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I Play My Piano of Words
I play my piano of words.
I strike clarion literary chords.
I phrase triads of syllables,
And make my vowels treble.
I caress the keys of fancy,
Enrapturing beasts with serenity.
But my key-strikes fall silent,
Until your voice sings jubilant.
As you read the poems I wrote,
You sing a perfect note.
You become my instrument.
You tremble, vibrating ardent.
Your voice becomes my string,
So my words might sing.
Your tongue is my reed,
So your passions might bleed.
Whether in adagio or allegro,
I make verse in elegant tempo,
I weave verbal harmony,
From empty cacophony.
Whether alone or in concert hall,
I lull all into perfect thrall.
And like bittersweet melody,
I capture perfect tranquility.
As musical notes hang in the air,
Mine play a score fair.
As drums thunder and boom,
Mine strike with feathered plume.
Fingers caress notes from ivory.
Mine make words from technology.
As they vivacissimo strike and appassionata play,
I give you song so you may live and love today.
Removed
A key sits out the lock.
A picture removed from the frame.
The hands are gone from a clock.
A dancer dances alone.
A door is shut, closing out the light,
Its keyhole gapes, waiting, incomplete,
A body stumbles at the portal tight,
And drops the key out of sight.
A glossy image betrays,
The love of better days,
And is rent in half,
Framed now by the trash.
A clock sits, desiring ticks,
It stares blindly at the dark,
Wondering how to turn the trick,
Of grasping time without a mitt.
Music sounds in a sizzling kitchen,
While a cook dances alone,
His arms outstretched to beckon,
The dream he makes alone.
A Rope in the Air
A rope dangles from a distant beam,
And dances while a hidden hand untangles,
A man stands in the darkness at its feet,
And tries to leap and catch it in the air.
Upward and higher he strives to reach,
While each time he falls into desperate mire,
The rope jumps its arms akimbo,
While through limbo he sails ever the higher,
The man does not know the end of the rope,
He holds a hope that its end is relief,
Or maybe another peace,
Where he craves his final release.
Birth Announcement-Exploitation Directorate
Life encoded by binary bits.
Trapped in a discourse of digits: It(’)s biography suspended.
One for beginnings,
Zero for endings recorded in black and white.
Betweens exist no longer
In calculations no stronger than a perfect calculus.
Love and death announced in e-mail
Bring ruddy and pale their sorrows and joys.
Math: A Lament
While a plane infinite may be,
It still can't encompass this complaint.
No matter the multi-variance of the matrix,
It won't calculate, for all its tricks, the calculus of my confusion.
I am one probable to die:
Before that likelihood lay squared into the distance,
But the differential of the limit changed:
It became, at a Hessian's fixed bayonet, infinitesimal.
I am termed thus irrational: in my mind numbers repeat perpetual.
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Two Guides: One to the Future and the Other to the Past
A road wanders through a twisting wood,
While we the people follow down its way,
Our guide a man who tried to steer us good:
Ahead he watched while under-foot gave way.
So we another found to show us home,
But neither he nor we knew where it be,
So he took us ‘round another roam,
And piped while telling us that here we see…
Did ever we know where lay our journey’s end?
We follow foolish cares around the bend.
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Old Men Are Empty Houses
Old men are empty houses,
With dark windows leading down deep souls
Old men are empty houses
With vacant voices sweeping lonely verandas
Old men are sagging houses
With broken backs bearing agéd burdens
Old men are sagging houses
With sunken floors easing slowly down
Old men are grey houses
With wispy grass winding in the wind
Old men are grey houses
Sallow skin showing silver days
Old men like old houses survive
Lives lived and passions died.
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Juxtapositions
Hotter than a dog covered in mustard.
Colder than a beautiful woman just before the dawn.
Duller than a hunk a lead in a bucket of black paint.
Sharper than a razor slicing cheddar cheese.
Cooler than a blue ice cube.
Wittier than a whit of foxes.
Yellower than a lemon crossed with a canary.
Stories
Reminds me of the man who, on his favorite day of the week, would buy a copy of the newspaper for the day and reread it for a month so that every day might be as good as his best one.
The Miscarriage
I.
Life stills life ta’en from out the stillness,
Returning breath to empty mist, a liquid sigh.
What once gave life takes and drowns it.
Down in dusky undertow,
Far from what was near.
Hoping with baited breath
It steals the air from a scream of stress,
Leaving behind a whisper, faded inside,
Of desperateness.
What was closed now is open, yet held in half a state,
Empty fullness dwelling in despaired anticipation.
What was to be clutched, released, yet held in hope.
Is gone.
Hope lives that what was will once again be.
And yet it limping lies
Still
And
Empty.
It leaves nothing behind:
Vacant embrace.
Something mourns
Nothing
That was
Yet
Wasn’t
And never
Will
Be.
Can one love what never was?
II.
Held in imperfect perfection
Dwelling solely in the mind’s eye,
Sighted, recognized by blind Tiresias,
It floated the wine-dark sea.
