These Urban Rites


Poems

If the soul selects her own society
Then tell me who shut the door on years
Shared, oblivious, estranged that was
Once so intimate, divorced reality

Some things that fly – are meant to be
Don’t you know, lover, formerly Beloved?
Where we two crept through winters
Hand in hand for a short while

Was it enough, tell me lost friends?
I have known some of the most lonely hours
Sensitive perhaps to primitive emotions
Of abandonment, alienation, dependency

On a clan, a tribe, a friend, a partner
Who was not truly there, the family unit
Is then, not what it used to be
Brothers, unsistered, father impersonal and past

Faith is a fine invention, for community
But what if the world was dangerously anonymous
What if the trusting woods were no more?
And friendship, as if spoken by a distant bird

Whose voice has been ripped from evolution’s side
We, who were once two butterflies at noon
In our starry youth, overcome with glee
The tides have turned and we’ve been beaten

By men who would be our competition,
What mystery pervades such a world
Where the street and brutality have new meaning
And poverty a disfigured face to those
Who once might have shown us kindness.

Realization of Solitude #amwriting #poem #NationalPoetryMonth #micropoetry


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Man is the only being who knows he is alone

This morning, let me drink the silence
Let me swim in my own solitude
Being the profoundest condition
Of my humanity, you’d think

I should get to know her better
Intimacy and silence, that’s all
There every is, I cannot often
Penetrate another being with my love

Since surrender must occur mutually
And there are times my emotion
Does not require reciprocity
This morning, let me forget about altruism

For we all deserve the dream
Beyond myself, somewhere, I shall
Then wait for my own arrival
The slow enlightenment of lifetimes

Because two bodies, naked and entwined
Soul and body, mind and heart must somehow
Learn to live together and leap
Over time, we are not invulnerable

However in the silence of today
I realize there are no yesterdays, no names,
No you and I and no tomorrow
This morning, I want to give myself up
To something higher than I ever was.

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Scarcity of Silence #FreeVerse #poems #micropoetry #silence #amwriting #NationalPoetryMonth


37

Scarcity of Silences

Silence isn’t depressing
It’s being with yourself, oneself, myself
That’s quality time
I knew it perfectly well

Nature is always present
Like when I used to walk in the woods
I wasn’t alone, I was surrounded
By trees, the forest, the snow melting

There weren’t windows, buildings noise
It was silence glittering and blinking
In terrible moments that were
Beautiful because they felt innate

Flat as a poster I walk this city
Without silence, or a clear mirror
Perhaps without silence, we
Find ourselves wanting everything

And everything we cannot have
I blame too much breeding
As the cause of the scarcity of silence
Dare I say it’s gone extinct?

Poetry takes me back to nature
When all the nature has been stripped
Searched, and taken, sort of how
The world treats a young woman
Who once knew what silence was.

Living off the Grid #EmmaFillipoff #FindingEmma


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On Living off the Grid

We’re all a little bit lost
Not unlike Emma Filipoff
But we can’t all live off the grid

How many years will it take us
To go back home, there’s
Nothing worse than feeling alone

In a lonely world like this one
Everything sees through me
And I am anonymous

One soul lost among billions
And In a few years everyone
But my mother might forget about me

If I was to get lost in a city
I can’t go further west than
The West Coast, and every fibre

Of my beings wants to write
But I can’t live on poetry
Because being off the grid

Implies no internet, no smartwatch
No identity for that would be
The opposite of getting away

I no longer cry for the life I chose
For the life that chose me
I want my feet to be bare

To Walk freely without worries
I want my life to be shaven
I refuse to carry possessions

From place to place, it’s unnatural
Of unnecessary burden, the better
Part of it, my poetry, is open.

– Emma was last seen in 2012. Contact Shelley Fillipoff here if you have seen this young woman: https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff

Afraid of Big Cities


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Being Eaten by the Big Apple

The big cities can kill you
Like how they can make you poor in a month
It’s unforgiving to move
To a bit city if you are poor

In debt, alone, or any of the above
New York, Toronto, Tokyo
What’s the difference, they swallow
The soul, perhaps we should avoid them

There are too many people
On any given corner to get
Through, to reach your destination
Unless you become one of them

Cold, hardened, not stopping for
Just any homeless man, walking over
Their old guitar, not crying in public
There are days I have no retrospect

I have purposefully forgotten
Some of the Godless situations I’ve lived
It’s for the better I think, I wouldn’t
Want to live with the humiliation

The wide-dilated embarrassment of pupils
And fear it took to communicate abandonment
The insomnia of old wounds rubbing sweat
All over my half-starved body

Everything was a ghost and I’d pray
In my own rituals for God to
Show me a life beyond this
I remember not feeling rationale or sincere

I remember imagining acquaintances
Were friends or people in coffee shops
Were people I could get to know
Adversity does strange things to you.