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8.0k · Sep 2012
Palm Sunday Penance
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
Palm Sunday Penance
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall
I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times."
                    - Matthew the Apostle

I
Seventy-seven bottles of gin
lie in the guts of sensuous men;
seventy-seven *I forgive you's dissolve
in a fanatical mind's resolve.

II
What offence occurred under Saint Constantine's priggish eye?
Was it specious as a Samian's thigh?
Or Sumerians receiving alien diplomats?
Maybe somewhere far under Moscow Putin's massing cloning vats...

III
Whatever discursive and belligerent milieu
church authority finds most tried and true
seems to be the most important decider
in the future of things like the Large Hadron Collider.
Perhaps, unfoundedly, they find it funny that Higgs
(though it seems much like calling the Liberal Party "Whigs")
is a name shared by a man and a theoretical particle
(though it be libelous in any journalist's article),
and thus label similar advancements as "blasphemous".
I guess that this is what it is: believing just because.

IV
Who can know blasphemy from piousness?
Maybe all Luther did was obfuscate a prior mess.

V
Seventy-seven palm-branch-adorned, donkey-riding kings:
an automatic-ring-making-machine beleaguering proselyte rings.
Continue reading...
5.6k · Sep 2012
From California with Love
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
From California with Love
I still remember
the drawn out afternoons,
the minutes passing without a thing to do,
the clock just a metronome
keeping us in time.

I poked fun at you without reason;
jealousy leads one into themselves it seems.
Do you recall?
We were carnal beings...

I'd apologize for my egoistic banter,
but apologies are best left to the
eulogizer,
and this may be some sort of graveside whisper;
a long-winded to-do list of idle talk.

I'd call you
"Lesbia", "Rosalind", 
"my diadem stashed away",
but twenty-two months wore words away
and it would seem like frantic blandishing.

Maybe in my own life
I may be able to demonstrate
what William Yeats had meant
by a body quarreling with it's soul,
but I think -- You're delusional! --
that I could be content.

I remember everything ---
I remember the yielded heart feels a subtle sting.
The yew chattered in the wind outside your
window and I felt rooted
as I told you
I was you and would always be.

But twenty-two months is a long time.
Continue reading...
5.5k · Jul 2013
A Suburban Shootout
CH Gorrie Jul 2013
A Suburban Shootout
Have you heard of the
gardens clandestines grow?

The neighbors have, although
until today the gardens were usual, not a
pastime no one would seriously guess.
The flowers are conceptual homonyms
bordered by Boxwood africans
no breadwinning cardinal would bless
with its roost.
                         Grass beneath a golden ninebark
is slightly depressed where some pistol was.
For the past few years the neighbors have wondered daily What the hell is it this guy does?
What, with him always vaguely mumbling "...lots of business trips." It's dark
now, blood spatter coagulates on the picket fence.
                                                          ­                               Four tire streaks on the road,
the responding policemen kept it hushed, speaking in code
to disembodied voices on a radio. Not much more than a glance
and shrug at the neighbors' concerned inquiries.
One consensus formed: he was deep
in consequences from promises he couldn't keep.
This was speculative, of course.
                                                         The palm trees
rustled above their heads. "Maybe he was a clandestine,"
one of the neighbors remarked
as another dismissively barked,
"Ridiculous! He kept a garden!"
Continue reading...
5.1k · Sep 2012
Seventeen
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
Seventeen
We rushed on glorious wings
that fed bombs into Baghdad soil
with feverous lust for a hollow dream.
Now nine long years later,
seventeen bodies lie on earth where oil
engenders a lust that’s even greater.

Seventeen skeletons innocent;
Seventeen bloodlines’ descent.
Karzai’s blank solace and Kandahar’s dead
seventeen lay heavier on the heart than lead.

Three tours were far too many,
the fourth far more than he could take.
A sergeant who’d have given any-
thing for his wife and kids’ sake.
Seeing a good friend’s severe injury –
the last blow Sanity could handle.
Morality goes out – light from a candle
swaddled in smoke’s endless perjury.

Seventeen seconds of forethought
may perhaps have faltered his shot;
Seventeen centuries of ponder
and still the heart may have not grown fonder.
Seventeen lovers left alone,
or loves that’ll never come to pass,
seventeen graves of heavy bones
mark where a madman’s mind broke at last.

Seventeen skeletons innocent;
Seventeen bloodlines’ descent.
Karzai’s blank solace and Kandahar’s dead
seventeen lay heavier on the heart than lead.
Continue reading...
5.1k · Nov 2012
Moody Creek, Idaho Dross 1996
CH Gorrie Nov 2012
Moody Creek, Idaho Dross 1996
Reclining in their rocking chairs, the brothers Beau and Cletus gazed despondently out
Past the final farm toward the convergence of the worn highway
And the fritz horizon. Cows paused their chewing; an ashy sun
Obscured in incongruous fluffs of cloud; it grew
Greyishly chilly. "Shame the kids're movin'," Beau squeezed out before a deep belch. Cletus only
Mumbled, his voice lost in the light drizzle rapping on the milky sheet-plastic roof. The
          porch

Was unfurnished, save the chairs, one ashtray, and a novelty sign reading: "Get off my porch."
Cletus took a long, pensive drag off a cigarette before stubbing it out.
He coughed a raspy croak wetted with sixty-six years. Besides Cletus' sporadic coughs, the only
Distinguishable sound to be heard in Moody Creek wafted in from the highway:
Rattles of the day's final Spokane- or Boise-bound semi-trucks grew
Inaudible as Beau transiently  murmured, "Purtier than a string of fried trout, that there
          sun-

set." "Whaaa?" Cletus wheezed. "It's settin'," answered Beau, loosely gesturing at the sun.
Fractaled-orange-shafts webbing manifold shades of yellow – amber, belge, stil-de-grain – grew
Plumply stout upon the farmland, edged between properties and crumpled on the porch.
"I'll tell you what Beau – I'm glad they got out,"
Cletus uttered with assurance, his eyes scanning the reaches of light upon the highway.
Beau fixed his cap, musing over Cletus' words. He cleared his throat before beginning, "If
          only..."

Then stopped and itched his belly-button. Cletus turned to his brother. "I know one thang only
Beau: they'll do good in California. They'll be livin' high on the hog. Yer son n' my son
'll 'ave secure futures." Jack nodded somberly. He hated the highway.
He hated its ability to isolate everything. It had been his original revamp, the now-rickety porch,
His first project on his fixer-upper after marrying Dorothy West. They'd wed out
In his father's corn field; bought a house a mile or so down the road. Kids were born. Love
          grew,

And in its growing all things tangible and gorgeous – like tangrams piece together – grew:
The farm, the house, savings account and family. They ate hearty; drank canned beer only –
Living was smooth – but it changed when Dorothy took Little Dale and got out.
She wanted what the farm couldn't give or grow, leaving tiny Moody Creek with their son
As the last moon of May, 1955 went up. "*****!" Beau had yelled from the porch.
He'd woken to his Buick's rev and watched its taillights wane upon the
          highway.

