Spread your wings, ‬
‪Fly my son, Fly away. ‬
‪He said with a calming voice, ‬
‪Continued, ‬
‪These dry eyes will haunt you down, ‬
‪Fly my son, fly far.
‪He started to cry with eyes full of tears, ‬
‪Pointing to the sky, ‬
And gushed,
‪Get along with the clouds, ‬
‪And don’t come back, ‬
‪These ***** souls will eat you alive.
‪Fly my son, fly as farthest as you can, ‬
‪Because you don’t have a home now!

Beetles creep & earthworms writhe
In soil and leafage mould
Where men, in towers' ivory
Broach loud and souls are sold.
Honesty and purity
Enflower places plain
But pompousness and leather hearts
Merely promulgate distain.
Distancing the words, effete,
Conjure portals cold
Whilst wallowing in self esteem
Seldom glints of gold.
Instead the psalms of simple chime
The bells of true release,
Where meek and mild and unposessed
sweat blood and bleed for peace.
Where the stroke of brush, unfettered,
Lets the masterpiece unfold,
And children sit enthralled, only,
When tales of truth are told.

M.

The chessboard is patterned in onyx and white.
Yellowed ivory are the pieces she plays.
The King is in Jeopardy; her options are few;
Death’s Jet pieces are against her arrayed.
Her opponent is fearsome; a skeletal Knight,
enrobed in a caftan as dark as midnight.
Each move she makes falls before the plan
of the specter’s outstretched bony hand.
As she pauses to ponder if her next move is wise
Her spectral opponent assumes a new guise;
“it’s your move, Dolores.” Her opponent now said
in the guise of her husband, some twenty years dead.
By now almost all ivory pieces are gone,
leaving her only her King and one pawn.
She moves to defend but no chance can be seen
in sending a pawn out to battle a Queen.
Once more her opponent assumes a new face;
Her beloved lost Daughter assumes her Dads place.
She has fought long and hard; long past hope of gain.
Now draining fatigue saps the strength from her frame.
“Mom, it is time to resign without shame;
None can deny you gave Death a good game.”

~for better days for the poet betterdays~

mournful tunes play silently, but still too often,
eyes wet but in corners kept, recurring then the
memories, keepsakes, letters, books, small trinkets,
not dusty, but dusky, resting on in-between ledge of a
mountain-sized twilight of well lit shadowy haziness,
edgy dark brilliance, a comprehensible contrast non-comprehendible

tunes that bless with equal measures of grief,
comforting, by memorable card flashes of good relief,
a dividing line, hazy and frequented crossed, a sort of path,
with no destination signaled, as if the path itself was an end,
to a meaning, a solution, with no clarity divined, a division
of sight and insight, providing an ill fitting reconciliation

mourning is electric, morning is electric,
letters, words bottled up in evaporating perfume bottles,
seeking the comfort of dissipation unto a larger atmosphere,
the scent in everything tangible, stronger still yet, in intangibles
that can erode but never ever fail to return instantly when voked,
by vision, odor, a particular child’s smile, line in a poem volunteered

recovered, uncovered, a post first writ to be written, discovered,
when time and place coincidentally breathe together, at last,
beckoning you to places where memory serves only as a pleasuring,
upright mind marker, decorated in chains perpetual reforging,
absent pain, gleaming dreamings full-replacing longings for pasts,
new verses composed, passing, a grand addition to a child’s legacy

I delight in
the song of the meadowlark,
sonorous upon the fields,

And,

While I revel in
the rumbling refrain of the storm,
echoing on the hills,

I recall:

Though we were written only as
an alternate ending,

exclusive expression
delicately dotted
upon the utterance of
intimacy

The poet lives two lives.
One on the outside,
And one in their mind.

When you look in their eyes
You could see an abyss.

If you looked long enough
You could sink into it.

But most people don’t see it.

Take the time to read the words, though,
And you would know for sure.

The poet lives in two different worlds.