Sittin' on the dock of the bay,
Watching the sun slip, Simon-says, slide away,
Cheeks blushing flushing from orange ray-guns,
Drinking blush rosé to oil our eyes
For the subtle story the sky shortly will reveal,
For the subtle story the sky shortly will revel.
Grievous judgement to make,
Thinkin' skills possessed to praise,
When but yesterday I easy confessed,
When at the Blue Canoe (another poem),
I did not.
(The clouds were magnificent. No, I cannot write a poem about the cloud colors. Their shape shifting inexhaustible. Mine eyes high on their creativity. I'm just not good enough a poet to tamper with that sky.)
If you courage enough to
Call yourself poet, then
It is audacity, not blood,
Warming your extremities,
So foolishly try, always be prepared to fail.
No impulse. We pledged that tonight, ours,
One hour of sunset over Silver Beach.
Brought the wine, forgot the pillows,
So Abraham & Isaaca went prepared to sacrifice
All feelings in their butts for the greater glory
Of love and one of nature's great poetic challenges..
The conundrum~miracle of every sunset
O'er bay, lake or ocean, is its special,
Only-In-Nature unique way of customizing
Its descent just for you.
No matter where one observes,
No matter where you worship,
Wherever your temple, mosque or church situé,
Tennessee, Rhode Island, the Philippines,
Germany, Colombia, even in the ole U.K.,
(yes, you, know it, yes you)
The very same setting sun we all see,
Sends a magic dazzle gold orange path invitation
To the exact spot you are voyeuring,
One sun, all destinations equal before human.
How can that be?
Trepidation and tremblingly,
The clouds.
She leans on me, a perfect fit,
My back resting against a pylon,
So we see the clouds
With common exactitude,
But it is a quiet time, silence only shared.
Images stored silently within ourselves,
For we see the formation, man, woman,
Precisely and exactly, totally differently.
The clouds.
An armada moving imperial and imperiously
At a stately speed, saying I am awesome, fear me.
The largest cloud bank is an aircraft carrier,
Miles long, painted horizon blue-grey unsurprisingly.
The small white wisps, fast destroyers, stealthy submarines,
Moving fast to protect the mother ship,
Running random to confuse enemy radar and the
Pathetic, limited, human eye.
The colors.
Here I fail willingly, unashamedly.
So many sunsets, so many hearts,
All different, all the same.
Lacking knowledge, I cannot tender,
I cannot offer you tenderness to love
Enough,
The variety of oranges, gold, varietals interspersed
With pinks singeing the cornea,
And mock myself for all my meager brain yields is
Good Humor creamsicle...a delicious irony
You who write after midnight
Of razor blades, pills and shotguns,
And not marked two decades even, on this planet,
You want hard,
Write a poem about a sunset in ways never done before.
You, who are wracked with despair
Speak to the man with no job for months
And mouths to feed and a life insurance policy.
Speak to me.
I want to tell you to get over yourself,
But you reject that old saw.
Ok.
Get onto to yourself.
I have walked the hallways of deep despair,
Heard the bells ring between periods that signal only the next
Hell,
And to this day, still do,
But still I try to write external of sunsets and greater glories.
How many lives depend on you? Are you proud of your weakness?
Do you hate me yet for acknowledging out loud,
We are both cowards?
I have five mouths to feed,
Before I parse a morsel.
One less than two times three,
What do you have but to
Grow yourself?
Yeah coward.
Too yellow to write about a
Yellow sunset, cause that is hard in a way incomprehensible
Until tried.
Or the passing of your mother who could not speak clearly
But you, thru her eyes knew that she had poems to yet recite.
Run away like I did ashamed with frustrated failure.
Why should I coddle, give you easy soft?
.
If you come here to share, well and good.
If you come here to find comfort, good.
So gaze upon these words and feel
The love that only experience has earned.
What do you know of heartbreak?
Imprisoned for decades in a loveless life,
I walked by the water nightly, so tempted
To stay, to not pass by but pass on,
Yes, the same waters where I CinemaScoped
Yesterday's sunset, and walked away.
You can read about it if you look,
Look me up, look here, the story is in my poems, but always,
Look up!
So do something hard, something external.
Fail but love yourself more for just having tried.
Then try something else.
The saddest poem ever wrote
Was not yours, where you titillate with daring words
Razors, pills etc.,
The saddest poem ever writ
Was this one, a meager vanity to capture a
Sunset that keeps trying every day to
Surpass
Supersede
Its previous glorious failure,
Like we should too.
Keep trying
Now, I shall rest,
For I know that soon I shall see, feel, think,
Of something new that will make me eager to
Write a new poem.
August 3~5, 2013
Written and posted here one year ago today. Strangely, it fits my mood exactly, again, today, 2014. Edited for clarity here and there...
*If you courage enough to
Call yourself poet, then
It is audacity, not blood,
Warming your extremities,
So foolishly try, always be prepared to fail.