“Some A-typical”

“Some A-typical”

 Some a-typical arises foisting tired but boisterous

Caveats, addenda, screaming anomalies and all hell

To pay for lack of any better thing to say; they spell

The hour, they cast the iron, they fire today’s’ preposterous

Prescient fears in plastic, in the force and thrust

Of what appears to move and yet is still, the well

Run dry, the will remains as the perfect dungeon, the knell

Of what the bell once toll must exorcise from former trust

And changes, oh-so-slightly this or that design,

That redefine the times and needs of those whose path is but a day,

Whose reach they say will last no longer than the torch will bear,

And no, nor longer than these golden laurels resist fatigue in metal there

Upon the brow or ancient logs and temple columns petrified

Upon a page deny the rites of Cæsar’s pyre to wash his sins away.

“A Single Tone”

A single tone, the elastic green or thin
Blue line of tomes and trilogies
Of joyous soliloquies
And what it means to breathe. A baby’s skin,
Yes. Thin, the moment’s mine, and from where I sit,
So’s the next and then the next,
And for a time I am the action and the text
For more than actors; multitudes may fit,
Choirs of spirits throughout the years
In what they do, or may accomplish,
What their open windows, what they wish,
Expressed in what they will and will not and what it is they fear,
At once the souls of children in embryonic features
Of worlds and what becomes of them: in fact I was their teacher.

“And What Is Selflessness?”

“And What Is Selflessness”

And what is selflessness if not what one
Is and sees fit to do as good as what it’s sown alone?
No encouragement distilled from boiling stones,
No obsequious fluid aplomb’s applause is wrung
From those who stand to fan the flames, no frowns
In nightly meretricious circus clowns that advertise
The wonders of themselves as holy spies
Whose close opinions eagerly set down
What is or is not righteous, whose voices through the prompters sound
Alarms, if not, their disappointment; their networks cheerfully announce
The bias of their purposes and in the end will pounce
On weaker minds, the likeness of themselves from tea and coffee grounds
And all to raise this holy man or that to seed opinion and its minions, feeders,
Of the put-your-hands-together gospel shouts as praises for their leaders, so…I think I’ll stir fry what I do tonight.
I want so much, and nothing in itself
Will do, but some specific combination felt
Somewhere back in 3/4 time, perhaps. a noxious numbing notion fights
For my attentions and I feel quite close to ripe for what may fall
A little off the screen and to the right, but not so fqr gone
That some sweet portion of the song
No longer speaks to me—a surprise, perhaps—if only I could find the ball
I lost―whatever that might be―and walk
Straight on without a thought to just how much
I could retain if I could reach some vagrant soul to touch
The thing, inhale the fragrance, strip the gears to all my faults
While I am oh-so-slow just now and running low on fumes.
But I’ve so few seeds left tonight to dwell on faulty memories and ordinary clues.

“He’s Competent Enough”

“He’s Competent Enough”

He’s competent enough,
His purposes, deception; to lure, to entice;
His blessings’ victims savour His advice;
His beauteous summons–roughly
Marked beyond a phrase; everywhere
A preposition–redundant, simple superstition,
Hired, inspired, peerless in its erudition.
His words herald neither faith nor certitude, declare
His recusal from all beginnings which
Have no memory to ends that
Bear no fruit. His tapestries, exquisite,
Hung like Grendel’s arm upon the great oak door, each brilliant stitch
Hangs limpid there, its stench a hint of  the silent letter of blasphemy,
And all that raises Heorot here where mortals live and death is immortality……There is the stain of waiting in the atrium
For what came roaring in the autumn’s leaves and days.
That novel not begun, anticipation of some new light at dawn, a matineé
Not yet here but in the fringes of winter’s deeper last opprobrium
From those he knows he must leave. Pencil in all weighty schemes
And actions on consignment, back orders, slight
Delays festooned with orderly progression. Flights
Booked months or weeks in arrears, and in his head dreams
Bathing freely in the vanilla images of the nightly moon’s thought
That soon he will be free. These, but only natural conclusions
In one so penultimately close to actual lines of light’s diffusion
Of some cosmic credit, the long ignored desire of eternal spring. Supine,
He lies here wondering just what the summer’s fuss was all about,
And now when all is almost said and done, at dawn the flame goes out.

Painting by John Howe

“She’d Doubted”

“She’d Doubted”

She’d doubted little but that she’d seen
The years erode her apathy; her reticence,
The lofty presage of an onslaught of age and common sense.
Few could guess, of course. They’d cauterized intentions
and but for the rising of the occasional dream
In time might well have known her fear but then she’d met herself
And found the chance encounter oddly pleasant.

He’s elevated loneliness–a badge of honour in youth–an essence
Among the many rites to be stacked neatly on the shelf,
And in time finds no lasting nights, no respites sealed; revealed prayer’s the thing
Retained between the shadows, stale, perhaps, at times like flowers
Pressed between a journal’s soulless leaves, natural powers
Collapsed within a hidden room where only sunbeams and dustbunnies sing
Anywhere but in the rain.

