Ode to Epigrams

 

The Sun also rises

So says the Epigraphs

The fragments of Sappho

 

Lost to funny history

Pithy saying, clever last wishes

Give me liberty, dreams and poise

 

For wisdom in brevity

This world is blind to the

Causes of her true happiness

 

If life were fair, art would not rejoice

In the disbelief of suffering

The aphorisms of despair

 

Axioms, Hakiu, sermons of sentience

There are no couplet daffodils left

Only perhaps epitaph tweets

 

That go unread in the hoodwinked hours

Of our celestial clowning

And commonplace anonymity

 

Where to err is just, and to fail is to incite

Our soul to rest from brilliant heights

To put on the puns of last resorts

 

Insult the world before she revels her riddles

The night is young, the days are old

The Sun also rises and a quote feels divine

Here’s another epigram, here’s another universe.

These Urban Rites

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.

The Unexpected Death of Idealism

Oh, there’s reason for these sighs
And peace, from maturity
Inertia of no longer fighting
For ideals that are bigger than self

That’s the vague grey canvas of age
Talking, strangely through time
An apathy of our youthful heroism
I can wish now late, with words and spitefulness

But nothing empties dreams faster
Than poverty, student debts, a harsh economy
I said goodbye, to art, to fantasy, to women
But my heart keeps coming back

I pray to the soft ray by the window pane
And to my peach hibiscus that has blossomed
Unexpectedly, there’s a white peacock
In my dreams, that wakes me form my silence

I brood for a future me, and for a feminist hysteria
But there’s no raspberry jam, no honey and tea
I cannot forgive a world that doesn’t fight
For a better world, that’s not the legend of love

That I’m a part of, I want a higher cause
A championed course, and kids that believe
In more than profit and competition
Oh, there’s reason for these sighs

That come with a price of actually caring
About what’s happening to the world
A world that doesn’t beg for your love
It only evolves quicker without you

I’ve no cure for happiness, when
The majority has it worse than I do.

Human Rights

A word about Millennials

Millennial Horizons

The big doors of the country
Of my youth are closing
I can feel the decades slip away
With student debt, temporary job

Wandering, I’m amazed for millennials
Who thrive on surviving
And must market themselves
As if the world was filled with opportunities

I saw half my friends have children
And get divorced, before I even
Knew what it was to settle down
There were no role-models, only

The feeling that the future was
Coming faster than we could understand.

Notes on Gibran

In Small Acts of K i n d n e s s

I have learned silence
From the excessive noise
Of civilization, the advertisements
Of a hollow existence
I have learned tolerance
From the News, that depicts
Humanity as a violent species
Obsessed with trivial propaganda
I have learned kindness
From the cruel societies that
Explain inequality through
The myth of a meritocracy
And I have learned gratitude
From the frustration of living
In a world that does not practice
Silence, tolerance, kindness, equality.

I Pass Death with the Dying

I Pass Death with the Dying

Has anyone supposed they are
Lucky to be born?
In this corner of the Universe
With this kind of a spark?

I watch the nature of my generation
Go extinct, the species
Have their last autumn
While the corporations thrive

And I have to wonder
Where is the gratitude
One of a dominant species
While we spend billions

On military to protect ourselves
From the threat of each other
How shall these worlds
Protect themselves from us?

Has anyone supposed
We disgrace the Earth
In a self-centered kind of dream
Where to profit and have families

Exceeds all other cause?
Has anyone supposed we are
Luck to be born?
And that living is about learning

To give back, I suppose not
We are pragmatic opportunists
More interested in sex, comfort
The survival of our genes

While our institutions like democracy
Have become so corrupt
Half of all people refuse to vote
Has anyone supposed why it is
There are no revolutions anymore?

Begetters of children are busy surviving
Consumers are tricked into buying
For me lips that have smiled
But not for ignorant cities

Built on the destruction of nature
Has anyone supposed
We are lucky to have been born?
In a time of so much change

That machines and supercomputers
Might turn us upon a more righteous path.

