For some reason whenever I want to illustrate a point about imagery I find myself tapping out a haiku or senryu. This would be a senryu since there’s nothing of nature or seasons illustrated.
embrace
warm skin slides between
shoulder blades and pulls to join
parted lips and tongues
Was just looking through some of the posts in a Poetry group and came across a ‘haiku’ titled “water”. It was basically a statement saying water is water, and isn’t water great? Nothing really visual or haikuy. Found myself responding to the post with my own “water”. The only way to explain what a haiku is to someone is to just make one.
water
beneath the full moon
darkness licks a thousand stones
between reflections
Some women don’t see men as people, but as crops to be harvested or weeds to be destroyed. They don’t see them as companions, partners or even equals, but as assets to be used and ultimately discarded. These are emotionally dangerous creatures who manipulate and undermine honest, loving men who would have done right by them if they didn’t turn out to be callous, backstabbing hos.
cash-crop
I am feeling pretty good about life. It’s odd. I guess once you get the knife twisted up in your guts a few times too many it begins to dawn on you that maybe it’s better not to give people knives, or your guts. This realization can be very freeing.
Emancipation
I guess I’ve gotten tired of sickles knives and daggers,
chucked about with nearly careless ease,
with all the wily wounds that women have to offer
to any fool who offers up his heart,
trusting like a lemming the old disproven notion
that every man must have a missing half.
I think I’ll just delight in moonlit walks and sunsets,
the playing of the wind in bamboo reeds.
I guess I’ve gotten tired of sickles knives and daggers,
the momentary love, the counterfeit devotion
that lures a man into a sense of calm,
trusting like a lemming the old disproven notion.
I suppose I’ll just enjoy my own good company
instead of putting up with all the grief,
with all the wily wounds that women have to offer
with every promise planted with a kiss,
with every tender touch and every supple motion
that lures a man into a sense of calm.
I find I much prefer my solitary freedom
to walking over eggshells field by field.
I guess I’ve gotten tired of sickles knives and daggers
and all the broad assortment, weapons of emotion
balanced on the fingertips of love
with every tender touch and every supple motion.
I imagine days are smoother without the crazy weather
that comes with intimate affinity,
with all the wily wounds that women have to offer
the sorry sap who seeks a loyal lover,
deluded by the dream of a lifelong soul connection
balanced on the fingertips of love.
I reckon now it’s time to meditate on vapors
rising from the stream of life, and breathe.
I guess I’ve gotten tired of sickles knives and daggers,
with all the wily wounds that women have to offer
as lightly as they offer their affection
to any fool who offers up his heart,
deluded by the dream of a lifelong soul connection,
that every man must have a missing half.
This will be the last hybridanelle, villanelle, or terzanelle I write for this project. I’ll be closing the project with a handful of terza rimas, probably more experimental than traditional. Then I can dive into my next project, which I’ve already been phasing into with the trisects.
Millions of years of biological evolution drives us; the mind rationalizes and justifies this compulsory insanity. Lucky is the soul who somehow finds he or she is at peace without the need of an idealized intimacy.
mirage
There is a little dirt road called Low Gap Road that winds into the hills west of Ukiah to the ocean. Not long after I moved into the Ukiah area to work for REBOL Technologies in ’99, I found myself exploring this road looking for a place pray.
prayer
Ever since I was a runaway, as I went through my various spiritual-religious phases, I would seek out remote places in the mountains to pray. Prayer has had many meanings to me throughout my life. It began with pleas for my safety and well-being and migrated steadily toward seeking out understanding, sanity, peace of mind, and stillness of spirit. Mixed throughout have been requests for others who have touched my life. Ever present has been a desire to seek out god’s will for me, and the power to carry that out—a lasting echo from my teen and adult exposure to 12-step rooms and precepts.
Throughout my life, while praying in the night, it has been rare that I would do so without seeing a shooting star. I can remember when this began. I was still 15, and not long on my own as a runaway. One night on the top of a mesa near Kingman, Arizona, I made ready to sleep and found myself completely overwhelmed by anxiety and hunger. It was cold, and through the little round breathing hole of my sleeping bag I peered up at the stars and cried, praying. The moment I told the stars that I just wanted to know that everything would somehow be okay, a star fell across the length of my field of vision. I can still remember the sudden calm that practically tingled in my limbs. And an instant faith. A faith I have never lost.
This is how my hilltop prayers began.
I had a friend who worked as the head librarian at Mendocino College, the community college just north of Ukiah, who was dying of colon cancer. She was a quiet yet powerful influence on my life, in ways I don’t quite understand, but in ways I can say with certainty inspired me to go the direction I went with studying and writing poetry long term.
One night at this place of prayer on Low Gap Road I asked for her to be healed, and just as I finished asking two shooting stars, bright with long arching trails, shot across the night just in front of me, horizon to horizon, one above the another. I must have misinterpreted this response because about a year later my friend lost her battle with the cancer. My own father’s death never struck me with such savage pangs of loss.
After her passing in 2002 I visited my place of prayer I think once more, and then all but forgot about it. And since then to now I have not sought out another place for prayer.
A few nights ago I remembered Low Gap Road, suddenly, as if a voice just whispered it into my thoughts. And I found myself filled with ambivalence at the thought of returning for a visit.
I decided to go. And once there just stood silent—for over an hour—playing my bansuri flute in the night. Finally I folded my arms across my chest and looked up at the night and found myself saying, “I guess I feel betrayed.” And went back to playing my flute.
A while later as I played, I turned to look west at the risen moon, and just then a shooting star fell toward the north.
