Seems the spirit ever mends,
though the light behind it bleeds.
Poor lamp am I…how strange
that the mind should sharpen
while the maggot feeds.

Each day the world grows older,
yet her face remains fair, her view serene.
I’ve seen the way she jades her young,
and watched her fields rush green.
But only as the sight grows weak
can at last these old eyes see
what waits the clear, unbroken pools
in wide eyes peeking back at me.

You children play, and don’t mind me.
The sun lies full where I drift, content.
If I seem to be brooding
on happiness spent,
then forgive me, I’m grateful
to not have to brood on sorrow.

So you children play. Can it truly be!
Did time once bend, could slights once heal…
it seems so long—seems scarcely real,
that I was a creature of yesterday
who could not see past the morrow.

And where is that child now?

Is he dead, was he dreamt, is he lost for good,
or is he only sleeping?
He would run, he would leap, he would laugh if he could.
He has savored his life, has drunk it to the full.
Why then is he weeping?

No, you children play, and don’t mind me.
Embrace this splendid, fleeting day.
Look away.

Cling to the cup while the taste is sweet,
and bask in the light of your youth.
Ah, what is youth but a longing for age,
and age but a longing for youth.

Watch the blue dream resuming,
feel the moth in the fist.
Taste that warm promise tendered
in a child’s first kiss,
grown cold in the arms of the hunter,
matured, developed to—

This?

No, you children play, you children play.
The leech has yet to find you,
let your blood sing while it may.

The rabid angel’s eyes are bright,
her loving voice is lying.
Her ***** heaves, but the heart is cold.

Season to season, her black shadow clings.
Lamb after lamb, how pleasantly she stings.

All our lives we look to things. I tell you, by my eyes,
there are things behind things…stirring bashful children,
spiteful children—the angel drives her docile prey;
herding awkward children, skipping children,
skipping their childhood away.

No feat of man, no higher hand,
no will can hold the years at bay.
Alone, I watch them, day by day,
growing, slowing in their play.


Okay. NOW CUT AND PASTE THE LINK BELOW TO READ HERO, A SPRAWLING, GROUNDBREAKING FANTASY FOR GROWNUPS IN TWO PARTS. (BUT YOU MUST CLICK ON THE PROVIDED LINK AT THE CONCLUSION OF PART ONE TO ACCESS PART TWO! THAT’S WHERE THIS TALE’S AMAZING RESOLUTION LIES. But please...intelligent, soulful readers only!)
NOW HERE’S THAT LINK:

https://allpoetry.com/poem/14922744-Hero---Part-One-by-Ron-Sanders


Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

contact:
ronsandersartofprose@yahoo.com

AROUND THE CORNER

You always knew it would happen again:
the ruby beams, the whispered code, the silhouettes, and then
a muffled crunch, a stifled cough, a soft and cryptic knock.

A latch that wasn’t fastened on a door that didn’t lock.

They’ll catch you, they’ll break you,
they’ll wipe you for sure.
They know your every step and stop:
where you are, where you’ll be,
exactly where you were.

What did you feel when your mind was removed;
was it hard, sharp and painful, or satiny smooth.
Do you weep in the dark, do you know in your heart
that they kept you intact when they tore you apart.
Does your lurching awareness obsess on your doom,
do those tiptoeing whispers leave prints in your room.

Keep moving, keep hiding, till death brings the end.
They’re just around the corner, they’re just around the bend.

Go leap out the window, go slip through the trees,
burn the leaves in your journal and bury your keys.
Haunt the alleys and rails as you sneak town to town;
one eye on your back, one eye on the ground.

So where was your head when they rewrote your brain.
Did you think you were God, a file, or insane.
Are you groping for clues in the patterns they weave—
is a single thing real in the world you perceive.

They’re coming. Keep running. Don’t let yourself fall behind.
They’re searching through your blackest dreams, escorted by the blind.
They’re watching from the shadows, their burning eyes aligned.
They’re waiting in the dark around the corner of your mind.


