From poetic conjunctions

From poetic conjunctions

I’ve tried to avoid
Beautiful imagery
That is not the soul of poetry
I’ve tasted the renaissance

Underwater, in the surrealism
Of the meaning of existence
Poetry came, like the spring
When the medieval town began

To unfreeze, and all of history
Recollected itself in art
In the copying of our shut eyes
The silver imitations of golden ages

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I’ve tried to avoid repeating myself
But poetry is a dialogue with itself
A vertical path to a comic
Music that never truly dies

But is reborn, ideas transported
Encoded in phrases pleasant
To the ears, I’ve tried to avoid rhyming
And the stars were shinning

In the ornaments and decorations
Of so many beautiful minds
I found orphan asylums articulate
With God’s mystery and evolution’s

Garlands rescued in the puzzle of the dance
What you meant by lasting?
A mysticism in the frank approval of poems.

Double dream of spring

Double dream of spring

In march I had a double dream of spring
Like a painting infused in my waking moments
I felt an immense hope that

All the sacrifice of ancestors might come
To something in me, like
A new beginnings or so many phrases
That resulted in a compact language

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Flowers somehow resembled
Galaxies and for a moment
I throbbed with the secret

Sweetness of life, there where
The sun begins to cut laterally
Across years like a Godlike figure
And possessing an imagination

iii

He leads me to dream about the future
Spring was a metaphor for change
And I wanted to badly to change

That I would eat the fruit of
The transformation and feel
April’s rain down my cheeks
For flowers of May and ideas
In June, which would change the world.

some stars

Some Stars

These are amazing, each
Fleeting with the light of each other
As a performance in the night
Arranged by chance

Floating like trees in morning
To meet as far as the eyes can see
As far as things can travel
Exploding to tell us that

ii

Life is everywhere
Something so simple
Like oceans or trees but more distant
Gazing into history with a chorus

Of smiles and a canvas that
Felt like the face of eternity
Placed in a puzzle of so many pebbles
As to dance by the waves

iii

In the sunshine, moving slowly
Across the skies with their
Own accents, own astrology
An astronomy of amazing indifference

Fortitude, prophecy, design
Intelligence in a quantum physics kind of way
These are joining a neighbour or moving
Towards a friend, and does it mean something?

The way they double up, have baby planets
Disappear, we may touch, love, explain….

On learning to Dream Big

On learning to Dream Big

You will say unbelievable things
Dreaming big, early in the morning
And some part of you will
Always remember, taking heart

To the extraordinary limbs
Of courage and destiny
That resides in you

Brave enough to bury ghosts
And cut ties with dysfunctional
Experiments, rising to maturity

Will you be able to
Open closed doors and close
Opened doors that impoverish

Your mind, your body of purity
Your motivation to achieve?
And they will say unbelievable things

And you won’t falter, because
You will be prepared, having
Goals at the root of your actions
What will be able to sway you?
It is a short walk anyways

From adulthood to maturity
The years won’t seem so slow
And you wrote all the things
You dreamed about and
Like music, your goals walked with you

You loved what you wanted to be
And as you abandoned things
For that which you most loved
You found the sacrifice was sacred
You came to believe in
Hard work, as an end to itself.

A question of talent and work

A question of talent and work

If, you have discovered your talent
And if, it is something you love
This is the world on a tightrope

Do you choose to focus?
If, you have a certain potential
Are you ready to squander it

And give in to future years
Of holding your breath with regret?
If, by some sense of folly
You put the needs of others
Ahead of your own, can you

Reckon with the realization
That you squandered your talent?
Between your thoughts
As you walk to the place

Where you do your labour
In the morning, inching across
The space-time of your private
Agony and written there

In your soul’s secrets
Would you let yourself admit
That you once had talent?
I guessed as much, so

Teeter and succeed, and do not
Accept failure, but walk ahead
For talent is stranger that we
Might imagine, it requires
An incredible amount of work
To fulfill, make it work for you.

