This is the fairy godmother's dream,
In this world nothing is what it seems,
A tribute to Martin Luther King,
I do  dream of a circling ring,
Of global helping, healing hands,
I dream of Peace in every land,
I dream that guns be obsolescent,
That equitable freedom be made prevalent,
I dream that hunger be obsolescent,
I dream that safe water be ever present,
I dream that children grow and play in unity,
I dream that none be taught bigotry,
I dream of women free of discrimination,
I dream of no slavery in any nation,
I dream of one global human race,
I dream of an infectious smile on every face,
I dream  of the perfect communion of the soul,
I dream that  Heaven on Earth  be our whole,
Maybe  I dream impossible dreams,
In a world where nothing is what it seems.

iPad Love

4:49 AM, and by the light of the silvery moon
and our iPad screens turned down low,
we snuggle side by side, our fingers glide so softly upon each,
each of our own devices, this technique,
it could be an app, teaching how to caress a human being.

No need to tell you in sound, out loud,  
how you turn my heart upside down,
I'll just post a note of appreciation on Facebook,
you will see it faster, and besides, you got your earphones on and
could not hear my sweet nothings if I screamed them in high definition.

The newspaper arrives on the electric "doorstep" -
no longer will do we venture outside in
pink bathrobes and curlers, or boxer shorts,
a legal gesture of neighborly disdain.
Americana, losing another icon, as well as  
insuring the unemployment of thousands of newspaper deliverers,
boys and girls, on bicycles, their first job, now obsolescent.

Your feet, so cozy and warm, touching mine,
the sensation, lovely and fine, duly recorded in a poem
that on my iPad I scribble, as my typos disappear, out of sight.
your ear, I nibble, something you hate and I love,
but electronically, it's done with no fuss or muss, and
I don't even have to move!

Sadly, I can find no app that will bring the warmth
of a cup of coffee to my night table, and the gun metal casing of
this invention is chilly, but still Steve, with almost God like vision,
you brought us closer in ways prior unimagined.

So baby,
shut it down,
turn me on,
make me warm for real,
glide your now practiced fingertips on my grizzled cheek,
whisper a phony "ugh,"
cause I know, you will read
this iPad love poem
and cherish us for evermore.

Nothing, something, even as thin as my iPad 2(!)
will come between us and the holiness, the uniqueness of
the human touch.

2011

stepping back into the west
chills reverberate up and down my spine
chiseling open obsolescent padlocks
dangling with dust
on ancient treasure chests

pallid colors in the attic release
a blossoming familiarity
faint hints of retrospections float on faded paper
granting me access to roads
where no map is needed

as i peruse the streets
my heart flows coalescing with the vicinity
caressing each detail i transform to fluid
and fuse with the past
through fresh strokes of watercolored memories

recollections flash before my eyes
revealing antiquated stories
though thought forgotten
an etched history endeavors to define me
renewing itself as i turn each corner

i shudder at some remembrances while encompassing others
through synchronicity realization hits
that I am all of it
yet none of it
at the same time

familiar faces paint meaning onto me
no longer do they know me
yet they airbrush vestiges of yesteryear
and coat me with connotations
i allow them to think i am whatever they imagine

i morph into their canvas temporarily
then break free in multi-dimensionality
they don't hear me with a new listening
no longer invested in their projections
once sharp triggers now appear in soft focus

an auspicious mist lies around the edges
of my former life
it is as if i never left
yet traces of the east lie sandpapered in me
a maturation commingles with my former self

flushing out on my skin
tethering newfound emotions
a gentle gratitude for home territory
nestles softly
inward

i listen to the clicks
of my scuffed cowboy boots
on acquainted yet somehow distant sidewalks
the echoes layering multiple impressions
glimmering with the utter beauty of this terrain

as I wander through the majestic rocky mountains
drinking in the quaking aspen's crimson edges
interfacing the evergreens
hushed whispers of autumn loftily rest
juxtaposed neatly against futures waiting to unfurl in the wind

an amalgamation of intimate sights and scents
dance in open wounds
dazzling
homesickness cured
a wholeness returned

as winter's crystal dawn blooms
i realize the depth of my growth
for in leaving here and returning
i cherish the west
my home