And though he remarried, this was, in truth, mostly why Beau never squarely looked upon highway.
The light drizzle grew
Heavy, intensifying. "Gosh **** rain might near knock the coverin' off the porch!"
Hollered Beau. Cletus looked up and blew a cloud of thick grey smoke. "It's only
Rain Beau. No need gettin' ornery." That morning they'd seen off their youngest sons as the sun
Was just rising. One left to work for a dairy ******* in The Valley, the other went to figure
          out

Himself and his career. The porch shuddered. Beau absent-mindedly repeated "If only..."
Daylight died; black inked upon the highway. Cletus lit a new cigarette. Moody Creek grew
Dense, compacted by the darkness. The sun inched away. Cletus hacked and put his cigarette
          out.
This is a sestina. The six end words of the the six lines of the first stanza are repeated in different orders within the following five stanzas. It is all followed by a three line envoy containing all six words.
Continue reading...
4.8k · Aug 2013
On a Marriage that Was to Take Place atop Half Dome in Yosemite National Park
CH Gorrie Aug 2013
On a Marriage that Was to Take Place atop Half Dome in Yosemite National Park
for Nick and Kaitie

1.
Yesterday, right when our call got dropped,
I was going to tell you something about marriage.

I was going to tell you something gnomic,
a maxim worth getting engraved.

I've since forgotten,
but I believe it was akin to saying that, like Truth,
marriage is impossible to define in verbal space.

So, I guess I'm glad I forgot. The words
would've seemed either too hastily conceived for their subject matter
or else weightless, enigmatic – without impact.

I think it was Auden who whined, “Marriage is rarely bliss,”
though he lightened the phrase by encapsulating it in the context of modern physics –
namely, *at least it has the ability to take place,
and that should be enough to bring bliss equal to Buddha’s Emptiness.

So, I'm happy our call got
dropped,
for the dial tone was
the pithiest aphorism on marriage any sentient life could've produced.

The key word is “produced.”

2.
    This is what marriage is not:
Socrates gurgling hemlock
    on his dusty prison cot,
giggling as he glimpsed a dikast’s deformed ****;

    Nietzsche tenured for philology
at Basel; Nietzsche feverishly etching
    Fick diese scheiße! on a Jena clinic's wall; biology
predetermining the team for which he was pitching;

    a poem; a hotdog; *******;
a discharged Kalashnikov
    engendering generational pain
somewhere in Saratov

    circa 1942;
this is what marriage is not:
    hatred, jealousy, ballyhoo,
obsessive yearnings for a yacht;

    this is what marriage is not:
anything one pair of hands has wrought.

  *August 22, 2013
^"I think it was Auden who whined, 'Marriage is rarely bliss,'..."^

from "After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics" by W.H. Auden

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.

^"...that should be enough to bring bliss equal to Buddha's Emptiness."^

Śūnyatā, in Buddhism, translated into English as emptiness, voidness, openness, spaciousness, thusness, is a Buddhist concept which has multiple meanings depending on its doctrinal context. In Mahayana Buddhism, it often refers to the absence of inherent essence in all phenomena. In Theravada Buddhism, suññatā often refers to the not-self nature of the five aggregates of experience and the six sense spheres. Suññatā is also often used to refer to a meditative state or experience.

^"I am not talking about inside-out space giraffes / debating Tensor-vector-scalar gravity..."^

Tensor–vector–scalar gravity (TeVeS), developed by Jacob Bekenstein, is a relativistic generalization of Mordehai Milgrom's MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) paradigm.

The main features of TeVeS can be summarized as follows:
- As it is derived from the action principle, TeVeS respects conservation laws;
- In the weak-field approximation of the spherically symmetric, static solution, TeVeS reproduces the      
  MOND acceleration formula;
- TeVeS avoids the problems of earlier attempts to generalize MOND, such as superluminal propagation;
- As it is a relativistic theory it can accommodate gravitational lensing.

The theory is based on the following ingredients:
- A unit vector field;
- A dynamical scalar field;
- A nondynamical scalar field;
- A matter Lagrangian constructed using an alternate metric;
- An arbitrary dimensionless function.

^"...Socrates gurgling hemlock / On his dusty prison cot..."^

Socrates was ultimately sentenced to death by drinking a hemlock-based liquid.

^"...Giggling as he glimpsed a dikast's deformed ****;"^

Dikastes was a legal office in ancient Greece that signified, in the broadest sense, a judge or juror, but more particularly denotes the Attic functionary of the democratic period, who, with his colleagues, was constitutionally empowered to try to pass judgment upon all causes and questions that the laws and customs of his country found to warrant judicial investigation.

^"Nietzsche tenured for philology / At Basel;"^

Nietzsche received a remarkable offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate. Despite the fact that the offer came at a time when he was considering giving up philology for science, he accepted. To this day, Nietzsche is still among the youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record.

^"Nietzsche feverishly etching / Fick diese scheiße! in a Jena clinic;"^

"Fick diese scheiße!" is German for "**** this ****!"

On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day Overbeck received a similar letter and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of a serious mental illness, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890, the art historian Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition.

^"...Saratov / Circa 1942;"^

During World War II, Saratov was a station on the North-South Volzhskaya Rokada, a specially designated military railroad providing troops, ammunition and supplies to Stalingrad.
Continue reading...
3.9k · Jul 2013
I do not like the architecture of the mall
CH Gorrie Jul 2013
I do not like the architecture of the mall
I do not like the architecture of the mall.
It's discordant and lax. The architects
dismissed all Edwardian charm
and even the Gothic grace.
When crossing my field of vision,
the mall concedes defeat,
whimpering against a prismatic sky:

"I am a hodgepodge of ambition distressed,
resolute on pioneering a style unlike anything past,
but locked off in dead history, trapped
in a monologue whose audience is myself."

I presume it's the same across the world,
architecture molded into something impulsive,
something so forced it falls flat.

Where have all the artchitects gone?
Continue reading...
3.7k · Jul 2012
Lines Written in Bath, Somerset
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
Lines Written in Bath, Somerset
Around me architectural mastery:
sycamores, embankments, enduring ionic pillars.
I round a walkway bordered by trees,
enamel thawing, gliding off their low leaves.
Beneath the late-May’s pounding sun,
through the glittered trees’ reaches,
a gazebo crackles into sight.
Children in their prime, sunbathers, a wistful portraitist
encircle it carelessly:
a leisured chimney; the billows of life.
The foliage escapes into the river,
purplish, palpitating, cyclic creases
receive the dewy notes.
Kayaks licking acacia-gum-edged
ripples sputter and slip
through reverberations
of leveled white-water terraces.
Blackcurrants in clotted cream
slide on the plush lips of a young passerby.
The 8 above a doorway
dances motionless, silent in my periphery;
“Nicolas Cage just sold the spot”
pops from unknown lungs
inside the Circus crowd.

Unacknowledged, half-proud
hands built the Roman baths
alone, closed-in by such grace,
forgotten, then as now.
I wander these ancestral lanes
more or less alone, the same.
Continue reading...
3.5k · Jul 2012
The Broken Dock at Rosses Point
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
The Broken Dock at Rosses Point
Yesterday folds our vital documents
into its briefcase and steps onto a busy street.
Busses lunge on asphalt, rolling
knotted muscles and emptied pockets deeper
into roads where dogs and paper
blur the lines between news and ****.
Lovers, condos, taxis, and sidewalks
pray to scrape up rent. Tomorrow crouches, ready to spring
and ****** us back into the boxing ring.

I sit at the Earth's end,
an old, fractured, water-worn dock
cradles me and fixes the scene.
Yellow sails swimming the jetstream
hang on to the red dinghy whose wake
sets my eye upon the far shore.

     Coney isle ‘cross the murk-warped sea
     holds ancient homes like a tapestry
     holds ancient threads that you can see
     in some museum for a fee.

