He said,
"It's not you, it's me."
And I agreed.

The Lilac trees were bushes then
In the front yard of where I grew up.
Their perfume filled the small front room
Of the tiny little house we lived in.

Across the yard were Holly trees
One for each of us three kids
Who loved to push each other
Laughing, onto their sharp leaves.

Three Lilacs and three Holly trees
All planted by my mother
And all of them were tiny shrubs
Just like her little children.

The kids and bushes grew in sync
As days and years meandered by
Until the kids were grown and gone
And left the bushes growing there

To mark the passing of the days
That added up to childhoods filled
With  perfume in the afternoons
And sometimes thorns into the fingers.
ljm

My bags are packed
I’m ready to go
I’m leavin’ you now
But you should know

My pen has ink
And it will flow
Soon I’ll return
With a happy glow

It’s only for
A 2-week trip
Then I’ll come back
With newfound zip.
ljm

Did I never notice,
make note for future ferance re
sufferance, under the load of we,
the people. we,
the people who lived on land
rented from Mormons
who claimed the God who runs
Easter and Christmas gave it to them,
for being brave enough to take the land,

as had the valiant Evangelista in
sisting resistance to Hari Krishna- yeah

I was alive, when the times did change.
I was the bargaining chip that tipped the bet,

straw boss, that is one subliminally poetic
job title, given me, as anyone could see,
due to me, being so good with the spiritual
interface on a standard fifties American mind set,

absent, the reading done in college prep, by those
who run the world now,
boomers, big wave of new blood, with a few set
aside for trial runs,
some things we never tried on Turing, but Von Nueman
says the all
go rythms have been mediated,
forming a message that never
ever
may be altered,
but it is in code.
- not possible without faith to know
- the imagined unit of measure
- is prescience - possible
- original bias to plus,
- as we well recall a while ago, each
- matter was balanced in antimatter
Pfft.
What must one say one may
know, al as re al as ev er re ai ai ai, syllables
silly
ligare knot re
ligare gnosiadnozity re
legions in legirons marking time,

stamping cleated feet to the cadence,
double time,
ramming speed, boom

v; for verses victimized
Ken Pepiton at 12/23/2021 1:15 PM
v: for inimical
from Latin inimicus "an unfriend; an enemy".
from in- "not" + amicus "friend"
related to amare "to love" ah,
more
mimicable me, see me mirroring
the flow of snow,
in the pre-broken globe, shaken to delight, a bit
a
me who sees the swirl settle
knowing, after all, is when we know
knowing is
as imagined,
or it is not knowing, at all.

I think, at the bottom of the pile,
is a list of all the things
I've learned to be afraid of...

And it all comes down to one
moment, one millisecond of traffic light red strobing deep into my terrified soul,
Pushing me forward into a sun so bright it burns like acid
And callously exposing me in all of my littleness
To the universe who looks over once and then ignores...

When I fell in love with life I did not know that one day it would lay in wait for me to pass by,
And then jump from behind to press
Itself into my open back
Slicing my core to ribbons,
And presenting me with the only truth there is:

"Nothing, absolutely nothing, is guaranteed."

Winston was a dog
who bullied his canary

He’d often bury eaten birds
behind the old shed on the prairie

Till the day he chocked on a bone
coughing up an aviary

then sadly came the angry crows
pecked his arterial pulmonary

I know its mad
and may sound just a little crazy

but that’s what is trending
and now tweeting at #dogsobituary