Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
“It really is,” I whispered, “It really is a beautiful world."


     “This really doesn’t feel safe,” Jamie said, her voice holding just a hint of fear. She was probably right. By anyone’s standards, this was straight up stupid, and here I had convinced her to come along with me.
     “Nah it’s totally fine. I wouldn’t do anything to put you in too much danger.” I said this without a hint of doubt in my voice, confident as usual. I had to keep the fearless and confident image or she might change her mind. I hoped the risk would be worth it in the end, but I couldn’t really be sure. How could I know unless I tried? If I didn’t try, I would just be left wondering how great it might have been.
     “We are really freaking high.” This time Jamie said it deadpan, more of an emotionless observation than anything else. Again, she was right. I looked down the long white ladder past her. It was probably 80 yards to the ground from where we were. Above us was another 20 yards of ladder, leading up to a narrow platform. We were climbing a water tower. The platform above us circled around the tower just below where it began to bulge outward into a spherical shape at the top. There was no safety cage around us, nothing to break our fall except for the climbing harnesses we wore. Each harness had two straps, each with a clip on the end. One clip would be snapped onto the first rung, then the next clip to the second, and so forth until we reached the top. It wasn’t fool proof but it was better than nothing.
     “But seriously my hands are getting tired. How much further is it?” Jamie was great, but complaining was one of her most annoying flaws. Most people wouldn’t have made it this far anyway. The fact that she had was just a testament to the athleticism and strength she had underneath all that complaining.
     “Close. Maybe fifty rungs. Hang on for another five minutes and we can sit down and rest.” Yet again she was right. My hands and forearms were burning like crazy. I had long ago learned that climbing with gloves on a slick painted surface was asking for trouble, so today we had no protection from the narrow rungs pressing into our skin.
     For the next fifty rungs, the only sound I could hear above my heavy breathing was the clink and snap as each clip was removed and replaced. It was surprisingly calm this evening, the sun not quite finished slipping below the horizon. It was late August, so the temperature was still somewhere in the 70s this time of day. The backpack on my back seemed to get heavier and heavier the higher we went. I could feel the straps digging into my shoulders and trying to tip me over backwards. This bag was far too big for what I was doing, but I needed some way to bring a sleeping bag and blanket up. Finally, my hand left the last rung and found the top of the steel platform. I unclipped from the last rung and snapped on to the hand rail that went around the outside edge before I reached down to take Jamie’s hand.
     “Thank you sir,” she said, “I see chivalry is not dead.” Her hand brushed a few loose strands of long blonde hair out of her face as she stood upright next to me, looking out over the edge.
     “Ok, you were right. This is worth it.” She said in a matter of fact tone. I laughed softly.
     “This isn’t actually what we came for,” I said with a grin, “We aren’t done climbing yet. I just didn’t think you would actually come if I told you how far we were going. But the view is really nice here.”
     “You can’t be serious. I didn’t see anything going up any further.” She sounded rather incredulous.
     “We have to follow this platform around to the other side. There is a set of stairs going up to the very top. At least it isn’t another ladder.” I tried to sound confident, like it had already been decided that we would go on, but I couldn’t stop a tiny bit of a pleading tone from leaking in. I knew there was a small chance that she would want to stop here, but I also knew that going just a bit further would be completely worth it. I had scoped this tower out from the ground several times, using my trusty binoculars that I bargained for at a neighbor’s yard sale. When I discovered the stairs going up past the platform, I used an online satellite map to take a peek at the very top of the tower. From what I had been able to tell, at the very top there was a completely level platform, twelve to fifteen feet in diameter, with a secure looking rail around it. Amazing what a person can find online.
     My hope was to spend the night on that platform, hence the sleeping bag and blanket in my massive backpack. Tonight was supposed to be the brightest and most active meteor shower of the year in North America and the weather had decided to be kind to us star gazers, leaving a clear and cloudless sky for the evening. It would be perfect. Perfect if Jamie would go along with it, that is.
     “You are the worst kind of person,” she said. She wasn’t facing me so I couldn’t really tell how she felt about it. Finally she turned around and rolled her eyes. “Ohhhkaaaay. Let’s go. We’ve already gone this far.” She was used to situations like this. I was the one who always wanted to push the limits, go a little further, risk just a bit more, and she was the one who always asked me to reconsider and then went along with it anyway. I always felt bad for a little while, but I got over it pretty quick. It’s not like she didn’t know me well.
     “You are the best kind of person,” I said with a wink and a grin, “But let’s rest for a bit. My arms are tired now.” We sat down and I took off my backpack, setting it on the platform beside me, digging through a side pocket. I pulled out two bottles of water and a box of Poptarts.
     “Poptart?” I offered, “Snack of champions. All the professional water tower climbers eat them I heard.”
     “How are you not fat,” she replied, taking a delicious cherry snack from the silver wrapper. It wasn’t a question really, it was more a running joke between her and I about how much I should actually weigh. She’d usually joke that one day all the junk I eat would hit me at once and I would wake up weighing 400 pounds. Even though she joked, she wasn’t beyond being bitter about my eating habits since she worked hard to keep a perfect physique.
     Next I pulled out two plain white pieces of paper and handed one to her. I began folding mine delicately into the perfect paper airplane, using the flat section of the water tower for some of the more delicate creases.
     “I don’t know why I hang out with you. You are literally so freaking weird. Like who the hell would bring paper up the side of a water tower just to make a paper airplane.” She laughed even as she criticized. I knew she didn’t really mind. She had on multiple occasions told me that my “quirkiness” as she put it definitely made me more interesting to be around. I guess I was a little odd, but I didn’t really think that was a bad thing. I did what I thought to be amusing or entertaining. It wasn’t my fault the rest of the world didn’t seem to feel quite the same way about life.
     “In fifty years don’t you want to be able to set your grandchild on your lap and tell them all about the time you tossed a paper airplane off the side of a water tower? Grandkids don’t want to hear boring stories. I would know. I was a grandkid once.” Jamie just shook her head with a grin and started folding her airplane. Mine was finished and ready to be launched into the great unknown.
     “This is Air Farce One to ground station Loser, requesting permission to take off.” I did my best Top Gun impression, trying to remember how cool Tom Cruise sounded when he said it.
     “This is ground station Awesome to Air Farce One. Ground station Loser could not be located but we can go ahead and give you permission to launch. Have a nice flight.” Jamie still had at least a little bit of a child left in her. I tossed my paper airplane over the side, watching it glide several hundred yards before landing in the low branches of a tree. Mission complete.
     “What perfect throwing form you have,” Jamie said sarcastically, "You were probably one of those nerds who just made paper airplanes in class all day as a kid." Ouch. Yea, that had been me. Jamie wound up and threw her airplane with all her strength. She had made more of a dart than a glider and it flew fast, eventually landing in a tree considerably further than mine had.
     “You win this round,” I said with mock disgust, only barely able to hide a smile, “Let’s keep going.” I removed my clips from the rail and began walking along the platform. The bulb at the top of the tower was much bigger than it looked from the ground. I could just imagine the thousands of gallons of water above and beside me.
     Eventually we reached the stairs. It was nice of the designers to have taken pity on the poor inspectors who had to climb this far up. A ladder going around the outside of the bulb would have been terrifying. The stairs curling around the side felt much more secure. Reaching the top, there was a narrow platform leading from the edge of the bulb where the stairs ended to the flat space in the center of the tower. There was only a handrail on the left side so Jamie and I were sure to snap our harnesses on. The sun had almost fully set by now, the last tendrils of light just enough to see by as we made our way to the center.
     “Okay this is cool. You know what we should have done? We totally should have brought an air mattress up here and slept or something,” Jamie thought aloud. “I’ll bet the stars look amazing from here. Oh and look you can already see the city lights over there!” I loved seeing her excited. She would take one hand and play with her hair while the other would point at things. It was kind of weird when I thought about it, how she always pointed at things when she was excited. But that was just Jamie being Jamie.
     “You read my mind.” I pulled the sleeping bag and blanket out of the backpack and laid them on the flat steel. I probably should have realized how cold that steel was going to be. Oh well.
     “We are so in sync right now,” Jamie laughed. “This is awesome. You were right.”
     “Wait so what did you think was in the bag?” I asked. She hadn’t mentioned it before and I never said anything about it.
     “Honestly I thought it was a parachute or some **** and you were going to try jumping off the edge,” she laughed, “I would have tried to stop you but I decided I really won’t feel guilty when you die doing something stupid.”
     “Brilliant!” I exclaimed, “I am so going to try that next time!” I wouldn’t really. I liked doing risky things, but I wasn’t suicidal. We spent the next few minutes getting the sleeping bag and blanket situated. I loved the fact that Jamie could be spontaneous sometimes and that she was totally okay with just camping out on top of a random water tower on a Wednesday night. How many people in the world would have been okay with that? I was lucky to have her as a friend.
     We had everything settled by the time darkness fell completely. The climbing harnesses had been stuffed into the backpack and the backpack had been strapped to the railing on the side of the platform. With the sleeping bag laid completely open, there was still at least five or six feet of open platform on all sides of us. It felt secure enough.
     “I also forgot to mention that tonight is a huge meteor shower.” Jamie and I were on our backs, looking up at the infinite blackness.
     “I love shooting stars.” She said softly. Her eyes were wide and I could see her making fake mustaches out of her hair. She had kicked off her shoes and socks and was wiggling her toes in the night air. There was only a sliver of moon, just bright enough that I could see the glow of it on her cheeks.
     “It makes me feel small,” Jamie whispered, “I feel like that should bother me, feeling small, but it doesn’t. It’s weird because it’s almost comforting to me. Here I am, this tiny speck of dust, floating around on a larger speck of dust in the middle of infinity.” She wasn’t usually one to enjoy philosophy, but on the rare occasions she spoke like that, her point of view and opinions usually inspired me. She had a beautiful mind. She just didn’t often care to open up and share it like this.
“It makes me feel like it can’t all be an accident. Some people say that we got here through a series of random and fortunate events, that there is no great plan or design. But I just don’t see how that can be. How can mere chance create something like this? Of all the possibilities, of the infinite infinite possibilities, I just can’t believe that people, that you and I or anyone else were put here by accident. I don’t think that life could be an accident.” She spoke softly the whole time. Her voice never raised or quickened. Words seemed to flow forth effortlessly, as if this all were prepared and practiced. She was able to speak without doubt or hesitation, with such certainty that even the greatest cynic might have stopped to listen.
     She continued on, weaving words as though spells, playing ideas as though harp strings. She talked about her life, telling me things she never had before, teaching me things even I didn’t know. Jamie didn’t seem to be Jamie for the next while. Instead, she seemed to have become a font of wisdom, ideas, and genius. At least, that is how I saw her. She was able to take a single idea, and examine it from all perspectives. It was as though she held it in her palm, slowly rotating it to peer closer. She made connections that I had never thought of, inspiring me to think even deeper, loving the moment. All the while she lay there, watching the stars, wiggling her toes, and making pretend mustaches out of that long blonde hair. Eventually, she turned silent.
     “But what if it is an accident?” I said. My voice was unusually soft. “What if it was all an accident? What if there is no plan, no fate, and no reason for anything? What if there is no beginning or end and we are just insignificant bits of space dust? The idea of it not being an accident just seems so conveniently comforting, almost too convenient.” Jamie was silent after I finished. My heart was beating fast and my mind was alive. I didn’t feel close to being tired.
     “So what if it is,” she said eventually, “What difference does it make? Even if it is all an accident. Even if there is no meaning to life at all, it seems like a beautiful accident to me. Here we are, you and I, able to share this with each other. That seems like a beautiful accident to me. Here is this great big world, all the adventure, all the excitement, and all the love that it is filled with. That seems like a beautiful accident to me. Here is this infinitely huge sky, filled with stars that are incomprehensibly far away. If this is all an accident, it is the most beautiful I can imagine.” She paused for a while longer. “I feel that whatever you believe, it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps you believe there is a supreme design and plan, or maybe you believe that life is an accident filled with chaos. It doesn’t matter. We all live in the same world. We all see the same beautiful sights, we are surrounded by it. It is only our perception of it that differs. I choose to believe that such an incredibly beautiful world cannot be an accident.”
     I was quiet for a long time. Jamie had, for all intents and purposes, rocked my world. Hers was a perspective I had never thought of before. I, who believed I had thought it through from every angle. I, who believed myself smarter than the world. I realized then, at that moment, laying on the top of a water tower in late August watching a meteor shower, that maybe I was not a genius. Maybe I did not have the world figured out like I had believed. Maybe, just maybe, I was just a cynic; a cynic blinded by the misfortunes I had seen and suffered; a cynic disappointed in a world that had not treated me well.
     Jamie took my hand in hers, interlocking her slender fingers within my larger ones. She turned her head to the side and looked at me, still sporting a fake mustache. The sliver of moon was reflected in her eyes just so that I could not really look into them. Her lips were curled into just the slightes
Does it really matter whether or not this world,
Is made from some divine blueprint?
What beauty is lost in either idea?
It doesn't matter if this is an accident.