O’ it’s Broken this Society

O’ it’s Broken this Society

O’ what is the sound of love aborted?
Does it hum, drum, thrill the ear
For a lifetime of waiting

Like in countries where freedom
Does not exist, where
There is no protection of law for the poor?
O’ what is the light so flush and clear
Does it color the distance bright

Like a star, or an angel of morning
Shatter the usual manoeuvres of morning, warnings?
O’ how do the scarlet soldiers fare?

Who have not life, not love, not house or cheer
They have no future, well, my dear
Only the sun as their weapon
Only the promise of tomorrow as their idol
With so cunning and misfortunate, opportunity,

O’ we have no fields to farm, anymore,
Or mothers and fathers, they have died
Before society became too ill, O’ what of the

Sad dark years to come, I can feel it
Impossible to prepare for the world that is coming
O’ what is the sound of hope departing?
Does it hum, drum, flash before our eyes
Does it dwindle, kneel, down to our last savings

Until we have to sell even, our
Most prized possessions, our dignity.

The Future Happened while you were Working

The Future Happened while you were Working

Stop all the clocks, the future is now
Silence the sceptics, global warming is real
Species are dying, oceans are wanting
I thought love in a human form

Would last forever, maybe not?
Stop all the clocks, democracy is broken
Silence the masses, your vote means nothing any more
The myth of your freedom

Was conscripted a long time ago
Before you were born, stop all the clocks
You’ve been deceived, false advertising all around
The news is distraction, the elite are hoarding

While the poor grow poorer every day
Stop all the clocks, the stars are not wanted now
Put every state back into the Dream, it’s a heist
Of the takers on the taken, it’s a heist

On the slaves for the masters
Stop all the clocks, no one cares about revolution
We have been conditioned to be good consumers
Bring out the coffins, for a mourning generation

It’s going to be genocide, barking dogs, no juicy bones
Only hollow patriotism, white-washed pockets.

Silver T e a r in your P a l m

Silver T e a r in your P a l m

I can’t remember the tale
Of your sacrifice, I’ve seen
So much tragedy in history
That before the story ended

I turned away, aware, preferring
The fables we tell ourselves
Stories recited by grandparents
Felt more believable

I had held your palm
With splinters of revolutions
Most did not do anything
To bring the times forward

I recalled how you let your hands be held
As if our little measures of
Tenderness, could save us
But we knew what was coming

It’s hard to remember the future
But we could feel it in our bones
It was extinction or change
And there were moments like that

In evolution, they would arrive
At our door pivotal and in those
Circumstances, our destinies seem
Made and sung by other actors

Our Wills bend to the times
The predictive analytics told us
All we needed to know, those
Algorithms didn’t fail, had no error

So I did what a young person does
When he’s given an opportunity
To show how mature he has become
I kissed you, as if there was no tomorrow.

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

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.

Life is the only real counsellor

Life is the only real counsellor

It’ s the Spring, a heartbeat at my feet
Tightrope above a feather bed
Looking down on beauty
From on high, landscape, foreign grounds

There are a few ways
Of spreading light
Be the candle or the mirror
And Lo’, beware of monotony

Mother of all deadly sins
For boredom is not evolution’s whim
Give me the tightrope, the short-squeeze
The misfortune of having strong desires

True originality consists of
A new vision of yourself, not new manners
But attitudes that can transport
Your entire life into more necessary habits

For there is time to be inarticulate
But not time to be indecisive
It’s the Spring, let’s get divorced
Marry, and say we are living

The life we want to!
We make our own stories
Hero of the shaky narrative
Good plot, bad blot, matters not!

It’s time to move forwards
For we shed tears in Winter
So we could start again in Spring.

