Bronzed blade, raised in ire, abreast,
Foresquare to thy foe, attest,
Norseman with thy flowing hair
Howling, teeth bare challenge, there!

Somnolence now thy time of quiet
Quiescence to the moments write
Captured, soft, her sweetest smile
In rendering thy pain, worthwhile?

Wherever whence, thee came to know
Beyond high fjord, through iceberg flow,
From battle ground of dire plight
To reminiscence in the night?

Know thy words be justly spent,
Thy coiled emotions caste and vent....
Now worn as Talisman by we
Who greive this passing hour of thee.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

I cannot show them my sincerity,
Cannot hold in my hands, my pain.
Delusions and dreams, my sweetest escape.
Except a lesson, what did I gain?

I thought I would know, now I don't know why.
My love was falsely advertised.

The emotions, they come in waves.
In my head, I still replay your innocent gaze.
The absence of our potential days, it lays
On my chest, becoming a part of me as it weighs
I guess we've both gone through different hallways.

Sometimes
Simple things are
Complicated than
Complicated things

I’ve been the storm, I’ve been the tree,
Breaking down and breaking free.
The deeper pain, the higher climb—
My soul’s grown wiser over time.

I don’t just bloom—I rise, I bend,
A story still I’ve yet to end.

I sit in the sun room, I am shaded for the sun
is only newly risen, low slung, just above the horizon,
behind me, over my shoulder, early morn warm

Slivers of sun rays yellow highlight the wild green lawn,
freshly nourished by torrential rains of the prior eve

The wind gusts are residuals, memoirs of the hurricane
that came for a peripheral visit, like your unwanted cousin Earl,
in town for the day,
too bad your schedule
is fully booked,
but he keeps raining on you,
staying on the phone for so long, that the goodbye,
go away, hang up relief is palpable

The oak trees are top heavy with leaves frothy like a new cappuccino,
the leaves resist the sun slivers, guarding the grass
from browning out, by knocking the rookie rays to and fro,
just for now, just for a few minutes more,
it is advantage trees,
for they stand taller in the sky
than the youthful teenage yellow ball

I sit in the sun room buffered from nature's battles external,
by white lace curtains which are the hallmark
of all that is fine in Western Civilization,

and my thoughts drift to suicide.

I have sat in the sun room of my mind, unprotected.
with front row seats, first hand witness to a battle unceasing

Such that my investigations, my travails along the boundary line
between internal madness and infernal relief from mental pain
so crippling, is such that you recall begging for cancer or Aids

Such that my investigations, my travails along the sanity boundary
are substantive, modestly put,
not inconsiderable

Point your finger at me, demanding like every
needy neurotic moderne, reassurance total,
proof negative in this instance, of relevant expertise!

Tell us you bona fides, what is your knowing in these matters?

Show us the wrist scars, evidential,
prove to us your "hands on" experiential!

True, true, I am without demonstrable proofs
of the first hand,
my resume is absent of
razors and pills,
poisons and daredevil spills,
guns, knives, utensils purposed for taking lives

Here are my truths,
here are my sums

If the numerator is the minutes spent resisting the promised relief
of the East River currents from the crushing loneliness that
consumed my every waking second of every night of my years of despair
                           divided by
a denominator that is my unitary, solitary name,
then my fraction, my remainder, is greater than one,
the one step away from supposed salvation...

Yet, here I am sitting in the sun room buffered from
nature's battles by white lace curtains which are the hallmark
of all that is fine in Western Civilization

I am a survivor of mine own World War III,
carnaged battlefields, where white lace curtains,
were not buffers but dividers tween mis en scenes,
variegated veins of colored nightmares, reenactments of
death heroics worthy of Shakespeare

Did I lack for courage?
Was my fear/despair ratio insufficient?

These are questions for which the answers matter only to me,
tho the questions are fair ones,m my unsolicited ******,
they are not the ones for which I herein write,
for they no longer have relevance, meaning or validity,
for yours truly

I write poetry by command,
by request, good or bad,
this one is a bequest to myself, and also a sidecar for an old friend,
who asked in passing to write what I know of suicide,
unaware that the damage of hurricanes is not always
visible to the naked heart

These hands, that type these words are the resume of a life
resumed,
life line remains scarred, but after an inter-mission, after an inter-diction, an inter-re-invention
in a play where I was an actor who could not speak
but knew every line, I am now the approving audience too...

But I speak now and I say this:

There are natural toxins in us all,
if you wish to understand the whys, the reasons,
of the nearness of taking/giving away what belongs to you,
do your own sums, admit your own truths
query not the lives of others, approach the mirror...

