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as a kid
i built my wall with lego's
then later on
i finished it with stones
 Apr 22 Pepper Dove
Fey
Have you ever seen the rain?
Amidst the mossy caverns light,
No pain among the insane’s plight,
Imprinting silvery vervain,
Have you ever seen the rain?

Falling softly, washing pain,
Through whispers of the trees decay,
Under the gentle stars anew,
With pleas serene, a lasting hue.
Have you ever felt the rain?

Kissing cheeks with no disdain,
A soothing touch, a cool embrace,
In its realm no harm, no pain,
Have you ever felt the rain?

It cleanses wounds that lie within,
Bewitching souls, a gentle kin,
And as it falls, a symphony unfolds,
Of nature's orchestra, with stories untold.

Have you ever heard the rain?
Its melodic chorus, a sweet refrain?
A lullaby for restless souls,
Guiding them with peaceful notes.
Have you ever heard the rain?

It murmurs secrets to the earth,
Of rebirth, life, and unknown mirth,
And in its cadence, a sacred art,
The rhythm of life, a beating heart.

So, have you ever seen the rain?
Gracefully mundane in its reign,
For in its tears, there's wisdom deep,
That even storms lay you to sleep.

© fey (17/04/24)
If they had a sound
It would be a can of loose screws
Sitting on a washing machine
A constant jangle of bits and pieces

If they had a taste
It would be sour candy
And a battery on your tongue
Electric and sharp all at once

If you could touch them
They would feel like static
And cotton *****
Unpleasantly soft with a scratchy tingle

If you breathed them in
It would be rubbing alcohol
With cinnamon and pepper
A raw burn followed by touches of spice

But when you see them
You might not realize
A bouncing leg here
Drumming fingers there
~for all the old poets,
especially one so denominated, my old faithful friend…~
<>

the
THEY,
emboldened and italicized,

are whispering and whimpering,
even
whining
that I’ve gone
wimpy,
lost possess of mine
facilities and faculties,
no longer able and capable
to command, demand, in hand,
import
a decent poem
from & in the English language(s) to
purport,

lost my edges,
hide behind the hedges
of inconsequential ancestral
and incestual rhymes,

these
THEY
do oft appear as voices in my
now emptied and unemployed head,
but familiarity breeds contemporary
contretemps of contempt,
for they are remiss,
in dismiss when the eyelids
flutter,
the noble temporal lobes
mutter,
’tis thy~thyme ole man,
for spillage of your

FPOTD
(first poem of the day)
thus kneecapping the cancer
of a restless dark hour period
where failures and faults,
of lines
crossed and uncrossed,
bear you to pieces,
bare your lifetime
laundry list
of pulsing, palpable,
fulminating and always ruminating faults
of which penance cannot be bought
by the bags of pennies and sordid assorted coins
that THEY
will find in the back bottom of thine closets,
along with the manuscripts
of the discarded and forlorn,
unloved and unpublished poems that you chose
to have buried with you,

lest you think that
eternal rest
will best
them voices,
they will accompany you
to permafrost of forever dark,
their once and future demise,
a travesty of
justice…

enough.

lists of to do’s;
the exercise of delaying death
for one more day,
by trodding on the treadmill
that postpones the inevitable
that can
always tun longer and faster
and cannot be outdone, outrun,
but
this poem
disgorged and disbanded,
it’s bytes,
will not bite mark me
in the forever future
their bytes are alive now,
free to be chomped and well chewed,
and once fully digested,
be return to our Mother
Earth

where some disclaimed poems
go to be buried
within it’s eternity
A sparrow sang for breakfast
the robin sang for tea
Death by misadventure
the magpie holds the key

The jackdaw sang for supper
the nightjar at midnight
The major sips his sherry
as the conscripts fight the fight

Then as the sun rises
and the day begins again
The salmon swims the river
and the deer runs the glen

So, the fisherman packs his tackle
and his glasses for the sun
While the hunter wore his stalker
and loads bullets for his gun

Then we ponder at life's menu
as we drink a glass of wine
Whose time will it be tomorrow
it could be yours it could be mine
Tell the loved ones, how much you love them,
waste no time, and it's no shame
because if silence, steals your word
it may be lost, and never be heard.

Don't defer it, to another day
what you feel, immediately say
we don't know tomorrow, what's in fate
it's too far away, it'll be too late.

If you willed, know it to be true
it's easy to say, I love you
when you hesitate, high will be the cost
chances postponed, are chances lost.

When they are with you, it's such a boon
to have the loved ones, so tell them soon
before time snatches away, you or them
with your love unuttered, heart unspoken.
The lights dazzled their eyes
but illumined their faces
like two children drowned in surprise.

The air smelled of freshly baked food
the girls dressed in their best
giggled in utmost festive mood.

The two strangers passed through rows of light
that quickly transformed day into night
and the only beats louder than their heart
were the noise of heels quicker and smart.

One moving faster paused to find
the other had fallen behind
and soon remembering the six years between them
broke his pace to be with him.

They were dreamily moving when they reached the strand
where the river sparkling with lights
drew them to her bank for some rest.

From there they flew on wings
to extract all they could on one night
passing the musics, and the church chimes
like they were on their last flight.

When everything else fell apart
the joy still rang in their heart
and the two brothers with moistened eyes
headed towards another sunrise.
Chandernagore, Nov 19, 2023
“I fear that many people are put off by poetry because they don’t know where to start. If I have any advice for them, it is this: find what you like.

Who is to say what guides this process?

In my own case, it has simply been the fact that certain phrases, poems, and figures have acted like flare-lights along the path of my own life. Sometimes you see a flicker in the darkness and know that it is saying something—often something of great importance—and you sense that you have to go toward it, to get near to it, all the time looking out for other lights.

My love of certain poets stems from a single phrase they wrote that hit me like a great freight train of truth.

At other times, I have been attracted to a poem or a poet because I am taken by that feeling of recognition that someone else has felt or thought exactly the way I did. As C.S. Lewis says, as a character in the film Shadowlands, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

Sometimes, we read poets because we want to be like them, or because they are arbiters of good taste, or have been through something we want to know about. Literature—poetry, in particular—offers us a way to become different from what we are or might have been otherwise.

In the end, I suppose the question is: What is the purpose of all this? Why is it worth making our heads into a well-furnished room?

I think it’s because what we have up here—in our heads—is the only thing that cannot be taken. So long as we have memory, we cannot be made into automatons by man or machine…”

Which brings me back to Shakespeare.

The Tempest is the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own. And because of that—and because we know so little about his life that we always look for clues in his work—a lot of autobiography has always been read into the play.

It is about a magician, Prospero, at the end of his magical days. At the end of the play, he promises to drown his magic book and break his staff. It is impossible not to read a certain amount of biography into this, Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage.

Every now and then, somebody comes up with a new theory about Shakespeare. All have been heard before—for example, the vivid description of the sea in The Tempest indicates Shakespeare must have spent time as a sailor.

My response to this? In that case, Shakespeare must also have been a Roman emperor, several English and Scottish kings, a Danish prince, a shepherd boy, a teenage girl in love, a murderer, and almost every other person who ever lived. It is a reductive argument, because it forgets that in the realm of the imagination, you can be all things without actually being them.

And, in any case, at the end, it all disappears, falls apart, and comes together again somewhere else.

This speech, by Prospero, in the fourth act of The Tempest, is the finest farewell of any I know, and one I hope to keep in my own head for many years to come.

**Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep
excerpt from
https://www.thefp.com/p/a-second-year-with-douglas-murray?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=141539442&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1njhw&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=emailwaq
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