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In the evening we came back
Into our yellow room,
For a moment taken aback
To find the light left on,
Falling on silent flowers,
Table, book, empty chair
While we had gone elsewhere,
Had been away for hours.

When we came home together
We found the inside weather.
All of our love unended
The quiet light demanded,
And we gave, in a look
At yellow walls and open book.
The deepest world we share
And do not talk about
But have to have, was there,
And by that light found out.
Aquinas Sep 2014
I inject you into my arm
You run laps in my blood
Swimming for days in a lustful craze
Inside my brain you have your stay
Sleeping silently in the day
But at night come out to play
Invading my memories
Making it a thicket
Now you know everything that makes me wicked
Playing drums on my rib cage you sail to my heart
Leaving me aching, weary, and sickened
"Are you mine?" You whisper and beckon
"Forever and ever!" I answer
Unended
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2013
Photographs by Avedon

This was written in a friend's home in the Berkshire Mountains, on a Saturday morning, a few years ago.  Up early, I went exploring their bookshelves and found a book of Richard Avedon's photographs of average Americans out west.  Google "richard avedon photos of the american west" - then read the poem.  Please, for without seeing the faces, for this will make all the difference.  In the Berkshires, it is always chilly there, even in the summer sun.  This and other obscure references are better detailed in the notes.


Join my warmth and
my chill,
as the nine o'clock sun,
a 45 degree steeplechase
warms,
but still not
strong enough
to dispense
the lingering,
residual, remaindered,
breezy chill
of the prior eve,
that hides in,
emanates from,
the shadows
of the
deep wooded hillocks
of the
Berkshire Mountains.

Join my warmth
and my chill!

Upright jolted,
head kicked awake,
entranced and revolted,
excited and repelled,
emotive, yet, stilled.

For oh so casually,
this heroic city dweller,
brave and fearless
bookshelf explorer,
retrieves a book,
to find a new route
thru time and space
to the center of his brain.

Photographs by Avedon,
of my fellow Americans,
the Have Nots,
his "Havedons"
of the
American West.

These uncommon people
with whom I share
uncommonly little,
these drifters, the carneys,
the would-have-been cowboys,
busted blackjack dealers,
rattlesnake gut n' skinners,
coal and copper miners,
the hay truck drivers,
dirt so deep in
their pores ingrained,
colors and bloodies their souls,
browns their veins,
are the ones that
too oft,
go off first to
fight wars
in my name.

Photos untitled,
words unneeded.

In this far corner of our
shared contiguous space
called the
United States of America,
top of the line here
would be
insurance agents,
secretaries and maybe even,
the waitresses.

But their eyes,
oh their eyes!

Words I do not own
to fair share with you,
the clarifying gaze
of measured dignity and
immeasurable ache,
heritage pride,
heretical heartbreak,
that marks and unites
these disparate and dispirited
vessels of humankind.

Disjointed,
the noon suns finally,
raises my body temperature
browns my surface...

Yet, nothing eradicates
this ******* chill
in my soul
or calms my consternation,
as black and white
eyes discolor
my comfortable existence,
as I ponder
Avedon's words:

All photographs are accurate but none tell the truth

Pass over,
pass by,
The Evil Son at Passover
asks ever so sly,
what have they to do with me?

It is the Sabbath.
We luxuriate in our rest.
Rest is the greatest luxury

What is this Sabbath?
Heschel's cathedral -
existant both
in space and time,
and one enters
when and where
one can.

Do my distant,
(both in space and time)
American cousins
share my Sabbath?

Are they allowed
this luxury,
or is it endless exertion,
severity and deprivation,
all and every day
of their lives?

Constant risk every day.

Who cannot fail to see the
precipitousness of life
edged in the lines of their
hearts and minds?

Day to day hardens them
and teaches the
discipline of
severity unended.

Is the prudence of
self-forgetfulness,
their morning bitter pill
they must swallow
to carry on?

Among the resolutions
I need
to claim a
life fulfilled is this:

How to end this poem,
close this can of worms,
accidentally kicked open.