For the residents at Rosses Point
this is no end –
                          wit starts their children’s dreams
and holds them to life,
roots them in communal grasses
that grow and will always grow.
                                                       I didn’t know
that where the ****-stalk masses
life’s abundances overflow.

But where are their riches?

Cast in ditches by roadsides
where three hundred years of smiles,
vein-pulsing beliefs, busy thinkers,
sweet upswept streets,
all put wealth –
                           the heaping of coin
upon coin till nothing can breathe –
aside and laugh. They live,
surviving as they happen.

Inside the crumbled watchtower
I fling passion onto thought
onto nerve onto pen onto page
and then am limp,
like the carelessly treaded sage:
a child’s footprint.

     What anguish did the watchers know
     looking through the barred stone walls,
     their travelers still gone?

In the swirling, swallowing night,
that drops like the judge’s gavel,
I write images of the sundry
numb-fingered seaside –
                                          the birds call through the salt-stained air.

Fly, fly till you reach my words
that are split among a thousand minds and cities.
Fly till the grass overcomes the tread,
till the sun succumbs to lead
poisoning and dawn’s jaw drops dead.

The lighthouse, the sprinkling showers
from the clouds that shroud and mask
the would-be sky, guide
the heart that falls inside my throat –
                                                                two hundred tons of blood
beat through its bulge –
                                         I’m alive
and live on, like this unhampered ground.
The sound of ripples and the rustle
of reeds bring me back
to the time-broken dock.

I sit and remember my friends –
                                                       calmness soaks in and through my bones –
I am and will always be;
and when memory fails and fades
I will float the channel of everything,
beach upon this shore
and will be the grass and nothing more,
till history becomes the future
and the first layer becomes the core.
Continue reading...
3.4k · Aug 2013
Starbucks
CH Gorrie Aug 2013
Starbucks
Starbucks
should close some shops.
Only one every ten
miles would still be too much. *But...but,
coffee!
Continue reading...
3.1k · Sep 2012
Lost Letter Addressed to Seamus Heaney
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
Lost Letter Addressed to Seamus Heaney
Dear Mr. Heaney
I wish I'd read your poetry
years ago when I was still impressionable and coy and all that jazz.
Now it resounds in my skull, leaving a tingle in my right hand.
My pen is somewhat snug, but a revolver, no.
Ink and shovels aren't far from each other,
so your point is well-taken. In fact, they're co-workers –
Ink's proved itself just as deadly. It slowly ushers men into the earth,
their soil-seat, while the shovel stages the unending play;
the eternal lattice.
The Nobel hung above your head,
the vast array of pins, medals, papers with your name in billowing scarlet.
What a treat. Like the last cupcake in the back of
the refrigerator that had too much chocolate icing and was only
semi-covered in multi-colored snowflakes. I'd loved to have
personally presented it to you. There'd be my own plaque,
billowing scarlet and all. It'd say, "Mr. Heaney,
, you must own a *****." I hope you'd laugh, and not be offended,
thinking me a distasteful and insensitive lout. It may not be right,
but I can't help but steal the volumes surrounding yours out of
every **** library so
"Seamus Heaney"
may catch the eye of the common passerby
more easily. I think I even went to work on
enhancing a spine with a red sharpie once.
Red hits the eye hard.
That was in the central library downtown.
Don't tell anyone.
Beyond a laugh, what I hope for most is that you get this letter.
Just look at it.
Wonder why someone so far removed in age and culture and place
would ever think of you holding an over-frosted desert as glorious.
Continue reading...
3.1k · Aug 2013
Lemons
CH Gorrie Aug 2013
Lemons
Lemons
ripen, dangling
down; the tree a weary-
headed guardsman at Life's clear gate
to nil.
Continue reading...
3.0k · Aug 2012
Fax to Yeats
CH Gorrie Aug 2012
Fax to Yeats
"The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."*

I
You probably already know, William,
that it’s pretty much all the same
as when you paced the battlements
and howled to the indifferent stars
"It seems I must bid the Muse go pack!"
, caught in Passion’s cataract –
that torrent of emotive poetic grief.

II
Though politics have changed,
there's still old men in the Senate
who stare but don’t seem to see.
They’re caught in youthful daydreams ---
the girls’ bras’ are too hard to unclasp,
even when employing that agéd charm.
(“But O that I were young again
and held her in my arms!”)
You weren't an exception;
politicians are also subject to the Human Condition.
Perhaps more than a poet,
probably more than a poet.
So I guess you got the double dose, William.
In a split second the State slips,
staggers, and reinvents foreign policies,
only to double-back on itself again and reverse.
I know you remember those you rhymed out in verse:
MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly and Pearse;
their rifles still ring in the recesses
of the Public’s  miasmic mind –
the haze just dissipated over the Irish Sea.
And it's the spring of 2012.
Gore-Booth and Markiewicz are but marrowless bones,
Collins as well.
His still mix in the grave –
They’ve been for ninety years.
Yeah, it's pretty much the same,
Synge’s ******* is still unpopular.
In fact, plays are largely unpopular,
and playwrights work in restaurants
where sweat lingers on their brows
to eventually drip into an already-unfit meal.
It's hard to imagine a play once
brought Dublin to riot;
you couldn't start a riot now if you had
thirty drunken anarchists
with two Molotovs a piece
watch Godwin’s grave get gutted.
Though information is more accessible,
it's an age of information-apathy.
You'd **** a shotgun to your temple
if you saw the state of education today.
I'm afraid, William, it's all the same:
the gyres still run on ---
I fear they're running out of breath.

III
But it’d be imbalanced to leave you here;
at least you split on a Saturday.
Late-January trembles each year,
as the earth did the day you were consumed
in Helen(“who all living hearts has betrayed”)
’s immutable embrace;
your heart alone she could not betray.
And blind Homer who sang her betrayals
has ceased; mouths ran dry the day you died.
You left before your trade imprisoned you;
before the pen enchanted
your remaining years to a page.
You left before you couldn’t:
before the blitzkrieg;
before the world lost ten million more Robert Gregory’s
and you died from exhaustion mid-rhyme on the seventh-stanza of the five-million eight-hundred and fifty-fourth
elegy.
Regardless, it's really all the same.
Even those beggars are still playing twister with their whip.
Continue reading...
3.0k · Dec 2012
I am in Cardiff (2nd Draft)
CH Gorrie Dec 2012
I am in Cardiff (2nd Draft)
I
I am in Cardiff
     Where foams pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff
     Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am in Cardiff
     Where the Pilot Star became a conch
I was in the ruse of age
     Where the young kiss
I was in Joshua Tree
     Where the mind is thoughtless
I am a grove's wilting
I will be an unbearable urge
And I am shivering in Santa Ana near Bristol and 1st

II
There is intent when the addict mutters --
Estranged in his unhappy gutters --
"Life is cheap and love is free."
Hopelessness's epitome
Sits naked beyond the wall.

There is derision in the dealer's call --
Osmium-heat in an unimpeded fall --
"You can't change who you are."
Greed could tear down a star
To sculpt into a Cardiff shell.

Warrant breeds within a child's yell.