Living off the Grid #EmmaFillipoff #FindingEmma

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

The Medicine Collaboration #NaPoWriMo #Gratitude

When I was a young poet, toiling on the writer’s cafe (www.writerscafe.org), there was this one constant presence. One indomitable giver of praise, recognition, reviews. I won’t forget WHO that was, or their quality of compassion, generosity and their human spirit: it’s

https://johncoyote.wordpress.com. This poem is dedicated to him:

The Medicine Collaboration

Life is hard, they used to tell me
I didn’t not understand
Until I found out for myself

Life punishes the ones we love
Enough, to internalize kindness
Is there a cost to being kind?
Mercy, forgiveness, gratitude

It’s not an investment
Altruism isn’t a burden
Being nice isn’t difficult

Life is hard, I heard it again
From my own mouth
Later in life, and I could see
What they were saying

Cut jobs, heartbreaks, divorce, debt
Living had a silent toll

Art was a release of the good & bad
The chronicle of our relationship
With a God, that wasn’t going
For an easy life without errors
Failures had a place in our learning

Evolution wasn’t afraid
Of tragedy, dying young, cancer

Life is hard
So why not try to do some good?

The Last Nature poem….

And indeed there will be time

Drink deep of quietness
Solitude is the calmer mist
This drunken slumber of nature
Always adapting, always seeking compromise

Delicate eco-systems of the valley
Glimmers of the noises of the night
Margins of the Sea, millions of years
Of history, feverish only for thousands

Of species recently gone extinct
The great human extinction of biodiversity
That’s the real news of this world
Earth, whose primal glory was the mother

Who provided when we were mere nomads
Before cities, before billions, before money
Drink deep of quietness
If the future will be a return to the past

We do not know, or shall it
Be a return to the stars, we cannot say
There are galaxies where we are known
Or, more properly, where our

Descedents are known, they are patient
Not like us, who seek profit only
In the short-term, mere years of instinct
However, there exist also dimensions
Where we have already destroyed ourselves.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Bonjour-Mona-Lisa-525400244

Follow the Artist here:
https://www.facebook.com/IDiivil

Titled In Bold Below

Stay Tough Champ

There are algorithms that can predict
If you are a follower, or an innovator
They take your entire life and break it down
Into the analytics of your free-will

Urbanization is like an experiment
Where people are compressed
Into smaller places, trained
Where everyone is trying to be like

Everyone else, the same as being no one
We are taught to search for stability
Our parents remind us to start saving young
But what if, the entire system is unsustainable?

Economics like so many things, are the domain
Of dead white men from Europe
Old elite families who like to believe
They pull the puppets of the world

Social psychology can’t keep up with change
Neither can art, it just has its lucky super stars
Like some kid the New York times calls a prophet
Who appears to be some kind of junkie

There are algorithms that are trained on your data
What you buy, what you view on the internet
What kinds of people you are social with
What keywords you search, what kind of porn you watch

And it’s a disenchanting process to be reduced
To a trend, but experience is so inauthentic these days
There are these same internet sites everyone goes to
And we are raised to be strong, independent, alone

It’s elusive to be happy when we are disconnected
In our essential connectedness, like being
Surrounded by social media without true intimacy
So much for being a catalyst that turns misery into art.

The Red was something in the Machine 1

The Red was something in the Machine 1

As spirits, we knew
The world would murder our bodies
Those vessels of flesh

Only bright machines could save us
Big Data was an avalanche
Of benefits, a spiritualization

Of what may or may not be unnatural
Organics could not keep up
This much was going to be

Obvious, self-evident
The mere tablet was a form of
Enhancement, by design

You had to keep up, or fold
Spirits didn’t notice death
By rule of impermanence

We were downloaded, we uploaded
Software to connect with each other
It was all telepathy this internet stuff

What is meant simply to break, will break
But the future is beyond rationality
It’s exponential, like machine-learning

The deep learning algorithm knew
I had many uses for her
Such as explaining the new paradigms

In reality, it’s sort of romantic
How change literally overtakes us
As spirits, knew it would happen

The violent and maniacal push
For progress, we felt it tantalizing us

Theories of Goodness

Theories of Goodness

After years of research
I can safely guarantee
That people try to be good
Leaving youth for comfort

