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Nat Lipstadt Jul 2023
those of us in the middle muddle,

do not know from sides, boundary lines,
drawn by others, right-sided, left-leaning,
mean nothing to us, who seek something solid
upon to rest, when the clarity others profess,
more than evades us, even escapes us, and
the muddles of life seem to require simplest,
middling answers that are unacceptably refused
by grail seekers whose cause for cause, means
cause to cost others regardless, for regard for
the middle is disdained, by two-sided posts,
the know nothings, and the know betters

irony of irony, the rigidity of imposition makes
me more adrift, more aimless, and the task of
meandering through seems almost holy, for the
obstacles of society, requirements of modern life,
are so damning, wild expectations superimposed,
truths not just hard to find, almost indiscernible,
so I lay my pen down hard, awaiting for the
whatever-while, for to return, to go walking with
only the simplest grids to guide, meanderings in
general directions, ahead, always ahead, keep moving,
keep touching and when optimism returns,

I shall be relieved
once more,
I shall be released
once again,

good words will be caught,
released, returned back
into the atmosphere so
they will grow in size by
the very act of sharing



undated
————————————————-


Everyone must leave something behind
when he dies, my grandfather said.
A child or a book or a painting or a house or
a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said,
  so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.  The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. ~Ray Bradbury

(Book: Fahrenheit 451)
Brandi Jan 2018
The ground does not yield as I make my way

unsteady across the dirt mounds and bone-dry grasses

in the brittle frost of the early deep freeze.

It’s almost as cold as Mars at the equator, I find myself thinking.

I dream

of butterscotch evenings, and landscapes tanned

red and brown and meandering canals

clear straight to the bottom.

This is Bradbury’s Mars.

I close my eyes and stroll among the ancient ruins

until the cold drives me back into the chaos again.


The last rocket for Mars left a long time ago

and I am stuck on Earth to freeze.
dafne Jul 2014
He saw himself in her eyes suspended in two shining drops of bright water, everything was there as if her eyes were two miraculous bit of violet amber that might capture and hold him in tact.
Her face, fragile milk crystal with a soft constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity, but the strangely comfortable and gently flattering light of a candle.

For how many people did you know who refracted you own light to you? People were often blazing away until they whiffed out.
How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your innermost trembling thought?
a small piece I took of Violet Amber, which is composed of bits and pieces of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

— The End —