Excerpt from my book of short stories, Fictional Truth.
To wander where the rungs begun
Where all the prose beguiled the sun
And set ablaze the yester years
Leaving old men drying tears

For darkness came and went the same
So all they name would suffer blame
To right the wrong that came about
To sing a song with whisper or shout

Take control and lose the way
Climb the rungs out of the fray
To hights esteemed on day's morrow
A little luck the heart might borrow

And see how green this other side
Where dreams and wishes do collide
For all the prose beguiled the sun
Now I wonder where the rungs begun
Skypath Sep 2014
It's elementary, my dear
This bittersweet affection that I feel
From one boy to the next I grew
Ladder rungs of broken hearts

First grade
Blonde hair and disarming smile
Recess games and hallway passes
A note in a diary and minutes spent giggling
Never talking, always watching

Fourth grade
Glasses frame of brown hair and thin shoulders
Curious enigma to come and go
A bit more literate diary entrees
One year of crossed legs and shy smiles

Fifth grade
A growing tree of lean muscle and blue eyes
Short brown hair and a charming grin
Side by side on a rubber track
Gray skies and sweet goodbyes
A bright dance floor and a shattered heart
Miserable nights and heartbreak songs

Seventh grade
Long dark hair and chocolate eyes
This spring has brought a strange surprise
Wiry muscle and soft cheeks
Once admired, then adored
An ongoing thrum of sweet affection
Sidelong glances and gym class stares
New discoveries and quiet realization
Girl can love girl

Tenth grade
A firecracker packed with mysterious boys
And an enigmatic girl
A bomb in the summer sky
Spelling new names, new faces, new hearts
A whisper of 'I love you' at long last returned
Names carved on my ribs and pulling my lips
A tightened chest never felt so good
Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
announces autumn, and the equinox
rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.
Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,
looking for friendship or an old love's sleeve
or writing letters to his children, lost,
and to his children's children, and to us.
What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?
Say that it changed, for better or for worse,
sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk
a slant of witch-light; on the pure text
a slant of genius; emptying mind and heart
for winecups and more winecups and more words.
What was his time? Say that it was a change,
but constant as a changing thing may be,
from chicory's moon-dark blue down the taut scale
to chicory's tenderest pink, in a pink field
such as imagination dreams of thought.
But of the heart beneath the winecup moon
the tears that fell beneath the winecup moon
for children lost, lost lovers, and lost friends,
what can we say but that it never ends?
Even for us it never ends, only begins.
Yet to spell down the poem on her page,
margining her phrases, parsing forth
the sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scale
from chicory pink to blue, is to assume
Li Po himself: as he before assumed
the poets and the sages who were his.
Like him, we too have eaten of the word:
with him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge:
and write, in rain, a letter to lost children,
a letter long as time and brief as love.

II

And yet not love, not only love. Not caritas
or only that. Nor the pink chicory love,
deep as it may be, even to moon-dark blue,
in which the dragon of his meaning flew
for friends or children lost, or even
for the beloved horse, for Li Po's horse:
not these, in the self's circle so embraced:
too near, too dear, for pure assessment: no,
a letter crammed and creviced, crannied full,
storied and stored as the ripe honeycomb
with other faith than this. As of sole pride
and holy loneliness, the intrinsic face
worn by the always changing shape between
end and beginning, birth and death.
How moves that line of daring on the map?
Where was it yesterday, or where this morning
when thunder struck at seven, and in the bay
the meteor made its dive, and shed its wings,
and with them one more Icarus? Where struck
that lightning-stroke which in your sleep you saw
wrinkling across the eyelid? Somewhere else?
But somewhere else is always here and now.
Each moment crawls that lightning on your eyelid:
each moment you must die. It was a tree
that this time died for you: it was a rock
and with it all its local web of love:
a chimney, spilling down historic bricks:
perhaps a skyful of Ben Franklin's kites.
And with them, us. For we must hear and bear
the news from everywhere: the hourly news,
infinitesimal or vast, from everywhere.

III

Sole pride and loneliness: it is the state
the kingdom rather of all things: we hear
news of the heart in weather of the Bear,
slide down the rungs of Cassiopeia's Chair,
still on the nursery floor, the Milky Way;
and, if we question one, must question all.
What is this 'man'? How far from him is 'me'?
Who, in this conch-shell, locked the sound of sea?
We are the tree, yet sit beneath the tree,
among the leaves we are the hidden bird,
we are the singer and are what is heard.
What is this 'world'? Not Li Po's Gorge alone,
and yet, this too might be. 'The wind was high
north of the White King City, by the fields
of whistling barley under cuckoo sky,'
where, as the silkworm drew her silk, Li Po
spun out his thoughts of us. 'Endless as silk'
(he said) 'these poems for lost loves, and us,'
and, 'for the peachtree, blooming in the ditch.'
Here is the divine loneliness in which
we greet, only to doubt, a voice, a word,
the smoke of a sweetfern after frost, a face
touched, and loved, but still unknown, and then
a body, still mysterious in embrace.
Taste lost as touch is lost, only to leave
dust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve:
and yet, for the inadmissible, to grieve.
Of leaf and love, at last, only to doubt:
from world within or world without, kept out.
  
IV

Caucus of robins on an alien shore
as of the **-** birds at Jewel Gate
southward bound and who knows where and never late
or lost in a roar at sea. Rovers of chaos
each one the 'Rover of Chao,' whose slight bones
shall put to shame the swords. We fly with these,
have always flown, and they
stay with us here, stand still and stay,
while, exiled in the Land of Pa, Li Po
still at the Wine Spring stoops to drink the moon.
And northward now, for fall gives way to spring,
from Sandy Hook and Kitty Hawk they wing,
and he remembers, with the pipes and flutes,
drunk with joy, bewildered by the chance
that brought a friend, and friendship, how, in vain,
he strove to speak, 'and in long sentences,' his pain.
Exiled are we. Were exiles born. The 'far away,'
language of desert, language of ocean, language of sky,
as of the unfathomable worlds that lie
between the apple and the eye,
these are the only words we learn to say.
Each morning we devour the unknown. Each day
we find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,
a sunflower splendor of which none knows the source.
This cornucopia of air! This very heaven
of simple day! We do not know, can never know,
the alphabet to find us entrance there.
So, in the street, we stand and stare,
to greet a friend, and shake his hand,
yet know him beyond knowledge, like ourselves;
ocean unknowable by unknowable sand.

V

The locust tree spills sequins of pale gold
in spiral nebulae, borne on the Invisible
earthward and deathward, but in change to find
the cycles to new birth, new life. Li Po
allowed his autumn thoughts like these to flow,
and, from the Gorge, sends word of Chouang's dream.
Did Chouang dream he was a butterfly?
Or did the butterfly dream Chouang? If so,
why then all things can change, and change again,
the sea to brook, the brook to sea, and we
from man to butterfly; and back to man.
This 'I,' this moving 'I,' this focal 'I,'
which changes, when it dreams the butterfly,
into the thing it dreams of; liquid eye
in which the thing takes shape, but from within
as well as from without: this liquid 'I':
how many guises, and disguises, this
nimblest of actors takes, how many names
puts on and off, the costumes worn but once,
the player queen, the lover, or the dunce,
hero or poet, father or friend,
suiting the eloquence to the moment's end;
childlike, or *******; the language of the kiss
sensual or simple; and the gestures, too,
as slight as that with which an empire falls,
or a great love's abjured; these feignings, sleights,
savants, or saints, or fly-by-nights,
the novice in her cell, or wearing tights
on the high wire above a hell of lights:
what's true in these, or false? which is the 'I'
of 'I's'? Is it the master of the cadence, who
transforms all things to a hoop of flame, where through
tigers of meaning leap? And are these true,
the language never old and never new,
such as the world wears on its wedding day,
the something borrowed with something chicory blue?
In every part we play, we play ourselves;
even the secret doubt to which we come
beneath the changing shapes of self and thing,
yes, even this, at last, if we should call
and dare to name it, we would find
the only voice that answers is our own.
We are once more defrauded by the mind.

