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It is enough for me by day
To walk the same bright earth with him;
Enough that over us by night
The same great roof of stars is dim.

I do not hope to bind the wind
Or set a fetter on the sea—
It is enough to feel his love
Blow by like music over me.
 Nov 2010 Curtis Lindsay
Lucan
Say you want a cat. A dog's too easy,
would wag when wag is inappropriate,
and slobber on the guests. You'll take the cat,
so different and strange, it drives you crazy,

its shiftlessness, its ins-and-outs, its chi.
You call. It does not come. Is this a pet,
this Dharma ***? You say you can't accept
its vacant gaze, its scorn, who yearned to be

at home with feral grace, with all you're not.
But you're a Body safely locked from Mind,
that Problem no Mind solves. This point's defined
for you by ****, who's not the pet you thought

but Otherness, one owned by God, or none.
Cat sleeps for hours, wants out. A job well done.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.
Heap not on this mound
  Roses that she loved so well;
Why bewilder her with roses,
  That she cannot see or smell?
She is happy where she lies
  With the dust upon her eyes.
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
For shame, deny that thou bear’st love to any
Who for thy self art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lov’st is most evident;
For thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate,
That ‘gainst thy self thou stick’st not to conspire,
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind!
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be as thy presence is gracious and kind,
Or to thy self at least kind-hearted prove,
    Make thee another self, for love of me,
    That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
Vaguely lit by the summer moon,
lull them asleep among the foliage;
her sweet madness: the devil's paladins
lie in wait for more than a thousand years.

In the wine of daylight, they slip amorously.
- A nest of mad kisses, the beads of their love.
They have murmured their ballad - the paladins dance,
sighing around her, women and flowers beneath them.

Smile of beautiful lips, a small rustle of wings -
it is the nymph! Her great veil rises;
such mounting of my soul in love’s will;

As I float down, bearing shadow-flowers with them,
I never endured more triumphant clamourings -
gleams of the daylight:
dawns are heartbreaking, devoured by vermin.
(c) 2010, Lori Carlson


All poetry under the names Lori Carlson or Iona Nerissa are the sole property of Lori Carlson.
Please seek permission before using any of my writings.
~Lori Carlson~
I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deeper despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.
my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and
taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and
chipping with sharp fatal tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of
chrome and execute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am
becoming something a little different, in fact
myself
Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet
bellowings.
At night-the light turned off, the filament
Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,
His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low
To touch a swampy source-he thought of death.
Her father's hilltop home allowed him time
To sense the nothing standing like a sheet
Of speckless glass behind his human future.
He had two comforts he could see, just two.

One was the cheerful fullness of most things:
Plump stones and clouds, expectant pods, the soil
Offering up pressure to his knees and hands.
The other was burning the trash each day.
He liked the heat, the imitation danger,
And the way, as he tossed in used-up news,
String, napkins, envelopes, and paper cups,
Hypnotic tongues of order intervened.
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