Before adversity

Before adversity

before the finite variables
conspired to bring us
twixt circumstance, fate
free-will and intelligence

before the whispers of
our wounded self faltered
into the light of adulthood
before we felt truly loved

by another outside of our family
before we found what
we were truly passionate about
before we learned the Earth

ii

was an algorithm headed for
probable disaster, ruin, early graves
before we learned that meritocracy
was a myth, a name, given and taken

away from the masses long ago
before we meditated on bliss
so transcendent as to make our
personal cares irrelevant

I did not know how to appreciate
What was given, the
quality of gratitude appreciated
with our share of struggle,

iii

tragedy, drama, impoverishment
before my mother died
and I became another motherless child
I had an improbable vision of

the world and life that repeated
encounters with reality
were to correct, slowly
my sample-learning size

wasn’t extraordinary, in fact
rural living made it rather dull
before my idealism could have
been beaten down and my innate

goodwill was numbed by
the homeless sleepers, competition
poverty, heart-break, bankruptcy
student-debts, firings, lost friends

IV

= I might have been someone
You would have missed, noticed
Who knew who he was
Who knew how to hope
Who kept a little faith

The Unconditional Will to Live

The Unconditional Will to Live

Say tomorrow doesn’t arrive.
Say tomorrow doesn’t come
Say we don’t make it, what

Would you do, in your last
Year on the home planet?
In your last revolution

Of the Earth around the Sun?
Live like it, like that
From the pit of your stomach
From the top of your lungs
With the moments staring

At your mortal beating heart
Don’t say, it doesn’t matter
Every moment does, we are
As common and rare as stars
With thoughts knitted together

Acts of helping that knit together
Communities, families, countries
Peoples, groups, lovers of
Knowledge, art, cities, humanity

Say tomorrow doesn’t arrive
Say you never get to have children
Say we don’t make it, what
Would you do for real

What really matters, what
Makes you feel lucky, grateful, heroic?
So do that more, and say

We never got a chance to meet
Say you stayed home that night?
Say you want to feel alive, then do.

The Death of Pacifism

The Death of Pacifism

Here we grew
Orphaned out of love
Inebriated by history

Gloating about our potential
This youth of arrow and sword
This strength that will wane

This beauty that will cusp
From mother married to grief
And father sworn to selfishness

Here we dreamed of fathers
And wished for harbour-mates
With a body of writing like a balm
An outflung prayer to stars
The temptation to never write again

And cowards to barely truly live
That was our moment
An underground rebellion of one
An innocence endured like purity
A poverty knelt in the spirituality

Of simplicity, did we grow foolish
Or were we simply ignorant, uneducated
Too trusting of a wicked world?

So intimate have we become

So intimate have we become

Touch me, like twilight
Like the soft moist current of wind
For I can feel extinction
Like a sci-fi novel
Touch my face!

With cool grass fingers
Of Spring, I want to enjoy nature
For we are wounding nature
If that is, even possible
We’ve become hunters

Predators, tyrannical in our greed
Touch me, make me forget
Do the stars witness our disregard?
For life, the very privilege
We were freely given

When we cross Africa’s deserts
Touch me, like sunrise
Like the warm mirth of fire
For I can feel death
Like a time traveller

The algorithms hint
At the end of times
However seldom I am touched
Touch me, for I no longer
Have left any words.

The time of fire

The time of fire

This is the time of extinction
Not meteor or greenhouse
But human-made, ecosystems

Irreversibly dying, that which
Takes millions of years to evolve
This is the time of mammalian selfishness

Who hoard without regard
For other forms of life
They rage with children, billions

The world is young, many countries
Have a swarm of young people
Evidently certain to mimic western nations
And exploit and prosper
The News does not tell us this

That our planet is experiencing
A great drop and loss of biodiversity
In the lightning’s blitz of society’s
Celebration, creatures left their habitats
Unable to cope with the pillaging

The deforestation, the ocean-pollution
The urban sprawl, the short-term rape
This is the time of fire, oil, commodities
For men who would engineer their corn
To be poisonous, so that drug industries

Might profit, weep for the Earth
The Earth who made a bed of love
For our genes from 3.5 billion years ago
All has been passed down
The Earth made a brutal destroyer
Never imagine humanity as civilized.

Believing in Beauty

Believing in Beauty

Each and every time
The sun comes out
That’s part of the best

Of your golden edged time
Everytime you touch a flower
Or dream a cloud

With blue-tongued skies
Remember seasons are for melting
For merging and forgetting

We know what we need to know
Letting go takes courage
Giving up takes humility

Forgiving the rain for the darkness
While harvests are given freely
The rose endures without viewers

But is still already ready to be beautiful
Nature gives freely, without profit
Learn to dream a poem
In whatever you do.

Loving poetry, like a body of love

Loving poetry, like a body of love

Each of us have tasted
In ecstasies of stealth
Forever hidden alphabets
The fruit of dreamy-knit language
The stars that grow on words
Forever to be partially hidden

In the author’s mind
Tonight she lies
Naked and resembling

A word made fresh with a gesture
Of a symbol of a dream
That shares a secret gleaming
For those who know how to hear
That tattoo of wisdom
That little totem of care
Crosses the lyrics fragrant
With the pulse of beauty
Loving poetry, like a body of love.