III**
I am in Cardiff
     Where foams pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff
     Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am in Cardiff
     Where the Pilot Star became a conch
I was in the ruse of age
     Where the young kiss
I was in Joshua Tree
     Where the mind is thoughtless
I am a grove's wilting
I will be an unbearable urge
And I am shivering in Santa Ana near Bristol and 1st
Continue reading...
2.9k · Oct 2012
My Silliest Love Song
CH Gorrie Oct 2012
My Silliest Love Song
So...there's this girl who's rather smart
that, when her lips begin to part,
drives me up the wall in a good way.
I sort of want to see her everyday.
She's usually busy though,
so I occupy
time with one constant sigh
until she calls and then I go.

I don't really know too much about her ---
she's Aphrodite's caricature! ---
no,no, that's a bit rash and inflated,
but in my stomach butterflies've congregated
each time her face comes to mind.
Severely interesting,
her hands are often clean
and she's never proved less than kind.

I think it might be good to write her a song
(I should've been writing this all along)
so that she'll feel sublimely delighted
and is happy, though consistently derided
by the upkeep of her garden's flora.
She could use a lot
of things uncommonly wrought,
like poems stuffed with anaphora.

      In time all the snowflakes will evaporate.
      In time the sun will sleep under an iron leaf.
      In time acetylene darkens human hate.
      In time all time will seem quite brief.

So, in honor of her I have created
this mediocre song so dominated
by use of the Yeats-stanza's rhythmic-rhyme,
offering it to her as ends to the crime
of my deplorable mannerisms.
I hope it's well-received,
being arduously conceived,
but I'll openly accept criticisms.

Coral, though you must (and do) work a lot,
work harder at those things which can't be bought
(i.e. relationships, love, and empathy)
for even the natural workaholic bee
requires mutual love.
Even while working
find a small moment to sing
this song. I hope it's enough.
Continue reading...
2.8k · Feb 2013
Pigeon
CH Gorrie Feb 2013
Pigeon
The oddly abrupt crack; I turned to look,
Seeing a pigeon squirm in the driveway,
Crippled somewhat; terminally injured.

Unsure, I stared. Death -- for the first time -- seemed
Welcome; the better choice. Quickness is key
In difficult decisions. Scared, I gave

Chance control, putting the bird in the street.
A car passed, killing it. This conclusion
Appeared obvious, even at fourteen.

Maybe accepting this final release
Helps us help others pass away in ease.
Continue reading...
2.7k · Apr 2015
Alligator Pear
CH Gorrie Apr 2015
Alligator Pear
On this tan cutting board
You earn your corrupted name:
“Alligator pear.”

The serrated blade
Punctures your hide—a balloon
Under a pin’s pressure,

Shades of green furling out.
I’m sure you’d prefer
Vegetable status if you developed

Self-awareness; or maybe
You’d withdraw from knowledge
Of the human type.

I trust my cooking songs—
Slowdive and Chaka Khan—
Can’t hurt you anymore

Than your predestined obliteration;
Mastication via your domesticators:
It all ends in fertilizer.

(Where you began!)

O, avocado, phantom “fruit”
Born of the self-same Life Source,
Schopenhauer’s Will,

My transient enjoyment of you
Within this vegetable salad—
An Achaean enclosed by Trojan blades—

Suffices for a life of sanctity.
Poem for day 5 of National Poetry Month.
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2.7k · Jul 2012
Things to do
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
Things to do
(for the unknown You) –
Sweep up a mound of achievements;
layer dogwood and newspaper beneath;
find a small, secluded shoreline to sleep an endless sleep;
shovel money (in at least twenty currencies),
some status and fame
onto the funeral pyre’s unremembering flame;
write furiously with computer or pen,
fill out the days’ whitespace with enthusiastic fantasy;
revel on a fallacy (or three);
win the gladiatorial games in the Corporate Arena;
rediscover a bit of ancient folklore;
set up nice altruistic societies to make orphans feel infinite;
plant a little garden – give guidance in its growth;
build four or five fine-but-small boats
with richly decorated keels;
fight for something worth believing,
though I’m still unsure what that means…
A(my) guess: lyricism and poetry and prose,
musical composition, simply being kind and open;
A suggestion(for You): lay Your hand on a patient’s slowing heart
in a cancer ward, catch their tears with a jar
and meditate on better things to do;
give the old folks a laugh;
steal the Elgin Marbles back for the Greeks,
or, for the memory of ancient Greece;
find where lay a psychopathic fascist’s bitter ashes
and give them to the conspirators for closure;
(for me) place letters on the graves
of John Keats, Percy Shelley,
Wystan Auden and William Yeats;
rescind, abolish, annul, invalidate
my station in God’s dysphoric, existential reverie;
heap up beautiful words and send them off to sea
inside a laptop on a cellophane-wrapped raft;
(for both of us) think thoughts uplifting;
smile thirty-three times a day (or more);
plan for the future of ourselves and others;
give just a bit of love to our mothers;
sweep the kitchen and the city streets for free;
by your garden plant a tree.
Beyond these things for us to do,
be proud-yet-humble, open-eyed and acquiescent;
just accept; all things inanimate and animate, accept.
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2.6k · Feb 2013
Springtime
CH Gorrie Feb 2013
Springtime
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...*

Beyond the blackest cotton glove,
the compulsively edited manuscripts,
unmentionable lines untrained ears love;
beyond the satin lining of a human husk,
the failing engine or cooing soul
nightingales smuggled in the dusk;
beyond asking how giraffes like to die,
the moon's waxing through a kaleidoscope,
eyes hollowing before hearts tell a lie;
beyond the manifestation of a mental illness,
the coffee spoon having no coffee left to measure,
an overwhelming sense of an unseen presence;
beyond where the orchard truncates its blossoming
is renewal of equality like an unmapped sea
spilling its welcome to a choked wish.
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2.5k · Jul 2012
The Prisoner of the Left Ventriclle's Song
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
The Prisoner of the Left Ventriclle's Song
Tear down the clouds, kindle the summer sun
Let the bright, flooding clarity come
Displace the darkened world’s gloom
Let all the liars speak too soon

Make the wise men start to shave
Give voice to bodies in mass graves
Shatter insecurity, staring from its mirror
Pack away the things we most fear

Spark bonfires in every child’s heart
Teach them love, the most delicate art
Show all the CEOs what emotions are
Build great ladders to hug the stars

Put bows round each headstone
Free the debtors, forget their loans
Free every convict of insignificant crime
Fill the public fountains with a hundred thousand dimes

Make all the mourners dress in white lace
Let the summer sun shine from every face
Remove the cobwebs from the sad boys’ rooms
Steal the black thread from the weavers’ looms

Watch all nightfall melt away
Into a celestial menagerie
Stark prison of the heart
Let beauty’s peaceful riot start
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2.5k · Aug 2012
Kate Sessions
CH Gorrie Aug 2012
Kate Sessions
I
The stars are double-weighted tonight.
bulging, beating, they sink
from their proper lurches.
One by one across the murky
evening they sputter out.
What natural light remains
seeps from that subtly gaudy
bauble of a moon.

II
Peeled eucalyptus, ice-plant, new-mown summer grass,
dandelion, sloping hill, carved stone bench,
the view, the reflected city-light off the bay water,
white-washed near-tenements.

I am firmly locked up, chained in a bone cage
of chemically manipulated cranial plates;
serotonin, synapses, dopamine, dendrite
create a web like seaweed constricting the sea;
this computer of a head calculates, oscillates,
and processes the sensory.