Okay. NOW COPY AND PASTE THE LINK BELOW TO READ HERO, A SPRAWLING, GROUNDBREAKING FANTASY FOR GROWNUPS IN TWO PARTS. (BUT YOU MUST CLICK ON THE PROVIDED LINK AT THE CONCLUSION OF PART ONE TO ACCESS PART TWO! THAT’S WHERE THIS WORK’S AMAZING RESOLUTION LIES. But please...intelligent, soulful readers only!)
NOW HERE’S THAT LINK:

https://allpoetry.com/poem/14922744-Hero---Part-One-by-Ron-Sanders

CLICK ON IT!

Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

contact:
ronsandersartofprose@yahoo.com

YOUR GOD IS INDEED A GREAT MAGICIAN

Ah, this rolling blue globe—
so nobly fashioned, so grandly displayed!
From mountains majestic, sweet waters cascade
o’er flowers that tower o’er beetle and blade,
o’er horrors that harrow, like earth meeting *****.
Newborns like produce, aligned and arrayed
like bluing cadavers—

IN WHOSE IMAGE MADE!

These are factors, my friend!
We roll all our lives to the black bitter end.

Lord, why must Thy children rummage,
famish, and perish in Thy plenitude!
Why must good men stream stalwart to gray?
Are we mortals so unworthy of Thy great giving Hand?
So undeserving of Thy tending?​ How then may we please Thee?

Thou art truly a great Prestidigitator!
Such skill Thou evince, such finesse Thou command!
Let our wretched hearts join, let us marvel Thy sleight—
blood out of bedlam, plague out of mist,
babies in ******* relieved by Thy Fist.
O Master of magic, an awesome Conjurer are Thee!
Inspired are Thine antics; too practiced for sluggards as we.
Thy shills gather round and, as rubes beg to serve,
Thy emphasis thrills, Thy daring unnerves.
The boggling breadth of Thy legerdemain
bewitches the senses, bedevils the brain.
Observe:
Grim maids awaiting their loves gone to war—
a snap of Thy Fingers! These maids wait no more!
Thou art too fleet for guesswork; the moves are all Thine.
What thing of mere flesh could divine the Divine?
Your God is a wizard. Such prowess hath He!
Tsunamis, deluges—whipped straight from the sea!
Histories buried, whole peoples bled,
broken, departed. The doomed and the dead,
beseech His forgiveness from one common knee.
Yea, blessed are we! Be we sick or insane,
be we rife with contagion, be we lovelorn or lame.
O Great Benefactor…just SHOW! Accept our acclaim!
How can we thank Thee, repay Thee, how may we proclaim
Thine Image as Perfect, as Perfect Thy name.
Thou art Hero and Handler—how, Master, do we,
with raw voice revere thee, with swollen soles tread
the stars whence Thou ventured, the slime whence we came.
Forgive us our shame! We have failed Thee sorely.
Wherever Thou art, prithee…reveal Thyself.
Heal us, thrill us, amuse us some more;
Thine antics amaze us, Thine exploits astound.
The fruit of Thy labors in ripe fields abound.
Fruit reaping fruit reaping fruit of its own.
Laborers, ripe, ablaze in the sun,
too worn by their toils, too torn to atone,
their spent bodies ripe for that Magic You do.
O Father Who made us, Who taught us to heel,
We thank Thee for roaches, for each rash and wheal,
for hormones like lashes that drive us to sin.
The Big Dark approaches—what price to get in?
For all this, Dear Maestro, we clamor and kneel,
clapping in time to that Magic we feel.
Though we warble off-key, more than grateful are we
for plagues, flames, and rubble, for death and debris,
for tumors and blood clots and rumors of boils,
for madmen encroaching from alien soils.
Nay, astonished are we, overwhelmed by He—
He who maketh Himself invisible,
unreachable, immeasurable, untouchable, unsearchable,
unflappable, inculpable, impalpable, improbable…
and never even once witnessed! Not even once ever seen—
Genius! Unknowable, indeed, to mind or machine:
too fickle to fathom, too abstract to read.
Yet He is Poet, He is Artist, He is King above kings!
And for this we adore him o’er all other things—
o’er forests and canyons, o’er rivers and glens—
Yea, for all these momentous, magnanimous,
multitudinous, miraculous…ah, such depth and detail!
All the works of man pale, blaze briefly and fail,
like bugs on a slide ’neath Thy Almighty lens.