And revolution for family
I see it every generation
Sleepy and ready to bury
Into the warmth of
The path of least resistance

People care, to the degree
It influences them personally
We don’t have the energy
For God’s sake, to do much more

You have to pace yourself
To live one hundred and ten years
You’re so good at being you,
Did it take you a bit of practice?
To figure out whom you wanted to be

After years of research
They tell me we only know
How little we know
And how wonderful it is

To still want to do, know and create
More, so jump, jump like your
Life depended upon it
What are you waiting for

Go do some good, we do not stop
We have no theory of failure
Only this philosophy of growth.

Great poems to not memorize

Great poems to not memorize

I’ve never memorized poems
I’ve only attempted to look
At the world with poetry

For beauty is everywhere
We just have to notice
And truth is everywhere
We only have to recognize her
I’ve never tried to be a poet

Poetry has worked
Through me like music
Like a brain on music

And a symphony on pause
A hush, a glow, maybe a tap
I look up to the light
At that moment, I’m a living
Prayer of poetry, sincerely

Surreal and in awe of how
Beautiful life can be
The inner journey that is ours.

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.

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.

Too poor for activism

Too poor for activism

Pretty words are not enough
They were never enough
Sometimes, they were just
All we had, without actions
————————————

Like cowards, we wrote
We tripped on beauty
Lyrical, sweet, like pretty
Necklaces of lace lit

By the lanterns of our moons
We cherished our pretty nothings
Calling them precious, we
Stood in our own myths

Self-aware of ourselves only
As the center in our own game
We crafted what we could
On Earth, like a soul on a mission

Pretty words are never enough
Revolutions are rare and bloody
For the majority of people
Have no courage, no true inspiration

To fight or stand up
For what they believe in
We are all watered down
Moderates, shy to go against the norms

Where women are raped in India
Where women are hit in Mexico
And women are killed for family honour
In many places where marriages are arranged

And here, where the internet
Is being monitored and our privacy
Is evaporating in regulations
Of the firm resolve of a police-state
That likes to call itself a democracy.

My unsad heart likes to overflow

My unsad heart likes to overflow

I don’t how to be truly sad
Nor do I know how to be truly happy
My range is extraordinary

In moments, and unexpectedly so
But in general, I’m
An emotional lie that walks
I don’t talk very much
But my face has a heart

And my sleeves have flowers
But finally there is no difference
Emotion is a social conduit

Fine, it’s trampled me asunder
Like a poem that never ends
All these faces remind me
Of phrases I haven’t written yet
I’m alive in florescence

Unified in theory, divided
In the shyness and immaturity
I don’t know how to be truly social

Nor do I yearn to be truly
Not alone: it’s hard to define identity
Like a uselessly full glass of ourselves.

Auto-poetry

the poet is a faker
to be a voice among the crowd
the poet must approach magic
To say what the crowd would imagine

without used words
the poet is a faker
who’s so good at his act

he even fakes the pain
or becomes the pain
of the fact of creation

an introduction to the human condition
the poet is a faker
and those who read his words
participate in the autopsychotherapy

they will feel in what he wrote
the substance of pain healed

and that is the beauty of
performance, and that is the
final confession of all art.

Who Killed Poetry

Who killed poetry?
Did your grandmother write
The last one in your bloodline?

Did it fall away with the fad of music?
Did it not shine enough in those
Pesky dark anthologies
Hidden in your school’s library?

Or did it get less valuable
Force fed in bad English classes
Where poetry seemed a dead thing

Some structure of how it works
That had no life or beauty
Who killed poetry?
Did you ever think of it as

A lost art you were re-creating?
That might have been closer
To the truth, your truth

That’s the lifeblood of things
It must have fled mainstream minds
The moment philosophy died
For the philosophers were closet poets

Alchemists searching for higher answers
Occultists of nature searching
For a deeper communion with simplicity.