III
My body is a tattered jib sail
flowing in the light sprinkling rain:
the simmer of the gale:
a hollow cathedral abandoned
by the believers:
a vessel for my marrow:
an imaginary catalyst for profundity:
an incarceration: a hull of particles
arrested: some part of an experience.
Continue reading...
2.4k · Jul 2012
Hyde
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
Hyde
The trees expand with my eyes, here in
this solace, this international scene.
Pigeons, rowboats, the water and a

solitary swan – each a gift or a
gift’s ribbon. Snaking off into the air,
a balloon is cradled by the bustle

of the restless London-summer’s landscape.
The ordinary habitation is
so releasing: a miniature smile

scooters by; slow sweeps of saxophone
notes clear the sky; two bodies blended
in shin-height grass release a single sigh.

Abstractions felt but failed by my speech
take root here. Like semi-singed threads or strings,
they slide upward from the dirt to grow leaves.
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2.3k · Jul 2012
She
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
She
was an aperitif to an aphorism,
an apothecary of aphrodisiacs,
an apiary of my ever-buzzing thoughts.

She slipped streamline as maraschinos
into a Manhattan, that strike of sugar
staining the most bitter days a color no chemical dispels.

She was an enigmatic row of beakers
shelved in an ancient pharmacy
at the base of the Janiculum.

Her shape was incense wisps, her
touch a song sung in 1940s noir,
her locking gaze acrophobia itself.

Alliteration ran thick through her blood,
she painted like Debussy composed.
No single organism in the universe could’ve imposed

anything on her – well, maybe.
Maybe she’s just a girl, the way that I’m a boy –
no air of denigration here.

She was intricate, but altogether simple. Empathetic-yet-
tangible, her character was incredible.
It was not the beauty of her face, the body

that held her mind and laughter,
not the dazed sting in my hand as it cupped
in hers – it was her autotelic way and her hope.

And now her imaginings hang,
framed in my house; little landscapes of the heart she left;
retreats that prove I’ve loved and been loved.
Continue reading...
2.3k · Oct 2012
Something for Sam Harris
CH Gorrie Oct 2012
Something for Sam Harris
"If you wake up this morning believing that saying
a few Latin words over your pancakes will turn them
into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind."

He has often asserted that the thing is absurd:
that someone who does not (whether out of hatred, indifference,
lack of conviction, or frankly *whatever)
accept traditional dogmas
is still, for some reason, capable of wishing that they could.

I think he is right; I’ve heard a staunch atheist say “If only
I could, but I cannot.” So, this is why he aligns himself
as an anti-theist: he simply
was never properly convinced.
This position seems (at least to me) well-supported,

for anyone can quite readily (and easily)
accept what their father or their clergyman has said
(especially as a child, not knowing any better).
Thus, to be an atheist
one must have first acknowledged supernatural power

and then later, after a bit of thought, dismissed it. In light
of this, I propose a toast to the Real Skeptic,
the one who was never really convinced;
of it. The one who, when celebrating the Eucharist,
wondered why God wanted to be eaten,

who , when receiving Christ,
thought of the extreme certainty by which other faiths'
devotees (Islam, Heaven's Gate,
Mormonism, Bon,
Cargo Cults, Shinto, Falun Gong)

live and preach – some even delighted to die.
Thoughts like these always made me feel uneasy as a child
because how could I hope to keep my little mind
from accidentally discovering fallacy after fallacy? So, here is a toast
to the Unconvinced, who can’t possibly help but not believe.
Continue reading...
2.2k · Jun 2013
The Old Man Thinks of a Past Photography Job
CH Gorrie Jun 2013
The Old Man Thinks of a Past Photography Job
There were six horses,
Abaco Barbs - black, white, tan -
enclosed in my Olympus's lense.

The camera reached through deadwind
that whipped the Huey's window,
painted a staggered line where the herd had been.

It was fall 1977,
Abaco's Independence Movement had ended;
Oliver and WerBell were gone,

having run off like photographed horses -
distant, almost ignorant of me (at some point,
they must've assumed there were wildlife

photographers inside Abaco). It was fall
1977:
the ornamental Allamanda still rustled in deadwind;

the starfruit still ripened and fell. It was fall
1977 and that country
was nearly the same as it'd always been.
"The Abaco Barb is an endangered strain of the Spanish Barb horse breed found on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas. The Abaco Barb is said to be descended from horses that were shipwrecked on the island during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean. The population of wild Abaco Barbs that run free on Great Abaco once numbered over 200 horses. The Abaco Barb is found in different colors than the European/African Barb, including pinto (including the relatively uncommon splashed white), roan, chestnut, black and other colors. They range between 1.32 to 1.47 m (13.0 to 14.2 h)."

"The Abaco Islands lie in the northern Bahamas and comprise the main islands of Great Abaco and Little Abaco, together with the smaller Wood Cay, Elbow Cay, Lubbers Quarters Cay, Green Turtle Cay, Great Guana Cay, Castaway Cay, Man-o-War Cay, Stranger's Cay, Umbrella Cay, Walker's Cay, Little Grand Cay, and Moore's Island. Administratively, the Abaco Islands constitute five of the 31 Districts of the Bahamas: North Abaco, Central Abaco, South Abaco, Moore's Island, and Hope Town. Towns in the islands include Marsh Harbour, Hope Town, Treasure Cay, Coopers Town, and Cornishtown."

"In August 1973, shortly after the Bahamas became independent, the Abaco Independence Movement was formed as a political party whose stated aim was self-determination for the Abaco Islands within a federal Bahamas. In October 1973, AIM published a newsletter to launch it's campagn for 'self-determination through legal and peaceful political action'. AIM proposed that all Crown land on Abaco would be placed in a land trust. Each citizen would receive a one acre home lot from the trust plus shares giving them an income from land sales and leases. The land trust would enter into a joint venture to develop a 60 sq mile free trade zone. When AIM was formed by Chuck Hall and Bert Williams, they contacted an American financier named Michael Oliver, who through his libertarian Phoenix Foundation agreed to support AIM financially. The Phoenix Foundation had previously sought to establish a libertarian enclave in the South Pacific, the Republic of Minerva. AIM's first convention, held on February 23 1974, was addressed by John Hospers, the Libertarian Party's 1972 US presidential candidate. Hospers was later refused entry to the Bahamas. The maverick British MP Colin Campbell Mitchell also visited Abaco to offer support."

"Michael Oliver (born 1930) is a Lithuanian immigrant of Jewish descent, Las Vegas real estate millionaire, and political activist. He was the founder of the micronation project the Republic of Minerva, a failed attempt to create a sovereign state in the South Pacific in 1972. In the following decades, Oliver and his Phoenix Foundation were also involved in similar projects on the Bahamian island of Abaco and in Vanuatu with the New Hebrides Autonomy Movement (MANH) which was done by financing an insurrection. He also published a manifesto of his libertarian beliefs. Oliver is prohibited to enter in Vanuatu and his nation-building projects seem to be on hiatus."

"Mitchell Livingston WerBell III, (1918–1983), was an OSS operative, soldier of fortune, paramilitary trainer, firearms engineer, and arms dealer.In 1972 WerBell was approached by the Abaco Independence Movement (AIM) from the Abaco Islands, a region of the Bahamas, who were worried about the direction the Bahamas were taking and were considering other options, such as independence or remaining a separate Commonwealth nation under the Crown in case of the Bahamas gaining independence (which they did in 1973). AIM was funded by the Phoenix Foundation, a group which aims to help build truly free micronations. The AIM collapsed into internal bickering before a coup by Werbell could be carried out."

