings?
Mourn for the dying of mirth; for early demise
Of laughter.  Chains bind us to empty career.

What We've Be-Come

Everything the same and nothing different,
We waste our days in so many ways.
The clock of life ticks past the hour
And soon comes upon the midnight
Of mortality; the many enchantments
Of existence playing out their tunes.


With half of its people paying full price
For the other half, no nation can survive.
Vented life, grazing volcanoes of the sea,
Does more work than all the bureaucracies
Of governments and industries combined.
To them we've handed our liberty and lives. 

Our Selves Alone

Night flight of the moon, the somber sun
Is down and gone and only you remain.


Wild are the ways of the sovereign few
For a socialist sun has scorched the last
Vestiges left of our shrunken liberties.


Scared, those small senators of servility,
Silent as lizards under a noon day sun,
Voted away the hopes, the dreams,
The rights and futures of posterity.


Abandoned, now relying upon ourselves
Alone, we share a republic of the moon.

Hail

Black banded sky in brood-broken storm
Heaves thin air in thick hale-stones of ice.
Anger rides on slamming fletch-et stones;
Sharp, jagged, not fully formed, falling.


Such solemnity is made of banal sunsets,
Heavy in coruscating colors, thick in hue;
But here is slim nature, howling and loud,
Stating: here I stand and so fear my hail.

Truce

There is an armistice in art
Protecting they that make it.
Talent has tendency to touch
Even those who, with enmity,
Berate the others unlike them
For being so different; for not
Being themselves. And natural
As this hate is, art conquers all.

Then

Not light, but a before-light,
A black presence, pervades
The void.  Then a softness
In that darkness spirals out
And fills the dark with deeper
Hues, a black upon a black.


Spun, twisted into swirls,
Dark divides from dark
Making stars and worlds.
Into these worlds comes
Life, blooming to thought.
After thought, what then?

Leaves

It begins with trees broken into lines and planes
Stretched thin in winter's stubborn trigonometry.


Lines that are the signatures of weariness.
Planes that are bare scratches of scarcity.


For this is those trees hungry against a snow-filled sky.

Sleep

The moon, bitten crescent of silver,
Hangs silent in a secret sky of night.


Slowly the stars are moving in the slurry
Of the heavens shedding their dimpled lights
Down upon the dowsing bedsheets of sleep.


The gravity of the day's care is suspended
So we may walk in the sunshine of a dream.

What are we but a waking dream, a dream
That dreams itself into the world, and then,
Suddenly leaves it; gone to a home of sleep.

Night-Light

In the late night more hard rain is come again.
Shade pulled down upon the window pane,
Slapping wind cascades to a roaring thunder.


The black sun of mourning rises with that rain;
Rays, so cold from its burning, this slanting rain,
Heard drumming, drumming the window pane.


A twisted darkness wrung in hammering pain;
Long evenings spent alone listening to rain;
Night-light, sole companion, sharing the shame.

The Isles

Thousands fell then.  More thousands start to flee
The stars falling from the sky, thunderbolts of rock.


What compounds the cries of the dying is their anger;
Remorse at having taken no action, at ignoring warning.


That world falls away, dissolved into a dream of destruction;
The efforts of millenniums disappeared in dusts of desolation.


All that remains from the shards of civilization are our stories;
Tales told in verse of The Coming, crossing seas to The Isles.

Pagan

Sweet revenge is it to usurp;
To use, the imposed language
Of an oppressor so as to best him;
To prove the falseness of his claim.


When their songs got worse, so did
The people; these small-minded men,
Saluters of flags and rags. They who took
Our speech from us perverted our religion.


Those that crab sideways through their lives;
Their souls as dark and somber as their clothes,
Have forgotten us but we have not forgotten them.
Our time has come; for we, at long last, are awake.

The Green Man

The Wearing of the Green.

Ethics are like clothes.
If you can't live in them;
If you can't sleep in them;
If you can't fight in them,
Don't wear them: DagDa.

Twilight

Strange is the sizing of the setting Sun.
Blooming, swelling, great bellied beast;
Pregnant in its slinking, sliding decline.


Even when gone, its image is left
Seared on the eye; the negative
Of light, a burning ball of blurring
Blue, where before was scarlet.


In the twilight of the aging mind,
Dwindling in each passing sunset,
Strong afterimages still remain.

Release

Were we not pursued by ghosts;
Hunted, haunted, by our past;
Kept handcuffed  by memory,
We could accomplish anything.


Tethered to this mundane world;
Wings clipped by ten thousand
Taxing regulations to prevent
Our soaring flight to freedom,


We lose the gloss of luster and
Decay.  What's left for us to see
Are bars that bind this prison;
Not the space that lies beyond.


As birds in cages shall we sing
Of lost liberties and the theft
Of all aspiration. Nothing now
Is left but a waiting for release:


To fly.  