Defrauded? No. It is the alchemy by which we grow.
It is the self becoming word, the word
becoming world. And with each part we play
we add to cosmic Sum and cosmic sum.
Who knows but one day we shall find,
hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot,
the square root of the eccentric absolute,
and the concentric absolute to come.

VI

The thousand eyes, the Argus 'I's' of love,
of these it was, in verse, that Li Po wove
the magic cloak for his last going forth,
into the Gorge for his adventure north.
What is not seen or said? The cloak of words
loves all, says all, sends back the word
whether from Green Spring, and the yellow bird
'that sings unceasing on the banks of Kiang,'
or 'from the Green Moss Path, that winds and winds,
nine turns for every hundred steps it winds,
up the Sword Parapet on the road to Shuh.'
'Dead pinetrees hang head-foremost from the cliff.
The cataract roars downward. Boulders fall
Splitting the echoes from the mountain wall.
No voice, save when the nameless birds complain,
in stunted trees, female echoing male;
or, in the moonlight, the lost cuckoo's cry,
piercing the traveller's heart. Wayfarer from afar,
why are you here? what brings you here? why here?'

VII

Why here. Nor can we say why here. The peachtree bough
scrapes on the wall at midnight, the west wind
sculptures the wall of fog that slides
seaward, over the Gulf Stream.
                                                       The rat
comes through the wainscot, brings to his larder
the twinned acorn and chestnut burr. Our sleep
lights for a moment into dream, the eyes
turn under eyelids for a scene, a scene,
o and the music, too, of landscape lost.
And yet, not lost. For here savannahs wave
cressets of pampas, and the kingfisher
binds all that gold with blue.
                                                  Why here? why here?
Why does the dream keep only this, just this C?
Yes, as the poem or the music do?

The timelessness of time takes form in rhyme:
the lotus and the locust tree rehearse
a four-form song, the quatrain of the year:
not in the clock's chime only do we hear
the passing of the Now into the past,
the passing into future of the Now:
hut in the alteration of the bough
time becomes visible, becomes audible,
becomes the poem and the music too:
time becomes still, time becomes time, in rhyme.
Thus, in the Court of Aloes, Lady Yang
called the musicians from the Pear Tree Garden,
called for Li Po, in order that the spring,
tree-peony spring, might so be made immortal.
Li Po, brought drunk to court, took up his brush,
but washed his face among the lilies first,
then wrote the song of Lady Flying Swallow:
which Hsuang Sung, the emperor, forthwith played,
moving quick fingers on a flute of jade.
Who will forget that afternoon? Still, still,
the singer holds his phrase, the rising moon
remains unrisen. Even the fountain's falling blade
hangs in the air unbroken, and says: Wait!

VIII

Text into text, text out of text. Pretext
for scholars or for scholiasts. The living word
springs from the dying, as leaves in spring
spring from dead leaves, our birth from death.
And all is text, is holy text. Sheepfold Hill
becomes its name for us, anti yet is still
unnamed, unnamable, a book of trees
before it was a book for men or sheep,
before it was a book for words. Words, words,
for it is scarlet now, and brown, and red,
and yellow where the birches have not shed,
where, in another week, the rocks will show.
And in this marriage of text and thing how can we know
where most the meaning lies? We climb the hill
through bullbriar thicket and the wild rose, climb
past poverty-grass and the sweet-scented bay
scaring the pheasant from his wall, but can we say
that it is only these, through these, we climb,
or through the words, the cadence, and the rhyme?
Chang Hsu, calligrapher of great renown,
needed to put but his three cupfuls down
to tip his brush with lightning. On the scroll,
wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, the sky
opened upon Forever. Which is which?
The poem? Or the peachtree in the ditch?
Or is all one? Yes, all is text, the immortal text,
Sheepfold Hill the poem, the poem Sheepfold Hill,
and we, Li Po, the man who sings, sings as he climbs,
transposing rhymes to rocks and rocks to rhymes.
The man who sings. What is this man who sings?
And finds this dedicated use for breath
for phrase and periphrase of praise between
the twin indignities of birth and death?
Li Yung, the master of the epitaph,
forgetting about meaning, who himself
had added 'meaning' to the book of >things,'
lies who knows where, himself sans epitaph,
his text, too, lost, forever lost ...
                                                         And yet, no,
text lost and poet lost, these only flow
into that other text that knows no year.
The peachtree in the poem is still here.
The song is in the peachtree and the ear.

IX

The winds of doctrine blow both ways at once.
The wetted finger feels the wind each way,
presaging plums from north, and snow from south.
The dust-wind whistles from the eastern sea
to dry the nectarine and parch the mouth.
The west wind from the desert wreathes the rain
too late to fill our wells, but soon enough,
the four-day rain that bears the leaves away.
Song with the wind will change, but is still song
and pierces to the rightness in the wrong
or makes the wrong a rightness, a delight.
Where are the eager guests that yesterday
thronged at the gate? Like leaves, they could not stay,
the winds of doctrine blew their minds away,
and we shall have no loving-cup tonight.
No loving-cup: for not ourselves are here
to entertain us in that outer year,
where, so they say, we see the Greater Earth.
The winds of doctrine blow our minds away,
and we are absent till another birth.

X

Beyond the Sugar Loaf, in the far wood,
under the four-day rain, gunshot is heard
and with the falling leaf the falling bird
flutters her crimson at the huntsman's foot.
Life looks down at death, death looks up at life,
the eyes exchange the secret under rain,
rain all the way from heaven: and all three
know and are known, share and are shared, a silent
moment of union and communion.
Have we come
this way before, and at some other time?
Is it the Wind Wheel Circle we have come?
We know the eye of death, and in it too
the eye of god, that closes as in sleep,
giving its light, giving its life, away:
clouding itself as consciousness from pain,
clouding itself, and then, the shutter shut.
And will this eye of god awake again?
Or is this what he loses, loses once,
but always loses, and forever lost?
It is the always and unredeemable cost
of his invention, his fatigue. The eye
closes, and no other takes its place.
It is the end of god, each time, each time.

Yet, though the leaves must fall, the galaxies
rattle, detach, and fall, each to his own
perplexed and individual death, Lady Yang
gone with the inkberry's vermilion stalk,
the peony face behind a fan of frost,
the blue-moon eyebrow behind a fan of rain,
beyond recall by any alchemist
or incantation from the Book of Change:
unresumable, as, on Sheepfold Hill,
the fir cone of a thousand years ago:
still, in the loving, and the saying so,
as when we name the hill, and, with the name,
bestow an essence, and a meaning, too:
do we endow them with our lives?
They move
into another orbit: into a time
not theirs: and we become the bell to speak
this time: as we become new eyes
with which they see, the voice
in which they find duration, short or long,
the chthonic and hermetic song.
Beyond Sheepfold Hill,
gunshot again, the bird flies forth to meet
predestined death, to look with conscious sight
into the eye of light
the light unflinching that understands and loves.
And Sheepfold Hill accepts them, and is still.

XI

The landscape and the language are the same.
And we ourselves are language and are land,
together grew with Sheepfold Hill, rock, and hand,
and mind, all taking substance in a thought
wrought out of mystery: birdflight and air
predestined from the first to be a pair:
as, in the atom, the living rhyme
invented her divisions, which in time,
and in the terms of time, would make and break
the text, the texture, and then all remake.
This powerful mind that can by thinking take
the order of the world and all remake,
w
Loewen S Graves Mar 2012
I kiss like
a thunderstorm,
crashing into your lips
with the force of a
hurricane, I haven't felt
the rain in far too long

There is a promise
sealed to your mouth,
a record you can feel
beneath your tongue

reminding you that
I'll stay forever
locked in your eyes --
I won't move until
you break your gaze

I kiss like
I'm dying, the candle
flickering down to
the wax, no amount of
kindling can revive me
from a death like this

And when your breath
unfolds from the back
of your throat, you'll
kiss me back to life,
falling back into step
with everything
I knew before,

your bricklayer's tongue
chiseled between
my teeth --
we fit
like rungs on a ladder,
pulling me back to the surface

I kiss
like a firestorm,
knowing that
one day
something
will ******* away
My first kissing poem! Let me know what you think.
Sam Hawkins Apr 2013
What we have named Fire Escape
(an ordered, angular tangle of ladders and rail)
had made picture geometries in my west window
well-framed and flat--set foreground and background
in two dimensions, as the sun hid,
and my round eye opened.

What we have named Fire Escape
was flaked-paint brown orange, as if
first it had been born of a flame
and then had taken up living as metal--
tempered itself into usefulness,
which I should trust now, in case of the yelling
and the engines.

What we have named Fire Escape
was happy Jungle Jim or Jungle for Jane
for the sparrows I saw this morning
which flitted and wildly played
within, rising up
arched and back again.

Made of the square pairs of ladder rungs--
a tunnel entrance or ducking posts,
or highway bridges to clear;
the birds like small plane, daredevil pilots
each following each, going under.
No sparrow would ever crash.

And what is this I remember now?
How one bird eased its engine and perched there to stay?
As if to offer me, with a little turn of head gesture--
a thank you, for the bread I'd left on the sill? Or to say  
I'd better shut the curtain and make my exit?

Either prideful guess gets me nowhere fast.
Failed even is speaking in any sparrow languages
from my recline stuffed chair; again, but now imagined,
to draw beady eyes to fix on me, telling me much less.

That morning, with the very last sparrow gone,
I remember that nothing in my sight moved,
save an American flag at a distance in the wind,
with its one red-white striped wing
waving toward the cold north,
as the white church spire,
framed in open quadrilaterals,
held its position.
written and posted a few hours before the Boston Marathon Bombing, Monday April 15th, 2013
Cristin H Aug 2014
My lips were still parted

as I walked heavy hearted
dragging my feet
like darkness,
across a dimly lit street.

I stopped 4 times.

Four times
between the security gates
and the bed
your scent still slept in.

1
You turned to walk away.
I couldn't breathe,
like my lungs had learned
your leaving.

I begged you to turn around,
in whispers,
through heaving.