©2016 janetaylor

one asks:

why do I not send my poems anymore,
have I seized up, ceased down, now but an engine rust requiem,
absent the needed viscous, numerous verbal oils running requires,
to commend to thee without hesitant reservation

I lie, and say because,
no one read them

write profusely, blouse tear-wet, hair ungelled, thoughts unglued,
this here secondary, truth birthing reply, outed post a time delay,
revealed, staggering reluctantly, like an akimbo drunk,
who imagines every step his, still straight-lined,
then, in shock, in a confessional, through a divide,
stumbling admits,
no, they are not

my poems can no longer be milkman delivered to your
morning doorstep porch coated in condensation-wet,
thick-heavy, lovely but-out-of-shaped, rotund glass bottles,
for both this charming old practice I remember,
it and my poems, are now time-wronged,
passed over by the courant new notion of a sell-by date,
for who dares to desire to live in the timeless paths
of risky tomorrows?

these times, when life is a continuous elegy,
simplicity is so complex,
when truths are hard to distinguish
harder to believe, why then,
insert any extra hardening, provision extra difficulties,
add poems that strain, needing patience and careful handling

so many people, me compris, pained out,
obsolescent, meteor victims of dinosaur extinctions,
now so common, remarkably recognized and remarked upon,
then quickly gone to a swamp burial ignominy unnoticed

my poems, complex and long, wordy and abstruse,
do fit your avoidance profile, why to make thee weep,
so many demanding your abbreviated attention span,
my intimate uncomfortable intrusions are your lowest priority,
and this, irony, was my masters thesis topic

so I lie

forsooth my poems are secret read by the Marrano thousands,
writ by a me-disguised, they're seeked and sought out
by those who require a personal pinpricking, a violin adagio daily,
tiny little irritant memory provocations and sooth sayings,
deemed inappropriate, for no predeterminant answers asked,
banished from today's new world symphony,
governed by a set of exclusionary convent rules,
that perforce demand a trigger warning:

place no peas neath my mattress, so I may sleep,
without the discomfiture, the unordered risk intensity of
dreaming without any restraint,
composing the future in the moment

11-13-17 1:31am

hmph... where are the open mics?

This coffee-bean bag city abound

with eclectic fusions of wireless access

enter-the-net -abilities

Kenya to Columbia / slow, dark roasts...

and Napa Valley vineyards

intermingling

at Cream...

How oddly bright, surrounded by glass

windows--like discovery of x-ray vision,

through clear walls i see how packed

like an iMac convention it is

inside...

   Poetry readings: Yahoo local search directed us here,

barista-scented alcoholic webmasters

thin-legged tables laid out like a life-sized

chess board--us three white rooks performing

black bishop moves to the cashier;

curious like George as to where

in Carmen-cool-San Diego,

in this glowing rubix cubed place;

   where in the fluoresent skin of Comp-USA borne

peoples of the web, where

where oh where's the poetry?

Reading Vista-windows rather than obsolescent-absolutes

of books by Keats

or obsessive-compulsive Koontz...

   Though bright and machine-warm, Cream

felt metallic-shiny, slick as plastic; conversations

with an electric hiss

rather than a hum of heart-beats and laughter

where's the **** poetry??

   the readings?

a prolific geek or Hemingway refined older men

on a single microphone;

turn-table-tales in rhyme

on a platform made by the local grind

college theatre teckies (staple-gunned and glued)...

where are those poets?

   those spoken-word-wisdoms, writers

performing, even in their Goth-blacks, even in

their Seattle angst of cordoruoys or dock martins;

forget Starbucks, leave behind Jitterz,

the Expresso Roma is the poetry of coffee

no enterprise

can replicate

duplicate the unique...

   sadly i must concede, the spoken word

and poetic fluffers are a dying breed; as far as

i can web-surf, no place

houses them any longer, no more

do they sprinkle their pixie-dust of verse

or prose, mosaics,

fantastics of floral or funk

imagery and emotional

stark revelations of discovery...

   sadly--it is the day's turning of a page;

***** is the word,

adverb to lost horizons, i am

a dinosaur of the mess-no-beatnik-era,

"poet-a-sore-is-rest"

deep thoughts' ooze now the blood of

{fingers snapping} history

"yeah, man, cool...outta sight"

and i'm not yet extinct;

i am a teradactyl with so much sky

soon without a place to land, / below

crash into the matrix sea--Cream pixelates my woes...

communication has become a plastic factory

to Japan, and Europe, my inner "screeeeech!"