Banalities whispered endlessly, axioms, hesitation,
Then, between the beads, metered patience dwells to the side of resignation.
Patterns, tedious to the casual connoisseur of callow circuses,
Whose aunts and uncles–convalescent cynosures–apply the appliqué
That bests all daily bread but adds nothing to the liquor save signatures
That serve as ligatures and borders between circumstance
And disingenuous serendipity, floral blooms of in between,
And on the other side of propinquity and wider welding weeds
And creeping things visible for moments past the age of puberty. Seeds
Of adolescence are careless where they land, despondent with obscene
Displays of natural righteous rage at opportunities of eternity and propagation.

It is just so with common inmates as well those in military congregation:
Universal laws claim exclusive rights to the infinitive in subjugation
To principles set down by God-knows-what the conjugation.
We witness, then, in every accident a circumlocution of the spheres
What flowers, tadpoles, insects, and the whole of mankind fears.

“Elephantine”

“Elephantine”

Elephantine strides through memory
Anoint comforts when the mind is occupied
With choices on the breath and needs are satisfied
With little stimulation. Revise the inventory,
Raise the stakes in fractions, ignore the signatories,
Take a stand and ask yourself, what’s been petrified,
Where’s the fractal scrawled upon the walls so sanctified
From changes soldered to eternity? Inflammatory
Selfdom pacified, perhaps, but there is no closure found in rest
Nor in the restive inspiration; what dreams have forged flamingo
Bliss that soothes the buyer’s mind or softens in the seller’s tone,
The bias toward the natural final stop or just another philosopher’s stone?
Some random kiss that lasts a thousand seconds cannot stand the test,
And never mind the consequences, nor accents in the innuendo.

 

“Answers in the Tea-leaves”

“Answers in the Tea-leaves”

Answers in the tea-leaves, sheaves appear before the harvest
Is gathered; there within the dross, a silence brewed to solution.
Questions, masked, bitters in the waters provide ablutions
To the tongue; dissolved, a saviour moot with which to invest
In what must come when coincidence and will are spent.
And what of proceeds, pensions, dubious transactions
Boxed and packaged in the cards, admiring factions
That succumb to givens in the numbers of the deck? The rent
Is paid, the covenants lapsed, and here again,
The possibilities drown within themselves! When Vonnegut died
There came a deadly pause and then applause (denied
Of course, but heard!) from every semi-colon on the plains
of every page. “Just so,” the concourse wails, “What will you write?”
“With what ink,”‘s the reply, “and with which nib,
… and who’s the audience tonight?”

“I Am On or Off”

“I Am On or Off”

I am on or off with nothing in between
And as I speak with few, some, or not
At all, to crowds or to the wall; I’m caught
In queue to glimpse the minds seen hiding high above the catwalk, the means,
The glare of someone’s thoughtless headlamps along a cold deserted road, eyes
Ablaze, altogether missing in the sketch.
I’m on my way to Canaan Land or far beyond,
A prisoner to some casual frog in my own pond,
Declensions of a small plot of rooms stretch
Before me pleasingly. I have at once
Both everything and nothing worth the time
To move, uncertain velocities and straightened lines
Within the present augurs solids’ in a liquid balance. Suns
Aligned, I maintain the weight of fingers on the keys;
With so little depth in what I say, I am the simple universe at ease.

“She Wants To Write”

“She Wants To Write”

She wants to write; she struggles
With an angel, images are parboiled, ideas do not flow
At once and where she wants them. She demands to know
Just how it is that others write so freely, snuggle,
Fondle, knead words and sounds together,
Capture arias on napkins and motifs on the page;
Emanations of kinetic life on balconies of rage
And righteous indignation flaunts the comic flight of feathers
In outrageous colours never landing on igneous peaks
But forming xenoliths of grammar from the crystals of an age. Fear,
Perhaps. The answer for the muted mind lies somewhere near
A comic line of serendipity, anomalies of life: some there are who speak
In tragic eulogies, they place the goddess upright on the half shell;
her beauty swells―
The curse of fishermen and saints―
and some are simple poems in themselves.

”The Sum”

“The Sum”

The sum of yeasts expand the dregs of moments in the mould
Of images to come, some of use, most are not and so the breeze
In gentleness recalls; the times are short; the fee,
What stands stolid in the stamen that cannot yet unfold.
But, at so great a price, nothing enters, nothing leaves this place; nothing’s free and yet there is no looting,  no Granny Weatherall
To fear that in the groaning, smoothly flowing
Movement, here to there, both fruit and flower never knowing
Unity of purpose, no consummation in the delicacy
of dwelling too long on what must be
A glory for the anther in the night,
auspicate in favour of shadows of their mutual fate
While a lighted path from here to there spells a restive, wearied state
In hours―minutes and seconds, really―and the weighty knowledge
that what augurs in the grace of beauty comes too late,
“. . .And I’ll be going, now!” The pistil whispers this. “I am too late!”
The stigma augments as the fruit becomes too ripe,
and aspirations of eternity expose their flaws
In auroras and rainbows as substances within themselves
one and all abandon fleeting glory in the name of natural laws.

—Once

” Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo..”

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T.S. Eliot
[1888-1965]