I wondered if they had run me through
the x ray machine,

the way they did the rest of your baggage,

would they have been able to see it break me.

The rungs of my ribs
collapsing
under each step we took apart.

my heart sinking in my chest,
like treasure.

My hands clenched around each other
if not out of loneliness,
than in prayer
for you,
for yours.

(Walk)

2
I didn't know where I was going
at first,
I thought my moving, madness.
See?
You wouldn't really go.


I didn't make it to the elevator.

Nothing about me in that moment,
could fit into a box
I couldn't be brought down any further
I couldn't watch the doors close
on the only forever I ever had.

Too much symbolism will get to you like that.

The way I see you in
clocks and calendars,
still clinging to a countdown
your watch would stop short of.

I can still hear mine tick.

The way I smell you in
cocoa butter and ocean mist,
our love belonged on a beach
but swam too far from shore.

The way I taste you in
red wine and cigarettes,
I was drunk on your stare,
But you know those things will **** you.

The way I feel you in
poetry and panic,
praying into my palms
until my body felt holy.

Sometimes I write to your God.

(Take the stairs)

3
I'm outside.
The air is lit like a cigarette.
My body,
frayed
like a fuse.

Im bursting at the seems
of a skin that has never quite fit me.
Pounding on the doors of a mind
who can't remember
why?

I recalled every moment
you held forever in your eyelids,
then blinked.
When suddenly it hit me,
what if this time you really meant
goodbye?

I was trapped in wide open space.
Like the ones between my fingers.
like the one growing in my stomach,
like the one on the other side of the bed.

I guess I should have mentioned,
It would **** me if you left.

(walk)

4
I didn't leave a note this time.

But I promise
I had a million words to say to you,

I typed them up,
I wrote them down.
Watching each one
rise at my fingertips
and fall at your feet.

The way I did.

You spoke like family.
You felt like the pages
of my favorite book
when I ran my fingers up your spine.

I kept every note I wrote,
this time.

I couldn't hide another word
in the soft folds of your suitcase.

Secrets never travel well.

(Shhh)

I touched the door you'd touched before me.

Empty rooms are like a boxing ring,
My back was against the ropes
while my eyes fell to the drapes
tracking take-offs like ticket sales.

We packed the house.
Our home.

As time huffed and puffed
and blew the whole thing
down.

I stopped four times.

Each time I'd turn back
but when I started,
I'd remember the last time you left
while I watched, heavy hearted.
My lips were still parted.

Our lips were still parted.
Jesse stillwater Sep 2018
feel the wind whistle
down the tenebrous sky
come to carry away
my silenced heart

hold dear the love
you see through
    my dried  tears —
before  the  glint
doth  fade

lay me down alone,
my dearest friend,
eyes  to  the  sky
   neath the lone oak tree —
atop the meadow hill

where a lonely child
climbed gnarled rungs
in hope to sail away
on fleeting cotton clouds;
dreaming of a place
in the distant sky
to  call  home


Jesse Stillwater ... September 21, 2018
Thanks for reading — Jesse
Tom Salter Jul 2020
Beyond the violet and violence, through the hole in the heap
Dwells men of fierce histories and stone conditionings, there
They sit in circle and misery, holding guilt close
To their ears and parting with their own ditch-dipped words.
Collections of tragedies and schools of morose mentalities
Dance in the middle of the room, speaking down on eachother;
Most likely an attempt to impress Mother and to scold Father.
They don’t get very far, these talks, rather
They end further down the ladder than when they commenced -
Two rungs down and the heavy tattooed butcher man
Sinks two quarter-full whiskies to help him find his bed.
Five rungs down and the spanner wielding skinny man
Calls up a number to haunt unpaid listeners with what he said.
Nine rungs down and the privileged uni boy
Smokes batons of magic leaf until his eyes are painted red.
This is where the stories end,
Those Who fell past rung nine
Are no longer falling and alive.
One rung up and the naive boat keeping man
Tells his wife he’s feeling better but out of luck.
One rung down and the naive boat keeping man
Tells his wife he’s feeling worse but rather proud.
The ladder stands tall and overarching
At the ‘dried out men’ meetings,
It’s the only one that keeps its posture
And never falls under -  
Perhaps one day it will falter
And the men will see
That they are more than just
A rusting rung on a ladder.
Sara L Russell Jan 2015
Sara L Russell 20/1/15 11:32*

Windows of opportunity
ways of touching base
teamwork with alacrity
cutting to the chase
jingoist linguistics
speaking business tongues
ladders of loquaciousness
rushing up the rungs

See all the little workmates
running for the bus
trying not to be late
not to cause a fuss
every day frenetic
 a speeding metronome
a life too energetic
so glad I work from home.
Sometimes I sink into the couch when I'm deflated,
Then I jump up, limp over to a crutch, and become fixated.
Carvin a rut, punchin myself in the gut, getting faded.
Even the most fortunate son has misfortune to come.
I don't believe in bad luck.
I believe that you ****** up and that luck is based on mistakes, so you're the one that makes it.
Don't blame the universe for the problems that you've created.
Live as an example of someone who is always elated to view all things as a whole,
And chooses to focus on what's good for his or her own soul,

Fully accepting the ugly and embracing the beautiful,
Not reachin a peak then sinkin so low,
Just grind up some tea and speak to the old
Who inhabit the art that you teach, but don't reach for the gold,
Cuz focus on money keeps you away from your goals.

Restore your faith in humanity.
Replace it with insanity.
Product placement causes cavities.
Your plan is ****** sick.

Weekend warriors,
Just a buncha losers, all a buncha boozers.
Ya’ll take all the cash you earned and get your wrists slapped
Cuz you hand it all back to your rulers.

Put a rock on your lady’s finger, take a trip down to the jeweler, and then later you can trade her in for a sequel of half the value like a gamer, but who are you kidding, you ain't no player.  
By 2 years and 3 babies later you’re filing papers,
And the rock gets used as the paper's weight,
And who gets to keep it is a bigger debate than
Who has to get up and feed the kids every morning before eight,
And rush em off to school before beatin a desk for 5 days straight.
But that rock ain’t worth ****, isn’t that great?

She drowns in a pool of tears while he drowns his in beer til he gains enough courage or cowardice to stand on the tracks
And waits to be splattered like paint on the front of a freight.
Or maybe it’s the other way around since all males and females don’t share the same traits.
Either way they're all left with the same bad taste in their mouths, and they can't spit it out, no matter how much they try to *****, cry, smile, or pout.
So they just wait, and they wait, and they wait, and ask "Why?",
But that's not what life is about.
Get up. Get Out. Step away from the couch.
Start stepping to the beat of your own drum
Instead of beatin the beaten path;
Trying to climb a ladder with no rungs.
A refined freestyle from the other day.
I'm still at the bottom
Of this fruit cup
Haven't been stirred
To rise to the top
Because how
Do you go up
When there are no rungs
You care to step on,
Unlike some who think
They'll come up
As if on an escalator
I'm sorry to let you know
It's broken
Now stairs
You must do the work
Yourself,
Step up
Step up
Reach forward
Push, pull
Yourself up
If the sky
Looks like infinity
It's because
Goals are endless
And you're not inside
A measuring cup
As time is only forward
And so you must too
Lurch, drag, march
Step, run, jump
In the same direction,
And let me know
How it goes...
APAD13 - 088 © okpoet
Prelude  PART I


"Today when the threat is looming, as close apocalyptic years approach, it will be by cohabiting itself and the ruining valley of debris, which will make this world corrupted the next issue of the numeral scale of the new count, a rising hyperspace , concerning the parts of the kingdom of God ... "

Then on the Lord's day, John saw the glory of the risen Christ, and she understood from the point of view of God, he saw that the fate of the Church and threatened in the first persecutions took the appearance of a dark beginning.
And the time John wrote the Evangelist, including books were Jews called Revelation, that is, "Revelations". With fantastic images of monsters, angels and cataclysms, evidence of the Jewish people are stressed and are invited to await the judgment of God who intervenes from heaven with all his power.  So my beloved world is harsh and does not represent an apocalypse, but it is the true reality is when I will bear its overwhelming slaughter.

" Today when I walked with my winged feet near my friend Victor, I confided down the road crushed by afflictive legs; how difficult the taste of laughter when the decadent surrounds you, the human, the vile, the loose ...
Even though the celestial charisma invoke his memory and help nourish the weakness of Robert in hyperspace, with clean clothes, I can see his beloved mother consumed as automaton can take care of him. She is also her father, because it carries rooted in its members and manners, infinitely sharp look; in their arms they will gather wherever his soul is under his patronage that lives there ..."
I am  who  say that Roberto is a dog, who bears all the faces of dogs humble and serene. Perhaps tired of hearing young people, it is flush adults who do not accept, and who do not share as young faces were watching them, getting them to receive them what they should disclose them.
This is how we are numbed and distraction is fleeting, and he looking aside in his astrayed, he would be saying ...:
"Among the cradle and the grave I have a feeble scaffolding, and then complains, though his other I demolishes; unsconcient defends his executioner ... that the threat of death is its widespread depravity, which dominates it and want to go on like mortifiying.

      I want to talk about life ..., he said in his short years of life, which is more of it; possibly coming to complex, what our Somatic territory responds in normal or involuntarily. Comparative anatomy, and its innermost portion, the link body and mind, as a pure white as Samadhis and nature.
Homeostatic factors regulating our vitality, making its experimental modification, increasing to evolution, or maturation as a criterion of personal psychology go with the passage of time into in the depths of our mind.
Thus in a known threshold of Vedic architecture, its sensitivity is excited by regulating the effectiveness of the response to be made ... and everything related to the world of Ludwig Garroch; brother Robert in his strange Emigrate.
Yesterday when my arms away from hers, my fingers pounding away and recording what the heart more than a song, was a symphony sonata with a single end, long and sustained movement; It was the adage inner melancholy with an eye romanticism, which dominates the
passions of the visible world, which inhabits Antonieta, causing me, unbalanced living.


