Poem of the Month - January 2019

 
In ancient lands and isolated villages,
in makeshift watercrafts
in the company of warlocks
and medicine men
and seductive shamans  
spreading secrets.
In temples and halfway houses,
in prisons and poetry books,
in photos taken in the past  
of people who didn't last,
I recognize...
one soul behind every pair of eyes.
 
And in wheelchairs behind window frames,
behind steering wheels and silent pains,
in family feuds and friendly fiascos,
in primitive solitude fishing with barbasco,
in court rooms and homeless shelters,
in award winning movie scenes  
depicting machines murdering men,
in hospital beds and in gangs of skinheads wearing ugly threads,
even the buzzkilling, overprotective feds
I recognize...
one soul in every pair of eyes.
 
And here, from where I stand
upon this cloud
I'm floating far from the fear.
I turn around,
I see the secret,
I forget regret,
So nearly free.
 
And I hear songs of long forgotten dreams,
I sense waves of time crashing, flowing with the stream,
I recognize...
the love that lingers in our eyes.

‘It is a chilly God, a God of shades
Rises to the glass from his black fathoms’  
  
              - Sylvia Plath  
   
‘Tis a black lake, one of indecision    
Wherein the finished souls scream to the  
Oblivion of bottomless trepidation.  
   
Where here, they cannot turn back to  
The fuzzy stasis of life itself ---  
Aran-knit pleasantries    
And a warm teacup on a  
Green, knotty hillside and sheep in a mist,    
Blank-eyed and innocent, no.  
   
The hills have surpassed them a hundred times  
And replenished them a hundred more.  
   
The lake is reflected in the black of  
Their little yellow eye-button,  
And the lake is full of God.  
   
       .....  
   
Violence had escaped every lily-pad    
Which floated, those little green dissidents  
Umbillicied to wrathful Earth.  
   
Murky and brown and full of remnants,  
Shopping carts even poking through the mud  
Ensnared with the bodies of past inhabitants  
Of this great resource.  
   
And within they dwell ---  
Those civilizations of gnats  
Waiting to emerge in spring among  
Those straws of great, uncharted ruins  
To be disturbed by only a footstep of  
A frog-hunter in mud-waders.  
   
There is little to poke around for,    
It only disturbs the peace.  
The lake is full of silent screams lapping  
At the edges of solitude.  
   
       .....  
   
The lake absorbs all colors as    
We fall into it and rises within our dreams,  
Fed by fate's aquifers and    
Underground streams of fancy.  
   
Dubiously we give in to the chaos of  
The thousand currents we oppose,  
Falling in tandem into hopes oppresive formation.  
   
I cannot love if I do not know how.  
The unknowns are a nemesis we try to forget,  
And we, like sheep are so forgetful.  
   
God remembers nothing    
And Winter’s end tells me everything.  
   
           .....  
   
Oh, flat water, how you reflect me in  
Algae blooms of advisory deprivation.  
Ferry me to your depths, oh stone,  
Dropping, dropping, landing nowhere.  
   
Tell me when I’ve arrived,    
My heart feels nothing;  
The abyss is within and I breathe  
The million organisms as they    
Habitate my lungs.  
I drown in their procreations.  
   
The World’s oar-dips are so brief  
They disturb nothing,  
Just catch my eye, glinting  
And the eye is full of green haze.  
   
           .....  
   
Oh, Fields Of Mercy, to here I drift,    
Here on a grassy hillside where  
Above is below.  
   
The slow plodders drink the dew    
Off the grass, ruminating.  
Dolorous whimsies surround them,  
They drown in their own fatuity.  
   
The pen plods like an oxen,  
Then breaks free as a wild horse ---  
   
Its liberation is a fleecing of what it  
Never intends, never understands,  
Never fully demands or tries to contain.  
How the placid surface is so illusory.  
   
       .....  
   
And this God, he falls in holograms of  
Tiny water-bound light chambers  
Within the dark and  
Among the still.  
   
And, yet the green grass is never still,  
I watch it ticking...ticking...  
Counting each millisecond of its reaching    
As it is trampled by hooves.  
It still spins skyward and I rise with it  
Though my heart sinks into the dark.  
   
An ocreous and soupy mirror under the  
Floating algae, a greenery of hopefulness  
Wherein it all becomes clear,  
How I was meant to lay in the grass and dream,  
To not remember this moment of clarity.  
   
Folly extends its warm hand and I oblige  
As I exit my body.  
This is death, my friends,    
And its bliss is my unmaking,  
Its intrusion my bland release.  
I sparkle and fade, forgetting  
The life I made.  
   
A buzzing of beetles and I go numb, mindless.  
‘Tis then I realize God  
In a sunbeam between clouds of cotton,  
Drifting.    
   
      .....  
   
The fog lifts and I see the face,  
The face of everything.  
It rings clear as a dull cowbell.  
The sheep have moved on and I remain  
On this shoddy turf, a sky darkens,  
Silver and wise and perturbed.  
My hands trace an empty circle  
And I am without anger or grief.  
To be alone now is my only, last release.  
   
I have drowned in this orifice that    
Hollows to accomodate me,  
I surrender to its peace.  
   
I become mute to my own child  
Unresponding to his voice.  
Oh, hollow lullaby, such a sweet,  
Sorrowful tune.  
   
My heart opens on a blank page  
And I am face-down in its windfall.  
It bleeds a sunken language,  
An archaic reckoning.  
It releases its volumes to  
Shrill advancement.  
   
I say nothing, I am unmoved.  
It was the Earth that moved under  
My leaden mendacity.  
It was the grass pushing forth,  
The mirror-surface cracking  
Fleeing all imprisoned images  
To go forth skyward in dissipation.  
   
And I dissipate dissolve,    
I am not immortal and the lake does not hold me.  
It is an illusion that it holds anything.  
Even the waters are unformed,  
As so is the bottom.  
I sink into a murky plasticity  
And it is all I ever was.  
Words held no spell to overcome  
Such a brevity of self-announcement.  
Words were no match for Heaven’s great mantle.  
And I, like grass am no match for    
Crushing hooves or hungry grazers.  
   
My words are to be repurposed,  
Reworded, recinded, and remolded  
As the caring of this is removed from my breast    
Like a setting sun removes daylight.  
   
My observations are all that remain  
Their echoes all that still sing.  
‘Tis all this that had given me purpose  
And to this my final decree.  
Their dimensions flatten as  
I bend over the mirror and see him there,
   
‘Tis a wrathful God.  
   
           .....