“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

“Who Tolerates the Touch”

Who tolerates the touch of palm and fingers
Triggers of the tympanum’s lover’s voice,
The involuntary arch of eyebrows, that choice
Of recognition dresses doubt that lingers
Yes a while on what once was until it reconfigures
Long enough to serve the summons, reaction’s invoice,
Undesired but necessarily what is required; a void
Is not an option to the unbelieving mind. Ligatures
Every particle seeks are sealed with audience, weight,
And purpose in immortal cycles that begin and end
In memory, its regeneration suspends
Its own belief and use within its measured time.
For him who wills cannot resist nor hesitate.

“Just Another Evening’s Fast”

Just another evening’s fast,
By chance, a simple dinner, happenstance within the seams
And lining of sidling sibling intercourse that satisfies or possibly redeems
The thing that leaves its fossils free for future scavengers, no past
To contemplate, a coroner’s delight from the proceeds of a centrifuge.
Cleverness of movement mounts in moments somehow cleft
And processed as lesions in the lard of what’s been left
To marinate or age. Discharge, wastes from the deluge
Along the banquet boards, but dammed provide
A watershed, the simple servant to all cardinal sins
To celebrate with sufficient zeal a subtrahend
That will not be outgrown nor decompose and cannot break its stride
With backdoor vipers or ill-used garden snakes. At harm’s length
Visitations of the witnesses can only grow in strength.
And in the wake of rampant spending never-ending apostrophes
Display en masse in parliaments and congresses the celebrants
Of leisure indiscretion and rhymed
across the continents to vindicate the sycophants
That feed on chaff and tares and festering entropic
Taste. The eyes and ears devour content until the alloys
Reduce the whole by more than mere attrition: cues, inordinate;
Views, the outrageous comedy of news of Abel’s subordinate
To Cain’s disorderly conduct. Ephemeral sensations void
All issues in the ideology; the syncope
Will do while conflict sounds so much more human,
Don’t you think, or do you really trust a politician, man or woman
Whose distinction lies in dropping g’s? Possibly, or maybe
Not, but give us rolled up sleeves and no tie, please!
The tissues, lies, of course!but please. No more peace.

“The Pilot’s Flame”

The pilot’s flame and ambergris, fire and smoke, these privy orizons
As dews appear upon the sight of buds along an early midsummer’s talk
In the blind behind the backfields; still there is the chill,
a brief Nebraska morning’s walk
Through the shadows’ tides abiding shallows
in the breath of dawn; the garden
Path because we share so little
of the masters’ growth in blossoms’ bargains’
Fruits within us both and share with none, no idle chatter,
indeed a pittance of a fee for angels; pillars, cornstalks,
Arm in arm—so much can lead the way to joy within a cosmic room—locked
To one to yet another and another in the repetitious staid negotiation
of noxious clouds and dark but sterile clods, the venal vain
Attempt to mask indignity in stride until desire’s destination’s
Reached—we know by stealth to find a symmetry in solutions,
Solace in respite from the others at the solstice
of that brief but potent spot,
The proper pole to pierce the continent,
a place we’ve never seen and always sought.
I need nothing more to see your face, to read your book,
to savour proctors for procrastination
For the sake of pleasures found in greater prisms
for a lighter thought than pure imagination.

…a revision of the poem…”Swept Aside”

…a revision of the poem…

“Swept Aside”

Swept aside, all moments and celestial mementos collide
And waste no never-mind on credence and retention
In the wake of greater cosmic rinds and supine celestial reflection.
Mortality by definition lies; not so through what histories imply
But in the daily interaction of missives from the Goal
And penultimate ilunga * of the Source or
Sanctions of interaction in the triumphant triad of the coarsest
Ores of time, of space, and all that matters. Time, the cosmic linen folds
Of space and active order; space, the theatre of experience at the heart
Of the observer; matter, but an audience, a phenomena in passive
Active shadows of Creation and its nemesis. Simplicity is massive,
Complexity but a word; a question’s languages are art
And science while the answers form the pathos and the abstract.
What is more pathetic than to be and yet be nothing in the act?
Simplicity in the classic form requires
The prefects of a perfect vacuum
Combined in such a way as compliments the acumen
Of a strident meme, the jealous zeitgeist, tests that to the whole inspire
An urgent need to pause, to linger over bodies no longer really there,
A little more than a half a generation’s substance in a given time.
So granted this, so beautifully and tragically resigned,
Aloud comes the elegies of episodes to “Move along!”or “Retire!”
With such a cry inscribed, there was and always is
A here and there in rapid profit worshipped, fierce
As gallstones of desperation: “This, our chosen age, rehearsed
Upon a cross of memories little more than lyrics of an ancient tryst!”
And, equally, the many crowned and catalogued, remain aloof
Through symmetries of perfection in a sacred dynasty of embroidered truth.