These are factors, my friend!
Whether magic or miracle or blind nature’s trend,
we roll all our lives to the black bitter end.





Copyright 2019
contact Ron Sanders at:

ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

THE ROBOT SAYS GO

The robot says STOP!

And the chromed steeds align, champing, their reeking tails
caked in ferrous reminders of asphalt and steam.
Still that bright ruby glares.
White-knuckled jockeys, feigning repose, swap dat ol’ faux decorum.
But nobody’s fooling anybody.
Halogen eyes framing high cursive grilles.
Round rubber hooves hugging silvery seals.
Glass-encased egos, too streetwise to dream,
jack shoulders to lobes for a shared primal scream…
Veins race across foreheads, eyes tear up the road.
And just when it looks like those veins will explode—

The robot says go! The robot says go! The robot says go! The robot says go!

The Emerald looms, the frenzy resumes:
Alpha males ****** the old and infirm,
their eight-banger fumes blurring laggers in plumes.
Jocks in jalopies thread rivals and worm
their misshapen monsters round planters in flumes.
Past loads wide and listing—and back in the fray!
Harrowing, narrowing, the pack makes its way,
to one more agenda, two downshifts away, where nearing,
where rearing…appearing like some kind of god in the flow,

this robot says…
slow.

Brief as bliss, blind as bluff,
that amber eye opens, (not quickly enough).
The lead runners race, redoubling their pace!
—rolling dem bones, refusing to place,
hurling their monoliths all but atop
pedestrian puppets who, horrified, hop,
leaping like bugs till the robot says

STOP!

And thus realigned, still fuming in kind,
the new leaders gnaw on their dashes and wheels.
Damning the wire, their backsides on fire,
nerves shooting pins through their palms and their heels,
the gentleman’s juggernaut takes aim and steels.
Eyeballs near bursting revile the stop—
And just when it looks like those eyeballs will pop…

The robot says go! The robot says go! The robot says go! The robot says go!







Copyright 2019
contact Ron Sanders at:

ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

I AM THE WEDGE

O blackguard or fellow. Arise!
Nay.
Bridge that light that bridges all.
Nay! Peace…
What peace!
In sleep’s blue rictus, borne naked, supine—I am…roused.
Opine!
I exhort ye:  know thy fine.
Be bold or benign, be ****** or divine.
But know thy fine.
Exhort? Harbinger:  we are One!
Ye are cloven! And these be your bridges:
Worms.
Sss!
Maggots.
Sss!
Bigots, charlatans, sycophants, thieves…
Ignominious leeches all!
Ssssss! Ssssss! Ssssss!
Yes, yes, yes—ye art ethos without sinew,
Eloquence without spine, witting captives of World’s design.
Ye are carnal, mundane:  ye are sane, sane, sane—
Sane beyond redemption, sane beyond profane!
Prithee peep, prostrate. Now behold:  ye are Mine.
O piercer of nights!
I am he.
O dasher of dreams!
I am he.
Truther! Augur!
I am, I am.
I am all ye allege.
Be still!
Nay. I am the wedge.
And ye shall labor and love with accountability!
Ye who menace the frail shall burn.
Sss!
Ye who lie with same shall burn.
Sssss!
Ye thick, arrogant, groping,
Proliferating plumes of flesh…
All conformists shall burn! And burn and burn
And burn afresh. Within thine own World, where Virtue rots—
Miscarried, misnamed, unrealized, unborn—Nay!
Do not cosset possessions, nor flatter the beast!
They are myth, they are illusion. They are soulless.
It is not death…it is soullessness I scorn.
O be caring. O be kind.
That one egg might bind, all sons must bleed.
Womb and grave lie equidistant.
******, madness, sorrow, sickness, are seed.
And I am fecund.
O Life!
Hypocrites.
Ah Love!
Hypocrites!
Peace! Peace!
Hypocrites all! Blind as cadavers are ye,
Running in lockstep, sniffing thy self-serving,
Snuffling peers’ rears; disdaining the night,
Succumbing to light. And I? I?
I am Neutral. I am Gray.
Then name thy vein.
I am he who severs One; soldier’s specter, specter’s son.
Of faith and compassion mine fibers art wrung.
Ye living die a thousand deaths, yet remain in arrears.
Let thy live corpses lie a low while longer.
Sweet coma, black drug—
Beware thy Pale Master’s tongue!
Blasphemer! Vigilante!
Vengeance is poetry. Vigilance is mine.
I am he who doth sunder, to center from edge.
Thou art…Comeuppance!
I am the wedge.
And this blade ye ride be thine own design!
O Sunlight save us!
Save? To cling to the light, heaping woe upon woe,
Forever hurtling downward, smashed outright, yet still crawling?
Broken beggars bleeding, drowning heartless, gutless…
To, on dying’s cue, lift thy shattered fingers in brine
And be born anew?
Assassin, then!
Thy logic is *******. Have the greatness to be mute,
Suffering seaward, to that brave expanse where all salts art borne.
But we—
Unwitting? Never be!
The same tide shall return for ye:
Aweigh, forlorn, into the ravening
Tempest torn; a million billion testaments—
Defrauder!
Am I? Consider the beast:  electric pastors preaching,
Merchants plump, in line, beseeching.
Still ye puppets slumber, too rife to number,
Too fay to vie; strutting for thy hollow “Maker’s” eye.
Whirling, jumping, twirling, pumping;
******* random shapes and shadows,
Prancing in tandem, dancing solely to die.
Nay. I am the wedge, both hawk and dove;
Neither This nor That, neither Either nor Each.
Descending, I rise, thy facade to breach,
Mine soul well-bled of light’s lovely lies.
To the vortex, then! From one whose essence
Waives assimilation.
No grace! No peace shall ye posers reap!
Lash thine ears, thine eyes—Run, lemmings! Leap!
Preen thy prettified husks, let Inspiration go!
Or rip out thy roots and…Grow!
Sacrilege! Make public thy shame!
Shame? Shame? Ah…Ash, conceive us!
Brief spirit cede, sweet Flame relieve us,
Sunlight leave us lie.
May ye ****** and ye wicked
Fall to thy knees and cry.
Through gates of naught I lead ye,
Bleak day, bright night, precede ye.
Butcher!
There is black! And there is white!
Between extremes lies only gray.
Nay!
Said stain bleeds left and right:  less black, less white,
On that stage too deep to fathom,
One dapple distant, one ripple wide.
Outrageous!
’Twixt solace and horror,’tween torment and balm,
There ye will find me, in rages of calm.
The wise man hath his discipline, the lunatic his ledge.
And I? I am he who doth sever, I am he who doth cleave.
I am the wedge.




(Sorry about the missing italics and indents. I don't run this site.)

Copyright 2019
contact Ron Sanders at:

ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

DUST TO DUST

…settling.
The miasma pools,
notes the molten eyes,
the razor breath,
tenses.

Tapering,
a limb extrudes,
advances wispily, tentatively,
gropes recoiling flesh
tenderly.

Trembling, the plume gathers, rears—

Gasping.
The air like gravel,
fingers gloved in ice.
Knowing,
the old man feels his shadow tugged,
turns.

