“Abuses of the Flax Seed”

“Abuses of the Flax Seed”

Abuses of the flax seed, innocence in fruits
To sooth the stomach, clothe the back
And something close to comfort in the haystack
Comes to mind to suite
The times while I lie wasted.
I am in need of rest from all I have,
A kind of promissory ointment, beyond salacious salves
To moisten gross reliefs from what I’ve tasted.
Here it comes, then, repetition once
Too often off the mark by widths
Of little more than flaxen hairs. Maudlin myths
Give rise to hopes that round circumferences
Of any given globe lie peace and wisdoms
Enough to neutralize desire and indecision.

“Procrastination’s Victims”

Procrastination’s victims centre on the Why?
Infinities bury actions in prolixity:
The finite Who? spawns urgency
That as the application of a spice, advises
Seconds to become minutes in the hours of When? fired by
The sparks of What? and Where? and in emergency
Stabilized in the clouds of How? Ingredients brew exigency
In the Milky Way to seal the recipe that makes the whole thing fly.
As balances are sabotaged, the thought, the contemplated action
Grows moot in direct proportion to ladybugs of quality
And quantity amassed by distraction. The antidote, antipathy
To all those eyes; the override of satisfaction
In collusion with fervour for sugarplums and fairies; the lethal kiss
Of what seems to be in favour of exactly what it is.

“I Am No Other”

“I Am No Other”

I am no other, at once alone
A sea too vast, a cloud too bold
For liking what I feel. I’m told
Too much. Natural clones
Are strewn too close to shore and all in all
Too great a yield for one man’s soul
To taste while others merely marvel; still they’ve grown so old.
My own heeds nothing further than the plaintiff’s call
As I am here to witness what is fit and what’s amiss, nothing more,
No deeper core.  Immersed, stopped unawares, amazed at sights
Awash in waste and thoughtless wanderlust in flight
From all I’ve seen in just as many days as I ignore
The splendor in it all. I seine the inlet’s sound to seize
a hapless shrimp, a starfish, then again a mussel;
But, no! Another useless pearl whose oyster is deceased.

“They Spiral Out of Control”

They spiral out of control from coffers spun from circuit spools;
Images of speed spin webs of egregious debt beyond the means
Of organic opulence in public nothings; obscenities gleam,
Gratuities scream for leverage and credit in psalmistries of fools
And idol vendors’ biases. They feed on repetitious runes
And civic machinations, seizures of domain and sovereignty alike, slide
Markets and the rule of law in rubrics rank in rows of 1′s and 0′s. Abide
Beyond the codex then and close the open yaw. Computer litanies in rooms
Are daily sabotaged by Trojans soaked in scripts that rake the silvered sliver
Signals on the mountain noting slightest change to encourage evanescence.
Prolixity is the key to programmes obsolete and in arrears in advance,
Entitlements among the fêted calves and levied bank accounts
and corporations that deliver
All night long at half the cost of virtual holocausts
and ritual endlessness in angst in single souls:
They’ll not abate this side of cancer,
nor speculate beyond what they’ve been sold.

“Something Close”

Something close to life’s desserts
contains a draught of loss in all that glory;
after longing, we reign for precious seconds
before the here evaporates like chocolate mousse,
delightful, possibly salacious; addictive, yes, but gone
Nonetheless. Perhaps it’s age that solidifies liquidities in this;
perhaps coagulation with having endured just so much conjugation, so many
strident verbs seduced from the indicative to the vagaries of subjunctive
certain obscurity. Still certitude persists and grows with time.
The only antidote to the common predicate is to lose the subject
and assume it’s there just as surely as for every never
sits an always, with its sibling, ever, within the text
we’re sure to draw necessity, the sign
of righteous passage illuminating this world faithfully to the Next.