Will sunset end these
troubling questions
of which you have
your own,
more personal variations?
(what about the ...)

Perennials flower everywhere,
in Auschwitz,
along the Tigris,
even in Kabul and Somalia,
along the highways
that lead
to the mecca of
Las Vegas.

Perennials flower everywhere.

In warmth and cool,
in time and space,
they flower in my heart and
my brain and in
my prayerful tears.
flowing down my cheeks,
as I lay me down to sleep,
to dream these of
impoverished words

Havdalah^^ thoughts,
separations celebrated.

Distinctions noted,
even celebrated tween
holy and common,
light and dark,
Sabbath and
the six weekdays
of labor,
between sacred and secular
and
between me and
my American Brothers
of the American West.


I know
just one thing
to be true:

The Sabbath Cathedral is
open to all,
whatever day
you choose to
abide there

I await you,
my American cousins,
with wine and bread
and the
holy of holiest words
of comfort and sooth.

I will wash your feet and
lay you down to
restful sleep
in the
Sabbath Cathedral
in my heart.

Together,
at last,
we will be joined,
in warmth and chill.



August 29, 2010
Lanesboro, Mass.
----------------------
* "In The American West" by
Richard Avedon

** many of the phrases in this stanza were taken from an article "The Few, The Proud, The Chosen" in Commentary, September 2010

^ Abraham Joshua Heschel, a modern Jewish Philosopher.  Elegant, passionate, and filled with the love of God's creation, Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath has been hailed as a classic of Jewish spirituality ever since its original publication-and has been read by thousands of people seeking meaning in modern life. In this brief yet profound meditation on the meaning of the Seventh Day, Heschel introduced the idea of an "architecture of holiness" that appears not in space but in time Judaism, he argues, is a religion of time: it finds meaning not in space and the material things that fill it but in time and the eternity that imbues it, so that "the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals."

^^ Havdalah is the ceremony to celebrate the end of the Sabbath, and realize the distinctions between the holy day and the workweek, the day and the night, light and day...
King Panda  Sep 2017
no sickness
King Panda Sep 2017
I was not sick
and needed no

convalescence

no rebirth
or panning
view of

bloodscape

the black

gasp of dawn
it offered

never
drew

no sickness

no hospital
beds

or starched sheets

no goodbye
rain

or last shot
of whiskey

it unended

when the
sickness of

the mind
rolled in

with its fingers
shaped like a gun

and a trash bag
for my jewel

give me
no sickness


I begged

and robbers
there were three

beat me down and
left me like a

headless buck
Poetoftheway Feb 2018
the pleasured thrills of a
une liaison dangereuse
the mystery du triangle hypoténuse

two open, unended lines attached
to make a so interesting right (wrong) angle,
mais sans l'hypoténuse leur est pas de connectivité

indeed the hypotenuse hypothetical is crack for my brain
imagination steel furnace fired, molten are my fingers
as they trace the line you left for me on your body

to adore to cherish to lick to follow an arrow pointing
where?

to the heavenly pleasures that earth reside
in our differences substantial
which intrigue rather than
divide

opposites attract is true and not,
we could be
we could not be more unalike
that so excites for dreams only I can uncover
in the rounded shape  of thine wide eyes

a horrific inserts
she is only teasing me

but the need to dance on the brink
the fulfillment that origins in a need perpetual
is the one that satisfies because it cannot
be fully satisfied

if you know this need, then you are mine bonded

beyond is at where the hypotenuse connect our lines,*

"we'd be beyond human,  beyond poem, beyond horizon,
beyond stars and black holes and daisy-chains and metaphors
with  nothing to say to say to an end, because it goes on, my dear,   -- I'll see you at the brink...dance with me there"
a woman in the shape of a young girl,
her eyes wider than a grand boulevard,
who writes me in scattered verses I can’t comprehend
takes my hands in the metro on our way to
St. Germain-des-Pres, where she will make confession
she loves another, forgetting that was her first reveal
and why I now laugh/love her maintenant, plus complètement