                                       CHAPTER I


In the beginning years of his childhood, little Ludwig sitting at home, in the gallery. Ask her aunt who was ironing ... Madelain, how I would always be a child of five ...?, And being as such, a privileged to receive toys for many years. Attentive aunt, maybe go to hear with little complacency as his hands only want unroll clothes.
After two years at the age of seven, when her aunt arranging his coat to go to Mass, she teaches a carol that had been taught in childhood. When many wondered whether there is a Santa Claus ...?, And among his friends they looked to unravel the mystery. One year later, when he enjoyed his unicycle, who just dominated him, called him a cousin telling her it was her birthday. He did not hesitate to go to find out what was behind the call, so he found the means by which we celebrate, we live and cooperate towards happiness and delight to have us at each other.
Not long after a friend told him .. "You do not have ten years are too big And Ludwig thought he was well endowed and well stopped, so not your friend was wrong in the above. It is my label and my stance has put the world on me.
Every passing day came the stamp of manly character, a woman or girl who made change her hairstyle, and he did dress more attractive every day.
Later, in his teens, his gaze was well received and their voices radiated security screening. Where He must continue the line of men. Even when I was living as smoothly, looks out strong destination with which calls us to live with skin clean or *****, because it is inside the feeling and the pain does not come out, it is enclosed by the overflowing affection. Here is the portion of good or evil haunting things casual and destroys the healthy, it fertile.

                                        
              ­                           CHAPTER II


Then was a year with a sports compensate pleasant summer sated outdoors, almost fugitive ... will not wonder that life smiled on him serfdom, and very willing opened his prudence.
Every time I decided to go to his favorite places, he went with his burly comrades in the best mood to conquer optimistically. Thus, no wonder he wanted when he was alone and put your reasoning judiciously, because nothing is distant, nothing is impossible.

After unite desires and forces, to clean your bike, piece by piece, in full sun know much security would not allow the mother of vices ruin their fun, that scarce alive to possess the desire to move and go on compliance instinct. Casts on itself, the vigor of the inner, its desolate world full of free enthusiasms who obey no doubt the vital complex activity.
Ludwig and entering the maelstrom of men love hate Godson, you can glimpse the friction with the air, with people ... I wore. That their voices heard their soul contracts, and thus puts light feet towards an acceleration which does not afflict his troubled stomach, nor regret his decision and put fearful, but, bring himself retained encouragement of his mind to remember the maternal cooing, comfort and timely relief to protect forever the suffering, the suffering of torment without end, not he shut the inspiration of the good man that no harm will result, and not for nothing the valence of living and not quarrel prancing. No existing could shed some light on what role, and that little thought is not complicated, and thus shown kneeling and unable to distressing oppressors and agents tangled conduct to chaos, those characters of ambition and discrimination.
Ludwig, who lives in the Ecologist City, where large forest ... budded, is home jungle floral site, whose relations are flowers, trees ..., next to Strange birds migrate flower in her intra nature reproduced, and pods evacuated by butterflies.
His close friend, is the watery and salty sea, which is beloved because he falls in love, puts on alert and curses him by his surroundings and invoking him. Anyway, it dwells wherever it is, and is accepted as a basic element of the universe.

                                    
                                         CHAPTER III

The act of tender love would be fulfilled later ..., what his voice fell silent and had his eyes and heart fortify, which will be linked from far inside.
At night, with Roderick going to a festive night, they climbed the rungs center alone, with heat in his shirt skin later. And in a deliberate action, someone asks you a sign that taking care tired and distinguishing see that John was his friend, school mate. He did not hesitate, he approached, greeted him and his sister and a cousin when she noticed well, he saw that he wore perfect for your night.
Debra wore elegant, dark clothes and sang with her dark brown wavy hair; his white brunette and harmonious ****** complexion line, gave her constant reflection. Fate was present, as it would not go around the world to be looked at by someone, he would watch his choice. Little was said, he only realized he was not passing and North America came eleven years ago.


They roasted the hours and the party ended, Ludwig remained with her new friend and his old friend John. They went downstairs, thinking about committing his new friendship, as I had noticed a slight interest in it. This happened and the meeting lasted for several hours.
The next day, he went to see her lawns roads where she lived, always with its mystique and kneeling the beast that wanted to impose upon him, that gives it excessive materialism unloved peace.
She arrives at her house, which was to John, though not very comfortable, but sure to please and attentive to host it.
And that night said much that was the tender feeling and liking her, but as his policy was rigid and concerning celibacy, only mattered to him, the unknown world of madness in his brawling to survive.
Time passed and deepened love, Ludwig went to say goodbye to his beloved, especially that he had faith, but that day would betray him. And so I wanted to put his heart and iron sleep peacefully, but Debra no secret  to tell ...:

"Ludwig, do not abandon our own, we must have faith, and I understand what it is. Ludwig rested and then brought her hands to her, hugged her and kissed all over her face, covering her eyebrows, nose, forehead, mouth; his lips positions in the middle of it, wanted to feel her warmth and tell her he loved her and would miss a lot of pain. But there was no show weakness, he must be strong and not to complicate the farewell from North America. Mourn scared him, because he had forged the feeling, because his aching grief was deep and it was at an undetermined point, with great desire to hold her and kiss over his face.
So ever, it was unbearable, she would like to die in his memory and had to remember in the collective thinking of his family circle. Which it fits the feel shivers ideas with sensations, such as the best in its inherent upstart point.

It was hard, as if more than man Ludwig out the feminine side of himself. But irremediable was the end, eager poisonous reaper approached. Ludwig hugged her, kissed her and stroked her right breast ... saying: "Do not forget me ..." and so left. Then he wrote her, that madness had transformed her away, but the distance was prevented against carcinoma being all postponed.
To know he could not boil your blood heavy thinking, they were contracted muscles. When he relaxed, he saw back through the hatch of his head, the soul that was in an ****** tragic holocaust, where Eros tenaciously and rebellion dictated its laws. Ludwig slept, and consciousness became natural color, as if it were safer, eternally fresh and manufactured this dream a poem ...:  

" That one corresponding to the celebration,
I wish to reunite with enthusiasm and strength ...
touching eyes closed
the sad sky, the dry ground, dried flowers
and people backward habits.

As meaning if it takes itself ...,
is the meaning
although they are scattered
in flows oppressions ...
the animosity of delight just widow and desultory,
losses and more losses at the time of aging ...
and profits to appease others.

For more like,
there seems to be a big drop ...
the same credibility ...?
and setting as a feeling
remain imagination stationary.

As hard it corresponds to the body,
It is destroyed inside ...
and hardened thoughts
tears falling to the esophagus,
without recognizing either way.

Who the pace of living is customizable,
and no opportunity is lost ...
but growing and creative
rears its profile,
as an unforgiven mirage. "


    Have been and unrestless forms of peremptory perceive, and when it starts to wander in my solitude, transporting my sorrow with grief, wherever I go I will take silent and vivifying separation completes the probable brain, which lives and endures in avidity stamped man with his need to want the Lord's command that made me forge this creation .--- he told himself, as a witness epilogue of his poem, albeit as the cry to its essence it was about. Originally from the Ecologist City, where reigned the wise and calm, where he healed their diseases, which has dodged the putrefaction of their wounds, where you inhale the aroms most want and cordoned off its without a grave lack of soft and flowering odour.
To believe missing, do not be afraid and trust that will grab everything, that not a drop of air was not lost on her fingers, which will not fail to display their imaginative stuff Alma Mater.
With all their eating, you want to cure your bad like venereum, and would go into the hands of a counselor or a warlock who extirpated the curse. Heal her feet and hands to despair, to heal the memory of his thought that I seasoned and voluptuous breaks the veins of his caleter, which seems not of it like a dwarf be provided with a dagger will break their venal, and this to commit such surgery, he laughs loudly with garnets eyes, full of the worst evil.

And this way Ludwig Garroch, vague without fear of rags, without fear of hunger or the messiness, only idles so that someday I can walk on the water surface, leaving their hydrocentric footprints where plankton reverence their sense of pain, his infarcted heart , her long fingernails of violence.


TO  BE CONTINUED….
Under edition,  then under All...
Claire Waters Jul 2013
you came to me drunk and looking for love
when before it seemed i had plenty of
suddenly my eyes must have been
mazelike and empty
it falls out of me
so neat and yet so unkemptly
all these bodies in storage
and the coroner sent me
but i can't clean up this mess
i'm only good at disassembly

you cupped my chin in your hands
and begged me tell me what you're thinking
i told you i was staring at the wall
with that smile quickly shrinking
too fast for you to catch it
i felt your breath kiss my neck
as you tried a different approach
with a more subtle effect
i should have explained i need a while
to think before i talk about these things

My memere liked the smell of gasoline, i do too
the tiny shreds of dying nice and slow it pulls from inside of you
and stale cigarettes in mom and pop drugstores
and burying the dead birds, saying it was just time for them to go
explaining that they don't realize they are killing themselves
every time they slam into the glass doors
she loved the seashells welling up from the atlantic
and the waves that held me detained
when she disappeared from shore
the glass that cut, that taste of blood
the stillness of death and linoleum floors and the whining dog
i couldn't fathom how they could all remain

her still skin was first time i noticed
the shifting quality of epidermises cusps so waterlogged
like lotus leaves and flaking logs of driftwood in the ocean
the way it's currents pushed and pulled everything above and below our bodies'
disturbances and submersions of purple i didn't love
i wondered why our bodies couldn't just come back to us
couldn't learn to rigor mort this
still deaths leaves me feeling purposeless
waxy and elastic, with small hairs like the cactus on the windowsill
she said so but i can't convince myself that this is a beautiful thing

when i was young i dreamt of falling down the wooden rungs
of our staircase, screaming in pain in the airway and waiting to be saved
it felt so real, and days later we were pulling over on the side of the highway
when we got the call, saying no one was there when she had the fall
when i saw the sunset from the beach for the first time in years
that night i cried for the beauty and
washed off the tears, purple and red clouds
salt water and tender sounds
and stared for a long time
at the empty shell of a horseshoe crab
did not eat the poison berries
removed the glass from my feet
set down the photographs in defeat
sat and read the dusty books
still caked in her fingerprints
sitting on the shelves of the library

and he never liked gasoline
he always liked fresh air and talkative people
the little things, and the adrenaline of strings
the 4 am sunrise over town center's church steeple
i was terrified of loving this good person
this aversion confuses me,
i teeth at these pseudonyms for something so real
being turned into something transient
i can't explain it i just hate dominance
and love hurt children

i still see his face like it was yesterday
saying that it was his birthday, and he was smiling
about going to the lake
i still can't retrieve a single date
last year from the months of august to may
i just remember the pictures and google pages
i would read 1 through 25 internally enraged
by this rememberance of you
my fists clenched in a faded grip
feeling the searing headlines
cutting through the blackness
i forget what it's like
not to lose it all every time
i close my eyelids
and the waves i love creep in and rip
i've just conceptualized it to be a pattern
and accepted it