^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barb_horse
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacos
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abaco_Independence_Movement
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oliver_(real_estate)
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_WerBell
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2.2k · Aug 2014
My brother left (Revisited)
CH Gorrie Aug 2014
My brother left (Revisited)
1.
Before I knew he had.
His flight trailed off into a Utah
Sunrise. He left behind a little strand
Of thought, and, in a cramped, amber room that saw
Long talks of topics that soon thinned grey,
A set of dog-eared books has been put down.
Books that brought nearer to my thought his own,
While Interstate-5 grated the ground.

2.
He must have, as the plane touched the runway,
Felt the dawn’s shudder fracture his young bones,
His thoughts turning to those dog-eared days;
The seemingly endless months full of groans,
As they should have been, being spent alone;
And that set of books, at least it would seem,
Ignited the wick on which our passions gleam.

3.
These six years past since they took him away
Held minutes like a needle in plied dust.
There’s something in the spring that brings decay:
The outward beauty of the world just
Clouds the mind’s loss within the spinning gust
That all the blooming flowers usher in.
Then the rain comes...

4.
As the 5’s scratch cracks up the drying earth,
I recall Nietzsche, Guevara, Burgess:
Men who’d not anticipated births
Inside my brother and I like cypress
Trees, evergreen and coniferous, we
Drop seeds year-round. The setting Utah sun,
Barely audible, gasps in the copse.
He’s with me now. What’s done is done.
#loss #brotherhood #guevara #nietzsche #burgess
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2.2k · Jul 2012
At Sidney's Tomb
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
At Sidney's Tomb
Countless strangers sit or stand in wonder
at tall statues and head-height tombs
of solid, austere men who cannot utter
a word to explain the cathedral’s gloom.
The ostentatious architecture’s croon
from a tattered breeze
dithers through deathless abbeys
where memorialized men lay strewn.

The vacillation of their hearts
remains hidden like it did in life,
their public presence disallowed it then
as carved marble and stone now imparts.
That common unresting inner strife;
what was and what could have been.

I know it well (as well as I can),
that unfinished man Frederic Leighton’s tomb,
his beautifully ebullient Flaming June
brought to mind as I gaze on the grave
breathlessly overwhelmed, trying to understand
how anyone can frown on how artists behave.

That thought-drowned sculptor Henry S. Moore
is situated among the others, beguiled
without grave, a resting statue, “Mother & Child”:
in the smoothed out bends of arching stone,
from troughs between figures down to the floor
I read his face, all it held and could hold alone.

Down the crypt on straight-cut-steps I descend,
pressing on further through candle-lit corridors,
commemorations surround in half-light that offends
receding memories on sandless shores.
Horatio Nelson, John Donne, Sir Flemming, Chris Wren,
each pass till I find a man I’d adore:
Philip Sidney, that grounded man, that defender of art,
consumed in the ensuing century’s heart.

Consumed likewise I stand
gasping, beached upon a strand
of a non-physical contagion;
we’ll suffer it all again.


Three minutes more or less I gaped
until my feet forced my face away
and weaved my soul among the wooden pews.
This hallowed place where the past is draped
is an icicle looped through the fray
of my ambition’s thinning view.

Another adoration there!
That visionary mythology sewer
William Blake, whose piteous glower
for mankind begot his lasting dream.
On his placard chiseled rhyming pairs
beg: take things, not as they seem.

My fingers run the lines of text
slowly, strongly, as if forced by the air.
I fall down a thousand winding stairs
taller than St. Paul’s in my heart.
I compose all my strength to regain context
of cathedral, pull away from Blake, part.

Up the stairs I climb
back to the street.
The rustling, busy fleet
of tourists entwines
about me in my haste
to get outside the tomb,
that time-reversed womb,
of men who didn’t waste
time, place, talent, skill,
but impressed their lives on eternity.
The clock is still,
I’m out in the street –
cathedral shadows
twirling high, then low,
over my body and feet.

What is there, inside that place, is intangible and petrified by reality;
it is trailing smoke from the pipes of sages who spoke,
in broken thoughts, sworn things that cannot be repealed.
It is time unwoven and crocheted again into patchworks of undefinable color.
I must have died a hundred times unaware of it all – out of nothing it called.
It was felt and known, ended and rebuilt accidentally out of the contagion of guilt.
It was a small drag off of nothing.
Continue reading...
2.1k · Sep 2012
Windy
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
Windy
In the form of transparent, bundled tumbleweed
it allows us to breathe, the continuation
of carbon dioxide creation, the movement
of clouds and mists and birds, certain natural disasters,
being able to skim bays at a full sail
or the next step a plane takes after taxiing.

It includes us in the endless repudiation of itself
that it can't seem to –  no matter how it may try –
reverse or cure, bringing earlier
peoples to know it as a supernatural force
(there was simply no other reasonable choice available).

And for some reason
it keeps engaging in pyromania as it aids and abets
whatever impulsive firework-lighting-thrill-seekers
or placid cigarette-****-litterers did or did not
purposefully do.
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2.1k · Apr 2013
A Meditation
CH Gorrie Apr 2013
A Meditation
Honest directness may
bring some lasting peace:
murdered Cicero spoke
two millenia ago
all evil man may ever know;
still our statesmen gesture
in orchestral dumbshow.

Is peace born out of a lie?

Each new morning they wake,
senseless, enchanted;
an immense multitude
that works toward a coffee break.
They gaze, glossy-eyed,
upon the imperial upshot:
Democracy and Despotism
mix in the Melting ***.
Continue reading...
2.1k · Sep 2012
An Old-Fashioned Love
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
An Old-Fashioned Love
If I could love with an old-fashioned love,
they'd wonder whether I was mentally stable,
'cause no one lets me past that casual stuff.

See, all that game-playing --- I've had enough.
They say it only happens in a fable,
but I could love with an old-fashioned love.

People reject what the heart's capable of,
they treat it like the bill for the cable.
They never let me past that payment stuff.

I wouldn't want something held high above,
just something simple, without label,
if I could love with an old-fashioned love.

Not sentimental --- ...not roses, not doves.... ---
but basic, kindred, sustained, and stable.
But no one lets me past that puppy-dog stuff.

Maybe when I'm a ghost, a flappy old glove,
I'll find someone who's willing and able.
If I could love with an old-fashioned love ---
Enough! --- wait, what was I thinking of?
Continue reading...
2.0k · Dec 2012
I am in Cardiff (Draft 1 - previously titled "Flailing")
CH Gorrie Dec 2012
I am in Cardiff (Draft 1 - previously titled "Flailing")
I
I am in Cardiff,
          Where waves pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff,
          Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am nowhere

II
Where the sun severs the street and
Slowly, methodically,
They come, they come.
Electrifyingly stupefied in the dawn,
Tenantry not bound to cause and
Helpless as marred lead in the wind,
Stuck to strata and
Battered under **** pale-green
Thinned on spread fingers.

III
There is intent when the addict mutters ---
Alienated in his nettled gutters ---
"Life is cheap and love is free."
Hopelessness's epitome
Sits naked beyond the wall.

