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Alec Astaire Aug 2024
“Where is it I must go?”,
I ask my mirror’s reflection
Is there truly something missing,
Or do I miss imperfection?
I’ve yet to wander far enough
To dull my soul’s reverberations

My body, a holy temple fueled by resounding purpose

GONGG…..GONGG…..GONGG…..

Do I truly know my calling,
Or is my longing just a comfort?
If I am grateful for my life,
Should I worry time is too short
To spend any of my days
Without some type of progress to report?

I worry I am drifting asleep. I need to wake up before it’s too late

GONGG…..GONGG…..

What if I gave it up?
I fear it might end really bad
Would the universe reject me
And crumble everything I had,
Make sure that I was forced
To fulfill some sort of soul contract?

If I knew which one was my opponent, I could be prepared to fight

GONGG…..

I wonder, will I ever make it?
Is there even an “it” to make?
If there is something I desire,
Then is it something I will create?
Do I focus on my blessings
Or on a treasure that might be fake?

I ask for a sign that I am doing the right thing

…..
Let me know how you interpret the ending. I feel there are multiple interpretations
firstdraftfolder Aug 2024
bap·​tism: an act, experience, or ordeal by which one is purified, sanctified, initiated, or named.

floating in the vacuous flow of time -
endless whispers and murmurs,
trying to figure out which thoughts are mine,
and which thoughts are planted by others.

overwhelmed by the idea of being perceived.
to relinquish control or to take control?
we are nothing but one individual
in the sea of billions.

who's to say that this is worth our time?
who's to say that we have purpose?
i need a baptism to purify, to sanctify, to initiate, to name myself.
to find purpose in this ocean of nothingness.
Man Aug 2024
If you ask who this is,
It's not important.
That a man has a name,
What is its purpose
But recognition?
I don't care about the hate,
But I don't want praise-
Yet, I would hate to leave you in confusion.
The double edged knife,
When the answers hurt us both.
Perhaps it's better not knowing.
God
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited,
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Has willed and meted me the tears I've shed,
I clench my fist and shake it at the sky

And at the vengeful God who hammers me,
Delivering the blows that break my brain;
The God who finds his deepest ecstasy
In violencing my life with blinding pain;

Who laughs and says, "Thou suffering thing, declare
If thou hast understanding: Who hath laid
The measures of the earth's foundations?  Where
O where wast thou, O man, whenas I made
The cloud the garment of the sea?  How dare
Thou, foolish man, thy maker to upbraid?"
Compare "Hap" by Thomas Hardy
O Lord, I am thy workmanship;
     And shall the *** of clay
     Unto the potter say,
Dash me to dust, for I've a chip?
                              Nay.

Perhaps the potter uses scraps
     For purposes the ***
     Would likely like a lot
If he but knew.  Perhaps.  Perhaps
                              Not.
Man Jul 2024
Be the recluse,
Be the hermit,
And make your assessments of others
Based on short and fleeting interaction,
Drenched in the sweat of "purpose" & "agenda,"
And be met with statements
Which really convey nothing and rarely
Encapsulate honest thought in brevity
But are said only to end the conversation.
Close knit,
The threads choke,
Living your turtleneck life.
No collar to be turned up,
The cotton already hugs your throat;
Nothing to end abrupt,
That which never saw its start.
Those who talk
Simply to hear themselves,
Do they have anything to say?
Those with the blinders on,
They never see the entrance ramp
Neither the turn-offs
Till it's too late.
As with friends too many, but never enough;
Strangers are plenty, yet scarce is friendship
Jeremy Betts Jun 2024
Any second now,
I could come face to face with an enemy
Sent by a deity
With the soul purpose to immediately
End this agony
But I can guarantee
I'm not that lucky

©2024
Ken Pepiton Jun 2024
wondering at wonderful things, wonder
being my word,
meaning something to me as sure as
meaning anything to you, or them, the others,

those, there, beyond us, makers of stars
from matter in time, using power
by any name, called to make ready
a place for me.

Centered self-centering, spinning energy and
nought into creamy nougat
sweet and salty

but, E itself, power filled hosts of forces,

ha, some men trust in horses, now measurements,
horsepower, taken in from out,
observe the fact, fine act, great quest
made- p-ting snowball earth phase,

preparation of this place,
for us, not us alone, but us involved,
folded into the batter before the baking.