"where is the poetry?!"

It’s a sunny day on the lake
No weather lifts my mood
I’ve become socially anxious
But they just think I’m rude

It’s like life’s the arcade
And I’m completely out of tokens
Won’t blame it on the system
Cause I know it’s me that’s broken

Can’t drift away
Not even in a binge
Anchored to my pathology
Society’s definition of the fringe

Done drowning in the sorrow
I just shower in it to get clean
And wash away the hope
A habit from when I was a teen

Quit pushing off the bottom
You can’t fail if you don’t start
But still I die again and again
Trying desperately to break apart

Cause this nihilism gives me a meaning
Paradoxical in and of itself
To cut deeper in the wound
Cathartic hatred for myself

Done saying I’ll make one more attempt
To walk the path of righteousness
Cause I’ve only tried that four thousand times
And each time I’m left with less and less

All I’ve got is this page
And my obsession with the pain
I’m an infinite beaker!
From which the flow just won’t wane

You’d think my spirit’s dead
Cause I’ve been trying to **** it for a while
But the spirit’s hard to ****
Even after a couple million miles

If we are to ever fall in love, remember these things. Remember the things that make me laugh the most as I will need it when I am grumpy and in a bad mood, i have a love for bad jokes and anything ******* related, it is noted that I have the sense of humor relevant to a  12 year old boy. I was 12 years old when I first learned how to hate my own body. I mastered the art of dissonance while simultaneously shredding any sense of self worth from my paper skin, I was taught that I was not and never would be good enough. To this day, I still don't feel whole. Thats not to say I never will, I am constantly growing and learning to love my whole being. Still, when you tell me that I am pretty, or beautiful, when I am in your arms and you tell me that I have a perfect body and a loving soul, a part of me will not believe it. When you compliment me, I will lay there silent, not because I don't want to accept it, but because I truly don't know how. How you could possibly love something that has been broken so many times before, I will constantly second guess myself unable to believe that you are somehow capable of loving something as ******* up as me. I am always trying to ***** into place all of the pieces that define me, always checking to make sure that the glue i've used to put myself back together is still holding. Holding me in your arms will always be calming to me. I could be jumping out of my body but the moment that you rest your hands around me, I will fall quiet. If you remember anything, remember that touch is the one thing that can speak to me when nothing else can. Use your fingers to form words on my skin and your palms to send heat to the arctic places of my trembling frame. I am always trembling. But I am not nervous, rather calm with a disorder that causes my nerves to constantly spell out fear as if I am afraid. if I am afraid, I will not show it. I will hold it in because I was told at a young age that vulnerability is synonymous with weakness. But that is not always the case. The strongest moments I have are when I am face forward, naked soul, and crying. If you get the chance to see me cry, you are special. Remember that you are special. Remember that I can be happy too. Remember that even in the darkest of storms, the sun still lives on. Only in rain can we truly learn to admire clarity. I will be your clarity. When your vision is blurred and your ability to see is hazy, know that I will guide you through any fog that you encounter. I will not surrender until you force me to and even then I will refuse to give up. Astrology has told me that i am hard headed and strong willed. And ******* its true. I will walk to the ends of the earth for you before I give in, remember this. Remember that in my book, love is the biggest chapter, one that is constantly being scratched out and rewritten. Love is the part of my story that I have yet to figure out whether or not will ever be finished. Remember that I remember things far too well to ever forget you. I will not forget you. I will love you. Sacrifice my limbs to worshipping every part of you. I may not do what most lovers do. But most lovers don't remember the details. And the details make me who I am. So love my details, my imperfections, my lines, my freckles, love me like the way the stars admire the moons ability to be elusive. I am elusive, obsolescent, and desolated, yet I am free. But i can only be your moon if you let me. So please, let me be, your moon.