IV**
And I am in Cardiff,
          Where waves pummel the jetty
And I am in Cardiff,
          Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
And I am nowhere
Continue reading...
1.9k · Mar 2013
That Sadistic Boy Charlie Calgary
CH Gorrie Mar 2013
That Sadistic Boy Charlie Calgary
Knocking on my door: Charlie Calgary is here!
His clothes in tatters, upper lip bleeding.
With tenderness my mother welcomes him. He looks
at me knowingly, pretending to tear.
Trickery! Always bluffing till they bring
Something free. He's among the youngest crooks.
She gives him dinner and one of my toys.
"Count your blessings", she counsels me. I frown,
flip Charlie the bird, get sent to my room.
This is the same game he often employs.
Later on, mother's in her evening gown,
Charlie's gone. I sweep the porch with a broom.
The day finishes. It's dark. Quite quickly
the starlight shows --- walking off carelessly, save
knowledge of wounding and cruel, fleeting thought ---
that sadistic boy Charlie Calgary,
whom my misled, well-meaning mother gave
stuffed-chicken dinners, new toys that she'd bought.
Continue reading...
1.8k · Aug 2012
Where it Comes from and Where it Goes
CH Gorrie Aug 2012
Where it Comes from and Where it Goes
From the visions of sparrow vanguards
that fly insatiably onward.
From the tombs of ancient hearts draped
in flowing, moth-eaten fabric.
From the fighter jets stalling somewhere
above solitary and succinct farmlands.
From the bottom of a broken purple
sunset that lies embossed on my brain.
From the silliest half-thought left
unvoiced in the vagrant light of a damp
and desolate lamp lying in a landfill.
From several mouths at once.
From oracles cross-legged in caves.
From the gills of a catfish on a hook.
From mythical forgeries and the perjurer's tongue.
To the subdued hope resting in a
trembling hand gripped round its pen.
To satisfaction that is oneness that
seems to never arrive but is there
all along.
To the peaks of the Himalayas.
To my spidered desk light, shallow with doubt.
To my flustered and torrential page.
Continue reading...
1.8k · Aug 2012
The Old Hermit in Himachal Pradesh Sang
CH Gorrie Aug 2012
The Old Hermit in Himachal Pradesh Sang
"Like the gambler's eye
fixated
on a tumbling die
my mind fixes upon emptiness."
Continue reading...
1.8k · Jun 2014
I tip my hat to Kierkegaard
CH Gorrie Jun 2014
I tip my hat to Kierkegaard
I tip my hat to Kierkegaard
Who was there when things were hard,
To Mr. Hofstadter
Loading my cannon with fodder,
To Willie Yeats
Who showed me my poetic cognates,
To the Buddha
Who, mentally being a barracuda,
Illuminated what patience really means,
To Graham Greene's
"Brighton Rock"'s influence on Morrissey,
Which made me smile at the sea
And recognize "in my own life
What Robert Browning meant
By an old hunter talking with Gods;
But I am not content."
Continue reading...
1.7k · Jan 2013
Catchpenny Games
CH Gorrie Jan 2013
Catchpenny Games
You turned me into a paperweight.
Ambling out of your genealogy,
you chiseled me to the marrowbone;
     walk tall with your invisible chains.

You turned me into a paperweight
marooned on polished mahogany –
conquered West-Indian trees;
     walk tall while your mastery wanes.

You turned me into a paperweight.
From your bottomless, two-ton
tongue came my disfigured heart –
     walk tall, you pyrite suzerain.

You turned me into a paperweight,
deserted on paperwork seas,
ball-and-chained to the wooden beach –
     walk tall in your insidious vein.

You turned me into a paperweight.
I fell, clutching the snowflakes,
and held your whole ******* useless life together –
     walk tall, play that catchpenny game.
Continue reading...
1.7k · Nov 2012
Four "Memories"
CH Gorrie Nov 2012
Four "Memories"
for Barton Smock

     I
to see the flooding lake I crawl
through the thicket

I imagined
being the devil’s
garden
as a child

a lake
I first called
       *blue prison
but now
             love

after swimming
lessons grandmother
funded

     II
squatting arsonists occupy
the town’s church

during weeknights
I am one of four who knows

When it burns
I'll steal the stoup

     III
I dream rarely and only in naps

waking,

I try restraining
fantasies of
faceless women

     IV
rainstorms brake
the lake’s edges,
muddy the bankside flowers,
leave the canal sullied
forever

looking on, I
recall
*generosity
Continue reading...
1.7k · Jul 2014
The Cruelest Month
CH Gorrie Jul 2014
The Cruelest Month
1.
Late-spring's dilemma
Is unabridged and sweet;
Beardtongues and fuchsias peer through grass blades:
Blotches on the bristly canvas.

Camellias? Still in April.

2.
Slices of rye shift on my plate;
Miramar’s war machines whip overhead;
My mouth opens into the Gulf of Kuwait;

The toast becomes
Moldering lips of Pendleton.

3.
There’s a single-story house on a hill
That to helicopters
Looks like an easel.

Great canyons open
To the south and west; the street clings to time—

A pianist’s metronome
Waltzes crosswise on an eardrum.

4.
The eucalyptus bends the deafening breeze.

Are you still dredging Coronado's cradle?
(The tide
Disintegrates the illimitable skyline.)

5.
An unlit Anza-Borrego beats about my ears,
Stars piggybacking the horizon.

The cacti shrivel:
Glitter in a hurricane.

6.
End-of-spring guesses
Prey upon a betrayer’s conscience.
Stilted, they flash ephemerally.
Continue reading...
1.7k · Apr 2013
Eisai and the seeds of Kyoto
CH Gorrie Apr 2013
Eisai and the seeds of Kyoto
Tea sprouts wildly
by the roadside:
jade splayed fingers

flaming the earth
in warped green flicks.
Mild, astringent,

the aroma drifts
into the
triviality

of the present.
Looking over
my backyard fence

toward the road,
quick, damp-green scent
antiquates my

vision: Eisai,
holding seeds from
Kyoto, hikes

across border
hills into a
feudal Japan.

The tea-lined road,
framed by my
imagination,

is an anachronism,
a snapshot that’s
double-exposed.
Continue reading...
1.6k · Dec 2014
Through silver maple and winding hedgerow...
CH Gorrie Dec 2014
Through silver maple and winding hedgerow...
Through silver maple and winding hedgerow wind-songs sough April’s hearsay. In stoic silence, spring’s axes—shuttered trunks—goad their fruit’s swelling. Clouds tumble in like sea foam, blue splinters flashing out: incorporeal troposphere, a halo entrapped by math.
Continue reading...
1.6k · Jul 2012
My brother left
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
My brother left
before I knew he had.
His flight trailed off into a Utah
sunrise. He left behind a little strand
of thought, and, in a cramped, amber room that saw
long talks of topics that soon thinned grey,
a set of dog-eared books has been put down.
Books that brought nearer to my thought his own,
while somewhere Interstate-5 grates ‘cross the ground.

I sleep there still, although I left for good.
That house to this day asks me where he was.
Their smiles, the little comfort that they could
give, were emptier than their words. Often
I feel the vague pulse of their ragged stares –
torn, threadbare they unravel in the air
to mask their faces: that inner decree
which shades the truth. Where and how’d they ever grow wrong?

He must have, as the plane touched the runway,
felt the dawn’s shudder fracture his young bones,
his thoughts turning to those dog-earing days.
The seemingly endless months full of groans,
as they should have been, being spent alone.
And that set of books, at least it would seem,
ignited the wick on which our passions gleam –
slate-grey regards.

These six years past since they took him away
held minutes like a needle in plied dust.
There’s something in the spring that brings decay
here. The outward beauty of the world just
clouds the mind’s loss within the spinning gust
that all the blooming flowers usher in.
Then the rain comes –
in spitters and spats it spins the spire.
When gone the white-wick’s still on fire.