“The Wager”

“The Wager”

The wager of the least are promises
Of the best. The monoliths of reason are quantity
And quality perceived, the indicative of possibilities
In either mode weighed in equity and thus apprised.
The logic of the thing promotes the certainty of hope–
The life blood of change–and nothing in this world escapes
The kinetic causal catalyst’s craft upward or downward. Scrape
The bottom and the top begins its messianic anthem; cope
With transformation and in the fray, a certain moderation
Comes to mind, a casual but determined glance at maps
From here to there and back again. The Sadrat?
The siren’s illusion that what it seems, it is: confusion
Of the senses breeds capitulation to the daily run:
If these precious seconds lie, so, too, the sun.

“He Chose What Homer Chose”

William Shakespeare
[23 April 1564 - 23 April 1616}

Today marks the Anniversary of the Birth of Shakespeare 447 years ago, and, according to what records we may or may not have, it also marks the Anniversary of the Passing of the Bard 395 years ago. The general facts concerning William Shakespeare support the idea that he was born and died on the same day. In honour of the occasion, of course, there is a repeat of a posting some time ago:

"He Chose What Homer Chose"

He chose what Homer chose; the place,
The measured lisp of every school boy; the time, eternity;
The hour, the glory of the present tense, the panoply
Of stars above the placeless with the taste
Of honeys made pedestrian, obscured by tongues, the paste
Left finite and sour from beyond divinity and the bower of worship--the realities
Of man, the Son of Man, the seat of constancy is faithlessness in cold identities
Obscured beyond the reach of all--
the trial of facelessness becomes their saving grace.
Who knew the eyes of John or Peter, Paul,
or the meek and more obscure Bartholomew
But that the rumours flew and vacancies were filled, their names
Now everywhere and nowhere is it written
How the Christ appeared, or how their God had smitten
What was left of their disguises, appetites and virtues notwithstanding crude
And morbid songs of their demise,

...and cannonlore for all that glory in the flames.

"The past cannot be cured."

--Queen Elizabeth I
[7 September 1533 - 24 March 1603]

“The Cart”

The cart before the horse; body
Trumps the spirit; means before
The end; awards usurp the door
Of merit; the moon, the copyright of the sun; tawdry
Spectacles before what’s reckoned shoddy
Experience in the consumption of a single afternoon on the floor
Of oceans, Heorot’s secret songs, the sirens to summits in the ancient core
Of Wall Street. Plaintive chants and bawdy
Mantras roaring from the musk-filled halls of hoary Aryan trolls,
“If that then this and proclivities toward the silver screen.
Given choice, then, who will choose
The wizened oak, the gnarled Baobab, the obscure purview
Of shades that people Persephone’s garden, the terpsichorean dream
Before the glory of the road and all parts in between?

“None of This Tonight”

“None of This Tonight”

None of this tonight; cinders touch her cheek–blood red rosebuds–
The entourage of too much time to sit and think.
Simple needs will reign at dusk: the ashes in the sink;
The ghost of Billie Holiday crouched and scowling at the fireplace, the cud
Of herbivores that cherish whatever they can find that grows; a flood
Of tears that anything so common as the turning of a page, the highjinks
Of a cat who stares intently at some thesis on the ceiling and does not blink,
A dog who buries his booty where there is no dirt, the worn path of her only rug,
As all inclinations call her to a place she does not care to go; “Gone,”
The message says, and from that instant nothing further rules within her.
So many spent choices, petulant reticence, and pride
Revealed in lunar strokes across the bedroom wall that glide
As though the bravado of adagios, grace notes, ancient airs and songs
Of yesterday payed out in twilight grays, the future’s early morning’s blur.

“They Scrutinise”

They scrutinise the inner circle, seconds closer to the sun;
They tether vague fancies in what they see.
The goal, the Holy Mountain; the seed of moonbeams,
Sentimental grace notes in devotions on the run,
And as so much depends upon the multitudes, the hours in the flight,
The centre stage, the spotlight, so little alters the day’s applause,
The algorithms generously applied to the phrase or clause
Voiced without a thought to virtue, voids, or to the rites
Of solipsism in the critical mass, the accidental moment
Seen as just another occasional comma with little heed to order in a full stop.
I see them, I speak with them; I hear their thoughts,
Their questions earmarked from time to time–no need for comment
How much less provide a flint for yet another conflagration, yet another guess
Demanding fuel for candidates greater than the sun, never more, never less.