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Jon Shierling Nov 2014
Go on then and type type type away
into the gloom of a dying Eastern seaboard,
waiting and watching for a glimpse of that
rotting corpse you call a messiah,
yes the prophet of power reeking of
stale cigarette butts and old ******.

Type type type the day away
buying your worthless flowers
and plastic ******* palm trees
as you shed pieces of your soul
like flakes of aluminum shavings
metal snowflakes trailing behind
your beat up industrial exterior.

Type type type through the sickle cell night
wallowing in the animal urge to
go dance naked round a roaring fire
and make sweet love to Anglo-Saxon girls
lost in moonlight on a bed of pine needles
only to realize that those dreams are just as
sallow and jaundiced as the *** on the
rusty iron corner that you know you
will someday be sacrificed to.

Type type type till the pink lips of sunrise
claw their way out of another shuddering dawn
to find you red eyed and drunk
screaming obscenities at the computer screen
and wondering how the dead certainty that
filled you with passion and verse the night before
could wither away into the hollow crevices
that forever wink up at you out of the
gangrenous ******* chest wound of American Dreams.
  Nov 2014 Jon Shierling
Wilfred Owen
I
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
The front line withers.
But they are troops who fade, not flowers,
For poets' tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for filling:
Losses, who might have fought
Longer; but no one bothers.


                                   II
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling,
And Chance's strange arithmetic
Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
They keep no check on armies' decimation.


                                   III
Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags no pack.
Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
And terror's first constriction over,
Their hearts remain small-drawn.
Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle
Now long since ironed,
Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.


                                   IV
Happy the soldier home, with not a notion
How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
His days are worth forgetting more than not.
He sings along the march
Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
The long, forlorn, relentless trend
From larger day to huger night.


                                   V
We wise, who with a thought besmirch
Blood over all our soul,
How should we see our task
But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying, not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot tell
Old men's placidity from his.


                                   VI
But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever mourns in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears
(C) Wilfred Owen
Jon Shierling Nov 2014
I do believe that I'm finished for a time,
tired of longing after other lands,
and other climes in search of something
I know deep within, I have known
and had all along.

That place is my home
a home that I've always known
and always measured my loves by;
green fields rolling into a valley,
and a great mountain filling
up the horizon.

I wish to know where you have come from,
wonder if you remember what New York was,
or if the death of your grandmother
meant far more than you let on.

I left a cheap vase full of white
carnations on your desk for a reason,
and it had nothing to do with the affection I feel for you,
just a simple gesture,
a minor hoping happiness for you.

There are such things as a world yet undiscovered,
and yes, I get that you refuse to date a man
younger than you, but for ****'s sake,
you don't even know me?!
  Nov 2014 Jon Shierling
Traveler
Have you ever seen a ghost
Home alone at night
Have you ever seen the world
Through clear nocturnal sight

Have you ever peered through darkness
To see the other side
Have you ever felt such acceptance
Beneath a moon lit sky?

We define things which others cannot describe
We hear the whispers from the other side
Restless voices
Spirits in the wind
So safe and sound
At least we pretend

The days shall we rest
The nights we shall roam
The creeps be no longer creepy
The night becomes our throne
Traveler Tim
Re Posted to 12/16
Jon Shierling Nov 2014
When I look at you,
I don't see beautiful legs,
or a gorgeous face,
I don't see perfect *******,
or eyes worth drowning in.

When I look at you,
I see through the material
captivating as it is,
and into a mystery
beckoning to the immaterial.

When I speak with you,
the rest of the world doesn't stop spinning,
but it slows down,
and the doubts and history,
fall away into the nothing
from whence they came.

When you touched me,
there was no ecstasy,
nor a beautiful pain;
just a simple warmth
which I never thought
I'd be able to feel again.
Jon Shierling Nov 2014
This always happens,
somehow,
someway.

I have many things that I want to say
a feeling that if only were slightly
intensified, would be able to pour out of me.

So I will have a drink, or three,
but then, for some inexplicable reason
unbeknownst to me,
my hands start to move of their own accord
and I find myself writing
things I never had any intention of saying.
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