As the 5’s scratch cracks up the drying earth,
I recall Nietzsche, Guevara, Burgess.
Famed men who’d not anticipated births
inside my brother and I like cypress
trees, evergreen and coniferous we
drop seeds year-round. The setting Utah sun,
barely audible, gasps in the copse.
He’s with me now. What’s done is done.
Continue reading...
1.6k · Jul 2012
Heroin F(r)iends
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
****** F(r)iends
One morning I find my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead;
That evening I pace in gullible love.
Night falls, I find wished-on stars have fled.

With intravenous need their hearts drop dead:
The death boyhood knew nothing of.
At daybreak I find my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead.

I walk encased in a narrowing shed
That keeps me hidden from the sun above.
Night falls, I find wished-on stars have fled.

From the pulse of my trusting veins they’re bled;
The needle fits like a vinegary glove.
One morning I find my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead.

In them I saw lunacy's fountainhead,
Drug-sickness, soul-loss, young skin grown mauve.
Night falls, I find wished-on stars have fled.

Maybe if I’d not trailed they’re pitch-black tread,
I’d be whole: A full, unpitted olive.
One morning I see my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead;
(Nightfall!) I know wished-on stars have fled.
Continue reading...
1.6k · Oct 2014
Birthday Poem, Beginning with a Phrase of Yvor Winters' from a Letter Written to Kenneth Rexroth and Almost Ending with an Altered Lyric of Steven Morrissey's
CH Gorrie Oct 2014
Birthday Poem, Beginning with a Phrase of Yvor Winters' from a Letter Written to Kenneth Rexroth and Almost Ending with an Altered Lyric of Steven Morrissey's
"Where literature is concerned,
I will not cooperate at all":
A mind resolutely turned
From the social crusades of fall.

Seventy-eight years later
I agree with the "dilettante";
Twenty-five years cater
To reclusion in a shanty,

"Writing frightening verse
To a straight-toothed dude
In New York." Curse
My reckless solitude!
#birthday #morrissey #yvorwinters #kennethrexroth
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1.6k · Oct 2012
After the Bombing
CH Gorrie Oct 2012
After the Bombing
Mutilated chains of flowers
delineate where schoolboys cowered;
sixteen brick houses on St. James Street
reduced to red dust under homeless feet;
photographers pause, catching their breath,
spellbound by the neutrality of death;
clearing haze where the white chapel stood
reveals ever-dismantling wood;
the market's one register on a charred-black stand,
nearby derges lilt from a funeral band:

*...oh and as, and as
they're lain in silk and white ashes...
the town broken apart, flattened...

...in marble graves and mahogany
under skeletal laurel branches...
...on down to sleep, to sleep...

...we may walk with weathered ease...
...oh we may consider, may remember,
a granted time, an affirming love...
Continue reading...
1.6k · Jul 2012
To a Friend, S.C.
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
To a Friend, S.C.
Standing on my beached heartland,
a few hundred thousand bleached granules of sand
trickle through thick slits in my hourglass hands.

The dry-stream sands my fingers to periosteum as
my head walks the neural gallows,
last lines on the tip of the tongue.

He was a runaway circus animal,
the theme I hunted in vain.
He was my solar eclipse, my waning moon, the coastline;
he was a garden, a sculptor, an elaborate stone trellis;
he was frightened, he was in love, a philosopher without a cause;
he was Michelangelo, Camus, Akhmatova, Kant, Blake and Crane;
he’s the executioner, the brief reflection of a solitary grain
sliding down the boney hourglass
as the blindfold does the same.
Continue reading...
1.6k · Oct 2013
Koan
CH Gorrie Oct 2013
Koan
"Impulse is master",
said the learned man.
"It brings disaster
to a pondered plan."

But what about choice?
That's what I've been taught.
Trying speech, no voice
came, instead forethought

echoed through my head:
speak, and you'll be trapped!
I sat, mute as lead;
the man, smiling, clapped.
#buddha #zen #buddhism #master #disciple #koan
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1.6k · Jul 2012
(Introduction)
CH Gorrie Jul 2012
(Introduction)
The odor of blood drops in drapes,
figures half-lit form false shapes;
the bed on which I lie and the windows
welcome what the delicate line knows:
the open imagination's well-kept trade
that many shrug off
with a stilted stare or cough,
throwing discredit on what honest hands have made.

All that dreamlike inspiration
becomes a beautiful conflagration:
the smell of emblematic men and women slain,
and flickering lights from where thought's shadows came,
issue out of the creative heart's desire
that's uncontrollable,
requiring an artistic toll,
like the worn fingers of the bard that plays the lyre.

But that's what poetry's about,
a deep and draining silent shout;
the hand is left cramped and consumed,
the heart's violet blossoms begin to bloom:
sedative perfumes slide over your wearied frame –
half-memories abate,
the odorous dead dissipate –
you're deserted, yet the halcyon heart flares aflame.

Symbols come and symbols go:
the disfigured trees obscured by snow,
or simply standing against the wind
or windless heat; a cherished friend,
loved ones who’ve passed and the Lost Lyricist;
the Muse that eludes
the damp room in which it broods;
an image of stream near a stony tower’s twist.

Find here, dear reader and friend,
a testimony sung over again.
I write this text to release me from
broken thoughts and anger’s sum:
all that childhood and adolescence approved.
The unvoiced thoughts
of a boy caught by cast lots
inked to find something beyond evanescent truths.
Continue reading...
1.5k · Sep 2012
To A Poet Who Admired My Work But Who Was Urged Into Modernism By His Peers
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
To A Poet Who Admired My Work But Who Was Urged Into Modernism By His Peers
Your sonnets? **** good,
though the rhymes unrhymed today.

Sincerest regards,
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Continue reading...
1.5k · Sep 2012
Phoenix Song
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
Phoenix Song
The spidered light of a September night,
shallow and sparsely flung about the room,
reminisces the sound of a phoenix in flight,
while webs inside the rafters loom.
The phoenix song is like the pallid glow of a chandelier.
Waning, yet resilient,
it coos in mystic merriment
melodies in the key of a rattling nearby mirror.
Every so often the song completely stops,
filling me with a silent bit of despair.
Commonly this follows loud scores of pops
indicating the cycle residing in the flare:
into ashes the song bird bursts again.
It's Rudolphish nose begins to scrunch up ---
I see it even now as I fill my water-cup ---
a sort of reincarnation acumen.
But the bird isn't really real or here;
it's more of a half-truth or memory,
similar to tales of the origins of tea.
It sways, forgetful on my cerebral pier,
nearly falling into the waves of my brain,
dipping it's feather mid-refrain,
repeating it's song again and again,
and again.
Continue reading...
1.5k · Mar 2013
San Diego Goodbye
CH Gorrie Mar 2013
San Diego Goodbye
Intimate adventures: purple sunset;
Sabrina Elliott at her canvas;
My brother boarding some Utah-bound jet;
Easton Connell reciting tender lyrics,
Caught in a mad faith’s unwitting net:
“Daylight licked me into shape”; then night fell;
The city struggling with unheeded debt;
Lieberman and Sathyadev dying young;
Their mothers, a heart-wrenched duet.
James Howard humming, his guitar unstrung,
Paganini in that delicate hand:
The failed romantics; a thing to be forgotten again.
Continue reading...
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