These few lessons as souvenirs
Carried from the frozen, snowless places;
Passion lifts a man’s voice to the echo,
Whether Wisdom has given him graces.
While Wisdom speaks in the frost,
And the hunger, and the blistered hands,
And coming to the end of all,
It lifts the kneeling to understanding.
Love is His whisper, His breath
Undergirding every law, every prophecy.
If passion screams without these
It lacks all, and decency.
Bubbles pop, some stop
Delay their stay,
Sit on the blade of grass.
Crass decisions
Don’t always burst first.
Never did work that diner,
Finer dives offered better lives,
Everything went corporate
The portrait of America.
Trading sleep for cheap wages.
Had to kick my tobacco sticks
Because cancer costs as much
To acquire as to remove.
Improved my lungs,
Stung my mood.
Just the coffee now,
How I trust the brew.
Black swill, but willpower
Needs some release.
Keeps me sedated.
Thought I’d reflect.
I suspect I’d overdo it,
But TV keeps me occupied.
Compromised a few times,
But it ended fine somehow.
I usually focus on forever,
The grand, the stand, the
Land of the severed,
But I feel like a beer now,
Maybe a margarita;
Bubbles to pop when needed.
I closed my eyes today
To let wind rush by me, inside me,
Stirring ancient love:
Timeless, resilient, free.
Expanding with quiet passion.
Was there ever another, but You?
Our history, a simple melody
You play every note true.
Your tune lifts me to heights
Immeasurable: swelling and swimming.
My love for You, its own force,
Serenading while ascending
Until the bottom drops out.
These ages, years of devotion,
Girded by self, numb my senses,
Transform music to commotion,
Still Your rhythm carries on.
What I know of love is You.
All my love is reflex;
A response to Your truth
And unending faithfulness.
A turn of phrase as a tourniquet.
Words built empires,
Supported spires.
Wisdom reads and learns the writ
Before burning it.
Walls of words, now my own,
Generations of thought
Globally sought.
Their understanding flown
Into my home.
Phonetic currency,
Golden words
Coins of the world
I live in the availability
Of history’s prosperity.
No hand has toiled
To lift a stone or till the soil,
Nor was timber cut and laid
To build a farm or carve a glade,
No one danced in jubilee,
Nor anyone assembled peaceably,
Neither government grasping power,
Nor men banding to build a tower,
But first IDEA has taken root
And pushes men into pursuit.
I thought of you today,
The old times, the way
You steeped in frustration
At my many limitations.
If you cared, I wasn’t sure,
But I knew you’d need more
So bothered by my lack,
The unseemly attacks
You refused to see.
In some ways you punished me
For who I couldn’t be.
I’ve thought of you recently
Conducting yourself so decently
While I lived on the fringe.
I must have been unhinged
To fall in love with you.
A girl like me would never do,
Never blend into your world.
I wore my sins, my flag unfurled,
Against the backdrop of your pedigree.
I was your purgatory.
You were my paradise.
Silk water, black by the dim moon,
Tinkling between our eager fingers,
Like crystals singing in the wind,
Chiming giggles and splashes of youth.
Phosphorescence shimmered on contact,
Illuminating our gentle lapping,
Like stars descended, stealing in secret,
To swim in our innocence.
And all we were was always all;
All we are, all we will be.
Every breath stretching back to birth,
And on into eternity, and our breath
All mingled together.
We don’t talk about the waterfalls,
The jagged cliffs or canyons.
We are dusty road companions
Who wait out the squalls
On either side of the lane.
Perhaps too much the same,
Too different, to be conquerors.
We are friendly wanderers
And there is no shame
In quiet existence.
We waited out the resistance.
We learned the property lines,
Stayed in proper confines,
With dogged persistence,
And trust.
It took time to adjust.
Trading common intensity
At the cost of intimacy,
But we didn’t combust
And that’s good.
Farther than we could
Without one another.
In time, we’ll discover
All we withstood,
All we let thrall.
A sudden inhale of untended earth,
Bolt of electricity to the clay in my chest.
I breathe what I bottled long ago.
I glimpse the hill I do not crest.
The loner lives, deprived but well.
Silence feeds the timid beast.
Stranded in unending green
Yields forth an ample feast.
A moment known, a moment hidden,
And really, what’s the difference?
Once remembered, forgotten again-
I was born in past and present tense.
The wind must have changed.
Pruning season, my dead limbs fall
Lifeless, dry, beloved.
I grasp the death that thralls.
I hold it against myself, my soul,
Pressed against where it was severed
But death doesn’t grow.
It can’t be grafted or tethered.
At once, the limbs appear foreign.
Tossed back to a shallow grave,
I shuffle on, weightless, sore,
I wonder what the loss has saved,
I wonder at my design.
viewingcamelot 