Wish

Wish

I kiss thine eyes with my soul
With mystic empathy mine
But you do not look or see me!

Ah God! If I might once again
Feel the dreamy youth of feeling purely!
With identity projected, in wondrous joy!

The old-time longing for unity
It’s thrill is still in my cells
Like a circling memory of oneness

My whole heart leaps nearly to you
There, but you do not look or see me!
There is no method to convey sometimes
The inner possibility of energy
The old-time agony within my soul

The hush of alienation, loneliness
An eclectic talent for feeling separate
If only to magnify the unity-of-all-things
I kiss thine eyes with my private feast
A light blur stirs for thee from me

But you do not look, you do not see me!
And I was in my lonely light, with frenzy begging
For faces of the spring, for golden
Words spoken to me, as if I had
Thought poetry at the ocean side

For a lifetime of romantic depths
Without the shudder of youth
That passed so quickly, I am getting old.

Passenger of poetic arcs

Passenger of poetic arcs

I am not an original creator
I never loved poetry
As a young person
Nature taught me alchemy
Through a speech impediment

My brain existed around
A deformity, giving me
The possibility of linguistic adoration
A phenomena of thirst
That was never quenched in words

Only the dream of embroidered
Feelings that were vision
From another world
There was no essential musicality
No particular evolution of healing

I didn’t explore complex ideas
Or traverse steppes of philosophy
But I yearned for something
And words emerged
To conjure a caress in silence

For a little saving bath
In the horizontal language of English
And the pauses before mandarin
I felt a cruel hunger for experience
The inner experience of waiting

At the harbour of the future
For a temptation to dream
And an anticipation for tomorrow
That consumed and whitewashed
All of who I once was until

My flesh knew the golden dazzle
Of lines, pages, cursive lyrics
Slim innocent agile limbs of syllables
Terrific married to grief longing
Encapsulated as a passenger in a poem.

Silence is Nature’s beat tapping all hearts

Silence is Nature’s beat tapping all hearts

Silence is the sound of thought
For quantum silence would
Mean to not exist, and that is

Impossible for perception
Silence is not a lack of anything
Devoid of words, music, anxiety

It’s the great equalizer
The period in-between incarnations
The condition in-between encounters

And the sacred space that
Separates people, brains, chatter
The voices in our minds still
Sprout flowers faithful to the intent
That created them, the karmic non-hush

I’ve studied silence a lifetime
And still know nothing about her
For she is like the Tao, resting in action
Nestling in every leaf of every tree
Silence in the sun singing

Out loud but not for us to hear
Because we do not hear in light frequency
I can be content however
With silence as a blade of grass
Silence as utopia, purity, simplicity

The bareness of necessity
That transcends desires, wants, needs
A dream healer and healing dream
A drum sleeper and a sleepy drum
A cosmic background mother crying

Upon branches, beaches, even in
Crowded streets, I can feel it
Exhausted and spiralling
The presence unto nothing.

Mask for Sunshine

Mask for Sunshine

Spring chases death
As light softens night
Into the realization that time
Floods a clear sky daily
Time wasn’t linear

It was just our incomplete
Perspective that made it seem
Chronological like a butterfly
But our software will become
Transparent, like how buds blossom

Organic, mornings turned pink
For the nectar of new opportunity
Spring chases death
Out of the door, but
By the window we see

Our missing half of our lives
How love chases out all memory
Pruning our hearts with the infinite
We’ve studied days and yet
Still cannot find the answers

Practically speaking, there were no
Permanent destinations, no true markers
Only the aromas of experience
As perceived by our executive will
To see bare branches or

To touch and behold buds
The sun will chase us all west
Like birds along the gentle slopes
Of time’s lonely and illegible engravings.

Intelligence

Intelligence

Maybe my brain is made
Mostly by evolution
A silver spirit hung

The lovely ghost in the machine
Like the way I feel about
The future, the spiritual
Mystical connection with all

Living things, its patient
And not yet downloadable
Though I know it’s made

For wonderful things yet
And has permission to roam
In pure wonder, peaceful grounds
Where politics does not interfere

It’s private at least, in part
Maybe my brain is not made
Of light or pure music

But I perceive in my time
Enough beauty and truth to
Recognize my brain as a mirror
Soft and warm, like an embrace

In the design of snowflakes
And in the poverty of the worlds
Existence always feel fresh

With the improbabilities of tomorrow
So many algorithms, frames
Of reference, crucial variables;
My brain eats big data for breakfast

And loves the galaxy like
An ancient connoisseur.