They tell me to stop remembering
But they don’t understand with
Each blow life hands me
Another is already sewn
Into my ribcage, bruises in each hand
between each crescent bone,
this isn’t a coincidence
Most nights i hang my lungs
Dangling from my spine
Watching the walls cave in
the sticky residue of surgical tape
Strapped around my bicep
Will not wash off in the shower and then
This guilt will not wash off in the shower
and then, you are a burden, hidden
In the paperwork, between the lines
Three weeks later and there is still
Traces of it on me
Parts of me trapped in glass vials
i wonder what people thought
when they saw me in that blue robe
on the bed in the little blue room
I still remember how thick the
needle was
I was never scared of them
until now

i trick people when i feel like
i'm not seeing at all
i'm just feeling, not healing
with these words
that's my downfall
i wish i could give more
but this is all i have left
if i can't keep it locked in closet doors
i know the effect with be my last theft
don't force it out of me
just let the drainage catch your crests
let it come in time
when i feel safe knowing you
would catch my conjested confessions
and lay them to rest
scaled your apartment in one of my favorite dresses
right before sundown
watched the wind billow the blue silk up my thighs,
parachute like
as i looked down,
several stories above your neighbors
(wonder if anyone looked up)
swallowed my human fear, counted the rungs
had opened our forties prematurely in your apartment
sure didn't make climbing any easier
that big map stretched out yawning across the bricks in your living room
spotted the city you were headed for
blame it on uninformed geography but didn't
realize you'd be completely across the country
(didn't tell you but
your cat kissed my nose from the bathroom counter
while i was peeing
and i thought it was one of the most endearing things
that probably ever happened to me)
got to your roof outta breath
all adrenaline and eyes
took off that big leather jacket lined with fleece,
wrapped it around our backs and sat
facing the city you'd be leaving and i'd be entertaining
watched the traffic crawl on the BQE
the sunset bored, you spilled your beer-
kept rolling in it innocently- ******
laughing, god i just
wanted to keep touching you
couldn't decide what to eat
both didn't wanna impose
neither of us could remember the name of that tree
littering pink slippery offspring in spring
for you and me to exclaim fondness over
you were the birth of a simplicity
it was so
terribly easy to be happy
--To Elizabeth Robins Pennell


'O mes cheres Mille et Une Nuits!'--Fantasio.

Once on a time
There was a little boy:  a master-mage
By virtue of a Book
Of magic--O, so magical it filled
His life with visionary pomps
Processional!  And Powers
Passed with him where he passed.  And Thrones
And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed,
Thronged in the criss-cross streets,
The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields,
Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades,
Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul
Pavilioned jealously, and hid
As in the dusk, profound,
Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.--

I shut mine eyes . . . And lo!
A flickering ****** of memory that floats
Upon the face of a pool of darkness five
And thirty dead years deep,
Antic in girlish broideries
And skirts and silly shoes with straps
And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks
Plain in the shadow of a church
(St. Michael's:  in whose brazen call
To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed),
Sedate for all his haste
To be at home; and, nestled in his arm,
Inciting still to quiet and solitude,
Boarded in sober drab,
With small, square, agitating cuts
Let in a-top of the double-columned, close,
Quakerlike print, a Book! . . .
What but that blessed brief
Of what is gallantest and best
In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance?
The Book of rocs,
Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris,
Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars,
And ghouls, and genies--O, so huge
They might have overed the tall Minster Tower
Hands down, as schoolboys take a post!
In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman,
Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade
The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour,
Cairo and Serendib and Candahar,
And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk--
Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms--
Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles,
The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!

Old friends I had a-many--kindly and grim
Familiars, cronies quaint
And goblin!  Never a Wood but housed
Some morrice of dainty dapperlings.  No Brook
But had his nunnery
Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites,
To cabin in his grots, and pace
His lilied margents.  Every lone Hillside
Might open upon Elf-Land.  Every Stalk
That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed
Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs
You climbed beyond the clouds, and found
The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged
And drowsy, from his great oak chair,
Among the flitches and pewters at the fire,
Called for his Faery Harp.  And in it flew,
And, perching on the kitchen table, sang
Jocund and jubilant, with a sound
Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals
The shy thrush at mid-May
Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn;
Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still,
In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring,
For Pan's own whistle, savage and rich and lewd,
And mocked him call for call!

I could not pass
The half-door where the cobbler sat in view
Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun,
In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes,
Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know
Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched
His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists
And elbows.  In the rich June fields,
Where the ripe clover drew the bees,
And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind
Lolled his half-holiday away
Beside me lolling and lounging through my own,
'Twas good to follow the Miller's Youngest Son
On his white horse along the leafy lanes;
For at his stirrup linked and ran,
Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped
From wall to wall above the espaliers,
But in the bravest tops
That market-town, a town of tops, could show:
Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail
A banner flaunted in disdain
Of human stratagems and shifts:
King over All the Catlands, present and past
And future, that moustached
Artificer of fortunes, ****-in-Boots!
Or Bluebeard's Closet, with its plenishing
Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood,
And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases--
Odd-fangled, most a butcher's, part
A faery chamber hazily seen
And hazily figured--on dark afternoons
And windy nights was visiting of the best.
Then, too, the pelt of hoofs
Out in the roaring darkness told
Of Herne the Hunter in his antlered helm
Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit,
Between his hell-born Hounds.
And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear,
Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall,
The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls
Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins;
For, listening, I could help him play
His wonderful game,
In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners
Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.

But what were these so near,
So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought
The run of Ali Baba's Cave
Just for the saying 'Open Sesame,'
With gold to measure, peck by peck,
In round, brown wooden stoups
You borrowed at the chandler's? . . . Or one time
Made you Aladdin's friend at school,
Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp
In perfect trim? . . . Or Ladies, fair
For all the embrowning scars in their white *******
Went labouring under some dread ordinance,
Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while,
Strange Curs that cried as they,
Till there was never a Black ***** of all
Your consorting but might have gone
Spell-driven miserably for crimes
Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . .
Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night,
While you lay wondering and acold,
Your sense was fearfully purged; and soon
Queen Labe, abominable and dear,
Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom,
Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw
Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk),
And muttered certain words you could not hear;
And there! a living stream,
The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags
And cresses, glittered and sang
Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness,
Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! . . .

I was--how many a time!--
That Second Calendar, Son of a King,
On whom 'twas vehemently enjoined,
Pausing at one mysterious door,
To pry no closer, but content his soul
With his kind Forty.  Yet I could not rest
For idleness and ungovernable Fate.
And the Black Horse, which fed on sesame
(That wonder-working word!),
Vouchsafed his back to me, and spread his vans,
And soaring, soaring on
From air to air, came charging to the ground
Sheer, like a lark from the midsummer clouds,
And, shaking me out of the saddle, where I sprawled
Flicked at me with his tail,
And left me blinded, miserable, distraught
(Even as I was in deed,
When doctors came, and odious things were done
On my poor tortured eyes
With lancets; or some evil acid stung
And wrung them like hot sand,
And desperately from room to room
Fumble I must my dark, disconsolate way),
To get to Bagdad how I might.  But there
I met with Merry Ladies.  O you three--
Safie, Amine, Zobeide--when my heart
Forgets you all shall be forgot!
And so we supped, we and the rest,
On wine and roasted lamb, rose-water, dates,
Almonds, pistachios, citrons.  And Haroun
Laughed out of his lordly beard
On Giaffar and Mesrour (I knew the Three
For all their Mossoul habits).  And outside
The Tigris, flowing swift
Like Severn bend for bend, twinkled and gleamed
With broken and wavering shapes of stranger stars;
The vast, blue night
Was murmurous with peris' plumes
And the leathern wings of genies; words of power
Were whispering; and old fishermen,
Casting their nets with prayer, might draw to shore
Dead loveliness:  or a prodigy in scales
Worth in the Caliph's Kitchen pieces of gold:
Or copper vessels, stopped with lead,
Wherein some Squire of Eblis watched and railed,
In durance under potent charactry
Graven by the seal of Solomon the King . . .

Then, as the Book was glassed
In Life as in some olden mirror's quaint,
Bewildering angles, so would Life
Flash light on light back on the Book; and both
Were changed.  Once in a house decayed
From better days, harbouring an errant show
(For all its stories of dry-rot
Were filled with gruesome visitants in wax,
Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes),
I wandered; and no living soul
Was nearer than the pay-box; and I stared
Upon them staring--staring.  Till at last,
Three sets of rafters from the streets,
I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room,
With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene,
Guarding the door:  and there, in a bedroom-set,
Behind a fence of faded crimson cords,
With an aspect of frills
And dimities and dishonoured privacy
That made you hanker and hesitate to look,
A Woman with her litter of Babes--all slain,
All in their nightgowns, all with Painted Eyes
Staring--still staring; so that I turned and ran
As for my neck, but in the street
Took breath.  The same, it seemed,
And yet not all the same, I was to find,
As I went up!  For afterwards,
Whenas I went my round alone--
All day alone--in long, stern, silent streets,
Where I might stretch my hand and take
Whatever I would:  still there were Shapes of Stone,
Motionless, lifelike, frightening--for the Wrath
Had smitten them; but they watched,
This by her melons and figs, that by his rings
And chains and watches, with the hideous gaze,
The Painted Eyes insufferable,
Now, of those grisly images; and I
Pursued my best-beloved quest,
Thrilled with a novel and delicious fear.
So the night fell--with never a lamplighter;
And through the Palace of the King
I groped among the echoes, and I felt
That they were there,
Dreadfully there, the Painted staring Eyes,
Hall after hall . . . Till lo! from far
A Voice!  And in a little while
Two tapers burning!  And the Voice,
Heard in the wondrous Word of God, was--whose?
Whose but Zobeide's,
The lady of my heart, like me
A True Believer, and like me
An outcast thousands of leagues beyond the pale! . . .

