“Coup de grâce”

“Coup de grâce”

Coup de grâce, or a question’s simply put:
Devour paradise in this briefest breeze, or live within
The pale and maelström that penetrates a lifetime. Phrases, phases in the winds
Of light are bloated fires jilted, plundered truths, these the soot
And garnish of vanities enjoyed as spice, meant to jolt,
To jumpstart, to reinforce the bottom line–shortcuts
In weathered notions fully fleshed, fruition’s gains–neat, but
Missing something in the translation. Transition, reverend folks,
The longer, sweeter tide of thought stretched taut within me
Sees no sweet nothings, no grace notes breathing in or out
Of line with those who practice only basic chords, and yearn to jump and shout.
Rest, then, and put it to the test. Know this, attend! Simplistic as it seems
The truth will out soon enough. Within the endgame happiness
Enjoys dominion in this world, it’s true, but joy ascends the Next.

” Striking Images “

“Striking Images”

Striking images pass muster swiftly at evensong, prehensile joys recall that
Memories linger as cinders, shadows, sorrows of the previous, which is to say
That what begins in joy must have an end. Would that the daily execution’s stay
Made sense beyond the dream, the diagram of calculated error in the flat
Of one man’s palm so that intrinsic to the finest fabric’s slightest flaw, within
The stitch’s realm materials might negotiate what only an apostrophe
Can define in this fine weave-space or that sublimity of tapestry;
Skeins and lots, souls and families suffice but to begin
Again or with not even common license elude what will or will not last.
Sadly, even they who know themselves sit quietly as accidents upon the shore
Of evermore and know forever that what they know they only borrow.
So, too, it seems for fireflies and dragonflies worn
Loosely by horizons of a world so few if any ever see. They merely cast
Aspersions for the dead and doubtless: Ask them, then, who folds the seas
And what will be, and what they find so wondrous in eternities.

“Eliminate Dissatisfactions”

“Eliminate Dissatisfactions “

Eliminate dissatifactions in the path and grasp
A moment’s truce; given’s celebrate the certainties. Providence and proclivities
Provide a shroud to glory in memorials. Revision lines the summer’s festivities,
Dilute predilections and call it ever autumn; and, as the ever-present asp
Among the figs will play its rôle, so, too,  the ass will have his tour de force.
But, ponder: dichotomies are means and never ends for pure and simple
Truths against the backdrop of change, reactions robed in dangling participles
Camouflage themselves as fortune and pollute the soul in doldrums in the course
Last-ditch hopes for busy minds for recipes for the common pundits thought.
Secluded in the country”s veins seasons’ haloed garish city lights
Are ceilings formed of stars immune from politicians in their circus tights.
Our Ferdinand will not be compromised by matadors who line the Spanish streets, nor did Socrates lay down his last drachma for one more round brought
Low in mass hysteria while sitting bulls emasculate
their sacred bovine rites in corrals designed for vicious virtual gridlock.
No, both prefer to smell the flowers, graze bucolic fields, and tend the herd,
their rule, anointed bulls for all the cows within their sheltered stock.Eliminate redaction of glyphs and scrolls, runes annotating greater lesser conduits and ask
Who, then, it might have been who wrote the given’s, the certainties;
Who salutes entitlements and rites, and myriad  raucous destinies
Of personal perception that turn all certitude to doubt? The ever-present mass
 For figs will play its rôle, of course,
But, ponder and reflect on simple
Souls! Against the grain and contrary to all public thought and principles,
What we call fortune does not favour the cheap, the shoddy, the coarse
And rampant office and  audience of jaded channels caught
Rather in the main away from city lights
And all the progeny of  media’s circuitous flight
Through superstitious commercial  margins fraught
With cold corrosive gout. Of course  the many will provide the locomotion
And the force of mighty change howbeit  living souls require no self-promotion.