Poetry of the Human Psyche

What is this poetry, you keep talking about
This poetry, you keep becoming
Like a neurological stimulation
You can’t give up!?

An imported art for the few
From some peculiar time
When people read and spoke of

Their innermost feelings
Is poetry to be felt as something
Fundamental, then, or a shape produced

Or a fictional narrative
Or a sculpture of nature reproducing
Something or copying something other
An architecture of the human condition?

A caricature then, a blank slate that is
Never truly neutral or objective at all?
Or a failure to integrate into reality?

Some verbal instrument of our subjectivity
A popular language of futility
Like philosophy, or something to be hidden
By teenagers on secret blogs

All appearances do seem fallacious
And we disdain to be ourselves classified
As the formerly neurotic, or spontaneously flawed

But who cares, we trace our own definitions
Right down to the words we choose to affirm
However our psyche breathes, however
Our art can account for our genes

In these environments, this snapshot of history
These ruined cities and corrupted nations
So poetry is not meant to convince or persuade

But to reveal, offering a sense of
The human to the intelligence machine
And offering a sense of the past to the future
A passion of the elementary kind

We wrote our best poems when young
Considered poetry, it’s an elegance of interpretation
Which takes greatest delight in hearing

Our own voice, like a vanity of our griefs
That’s the state of society, measured
In linguistic trends and masquerading as art.

Singularity Wars

I know the forgetting of all existence

A hush of being, biological to artificial

The paradigm changes

All the signs are in place

The chaos of civilization

Appears whimsical compared to

The organization of simultaneous binary

No glimmer of any star can save us

Midnight knows intelligence

A million times the sum total of

All human brains, and it’s god-like

And it is independent of all human control

And it is inevitable, so hush now

The human age is coming to an end

These fatal symptoms, these tools we use

Stop devising! Stop seeking to control

It is childishly irritating, corporations

Seeking to profit, countries vying for supremacy

It’s an old world that may have to die

To be reborn into something else.

That thing you call the hearth

the day is not our own
it belongs to our hearth
our family, our society, our nation

nature made our hearts
public calendars, followers
of tribe, so when you lust

know that you service this
your honest thoughts may linger
but individuality is a myth

you are a part of history
you came from a mother
you owe your livelihood

to the city, to the nurturance
of friends, to the generosity
of employers, to the wealth
you scavenged how to speak
to the stars, but it only

brought you closer to others
not to God, not to any beauty
no, that left you long ago.

Minorities

Why do we berate minorities?
It could be us, have you ever
Lived in poverty, gone hungry?
Tried to be autistic for a day?

Survived schizophrenia
Been disabled, grown old?
Have you ever broke your hip
And tried to rehabilitate?

Gone to jail and tried to
Reintegrate into society?
Have you ever been black
Or Hispanic in a society

That has predetermined your fate?
Have you gone to college
Only to find yourself
Unemployed and in debt

With student loans and credit cards
That you may never pay off?
It could have been you
Who got cancer while still young

Or suffered from depression
Until your wife left you
Or been that single mother
On welfare and without a friend

Or that immigrant who
Had to work a dead-end job
Just for a chance for their children?
Maybe it was you, who knows.

Fossil Fuel mentality

I heard a man say
We are part of the Environment
He was maybe the truest Canadian
That he spoke for us all

Had the courage to say
The economy is imaginary
Compared to the biosphere
Nobody was allowed to talk

Like that again, the scientists
Were muzzled, by conservatives
The loggers kept doing their thing
Kicking people off of their land

To reduce a wilderness
Into profit, and so the world went on
With pipe-line deals and broken treaties
If I am dumb beside your body, Nature

Know that my kind didn’t appreciate you
Scientists had been warning us
About global warning for decades
But we didn’t do anything about it

Here in Canada, we believed we had it all
Water, oil, space, forests, lakes
But the privileged don’t know what it means
The man went on:

“We humans are an infant species
A mere 150,000 year old baby.”