Or, sailing to the Isles
Of Khaledan, I spied one evenfall
A black blotch in the sunset; and it grew
Swiftly . . . and grew.  Tearing their beards,
The sailors wept and prayed; but the grave ship,
Deep laden with spiceries and pearls, went mad,
Wrenched the long tiller out of the steersman's hand,
And, turning broadside on,
As the most iron would, was haled and ******
Nearer, and nearer yet;
And, all awash, with horrible lurching leaps
Rushed at that Portent, casting a shadow now
That swallowed sea and sky; and then,
Anchors and nails and bolts
Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang,
A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides
Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay,
A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal
About the waters; and her crew
Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left
To drown.  All the long night I swam;
But in the morning, O, the smiling coast
Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike,
Skirted with shelving sands!  And a great wave
Cast me ashore; and I was saved alive.
So, giving thanks to God, I dried my clothes,
And, faring inland, in a desert place
I stumbled on an iron ring--
The fellow of fifty built into the Quays:
When, scenting a trap-door,
I dug, and dug; until my biggest blade
Stuck into wood.  And then,
The flight of smooth-hewn, easy-falling stairs,
Sunk in the naked rock!  The cool, clean vault,
So neat with niche on niche it might have been
Our beer-cellar but for the rows
Of brazen urns (like monstrous chemist's jars)
Full to the wide, squat throats
With gold-dust, but a-top
A layer of pickled-walnut-looking things
I knew for olives!  And far, O, far away,
The Princess of China languished!  Far away
Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief
Of Eunuchs and the privilege
Of going out at night
To play--unkenned, majestical, secure--
Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped
Like Tigris shore for shore!  Haply a Ghoul
Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon,
A thighbone in his fist, and glared
At supper with a Lady:  she who took
Her rice with tweezers grain by grain.
Or you might stumble--there by the iron gates
Of the Pump Room--underneath the limes--
Upon Bedreddin in his shirt and drawers,
Just as the civil Genie laid him down.
Or those red-curtained panes,
Whence a tame cornet tenored it throatily
Of beer-pots and spittoons and new long pipes,
Might turn a caravansery's, wherein
You found Noureddin Ali, loftily drunk,
And that fair Persian, bathed in tears,
You'd not have given away
For all the diamonds in the Vale Perilous
You had that dark and disleaved afternoon
Escaped on a roc's claw,
Disguised like Sindbad--but in Christmas beef!
And all the blissful while
The schoolboy satchel at your hip
Was such a bulse of gems as should amaze
Grey-whiskered chapmen drawn
From over Caspian:  yea, the Chief Jewellers
Of Tartary and the bazaars,
Seething with traffic, of enormous Ind.--

Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heart
The magian East:  thus the child eyes
Spelled out the wizard message by the light
Of the sober, workaday hours
They saw, week in week out, pass, and still pass
In the sleepy Minster City, folded kind
In ancient Severn's arm,
Amongst her water-meadows and her docks,
Whose floating populace of ships--
Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines,
Bluff barques and rake-hell fore-and-afters--brought
To her very doorsteps and geraniums
The scents of the World's End; the calls
That may not be gainsaid to rise and ride
Like fire on some high errand of the race;
The irresistible appeals
For comradeship that sound
Steadily from the irresistible sea.
Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the tale,
Telling itself anew
In terms of living, labouring life,
Took on the colours, busked it in the wear
Of life that lived and laboured; and Romance,
The Angel-Playmate, raining down
His golden influences
On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did,
Walked with me arm in arm,
Or left me, as one bediademed with straws
And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart
Who had the gift to seek and feel and find
His fiery-hearted presence everywhere.
Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things,
Sends the same silver dews
Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies
On some poor collier-hamlet--(mound on mound
Of sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalk
Sullenly smoking over a row
Of flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty air
A web of rails and wheels and beams; with strings
Of hurtling, tipping trams)--
As on the amorous nightingales
And roses of Shiraz, or the walls and towers
Of Samarcand--the Ineffable--whence you espy
The splendour of Ginnistan's embattled spears,
Like listed lightnings.
Samarcand!
That name of names!  That star-vaned belvedere
Builded against the Chambers of the South!
That outpost on the Infinite!
And behold!
Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tide
Might overtake you:  for one fringe,
One suburb, is stablished on firm earth; but one
Floats founded vague
In lubberlands delectable--isles of palm
And lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas,
The promise of wistful hills--
The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream.
AD Sifford Apr 2014
There is a ladder that I climb
And climb I shall through all of time
The wood is rough and splintery
And so the task is hard, you see
And as I climb my arms grow weak
My bones, like the rungs, bend and creak
Sometimes resolve abandons me
My head goes down and I can't see
When climbing in this careless way
I lose my hold and slip away
So, quickly I fall ten feet down
I tell myself to not look down
I grab hold of the rung again
Then meditate and rest my chin
The rung has now a coat of slime
It feels I'll slip another time
I push the thought out of my head
For if I fall, then I'll be dead
I wipe away the dreadful slime
And climb again, step at a time
And though the top I'll never see,
I keep my gaze ahead of me.

"Why do you climb", a man once asked
"...If you cannot complete the task?"
"There are two worlds", I said to him
"...And one of them is filled with sin
Within that world, you'll find no light
Your soul is bound by fear and spite
In the other, you can see
Your heart's made whole and you are free
The line between these worlds is broad
That is the world on which we trod

But even here amidst our strife
You'll find there are two sides of life
We start between and go one way
By choices we make every day
This road we take is gradual
We slowly fall as blinded fools
Unless we climb the other way
And so please hear these things I say

As I climb, the light gets brighter
And the load on me becomes much lighter
The truth's revealed and my heart made full
As I climb away from sin's dark rule

So, where's this ladder that I climb?
He's here; take hold. He's yours and mine"
|Written 2010|
*from my Emerge collection, being poem #10. Please see the collection page itself.

The final original poem in the Emerge project set, "The Ladder" brought my own poem contribution to Emerge to a close, wrapping up my part in the theme with an open invitation to the reader to follow the God of my own lessons learned--The Father of Jesus Christ--Yahweh!

The Ladder was my most popular poem in my Emerge collection among my friends and family, and I feel it's one of my most favored and respected/appreciated poems I've ever written, even to this day. It's one people I know still bring up when my poetry is in conversation. Perhaps childishly, I think this bittered me towards it a bit. I love this poem, and it was certainly lead by The Spirit, and I hope it will have an impact in the world. But were other poems in the set that have deeper personal significance and treasured value for me, that I guess others will never be able, by no fault of their own, to appreciate.

At the time, TL was the longest poem I had ever written, and I believe it was actually the last one I wrote for Emerge.

The word "rung" all throughout the poem was originally "bar". I didn't know what they were called! :P

© 2017 A.D. Sifford.
I'm okay with you sharing my poems, but I ask that you show courtesy. Please be honest about the authorship by attributing it to my name. Thank you,
- Sifford
anastasia Sep 2018
her skin is jaundiced, quite like the color of the sky before a storm
if you look at her long enough you can almost smell the rain on her skin.
her ribs are not unlike the rungs of a ladder.
once delicate fingers have been burned at the touch of acid and bones have been made brittle.
her nails are jagged, each impacted with crescent moons of soil.
the digging is ceaseless.
she is searching for something she will never find, something that beacons like a lighthouse on the horizon
a sign of safety but blinding when you try to take a closer look.
she slinks along the edge of an unremitting chasm,
dancing with the devil throughout the evening,
but the night draws on and she comes dangerously close to stepping on his toes.
her rhythm is wrong, the metronome is feeding her lies,
but she is greedy and devours them all.
the gnawing inside her returns.
to sleep she goes, under the spell of the guilt washing over her like the sweet, sticky air of the summer, as the gnawing inside takes over.
Let’s take everything we have,
and build a bridge up to the moon.
From parked cars to table tops,
apple cores and spoons.
The broken toys under our beds
can be the very base.
Our weathered dreams from child hood,
will hold it all in place.

We’ll race for broken window panes,
and empty trash can bins.
For boxes once used as forts,
and endless bobby pins.
Shampoo bottles tossed aside
will make such lovely rungs.
Bubbles dripping out their sides
smell of summer and bubblegum.

We must hurry before they all catch on,
and yell for us to stop.
They’re fearing broken bones,
that we won’t survive the drop.
But still we climb like furry ones,
monkeys in disguise.
Jumping up from bar to bar,
higher in the sky.

Quick! Reach for the balloons
we let go of much too soon.
Tie them to sides of our new
pathway to the moon.
Make it look like a carnival!
Make everyone come and see!
Our dreams have gone far past their reach.
We’re actually doing this, you and me.

And in this day we’ll accomplish more than they ever have.
Because today we took our dreams, and ran with them hand in hand.
Talarah Shepherd Feb 2014
To divine the truth, is to define a miracle --
since you asked I'll reach into the bag of
both realigned and canned answers I keep
with the good intention of weaving old
wools for you, into wisdom anew,
just for you
Hell, I'd rather reach inside my lungs,
scrape with ten jagged fingernails at
lining sprayed with silver by what's
become known as better judgment
until the flesh caught underneath
peels away
There's gotta be more to this exhaling
exchange of words than we've let on
constructions of construction in the
destruction come from centuries
of hard and stark speech revision
for science
Ever open restaurant rooftop under
four grounded legs, four gazing eyes
Sky scape splashed navy painted dusk
You ask lightly, highly of me
How do humans rust?

A burlap bag broke in bleeding insides
I reach deeper into my recesses
the cavities keeping my trying heart intact
and pull that bleating piece of trash
up through my teeth and cough
up for you

Is there a soul there?
Is there a soul there?
Is there a soul there?
Doug Potter Sep 2016
Don't talk to the old man
on the ladder he's likely
cleaning eavestroughs

end to end full of leaves
kite string & black
beetles

He may mumble
teetering on the rungs
but don’t interrupt work

he has enough to handle.
Francie Lynch Dec 2016
Why do you put up with a social climber
With two rungs left
Before his feet touch the earth?
Is it pity, empathy or indifference?

Choices are often ultimatums;
Free will is frequently channelled;
Chaos and dominos infiltrate like moles;
Serendipity and chance prevail.
A few rungs were damaged,
And the playing field is never level.


Why do you put up with one so down?

Ladders, she says, extend both ways,
The angles depend on aspirations.
Going up varies,
Coming down, inevitable.


She concludes with:
*The law of gravity is grave.
That's how.
Why can't I fly? Because, I am caged in the bowels of bitter, deceit.
Why can't I dance? Because, my body is bound to the gravity of unacceptable, honor.
Why, can't I sing? Because, my lungs are choked by this haute reservoir of insanity.

But, the Trapeze, artist...
The trapeze artist, climbs the ladder of awe, itself, and walks the silver lining of death.