I don’t claim to understand any of this. But this poem, my 23rd terzanelle, was inspired by my reflections on it all.
Sometimes when a kid runs away from the residential home for children I work at, I can’t help but be a little worried. Most of them are not capable of making healthy choices out there on their own, or of protecting themselves from the most dangerous of predators—the mammals that walk on two legs.
missing
what will become of you?
your meal-back waits silent
cold as the grave
three slices of turkey
industrial green beans
exhausted in a pile and
mashed potatoes
tipping from the edge
of the topmost slice
all soaked in brown gravy
glistening in a dull dim pool
from the styrofoam
at regular intervals
AWOL marks your absence
even your ghosts have gone
slithering off to whisper
doubt and foreboding
behind your mud brown eyes
the roads are long
the streets dusty with soot
tapped from the heals of fear
and predation
you never took that one slow breath
hands trembling eyes twitching
you never breathed down
into the heart of your anguish
giving it room to rise
into understanding
down the hall your room
gapes in the stillness
bed neatly made
writing desk arranged
the dorm radio outlined
in hushed gray hues
the city’s cracked walls
harbor a quiet will to
cull out the weakened
passing cars carry menace
sharp white smiles cheerful
with an unsettling calm
anticipating indulgence
your meal-back waits silent
at the edge of the office desk
on plastic wood veneer
across the narrow room
plastic fluffs the hollow
gray of a tin garbage can
and it too waits
for the nearly plastic cold
of your neglected dinner
My 11th trisect—And pure metaphor, apparently. Segment one depicts the word, or more specifically the morpheme. Segment two depicts the line, as in a line of poetry. And segment three depicts the process of writing poetry. Talk about abstract.
craft
rock
pressed in ancient beds of granite, slate and limestone,
latent meaning morphs through dreamless sleep,
eventually to break the rolling waves and rise
from out the heavy hollows of the deep.
eons steadily reveal
frameworks laid beneath the ground,
raw potentials long concealed.
rugged hands reflect on broken bits of earth,
weathered through millenniums of doubt,
and dimly sense potentials waiting undiscerned,
conceptions to be learned and reasoned out.
soon flames are tamed in hearthstone mounds,
grains are pounded into meal,
and slings are armed with small gray rounds.
artifacts
barrows seal the homes where bones return to dust;
dolmens house the disembodied dead—
expressions raised to honor dear departed blood,
conveyed throughout millenniums of dread.
boundaries birth a web of walls,
stretched throughout diverse terrain,
enclosing keeps and township halls.
hallowed chambers echo whispers, murmured rites.
columns vault gray shadows to a haze,
and effigies defy the cruelties of time
amid the slow decline of ancient ways.
castles rise on golden plains
and mountain palaces enthrall
ridge tops in the sunset’s wane.
trace
ages past are carved and mortared into place,
stacked against the ravages of wear,
impressions left to echo long forgotten days
across the centuries of grueling care.
quarries reach through hidden lodes
for raw materials to build
nascent hopes and strong abodes.
waters feed the ducts of resolute invention,
wind buffets walls of praise and grave regret,
towers guard their gates from sinister intention,
bridges keystone over streams and vales. and yet
each rigid monument of skill
brick by stone in time erodes,
erasing every act of will.
My 128th ghazal, inspired by a woman with deep brown eyes.
moods
a clarity settles deep in her soft amber eyes
and peace wells up from nearly fathomless eyes
adventure lures the heart to the mystery
of sidelong glances cast from her earthen eyes
imagination paves her path with promise
where patience lightly walks with brownstone eyes
hope found refuge under the feathery green
of one long look into her mahogany eyes
she cheers the sunbathed home of inspiration
with a glittering veneer of cherry-wood eyes
love tastes of strawberry kisses beneath dark curls
coated with the cream of her dark chocolate eyes
compassion sways against the sprawling skies
praying up to the stars with terrestrial eyes
Instead of qafiya, or that species of rhyme that occurs just before the radif (refrain), I used words loosely hyponymous with the color brown for an associative parallelism.
I had maybe five hours sleep over course of four days when I wrote this, and I had just come off a 20 minute break at work, which involved a fitful nap fraught with sleep paralysis and vivid “dreams” that I mistook for actual goings on. An interesting mix peculiar to the narcoleptic.
shimmer
footsteps fall
across scattered dreams
i hear your voice
but see no face
a radio drones
in a nearby half-lit room
a body stirs beneath
light brown covers
something moves
outside in the dark
creaking almost silent
above the ceiling
i try to ask your name
my lips won’t move
and my voice grants no expression
to the wind
A friend of mine, a scholar of Buddhism and traditional Chinese, has recently been talking about how ‘sunyata’ is grossly mistranslated into English and misunderstood in the West as ‘nothingness’, when the most accurate translation would be ‘evanescence’.
When he first mentioned this I thought to myself, “Well then, I guess that makes sense.” Everything about life and every moment has always seemed evaporative to me.
I didn’t quite know what the title of this would be when I started writing it, but about halfway through, ‘sunyata’ seemed like a perfect fit. Still feels like a perfect fit. So, my 23rd villanelle.
sunyata
fill with evanescent light
every momentary cell
coursed throughout imagined form
every vessel heart to limb
pulsing moments on to self
fill with evanescent light
illuminate each hidden fold
churning vapors through the soul
coursed throughout imagined form
every fiber bound to life
linking bone to skin be still
fill with evanescent light
elucidate this vital force
streaming like an endless swell
coursed throughout imagined form
every sorrow pain and fret
breathing mixed amid the silt
fill with evanescent light
coursed throughout imagined form