*The word is ilunga, from the Bantu language of Tshiluba, and means a person ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.

When there is this, that is.
With the arising of this, that arises.
When this is not, neither is that.
With the cessation of this, that ceases.

His Holiness The Buddha

“Too Cynical for a Child”

“Too Cynical for a Child”

Too cynical for a child, too innocent for a man,
But then, what did you expect? I asked
Enough in all the opening years to empty the trash
And throw out the sash of operations in the half-light; I ran
From the womb when it was required. I am
An eternity born in and out of time, the last,
The penultimate of a line that survives–the cast,
My mother’s hopes, my father’s hand–
Beyond all thoughts of redress or retribution.
Within their sometime august and rhyming rôles,
The median in ancient paradigms and genes
Has faithfully rewarded patents in a pre-recorded dream
Of glory in the seeds but with a difference, a resurrection
Common to the seasons, divinely timed within my soul.

“Two of Them”

Two of them apprised will rise while only one survives;
The first, a germ like any other, in the second,
Excellence as loving makes it so. She reckons
Life in paragraphs and chapters, derives
Pleasure in the phrase, itself–in leisure lies
The notion of posterity, the fecund
Last and lonely station of a book—the legend
More important than the fact, the spies
Than what is spied upon. Where there are three
The Chinese say, some one of them must be a teacher.
Let both in compromise find refuge in the third
That one may truly love, the other form the words
Recording signs and sighs of mystery
And ritual and yet another sermon for the preacher.

—Once

 

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

Gabriel José de la Concordia Garcia Márquez [1927 -- ]
Love in the Time of Cholera

“Concessions”

Concessions, yes; hairy clouds and rains can comfort hearts
Within the sheltered warmth

and welcome of my own bed.
I imagine angels on the pillow

where I lay my head,
And when I pray I am at Temple,

nightly sanctuary of the arts
Within my head as when I read or hear

within tales and fables
Running rampant through that vapid place

where hues and sounds abound
But are not seen or heard; choirs in the void,

not a hint of laughter round
The workman’s bench, the manicured down

of gardens or at the table.
Yes! One day’s maintains bear no obvious hint of perseverance,
No consolation for the years,

no respite from the constant consequence
Of experience in real fears. Vision simply comes to me,

enabled,
Ready made. Who I am to speak?

With whom am I that am alone? I ignore
The whole vicarious mirage as I lay here but for a superficial middling time,

And here with me is what never is

and nothing more.

“Did You Think…?”

Did you think it pays to read between the Holy Lines
That spoke with outward-bound and bonded particulars and austerity
In eloquence to which the gray-scale decibels of earthbound clarity
Speak volumes if only to the ears of dogs or elephants; defined
Somewhere between the womb and coffin, clearly signed
Within the matrix, nothing; to all else
exquisite in the melody of choice, metonymy
In fear, perhaps, but action put to wind chimes, pure and unrefined divinity
To souls of children and the penitent in prayer, yet the object undefined?
Within composts of saints and poets supernal senses  are recused, none refused, and far beyond, their Prophets,
Hounded and reviled within their own brief imprisoned span,
The single particle becomes the raging legion
in cycles newly framed in paradigms
So far from what was or seemed to be convenient both to litigants and followers,
All concave mirrors turned to Truth. Their attentions birth
as the premature in understanding puts the match
to kindling fires of corruption in the land.

…Yes; even the word holds sway in beauty just as be and come and go as always in concert with all beauteous words seem to hold some affinity to one another that begs for more; it is the glory of affirmation; negation is its inverse holding fast to less as nothing seducing while it shuns to die as though to love is somehow related to a force of hatred amongst the other sovereignties  and prerogatives of antithesis, and, while integral to physical existence, are nevertheless peculiar to this world only and can draw no conclusion beyond the present natural illusions of form. Such fellowship is its own demise as is all that occurs in the material universe.

“The Midnight Hymn”

Friedrich Nietzsche
[ 1844 A.D. - 1910 A.D.]

Oh man!  Take heed!
What does the deep midnight say?
I slept!
I have awakened from a deep dream.

The world is deep.
And deeper than the day remembers.
Deep is its suffering.

Joy is deeper yet than heartache!

Suffering speaks:  Begone!

All joys want eternity,
Want deep, deep eternity.