“They Address Themselves”

“They Address Themselves”

They address themselves—their colours, fear and greed—
In grand default, in arbitraries, red, white, and blue,
And tributaries of their most great trepidation; it’s in the glue
That holds all expectant thralls in line, the call of need,
Acute in desperation, destiny in denial, and the expedient seed
Of Cain’s bright logic sprinkled liberally through each faithless day. The crude
Supposal of some slight spark in God’s oversight spawns rude
Reactions in petulance and ingratitude that feeds
Itself upon the notion that once created, “`twere no request
Of ours for breath or life,” and ërgo ours to burn, ours by right
To tax in proceeds, harvest excess and forget the usury of the loan
the blatant requisite of all demands, the values of a single moan
In chorus.  Worship cause, deny effect,and give them straw to bind their deficits
–We’ll rise again; we’ll perogue the day and place it on the shelf;
we’ll suspend the right another night and no one need attack the nation; America’s determined from within its destiny’s to turn the gun upon itself.

“They’d Rather Not Say”

“They’d Rather Not Say”

They’d rather not say the words: wisdom ploughs it under. Seeds are sown,
Yes, stranded, left behind, perhaps a new game, but certified survival
And uncertainty are symbiotic, the very crown of firsts and lasts. Revival
Always promised, tacit eternity denied and they’ll have you know
The rule of mandatory obstacles, and while meretricious ulcers grow
In time, no matter in what quarterly, and we all know their names. Denial
Only feeds the bonfire of restless shibboleths while the trial’s
Milked for maximum mileage, the drum rolls,
Please! and applause announce the latest bon mot
To bounce some sweet new version of what seems viable
As a phatic public nod to possibilities, probabilities, and pliable
Hopes for the working man; to the sturgeon, roe; to the cock, his crow.
The rhetoric is endless, the president’s term “to be determined…soon!”
Elections come and go, of course,…but there’s that elephant in the room…

“Leave Me?”

“Leaving?”

Leaving? His, the dreams? His, these choice and tender tones, all
Too little too late for those who will be sooner told what is
By those who cannot hear His melody, His
Several Announcements, yes! The heart turns not to the call
For walls but to creation in itself, as scribbled on the slates
Signed upon the obverse in sundry  geometric redundancy. Obliquely seen
We spy the models, traces, outlines, former dispensations, the obscene
Graffiti of the worldly scribbled in  a clay-bound plate.
This? Not He in This, no! but That; the earth
Born in caul, the offal left, his mother’s goal is realised, her manifesto declared.
The promise of penultimate breath echoes in the Text with nothing spared.
Patient in patience, lover of all present laughter, the child, eternal mirth–
Of course–is etched in slates and scales beyond the present worried worm;
As from the womb, to this He comes so far; so too, to that He must return in Spiral motions, springs, and in the riverlets of natural seconds, tiny buds
Aligned within themelves with all the other benchmark orbs
And gentle points of sweeping reference. Our symmetry absorbs
The oddity of growth in worldly and arbitrary minutes: as the muds
Decree, the hills agree and we are of course its sands and random beaches.
Numberless and unadorned, emerging abstracts form our concretes,
Limpid liquids recreate themselves as pliant canyons, sculpted palaces; discrete
Particles mustered in battalions to address themselves as crystals, breaches
In the granite veins that will allow the light in time to pass on through.
And as we stand disarmed in deaf amazement, we ponder
What natural majesties must certify the ruby and the emerald to wander
Disingenuous, impervious to cost through sapphire dusts in cosmic spectacle too
Wondrously created to be seen with contaminated eyes
As all arrive or nothing comes to mind and our own sweet surprise.

“In the Rush To Leave”

“In the Rush To Leave”

In the rush to leave , her feet
Were all she needed. Lips
Were why she’d never caught his drift in endless trips
She’s made in vain in rain and snow, and all that sleep.
“The hell you say!” she’s never once looked back,
But in this morning’s mist she’ll retrace her steps  and find the door
Wide open as she left it. No. Wait a minute… On the floor,
An upturned pot, a fork, and half a sack
Of sugar, and, “By God a note,…” she mumbles,
“Who the Jake are you to keep me waiting in the hall like this?”
She’sd baked the meatloaf, tossed the veggies, rolled it all in one big kiss,
And there she’d sat―hours while the flowers wilt. Another reason stumbles.
Grab the suitcase, three small wrinkled photographs and let it go at that
While gazing through a rain soaked window
on a midnight northbound track.