Why can't I write? Because, my hands are bound in the filth of my past,
meddling with broken things.
Why can't I speak? Because, the honor I am bound to, is to live, life, behind closed windows.
Why can't I see? Because, the blindfolds that sheath my eyes from sin, are more sin than any satan incarnate.

But, the Trapeze, artist...
The trapeze artist, climbs the rungs of the narrow road, and walks over the pit of doom, to save itself.
There is no explanation for this act.

So, why can't I shout? Because, I am voiceless to the concerns of the audience.
Why can't I beg? Because, the world has no room for weakness, fear and more loss.
Why can't I scream? Because...
Because...

Because the Trapeze artist dropped off the high-strung ledge of wonders...
And plummeted into a darkness, that has robbed my audience, of all conscionable thought.

Because... the Trapeze artist, is dead.
This is a poem that I wrote back in 2010 (on July 4th), which is the year I consider to be the dawn of my writing. It was the year that poems came to me effortlessly, continually, like bottled messages from yonder lands. I sat on the shore crafting a boat to make it to yonder, where I thought yonder held the love I so craved and spoke elegantly of. Now I may have been to yonder, and wish to never return...

Enjoy!

DEW
my date with thc,
serendipitous and sublime,
like the first time
curious george killed
the black persian *****...

got me sky-hiking
in a cloud of delusion
and creativity,
climbing ladders of abstraction
for nine mystic rungs

from mundane muse,
regrettable
like drunk ***
with an octogenarian

to lucid peaks of eccentricity,
a vaunted house built by
jimi and john,
long gone,
but resurrected
this date

we split a dime
into 3 nickels
and rolled every penny
into a top-5 billboard joint

we sprayed the submarine
purple
with haze
then made the wind cry
mary
as we gazed at two
giraffes making babies
on the serengeti,
laughing hysterically
like schoolgirls watching
riding miss daisy

then the cbd kicked in
and I toodle-ooed
my two
ungratefully dead hippy
stoneheads

and crashed from
the ninth rung of
the last ladder
onto grandma's bed,

clutching the first lines of
my date with thc,
serendipitous
and
sublime...

~ P (#Pablo#hcgktbpp)

(8/12/2013)
Stephen Lindow Apr 2014
This is the ladder---your first steps into the height. There are no apples. There are no angels. There is only broken shadow and socket; a rounded house of milk and voltage. Now, as you unscrew the bulb with fingertips, listen for the sand. It is sand from ancestral beaches were all families of glass have been blown. A beach where dinosaurs are continually struck by lightning. Continue swiveling until the blown-out bulb is free from the ceiling. Come down, but do not look down. Use the eye in each shoe to find the lower rungs. Place the old bulb in with the dish of pears. The new carton of bulbs are close by, sleeping. Unwrap a fresh bulb from its onionskin pajamas and ascend the same ladder previous. Using your musical hand, insert the threaded end up into the unthreaded beginning. Turn gently in the direction of sunrise until snug. Pull the chain, for the light of God's echoing equation will now sing. Squint and descend.
Harry J Baxter Nov 2013
The sun hides behind the clouds
but I see feet beneath those curtains
on a Sunday a girl with short hair and lesbianism smiles at me
You shouldn't mix plaid with stripes
that's like fashion 101
so I walked down the street
buttoning my plaid shirt up
when I fell down a  man hole
and a mole man said to me
you shouldn't buy those Adidas shoes
they treat the workers horribly
so I took them off
and cut my naked feet on rust ladder rungs
I went to the top floor
they told my I shouldn't wear my jeans so creased
they scoffed at the words denim
so I took my pants off and made them into a sail
I went to the mirror
and it told me I should fit a size bigger
and that I should probably work out some more
I tore muscular and skeleton systems from the pages of biology text books
and used it for kindling
to warm my cold shoulders
Kate Lion Mar 2015
i am waking up
pushing my way through the plastic covering all of the ideas i was never supposed to touch
so many ideas

i am choosing to walk down halls with varied perspective mirrors
i stop at the ones that make me look fat
and don't believe the ones that reflect a flattering figure
i walk on

i observe
i internalize
i try to understand

why do i think the way that i do?
i was born
into a straightjacket
on the rungs of a one-way ladder

never saw that others might be scaling or ascending the same wall
with rope
sheer strength
the stairs

who am i to judge which way is better?
"the injuring of another can be in no case just."

(as long as it's not hurting anyone)
The heart is the heart because it wants to be.
The paste and cement are cunning
and clever and selfish.
Dance circles around the lungs
and you’ll never realize that you have
not actually touched them.
(years and years, how could you never notice that you
pull back before actually placing yourself within them?)
They won’t notice until later
when they ache for hands upon ribcage.
For now, believe you are making contact
when you’re really just taking
and breaking. All of us are blind.
The best fakers are the ones who
don’t even realize they’re faking it.
I looked up at the skies
Never knowing how high it really it is when I think of people who have reached the moon
They are just lies
I’d never made to path to reach the troposphere anytime soon

Because I never realized my dreams until I noticed time really flies or could run
While I felt jealous of the spacemen who had gone past an achievable reality
So one day I brought a completely upright ladder with a fluffy cloud at the top rung to block the sun
I ventured near the majestic Everest for inspiration with amateurish alacrity

After a few rungs I realized I was missing the soil
I was living in a dream without even knowing it
I’d never known blood, sweat and toil
Well I was feeling tired by epiphanies I came across each time when on the rungs my feet fit

After a healthy amount of rungs I came under the impression that I had gone quite far up
So I looked below to see how far I had come, understanding I still couldn’t see my **** cursed cloud
But when I did I was overcome by vertigo and ran up the steps faster than a hare whilst fearing failure and making this one shot my only mess up
My entire life I had been around the wrong crowd

Thinking my progress was enough at every interval of my life but that was the dream or a holy shroud
Time to make that shroud a proper cassock for a righteous monk
Because I was on my way to some form of success I had found
But I didn’t know the nature of it because of the people I had been among and I had run amok

Now eight kilometers into the journey of 10 km of climbing I could barely make out the familiar snowy white
And stopped for respite to think about the purpose of all of this because I had decided on this just to learn how to work hard
I realized I don’t want to work any further and I thought I was right to seek God and reach the peak of my might
And I continued toward

I had to work quite hard to finish the journey to the cloud because I had taken too long a rest
So by the time I had reached I was sweating blood
And I was about to climb onto my beloved spacious cloud knowing I had climbed the highest
But when I was about get down the ladder fell through the cloud and I grabbed tight onto the wood already missing my cloud as I probably would

As it sped downward I realized it was going into the top of Mount Everest
And I prayed for a miracle because I wanted to meet my Lord not land on the top of some dumb mountain
But much to my chagrin I landed in the snow near an Indian flag planted by a mountaineer who had also done his best or maybe more and I realized this was just a test
In glee and forgetting my past and then reminiscing it to cherish this moment and realization I clenched a fistful of snow and raised it to the sky and I had learned that you don’t reach God by a simple stunt he has to welcome you after you’ve proved yourself through a real endurance test like drowning yourself in the golden fountain

You don’t set the goal he sets it
He uses your ideals as benchmarks
But he may not stand beside it unless you’ve known enough adversity to still manage living the rest of your life in a pile of ****
But if you still believe in living in a dream instead of dying in one you’re gonna stay stuck on Mount Everest because you’ll still have to move because of the lack of oxygen and you’re going to die and get reborn as a dog that barks

Now I had decided to block the sun how the hell do I get down this dumb mountain now
An allegory to success, enlightenment and morality. Filled with delicious chunks of prose poetry.
Francie Lynch Feb 2015
The coffee *** just signalled, Ready,
So I pour the cream before the java:
A cup of divergent thinking.
There are roads running
In opposite directions,
Sharing points of similarity:
A tree, a sign, me.
Inside or outside the box of thinking,
Using the lower and upper ladder rungs
To paint the same wall,
Prologues and epilogues to the same story,
Lawyers in clown suits,
Children using,
Kittens chewing slippers,
Dogs in litter boxes,
Earth cooling,
Healing and feeding the masses,
Elected monarchies... NO monarchies,
Sleeping in or getting up,
Cursory letter to family and friends
(Though this is coming to an end),
Making love while wearing gloves,
The moon moves east to west
In the blink of sleep,
Churches giving alms and unlocking doors,
Schools excelling,
Parents attending.
To juxtapose is divergent,
Like sobering up with detergent
(You may be clean, but are you dry?).

If insurgents were divergent,
We'd have more convergence.
Tivonna Jan 2017
In isolation I have lived,
                       protecting me from love's sorrows,
                       contemplating . . . *what is true love
,
                       while developing inner me.

Steep hills and valleys I have trod,
                      step-by-step in awed wonderment,
                      contemplating its creation,
                      yet learning teachings that it gives.

I recall being a young mom,
                      many emotions in its tests,
                      contemplating life-birthing pains,
                      now all dulled because of its joys.

Memories of family and friends,
                      whether old, new, or now passed,
                      contemplating nearness or loss,
                      their essence over-powers all.

I see news-clips of those displaced,
                      some with smiles and wondering why?
                      Together in supportive bands
                      with courage facing the unknown.

Romantic love is tempor'y,
                      regardless of its length of time,
                      taking us up the ladder's rungs,
                      while learning about selfless love.

That true love great teachers have spread,
                      creation learned or by others,
                      through selfless acts and by be-ing,
                      will last unconditionally.

Our unique gifts we develop,
                      becomes the ladder's brace for rungs,
                      supporting each phase that we now step
                      and that we can give to others.

Tivonna
I'm somewhat pensive today. Today would have been my wedding anniversary. I was married almost 30 years, it ended suddenly, no conscious glimmerings and I was not given a reason why.  It was a painful time. I've been on my own for 16 years. I'm okay and then some. 

I put my early writings together and was published this past year.  
Living in the Valley: A journey back to self.  Yes, my grieving in part prose, part poetry.  Since then, I've been blessed to have someone in my life again. Perhaps I should have written that book earlier!
Reason burns the prime
leaves in their cinders no solace
for one likely answer are a hundred questions
where crumbling bones can’t have the will
to climb anymore the rungs endless.

Finds beneath feet a resting ground
that in glimmer of hope abound
a tunnel light an emerging design
to craft from chaos a face divine.

Utters a prayer that’s never too late
succumbs blissfully to the savior the faith.

— The End —