Co-ignition.
Sudden, at scale,
Massive, at scale as well. Immaterially.

Light first. Nay,
think, others thought this through

I flatter myself that I have discovered---

waste O2.

-- in the span of mind time, autotrophic
timespace where does e come from

phototroph
chemotroph

whence comes stuff, heterotrophs

chemoautotrophs, absolutely
in-credible, how does any mind wonder?

-----------

Stamp my little boy foot and swear,
I shall prove death has no sting.

I shall think
of our sun, source
of life
in our bubble
of being.

It is imagined, by professional learners of such,
that the inter-stellar medium
holds cloud like structures,
in my day we called them nebulae, today
we may surmise, I suppose, promise
together surreal, point to miser's misery,

Midas, Phrygian king, washed clean of his curse.
Baptism at work, in the story of reasons for war.

Was the death to be immediate, or must we wait.
What knowledge bred this means, these letters,
letting us learn the memories,

first stories of broken curses that were first wishes.
We wish we were as wealth, as bling,
the thing, the will to be loved for my own good,
the beast that lay beside the door, waiting,

allusive link to ancient knowledge, used knowns,
knowns used to build the nations whose weapons

must be fed.

And not by bread alone, by my leave,
I learned, the story used to make money
the core reason for war's use of pride,
to make glorious loyalty honorable,
by the time the military mind
matures to use the values,
those to hope for glory,
those minimize truth,
key freedoms known
held under loyal lock down.

Sense.
Common sense, some is not
evenly spread across the gap.

You may never have heard a search,
with helicopters, the after silence,

then, the peace, pure re-
lief as well, laugh let out, you know,
we are invisible,

so we dance where we touch.
Friction ridges caress our valleys,
with swirly rippling Erotes, giggling.

Tuning to a single line of reason,
reasoning I know nothing, as I ought,
I thought, per
haps, gathered happenings, overtime
thinking why in full Kerrigan angst at WHY!
Dunning-Krueger.
Rhetorical quest punctuation, bang. Pre-
tend to pay attention, at the exclamation,
"For crying out loud, don't you know
ANYTHING?"
Rhetorical all caps loudness, registers, in
tentional, attended to,
appropriately,
ignored, as the current opinion
forms followers,
swirls of fast and slow linking interstellar medium

in our wake, as we take life in passing so near,
one mind
one time, see I knew it was me and not you,
who pulled the loose thread to open the sack,
and spill the beans.

Now it's Tuesday,
on time and wisdom, I was thinking,

the noble question B. Franklin proposed

as the noblest in the world:
What good can I do in it?

What good to know do I know?

Well, well, as an interjection, cast
in the word use we are making sense
from
for an instant, now and then,

Yes,
this idea that we exist as related
by lines that link us as fibers in yarn,

conscious use of science, learning
the winding of the bobbin,
and the rhythm of the treadle,

the perfect pinch and firm gentle tug

catch a whisp of wool pulled from distaff
to spindle

and singing all the while, to the muse

---------------
A thread spinner, not a weaver
of novel patterned knots and crosses,
novel, none the less, some olden
but, well, twisted fiber strands,
formed with certain genetic magic
from soil and water and time… I am.
Sure to leave my moment seeming so.

To leave my being so, to let me be,
not the bearer of tales, but the twister.

Some times, well, once, I imagined
spinning ghost turds into threads,

-- the bogus science, bovine male excre-
mental mind boggled constipastory explo-

it. Done, punish me or pay me, I care less.

------------
Not the only version of this knack,
have I,
I've not the rhyming step step slide version,
nor the read out loud oral interpretation version,

permitting
*per- (5)

Proto-Indo-European root meaning
"to traffic in, to sell,"
an extended sense
from root *per- (1) "forward, through"
via the notion
of "to hand over" or "distribute."

It forms all or part of:
appraise;
appreciate; depreciate;
interpret;
praise;
precious; price; & *******
by way of
pornē "*******,"
originally "bought, purchased"
from traffickers in abandoned words,

idled by devious psychsyncing punishing
similar spinning propensities in fluid pre thread
mind windings, ready to retell, as if we all think

we understand the Goldilocks paradox.

Pull your version of the moral in the story,
who do you think Goldilocks symbolized,

deep in the thinking of your child mind?
What color are you, while you imagine
three bears? How forgiving are you
to your invaders?

