brian-oarr
American
I am a twice retired computer professional now living in Las Vegas where I supplement my living by advantage play gambling. / / My favorite poets are Lucia Perillo, W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich and Thomas Hardy / / Favorite quote: "That man's silence is worth listening to." --- Thomas Hardy
"Boy were we wrong! We're the oddball. We're the freaks." --- Dr. Michio Kaku
We looked at trillions of those stars and knew,
that somewhere out there was another Planet Blue.
Those were not canals we saw on Mars;
optical illusions, lensed figment memoirs.
Stare into trillions, space mind overwhelms.
Rimbaud entrapped in countless ethereal realms.
Not the goal of evolution, merely happenstance,
the search for elsewhere leads a merry dance.
Planets a dime a dozen, yet no Goldilocks Zone
produces signals bearing SETI transient tones.
Birds more subtly impact our lives,
than do the aliens our universe provides.
Aug 14, 2018
Aug 14, 2018 at 1:16 AM UTC
Gratitude always falls short of intention,
leaving only a fiction of our meaning,
when silence descends blinking neon emotions
and a void, rather than a hoped for event horizon of joy.
But, it's how you transcend that shimmers humanity,
makes doubt ephemera and avoids conclusion.
No longer a skulker in spiky weeds,
you emerge radiant in a woman's wisdom.
Likely, it comes from a mother's nurture,
but the solitude of silence, these your father's whispers.
So, you've escaped both superficial and awkward,
arisen the womb unscathed --- Proceed to middle age!
Though perception often baffles understanding,
human genomes revel in such challenge.
Jun 25, 2016
Jun 25, 2016 at 9:17 PM UTC
Women who sleep on stones are like
brick houses that squat alone in cornfields.
They look weatherworn, solid, dusty,
torn screens sloughing from the window frames.
But at dusk a second-story light is always burning.
Used to be I liked nothing more
than spreading my blanket on high granite ledges
that collect good water in their hollows.
Stars came close without the trees
staring and rustling like damp underthings.
But doesn't the body foil what it loves best?
Now my hips creak and their blades are tender.
I can't rest on my back for fear of exposing
my gut to night creatures who might come along
and rip it open with a beak or hoof.
And if I sleep on my belly, pinning it down,
my ******* start puling like baby pigs
trapped under their slab of torpid mother.
Dark passes as I shift from side to side
to side, the blood pooling just above the bone.
Women who sleep on stones don't sleep.
They see the stars moving, the sunrise, the gnats
rising like a hairnet lifted from a waitress's head.
The next day they're sore all over and glad
for the ache: that's how stubborn they are.
Feb 10, 2016
Feb 10, 2016 at 11:05 PM UTC
Durgan
for J.M.
At Durgan waves are black as cypresses,
clear as the water of a wishing well,
caressing the stones with smooth palms, looking
into the pools as enigmatic eyes
peer into mirrors, or music echoes
out of a wood the waking dreams of day,
blind eyelids lifting to a coloured world.
Now with averted head your living ghost
walks in my mind, your shadow leans
over the half-door of dream; your footprint lies
where gulls alight; shade of a shade, you laugh.
But separate, apart, you are alive:
you have not died, therefore I am alone.
Like birds, cottages white and grey
alert on rocks are gathered, or low
under branches, dark but not desolate;
shells move over sand, or seaweed gleams
with their clear yellow, as tides recede.
Serene in storm or eloquent in sunlight
sombre Durgan where no strangers come
awaits us always, but is always lost:
we are separate, sharing no secrets, each alone;
you will listen no more, now, to the sounding sea.
Dec 25, 2015
Dec 25, 2015 at 4:26 PM UTC
The rotten fruit shall be shaken --- W. H. Auden
Do they somehow envision sainthood in the homeless
or extol the virtue of the millions toiling for minimum wage;
see themselves as the feudal overlords of trickle-down,
their enormous profits banquet omelets for the common good?
You know the politics whereof I speak,
the Me, Myself and I of anachronistic yesterdays,
the concave years of soup-kitchens supporting high-rise condos
and batshit crazy presidential candidates admiring selfies.
I wonder if it's all because they can't reach ******
impotence and pharmaceuticals which fuel our economy?