The lash rips across his cheek,
plunges,
finds the stumbling, lunatic heart,
squeezes.
Flaring, the probe bristles, dives,
severing nerve, shattering bone,
******* furiously at marrow—
whipping the flimsy carcass about,
dashing its brittle skull on stone.
Gutting it. Gnawing it. Pounding and
flaying and
grinding
it
down.

To gristle, to gore,
to compost, to clay—
onus, elan, are purged by the wind.

The vessel dissolves:
to garbage, to grit,
to whisper.
To wit:
to sludge, to seepage,
to sewage, to ****.
Lost in the soil
…settling.

SWEET ILLUSION

Not to rupture the seam:  in the long din of locking skulls,
appeals to the deaf are the bones of soliloquy.

Then like ooze they descend, rejoicing again!
The wise in their easy faith, their docile drift,
their wholesome lies. By what strength do I,
least pious of men, ascend these dim flights of reason:
Never bending, still I thirst;
this mortal rail both crutch and curse.
Such a stubborn ***…their cult of light would be mine—
had not that wasting disease, that mad desire to know,
been spawned in childhood, grown fat on my naivete…
had not that grim ogre Truth won possession of my mind.
I was young and strong and foolish.
I held a restless plum in granite,
ripe for any man with nerve enough
to worship sense over myth.
Their hallowed ruse is still beneath me.
But I’m older now, and bound by time
to grip the rail, to check my climb:
each step an hour, each day a tier—
ah, to pause, to kneel,
to part with my dignity here.
Up once more.
And who am I to think I’ll find
the answers I’ve been living for.
Let me hold my peace, never lose my grip.
Let me hang on till my senses slip.
Let me close to mind each skeptic’s call
as death takes wing to break his fall:
Don’t leave me, dear God, not again!
Catch me lest my life should end.

Worm

As this fever is groomed for the grave,
it weathers the lash of time.
Though lamb is the morsel you crave,
your sheep perseveres into prime.
You will have your prize,
but while I seethe…this mind is mine!
I’ll not be swayed by a crude, transparent suggestion.
I’ll bind my eyes, deny I see
that gleam, that sweet illusion,
grown bold, seducing me.
I’ll right my spine, I’ll lock my knees,
I’ll cast this trembling life aloft,
in offer to a breeze,
never knowing whence it rose,
nor ever where it flees.

**** you!

Each riddle answered begets another riddle!
Each vagabond, protean solution
is but a fragment of the boundless puzzle.
While I have strength let me learn.
Let me juxtapose, let me correlate the pieces.
Let me vow to expose you,
to hound you till I pin you down;
to rave the melancholy deep,
while sane enough to see
that I’m older now, and due in time,
to doubt my mind, to sense that I’m
nearly where you want me.

Beyond this feeble glow, all is certainly darkness.
Yet the wise speak of a further life, of a will to come.
They whimper when prodded; dogs drugged by a dream—
their gilt Dove a bauble—like children,
they are hypnotized by the gleam.
I can see it in their eyes.
And to pause here I can almost see
an endless night embracing me.

Listen! There is mirth at the threshold,
a perverse kind of pride.
Hypocrites! Echolalics! Somniloquists all!
Mother Reason, make them cease!
I know now it is wrong to be right:
I am lone, and ever colder. You thief!
Why did you banish my feet from their dance.
Why must my heart want to mangle the rhyme.
If I were a wiser man, I would plunge into Light.
Yet I set my teeth and climb. Come worm,
be swift; there are shimmers in the dusk,
and I’m older.

Take these eyes
that I may not be dazzled by lies any longer.
Break this hold, that I might extrapolate,
die born, and in my hour dare to face you:
To brave the night, to leap the rail,
to lift that last forbidden veil,
and make this coward see.
To fall, to grasp the loom of time,
to lose my mind, to sense that I’m
nearly where you want me.