High Jack,
have you any wool,
we spun the lord's and madam's

and found none for the widow's
children down the lane?

Are ye daft, Poet, mad as lead'll
make ye? Have ye taken to spacing
unkerned letters and lines with old

lead type weights to use gravity assist,

cam, see, loop de loop, and spin and spin,

threads to weave cover,
threads to weave rough leggings,
slow, so slow would be the learning

without notions popping up from nowhere,
as that man called the fool on the hill,
continues to redeem idled words,
and silently sing perhaps praise.

Worthship, measure of effort to enjoy,
get it.

It is the economy,
take joy as yours where you make it.
Peace, too.
---------
and thus not really any of my busy-ness
that I am to mind as my own, strictly
speaking translatable speils as wisdom,

Sophos, herself. per se,
they say she is the spirit in the works,
omakes ur will to make something from our
selves, our advantage as language users,
with letters translated chchchanges
into all understood
by using
simple child morals used
during emperical propagation.

To know wisdom and instruction;
to perceive the words
of understanding;

To receive the instruction
of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity;

To give subtilty
to the simple,
to the young man knowledge and discretion.

--- await the call, simple kind of man, listen
did you never read the rules for ready writer
status among the unemployable gifted sifters
of dust amidst the wonders of life in haps past

dare I hook a poem here,
after that very likely the, bluebird of happiness,
flew by me singing, twice, today, per haps

you stumbled into my realm,
I blew my mind in 69, and I am without guile,
no need, no greedy habit crying feed
feed feed the need to grow the talent, eh, weight
and see, fact check me, how heavy
was a talent in pure money
at the moment, back when
the metaphor this fits in as a piece,

was used to test the discerning disciple,

was it Diego? Si, yo crero per
haps, the meaning of things, and the matter
with words, is perceptual, per is a polimental,

many ways perhaps evolve comprehension,
little senses we have in common, luck factors,
time and place chances we be the readers ready

to bring justice and equity
to the beguiled and nonguiled,
while converting the guilty to con-
scientious objection to past proofs re-
proving the efficiency of meandering mind
streams
fluid fiber memory imagined in the Eighties,
here,
my old haunts, hang around,
we meet Suzi Creamcheese, she say, Uready,

we say, may be,
and so it is, with wisdom, James,
and so it is, indeed, first peaceable,
gentle, easy to treat kindly, no warring
spirit meetings of the convinced required,

wisdom works at a word taken for granted,
idling at stop signs where you looked both ways
and listened, as a child, and you escaped death,

time and again, what nearly killed you, did not,
and your life has not been dull, but worth it,
did it, with a happy ever, after all's said and done,

but, that won't happen here today.
Old war reasons asked the mystery to seem too easy to believe...sso I volunteered to lead the search for the old way men made haps gentle enough to ride.
We Are Stories Jun 2024
There are so many little tiny things.
Have you ever tried to count every pixel
Have you ever sat and counted the fibers in a rug
Have you ever traced the lines in your skin
A speckled masterpiece
Mashed mathematics and marshal law-
You are a magnet of tiny little magnitudes.
A mountain of meticulously managed meadows and malleable materials-
You are a mess from a mixologist,
But a drink so sweet
Seep deeply through every tone of button of shirt and stuffing
Be free
Be pixel sized if need be
Be kingdom
Be kindness
Be a rampart of rest to every microscopic dust particle
Be a tree
A happy tree
-
But don’t be not-
Not is such a word
None
Such a word
Nothing
Such a word
There’s no such thing as not
We always have
We always have had
And we will always
Thankfully.
-
There are so many thankful ways to live and breathe
So many breaths to take
So many contemplations to breath in with every single day
Whether you’re a happy tree
A scratch on marble
A bit of white fur in the rug
A stain
A bundle of skin muscle and bone-
There will always be more than enough to be thankful for
Even when we think about not
Even when we believe in not
Be fruitful
Be multiples not dividends
Be sappy
Be slimy
Be sloppy
Be a particle floating in a vast chasm
Be the sun itself
Be free
Be you.
Jeremy Betts May 2024
The grand scheme, void of me, stands in stoic devotion
To zero compulsion
It holds no emotion
What a notion
I'm feelin' like a single plankton
In a vast ocean
Aimlessly floatin'
In a seemingly meaningless motion

©2023
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