What penny to pay Charon
For a gossamer load?
Yet here hope’s still hopes hope again,
With an anchor that hoves them down.
While sailing a sea of sighs
A mother’s love
Is
Always replaceable
Never replacing.
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The Worm
A Baby Struggles to Crawl
The groundling twines his wormy ways
As winding about his baby body stays
Still and trembling.
His legs flail and desperately rail
Moving upwards, outwards, downwards trail
Never and nowhere.
The baby reddens his cry from legs to face
Ignorant of his body’s pace
Impotent and dumb.
His arms lie steady as trunks upon the forest floor
Like roots reaching down the earthly bore
Steady and deep.
The squawking chick shrieks trembling cries
As desperately seeks his body no longer to lie
Lame and mute.
With animal anger the child fusses and wails
As his humanity weakly fails.
And he lies unmoving.
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Age
Loves forgotten as fading words upon a page,
As an ebbing waxing rage
As life plays its final acts upon the stage,
As the fire glows and dies inside the mortal cage,
As spirit finds few coins for anger's wage,
Then passion wanes, growing sage.
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The Dog
There was a friend I knew
Who long ago had died,
But his dog,
Who ne'er could stand
To miss a single ride
By his master's side
Refused to go.
He lay before the door
Upon the old house floor
And refused to move.
Ev’ry time we pass
That old home way
The dog, now mine,
Still can’t help but sulk and lay.
Fallen on the ground,
And refuse to stray.
From time to time, I wonder:
who loves his friend the more?
A man who can feel the touch of hand
And heat of breath
Passing by my face and
Hear his gentle voice
Singing in the wind:
Memory of his final days,
And still someone with human grace,
Or the dog who waits with panting breath
Always expecting ancient joys
Of loyal home-coming,
Forgetting moments in between,
No memory of the master's death
Just instinctive, bated joy.
To Walker
A dirty bed beside my desk,
For a dirty dog,
Lies empty.
To the dirt he's gone.
As dust to dust,
So dog to dog:
He limped away
And lies about no more.
The bed he slept,
The faith he kept;
He keeps it still
In separate worlds:
The one below, his dirty bed,
Where down deep he lies.
The one above, in my head,
Where down deep he lies.
What’s Living in My house?
There’s Something Living in My House
It has taken me
It has shaken me
It has knocked me down.
There’s something living in my house
It has strayed up my son’s mouth
It has played his nose like a trumpet
It has flown out again.
There’s something living in my house
It has stolen my hunger
It has made it poisonous
It has run through me.
There’s something living in my house
It has flown into my lungs
It cries, rasping, grating, screeching howls
It has stamped down my breath.
There’s something living in my house
It has left this morning
As suddenly as it came
It was gone.
There was something living in my house
Swim Lessons
Drowning is silent and swift
Says the sign at the Y
As my son screams
Desperate not to swim
Like a turtle
With feet not webbed
As Odontochelys, the turtle ancestor
Whose tail pushed him through the water
Who was still learning how to be a turtle himself
And is now drowned
In the seas of time
Buoyed
By the memory of a boy
Who loves turtles, their ancestors and YouTube
But swims bittersweet
With longing and fear.
My son is not silent nor is he swift
He laughs as he screams
While the instructor drags him along
Most turtle unlike
Not even like Odontochelys
But like a boy
Who loves what he fears
And doesn’t know
How both to be and do
Silent and swift
Skills that come
Only after lessons
When no one is watching
When he will be bold
No longer either
A turtle
or
Afraid.
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Ars gratia artis
Let pictures sing and sculptures dance,
In the thorny embrace of romance.
Let barbarian frenchmen die and later burghers cry,
As they go their fates to try.
Let pink, coquettish roses bloom,
Next to Cupid in Rococo swoon.
Let youth gaze from frozen stone
While Moses speaks a hammer-stroke alone.
Let not th’ obscure horse crush illumined Paul
In chiaroscuro’s lighted pall.
And most of all, let Theresea in ecstasy gleaming
Feel the barbéd arrow’s divine dreaming
Lo! Release your wonders into my soul
As I forget the world’s weighty toll.
-25 September ‘01
The Old Man and the Stone
An old man sat on a stone by the sea
While wind whispered in a lofty tree
A great sigh arose from there
Wafting on a breeze through the placid air
And I, myself, alone, like he
Went round to see if he whispering be
But there arriving found an empty rock
And a greyly forgotten lock.
-25 Sept. ‘01
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Time
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Time falls, tumbling forward
And fumbling in a fit
While choking on the smoke of
Yesterdays
And gasping at the breath of
Tomorrows
It’s suffocated by a hand,
Holding shut the mouth of
Today
While sweet, free air wafts o’er fields of
Never.
Time runs, careening ahead
Flying beyond all compass points
It slips the grasp of
Calendars
Tears through the orchestration of
Plans
Running, slipping rough-shod on
Desire
While the pace-setter, always ahead,
Steps lightly along-side of
Hope.
Never to stop, never to reach.
Breathe, if you can
Race, if you will.
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