“Well After All, I’ve Paid the Rent”

“Well After All, I’ve Paid the Rent”

Well, after all, I’ve paid the rent;
I crack no eggs at dawn; I take what’s there,
And by the many waters of the shower scare
Up finely manicured reasons why I absent
Myself from kinetic fallacies, venial volleys of velocity
That loose the legions every day and bag
Bathetic memories in the process. I embrace the lag
Innate in all things mortal with condiments of patient animosity
Through the whiling hours in the queue
While others in the cast become the feature
Leaving little need for tickets; each or
All pose little choice when loiterers block the view.
And what was once a chorus in salad years will render
Souvenirs marshalled in arrears between the signs that read:
“Shake well before using…” or  the apt “Return to Sender…”

“Look To It, Friend!”

“Look To It, Friend!”

Look to it, friend! Some call it time,
Others less than seconds, others, singularity,
And at the least a mystery, perhaps an incongruity
Within the maze of observations and variations on the rhyme,
Some weathered moss-lined steps ascending forest temples
and the sacrifice of wine for blood in isolated shrines.
Argue, then,  what it means to be an onion or the teapot’s spout.
They say, “Speak more plainly, flesh it out!”
And scarcely is the thought expressed than a paradigm, a scion
Of the times declares, “Not at all,…it’s in the wrist!”
Setbacks scatter as sands of many mountains
Leveled by long forgotten storms; something close to fountains
Swell from everlasting hotspots, springs, and lethal mists
Of natural fraud and tragic truths misplaced, misguided, and disgraced
By mortality set to music while eternity’s forgotten or left to waste.

“I Am the Thesis”

“I Am the Thesis”

Í am the thesis of a latter-hour’s passing, the gauge,
Justified, set, the obstacle, the treasured triumph, some  truth; a willingness,
Perhaps, to see, to feel, rendered remains in escrow, moot and meaningless,
In themselves, the inherited simple gifts of breath and being.  Age
Has overcome he who would speak—bedclothes that drink
Me beckon, sirens to the rest of me as friends and vandals
Reconnoitre what is left by accident or design. Nightly shrouds,  candles
In the daylight greeting, physics of the present think
Me old, or older. Nearer to the least demanding obfuscation
In the glare of vacant eyes and vapid conversation. I am that son
Who long ago meandered through what then were the Hills of San Diego to run
The gamete of cows at pasture and their foregathering bull in rapid calculation
Of the time it takes to retrace my steps and reach the fence in time
while all the while no more credible witness than memory surveying
Prudence in that outer world; I was that child  beyond the love of misbehaving.
Action, then, logged with the company I kept―the audience no less than God,
Himself. Yes.  Foreshadowing of later eternities while the slightest bow
To the many selves within confused the tissues of my yearning,  shadows
Greater in the strophe than antistrophe in thought and wanderlust, the sod
Reducing me to willing patience of my body’s rhyme. Accident has stilled
Those ancient psalms now; more venal notions of longevity and meditation
cauterised all former innocence in lawless joys
to gaze on wishes in a wash of mitigation.
Baseless thought engaged within a centrifuge runs counter to the will
Of atoms, speaking tongues in form and mantras, melding all imagination
With the claustrophobic slant of worlds immortalized in cuneiform
And agoraphobic hieroglyphs of deeds performed before I ever came to be.
To this day these self-made gods gainsay my life
And monopolise themselves in catacombs below my earthly station. The knife
Was given to the Father of All Nations in His passion’s later life’s alarm;
His intention, wisely, was to use it, true.
But in the end, His certitude becomes Eternal Law,
His satisfaction, the bourne of centuries wrought
from just beyond Sadrat’ul-Muntahá.