If you want to understand suicide,
no need to phone a friend, ask the expert,
ask yourself,
parse the curtains of the
sun room and admit, that you do understand,
that you once swung one leg over the roof,
gauged
the currents speed and direction,
went deep sea fishing without rod or reel
and you recall it all too well, for you did the math
and here I am, tho the tug ne'er fully disappears,
here I am, here I am writing to you,
as I sit in the sun room.

Memorial Day, 2011

There was a time I wandered through your garden,

starving.

And you—each of you—offered yourselves

as fruit swollen with promise.

I reached for you with cracked hands,

bit in with blind hunger,

and called the bitterness flavor.



You were beautiful.

God, you were beautiful.

But so is nightshade,

so is the blossom that blooms on the mouth of a grave.

Your sweetness was lacquered in arsenic,

your nectar dripped with need.

You tasted of almosts

and if-onlys

and don’t-you-dares

disguised as love.



I swallowed you whole.



Thank you for that.



Truly.

Because I needed the poison.

I needed to tremble.

I needed to wake at 3 a.m.

with my gut twisted into questions,

my lips still red from the lie.



You see,

each of you grew in soil watered by my self-doubt.

You thrived on my silence,

my contortion,

my careful pruning of self

to fit the shape of your hunger.



I tended you like a fool tends a ****,

thinking it would blossom into medicine.

But you were never sustenance.

You were spectacle.

And I—

I was the banquet host,

laying myself out

course after course,

watching you feast

and ask what else I had to offer.



No more.



The garden is closed now.



I’ve uprooted every vine

that once climbed my spine like a lover.

I’ve tilled the rot,

turned the decay into compost,

and from it—

from it—

a single fig tree has risen.

Quiet. Modest.

But true.



She feeds me.

Not with frenzy,

but with fullness.

Not with hunger,

but with presence.

Her fruit doesn’t burn.

It lingers.



So to each bitter harvest:

Thank you.

Thank you for sickening me.

For seducing me.

For starving me so thoroughly

that when love finally arrived,

I could taste it—

and know it was real.



You were never the feast.

You were the lesson.



And I am no longer hungry.



— Formerly Yours,

Now Fed

~a question of a thousand dreams~^

“Where are you going now my love? Where will you be tomorrow? Will you bring me happiness?  Will you bring me sorrow? All the questions of a thousand dreams, what you do and what you see”

this one composes itself
for all dreams go unremembered
the first, the thousandth, the  every in between,
erased by the push button of opening eyes

but dreams come, marching in, saints mining the raw materiel
the quartermaster has stored, awaiting requisition by an
unarmed unnamed corp, witnessed but never seen

these dreams wisped soft willow budded, tempting taunting,
leaving nothing but unanswered questions that colored come
in black and white

elementary clues,
a pillow indentation,
single hair that stretches
across the sea between two pillows that is blonde or red  
but
certainly unmine,  
dregs of soured sentiment linger like the
aftertaste of too many coffees and stainless steel beers

heated summers breezes give no succor or relief,
and the rain following gives no pleasure,
for now you are hot and soaked,

but somewhere in there a dream is part replayed,
and eyes widening in major league surprise,
the question acknowledged, the dreams quest hinted  

she has gone, neither happiness or sorrow will she
provide on the morrow, no toweling of your wet hair fair,
and you awake sweat besotted, it is not rain, just pain,
and it is only one dream a thousand times repeated

and what you do and what you see
is the abraded night ahead, and
you bitter laugh, for there is no more other than to think,
the question answered, and you beg relief by
uttering
“perchance to dream”

3:49 pm

see the notes!!


someone accuses me of Plagiarism
because  I did not acknowledge that the quote in marks and Italics was from a famous song written 39 years ago

so here is my response to
“just saying”

congratulations on ******* me off
and yes I agree, you do not know the rules

“#1: Quotation Marks Are for Quoting People—Verbatim
Perhaps it should go without saying, but quotation marks are for quoting people. Quoting doesn’t mean summarizing or paraphrasing; it means repeating exactly what someone said. If you put double quotes around a phrase, your reader will often assume  that someone, somewhere, said that exact phrase or sentence.“

http://thevisualcommunicationguy.com/2013/09/11/10-things-you-really-need-to-know-about-quotation-marks/

i don’t want to be
alone
i don’t know what i’ll
do

The pain
Of being around
You

Burns like a tire fire,
Hurts more than desire,
Tastes like
Brittle charcoal,
Stings
more than
Any promise you broke,

Burns
Li ke
A tire fire,

Hurts
More
Than desire,

Tastes
Like
Brittle charcoal,

Stings
Like
Every
promise I
Broke.

Being around you hurts more

Than being a

Joke.