Poetry

Poetry

Cages

I'd like to think Martin Luther was talking to me

That through those school loud speakers

His words took flight on the backs of angels of aspiration

Flying through each of our cage bars

Illuminating the different colors and hues of each individual's bars

But always the same material, everyone's bars comprised of the same material

The common smelting process that forges cage bars out of others perceptions of us

The universal cage we all feel

That unifies the able bodied with the handicapped

Black with white, affluent and poor

That the blind are the ones who truly see one another as they are

His words were meant for history

From the one who transcended his bars

And taught us to be blind

And just listen, just listen

Choosing

east or west.  One must choose

The middle sun revels up high

Burning tears of sweat past the

Brow which shelters blue Eyes

Who witness the death of

Day and night in their sea

Trapped by choice

the blackness hides the night

One trying, Illuminating, Demanding

Straining eyes, uncertain of the

Interpretation of the land

illuminated by the creeping light

Inspiration and precarious

The morning sun wants one

As long as one is prepared to work

It will follow, but may leave

As quickly as lighting, a soggy departure

Is it worth it?

The relaxing cool colors of evening

Demand nothing more than your gaze

lids close on the twin blue seas

The subconscious works

The contenting western colors reside within

But upon the eastern beams brings the uncomfortable, tiring factory of realization

A tightrope of creative destruction

No trail of lost hair in the west

only accepting beauty, and night's

Blackness erases all

Reinventing justification or Unconditional acceptance?

 

Airplanes

We never really live in nature

We never really live in the city

This is human, to live art

Airports, the brush's resting place

As we watch the beautiful jet trails

Dancing with the setting sun's chiaroscuro

Intricate designs of vivid color

cross crossing across the sun

 as the moon watches from above

As I look up from the last prairie

In aw of the dance toward far off possibilities

With those left watching, if only

If only, contentness is all around

All Men

All men kill, ,what they love

All men kill, ,what they love

All men kill, ,what they love

Like Sisyphus and his boulder,

The weight is constant, without

Escape. From ever watching collective eyes, we toil

Shaped by the whims and desires of popular sentiment

To the cracked sidewalk of daily life

Innocence gives way to empathy

Neither will help a man

Suffocating him into survival

As the collective eyes watch,

Him give up to survive

Give up what built him into a human

For a glimpse of what it means to be human -

In the collective eyes

They ask only for acceptance

The punishment for condemnation is

Isolation and lonely freedom

Acceptance is to smother with the eyes watching

Ever watching, ever watching

Waiting for the sacrifice of man's humanity

We see it unfold

Each pixel of an eye is us

We stare down collectively

Bound by those same collective eyes

As we push our boulder up the hill

With his boulder Sisyphus laughs

He laughs at u headed warnings

All men kill, ,what they love

All men kill, ,what they love

All men kill, ,what they love

Old Country

Fleeing from Turks

Another Greek tragedy

The chorus sings from across the sea

Rome has fallen, but the seven hills remain

From farms to Worchester street

Nothing more than another ocean

Hope for prosperity put on layaway

Exiles in spirit

Only a matter of time before the chorus

Echoes through time

The seven hills remain

Institutionalized

Lying there on the couch, tv blaring

For twenty years now, you watch the dance of sleep

Never waltzing, just watching

The toll shows

The axe of memory dulled almost

To the edge of uselessness

The sand dunes of laundry pile high

Split by a meandering river of subscriptionless catalogues from the glacier mailbox

A wild woods you've created for yourself

Danger, distracting, around every corner

Will you listen to the wise owl?

Who has sacrificed youth for wisdom

Hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot

Can you here the way out?

If only you could here over the silence and pull of the tv

Amber

A butterfly in amber is still a butterfly

Almost luminous in

Amber and they conspire to

Crashing to the ground the amber shatters

The butterfly is still a butterfly

Only

Circumstances

I get in my car and drive

Nowhere in particular

Ah, now I remember

To meet friends at the restaurant

Why am I going?  I can't for the life of me remember why

What has happened? 

In high school and college it was easy

This thing called life

Why do I do what I do now?

We all leave life the same way we came in

Where is the ever present exuberance to get lost in

It was so easy

I use to think these thoughts

Deriving no small degree of consternation

That tortured and ruled my conscious

The world was so, until

I had sex with a girl in Athens

Not the first time I had sex

But the first time it meant something

At a certain point, her eyes rolled back and closed

She was in that toe curly ecstasy

A wave crashing over her

Her eyes closed, and she retreated inside herself with the pleasure

I was utterly alone

Physically inside someone, but alone

More alone then I ever had before

Or would be in my life

Not even sex, being as close as I could be to someone

Could create that overbearing exuberance

I would have to create my own

No circumstances could produce real happiness

The responsibility was mine

I don't know why sex was the straw

But it was

That was the day I grew up

Seeing Blind

the wind whips my cheeks

Stinging, an alert redness that

Opens and focuses my eyes

Whistling along the brick and past

A streetlamp, which sheds light

And allows me to see. To see

A blind women.  Who really sees

She knows not the color

Of the streetlamp's projections

Only of its warmth and that it is

No matter what color the brick

Inhabits.  A mere distraction.

It keeps here safe from the

Whipping wind.  So cold

On her face.  A reddish hugh

On the cheeks of the one

Who really sees.  Sees

All of us, for who we really

Are, the blinded.  For

The streetlamp is our curse.

Looking into the all-seeing

Eyes of the blind women.

Who really sees

Through the Windshield

the point of reference remains

Stationary.  Trees move by and by

a moving painting, through

The windshield, through the windshield

What mysteries, what possibilities

Daydream for hours, an escape

To a real place, new land

All ended in flames

As easily as anything, a trip to the ER

What possibilities