Spring to Space

Enough of weary winter, bring us warm Sun.


Some small movement, the slightest quiver,
Gives notice of changes still yet to come.


We come to heaven not ourselves alone;
But in the company of many multitudes.


Those who've gone before, ghosts of ancestors
Past, pursue us to assure us, in this our dream


To vault into the void; to spring into space.


Man wasn't meant to live here cramped
Upon the thin skin of one single planet;


But to explore and to seek unborn worlds.

Bealtaine

Art is sordid life's solitary defense.
Nature survives through a suicide;
By it's own occasional self-murder.

They who carry fire in their hearts
Most often bring it far in the dark,
Stolen away from suspicious eyes.

Ashes from deep memories, stirred
To glow by remembrance of beauty;
Embers kindled by the spark of Art:

Bealtaine. 

Query

The easy answer; the facile response
Shall not suffice.  For, see the fate
Fickle destiny has forced upon us.


Those who lack all magic prosper
While they of genius subsist
Abjectly in servile poverty.


The wise are vilified while witless,
Shallow fools are made celebrities;
Their sarcasm is considered sense.


The worse have the most children.
The best are barren and childless.
The world is filled with mediocrity.


That we should have come to this;
We who had such hope when young;
Now fallen down to such complacency,
Sits on us: condemnation and disgrace.

Memory

A pause and then a sigh and suddenly
Day changes to a melody of night.
The saffron sheen of streetlights
Flood amber into alleys of the city.

Ambient hues; hints of blue at corners
Color fast-fading musk of twilight balm
With after-images of this red sunset:
Evening submerges in turquoise night.

Unknowing

Dark, dank and desolate is the swamp of uncertainty.
It seems but shadows may enter
Into this valley of despondency.


Voices lifted from this abyss implore for clemency.
For surcease from the suffering;
From the terror of unknowing. 

They sink in sloth.  A slave in chains of gold is still a slave.
For their souls were won by ease;
Not strife.  Worn down by servile bow.

They practiced no art save that of careful conformity.
For this they were condemned
Never to stand in the glory of the sun;


To gaze forever forlorn at a cloud before the moon.

Being

Through Me pours life.


Neither concealed nor hidden
But in plain sight
Is emergence of existence.


Existence is.  It struggles
Not to Be.  It is revealed
In the standing light of noon.


Not birth; not death, can stop
Opening of this flower.
Womb; cause of all that is:


The She. 

Death

In silence does the hammer of the heart skip pounding.
To ghosts we ourselves must still appear as ghosts,
Spirits distraught, direction-less and lost.


Conceived in lust and born in error,
Humanity could hardly hope for eternity.
That which we are; we are
Although aspiring to angelic height.


That which we would be; that which
We would have been, is done; was
Finished with our end.  And yet


Nothing in our lives so honors us
As this acceptance of that fate
Which lies ahead for all those
Who are made of flesh:


Death.

Illusion

The edge of time cuts a fine line
Between what was and what will be
And we who believe that we be free
Are caged in the prison of the present
Now.

Dawn

Slow and slow a gradual music grows.
Blades of leaves lean towards their sun.
Dew melts in sadness for its lost moon.
Morning.

Wrath

Savage is the heart of man and savage too his temper.
Cold to the bone is the anger that steels his head;
The hatred that sweeps him on to the whirlpool
Of revenge.

Regret

Many a smile hides a tear.


Night winds blow and the
Moon's glow grows cold
In the dim light of memory.


That which was said can't
Be unsaid.  That which was
Spoken cannot be took back.


The trees of discourse have
Shook their branches and 
Freed themselves of leaves.


A silence has descended;
A long sleep deep and sad.
A snow has covered hope.


And many a smile hides a tear.

Voice

To touch at a distance
Is the invention; the magic
Of language.

That which we cannot see
We can imagine.

And though we die,
We die knowing that
Those long after us

Can still be touched;
Can still be embraced
By our inscribed words.

This we invented: we poets
And it is our lasting glory.

Clerisy

These that are clad in black
Are the slavers of men's souls.

The minds of men are fortresses
Whose secrets are solely unlocked
By keys of knowledge and of power.

Both of which those in black lack
As they gave reason and emotion
To servitude of non-existent gods.

For only through study of Nature
Can such forced entry be achieved.

Dominion

There is dominion in nature
Which man seeks to diminish.

A scepter is hidden in evolution
And only a revolution can take it.

Who shall conquer then?  Who shall win
This war for dominance?  This great revolt?

Rebels to the last are we, and it's in our dying
A new and better race of men shall come to be.

Rowing to God

I am I.

And what I am is who I am;
Not another's avatar or fantasy; but me.

The world survives without any knowledge of me
And I survive with little knowledge of it.

Were it to know me, the world would have advantage over me.
But it does not know my name and it shall never will; for

I am I.