<•>
un jour je vous enverrai un message au parc Monceau à 1500 heures; être prêt
susan hill  Jan 2015
Influence
susan hill Jan 2015
Do you see me as dark and desperate?
As someone of no consequence
I can tell by the exasperation and unease
The neverending instances of rudeness
The delight in my failures
Why do you dwell in the void?
Why keep me on a string of never ending
chaos?
I think drama is  your inheritance
My legacy is freedom
Farewell is unended
G Rhydian Morgan Jun 2011
i have just had the most wonderful
most thrilling idea
for a new book
a new tale
to resonate across the ages,

a vast rambling epic of a novel
w/a new metaphysics calculated to change
the way we
see
think and
feel

it’s gonna shake up this
crazy little world of ours
(once it’s written)

it’s a Chandleresque echo
of great noir thrillers
w/ just enough Eco
for my intellectual friends

pumped pulp prose
interwoven
interspersed
w/ musings philosophical
about the nature of being
(once it’s written)

i will call it Black Cats
In Darken’d Rooms

a reference to a joke i once knew
and w/in my whodunnit frame
my ****** mystery narrative
i shall lead
the exploration
the excavation
of all the big questions still unanswered
in this crazy world

(once it’s written)

it will be a book to change lives
(most importantly, mine)
and lead us
blinking
into a dawn of new Reason

we will enter a new age
a world w/out confusion
blessed by the Truth the book shall hold
(once it’s written)

all the other stories i have started
those tales half-told, those unended dreams,
i will put away
- for now

this is the one story
must be written
must be finished
those old ones just aren’t as important
somehow.
Pep Sep 2015
The years crept slowly
their light casting, crawling
with open arms to the now
amorous perspective
And the flowers bloomed to this
and the grass bled green to this
and the rivers distilled to this
and moved to unended oceans
So we were thinking of
the staggering of our hips
when repeatedly our lips
met in something...
so desperately called love
It’s an overused word
shot forward as one of many stars
across our hand painted skies
above these splitting shards
over this that “never dies”
Golden hour forever full beauty
shadows holding poses until me
and you take a little moment
to look at our time spent
And my trembling lips
halt our staggering hips
to breathe amongst the stillness
and gather such willfullness
to continue our gaze towards the clouds
Golden our time has been
But it was only an Hour of time.
The plot unravels in a place where there is a conflict,
The Just turns the **** locking arms with the Instinct,
Wrapped around a ribbon of constant struggle,
Not an inch of movement was seen to loosen the knot,
Warped under a sheet of plastic paper it carries the thought,
Caught in feet of the moment loved and boggled,
Altruid and Maltruid speaking into the world,
Reflection of mists and essences scuffled into artificial pearls,
It peaks as they peek the unended curiosity,
Whilst the mirror is fuzzing and buzzing,
Of their frail but truthful simple realities,
The key to the treasure they do not see when those eyes are in pus,
.
.
.
.
They yearn or want to call everybody an "Us".
Have you ever seen two sides in conflict?
Calling the other an enemy?
When in the mirror they can not see?
Eyes, ears, and spirits... Debris...
love
a version of life,
we encounter daily
in the hand holding
couples with locked eyes,
if should one ask, it be the chief
characteristic of this thing called lov,
is its unlimited unlocking nature,
it appears like a horizon,
unlimited, unended, a
line far but close enuf,
it can be touched
even if it’s the
brain confess
close and yet
unreachable

this dichotomy specially prevalent,
everywhere,, an illusion~
delusion, called the
unlimited ubiquitous~

all around us, there for the taking & giving,
a capability installed instilled at birth
to everyone, everywhere, to all,
but like
a key without a hole,
it is always hopeful and
optimistic, a resource
natural spring from
deep within the
earth, always
replenished

it’s an unlimited, ubiquitous thing
should be easy to spot, retrieve and
keep, but the key fits only one
particular lock, and that is so
**** hard to find & fit,
it makes us completely
crazy, non-compliant,
this love thing,
a rarity, and
a major pain
to everyone

*tho in everything,
yet keep on trying
because it is ubiquitous, imagined
to be unlimited, ready ease so imaginable, just over the horizon

— The End —