A nation moans from the exhaustion of despair with
forgotten cityscapes of odorous blacks and blues.
Oct 17, 2015
Oct 17, 2015 at 6:22 AM UTC
Since those long ago days in Latin class,
I have endeavored to speak your echo, Crystal.
How I longed to be amongst your trusted inner circle!
Alas, I had no voice then to speak these things to you.
Mrs. Tinkler must have sensed my blocked emotions;
always coupled we two to do textual translations.
I deferred and let you be the intellectual leader
feeling wholly given over to being your infatuated scribe.
It was always your property to be simpatico;
you were the giver of kindness and smiles,
your latent brilliance subsumed by outward caring.
What forlorn chance did my jejune heart have?
And now, at length, I can finally speak these things,
trusting in the smiles that touching substance brings.
Oct 7, 2015
Oct 7, 2015 at 1:40 PM UTC
So, I got to thinking about solid matter;
all things being held together electromagnetically
by photons of light rallying like tennis *****
between racket atoms of opposite electrical charge.
And I said, "Yup, that's how love works!"
Aren't lovers arrayed in possible simultaneous states
until acted upon by some outside infatuation?
Attraction a moment to moment subatomic entanglement?
There's your spooky action at a distance!
Perhaps, the universe really does play dice with human hearts.
Random fluctuation palpitations in a quantum space,
probabilities of possibility tending toward embrace.
Sep 30, 2015
Sep 30, 2015 at 10:31 AM UTC
"In Modern Drama we turn a critical eye
into the conditions of real life and morality." --- Arlen Rambush
Modern Drama 101
Her life had become an Ibsen scenario,
cloaked, as it was, in furtive AOL chat rooms,
seeking the romance no longer orbed in marriage,
rather to be panned from the internet wellspring.
It wasn't so much inconstancy, as it was whimsy;
more a channeling of Deneuve, than profiling Gabler.
And she found they flocked to her,
pigeons to be shooed away, should they get too close.
Soul of the house, everything to husband and family,
yet, it was in cyber tryst where she flourished,
that informed the powerful intellect at intervals
with mother and a carte blanche ingénue.
It's possible she sought to reform them,
tear them down --- or no --- it was conquest.
It was not she that needed men,
it was she that absorbed them in hedonistic pleasure.
Jul 27, 2015
Jul 27, 2015 at 9:01 PM UTC
One slept soundly in those Adirondack nights,
blanketed in youthful exuberance from
acidic rain pollution heralding the Crack of Doom.
The fish we caught still fit for human consumption,
the marble statues not yet melting in city parks,
nor green pastures distributed with a browning blot.
No, time was far from reconciled with nature,
the child in us still curled up at the center,
our songs still clarion beneath a complicated sky.
You might say our mountains had a low grade fever,
that there were generous shadows sunning across our chest,
but, Midwest chimneys bilged us with their discharge.
I can't go back, reality too painful a guardian,
every mountain bivouac of boyhood long diseased.
May 18, 2015
May 18, 2015 at 6:24 AM UTC
that I ran into my friend Vic was a good thing
because we leaned on the shadowy cars and he gave me
some new words: Faith, Reconciliation, Continuance.
But driving home, they began to fill me up with grief
so I tossed them out the window like a finished cigarette.
And I went down to talk to the creek, who was filled with a grief
of her own, a grief of too much water having fallen
in too few days. And she had me dash my empty beer bottles
against her tortured stones that night, had me make
the shrill cry of a hawk as I let each one fly.
And with each crash she gave me back my former words,
my old & tarnished words, the fs and ts
honed sharp enough to really hurt somebody bad. And sharp
enough to hack a trench into my chest, so the water could roll in
like freshened blood, roaring the way it roars against
the creekstones: girl you're alive, alive, alive . . .
I call the creek a woman because she had a woman's wisdom,
a woman's bitter tears, even had the housewife's old cliché
about how all love ends in either death, or separation
from those we love. And the creek made me remember
how they want you to believe the only way off the meathook
is by dying first.
She said: *whatever you do, whatever you do
don't let yourself be the one who dies first.*
Mar 7, 2015
Mar 7, 2015 at 4:00 PM UTC