lest the best go to waste

~for the Grande Dame of Port Hardy~


this breathing fire, a coronating sense of mortality, internally
stronger than ever before, though unaffected, no visible signage,
his invisible labored breathing, the torn fabric of easy gone mentality,
yet so corrupted, his interiors polluted, his crying-out-loud goes

unheard, the sheltering alone in his head, which now is stretched,
way past the point of no return ever, this new strand of side-virus,
of dreary sameness, familiar but reimagined as an atmospheric cancer,
the urgency by which his olive oil words, from pitcher poured, astounds

no subterfuge, he’s made his Great-Escape, to the sheltering island,
his refuge, part redoubt, jagged coastlines a hardening shell, no access
until you declare fealty to the Ferry Captains, who let you board for a princely $2 bucks, if you meet their unstandards, upstanding, healthy?

to the old cottage where we have summered forty year more, The requested Crew assemblage by early dawn (no ****),  for animals unencumbered by time-stealing watches, animal mutual truce declared, mottled multiplying rabbits, squirrels who know not any fear, orange breasted robins, **** deer, mollusks, rainbow trout, osprey, cat-sized cawing crows, and the watchers, the sea-it-all gulls

even the Canadian geese send a scout, in the poet’s nook we are formed, nervous not for their safety, but worried for mine, a Memorial Day meeting very traditional, atmospheric condition cool-cloudy-overcast, party sunny a bold-faced forecasters lie-trick, for an island *******-bonding gloom, a glomming gray weight tamps the air down

Friends! My Audience for New Poets! (their honorific, now over-a-decade old): The Gods have tweeted, this year may not have a next, no Jerusalem for your human acquaintances, the luxurious slowdown of island life, infected by a new urgency, explaining the known and the unknowns facing the human interlopers

Where’s Shelter?**

a refrain, a greeting,  we have sung together, so many times, self-satisfied, fore we knew well, knew anew, we had the answer, here, here, though to life’s cycle we are not immunized, but now your human admirers face agents of death, by invisibility masked, giving us no pause, so we, all, write now, must forward on to:

live/write our best, lest, our partnership be for naught, always between us truce of mutual consent, a natural love of all living things

Trigger  Warning:

I am about to advocate moderation and restraint,
counsel that has been known to spark
uncontrollable fury  in those for whom
anger has become a way of life.

beyond just exist, what is the motif of your life?


pity
the lucky few who know not the ordinary,
lives without the stolidity of repetition
who know their motif, write it live it,

pity? yes...
they are the few
their motives are their motif.

Fall Leaves Fall
by Emily Brontë
<>
Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

<>
the summer visage long faded from caramel,
to a bastardized version of ugly dirt brown,
the streets empty of traffic and the silence
is a sadder shade of lesser peace, the vibrancy
given way to sharper clearer long division disagreement

my worrisome peaks when the trees
denuded, less shelter than ever.
no cover offered, we stand divided,
visible lines of demarcation,
unable to hide, from each other,
unable to hide, from our selves,
the briefer day transits quicker
into night’s decay, and the words
we utter and state,, hollow sounded,
have no echo ability, no resounding,
and we all grow silenced, partly in
shame, partly because partisan words
bring no gain, or the satisfaction of a
response that makes us say ah ha! you see!

the leaves crumble breneath tired treads
and forested footsteps long ago forgotten,
beige dust that the wind swirls, delighted
by its new power to spread its grounded
memories of human interference into
a coverlet of dust

this fallen solitude hurts me, for it is in
opposition to the joy gay screams of children
in to water running, the oohs and ahs, of freedom’s fireworks  gloried colors proclaiming we are “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”

Critical thinking for poetry reading
July 30, 2023 5:00am

The Atmosphere and the Environs

Be attuned, uniquely sensitized, to all that is extant,
outside (the weather, the landscape, the sky), eyeing the slow steady changes occurring for you do not live in a vacuum, and these modifications of your immediate surroundings will, must
impact the writing.

I awake to  thick fog, and only the outlines of the trees, though grayed and invisible only within a short distance, are undeniably present, like giant figures, shrouded and menacing, but immobilized.  This fog, is it emblematic of my state of mind or just a modifier, a tangential influencer of what I will now be writing.

To be foggy when first you stir to a day ahead full of knowns and unknown, is not unusual even if the shy sky hints at a
bluer clarity to,come. For the morning fog is the story of transitioning, as humans do repeatedly throughout their days and lifetimes. In particular when passing from the fog of nighttime sleep,oft populated by terrors and all,we suppress, morphs into the no man’s land of dusky consciousness.

As I write the fog outside is clearer as the morning light from
above changes, and though yet present, forms remain i distinct, modestly identifiable, but overall, the world is u known and possibly full of dangers. The dangers I sense are in my own
foggy interior, a 1/ reciprocal of the outside, matching and moving lockstep with the outside haze. Thus, I do not know what will be the next words I write, though the words will,emerge of their own accord, or rather from my knowledge base, but not asking permissions, they come of willfully, voluble though unspoken, from the silence within me that is
confluences by the silence and the slow sea changes in my exterior world.

Even now, some few moments later, the distance is hinted at,
what could be a body of water, a mass of land, is shadowy
haloed, there, but not there, ghostly but discernible.

Am I a ghost or discernible? I could bite my flesh and presumably feel and view the test results confirming but confounding,my apparatus is functioning, but instead I settle
for the assumption that placement of theses new arrangements of old words is proffered proof enough,
that therefore I am.

But in doing so I have crosse the line into

My Interior Domains

Various lands, territories, states, states of being, consciousness, conscience, moral frameworks, goals,
needs,some conflicting are being slow stirred in the cauldron
of my ****** soup. Here in lies what we think are the sources
of our expression, slow stirring repeatedly, an admixture I add
and remove from, maintaining a semblance of weighted balance, but no guarantee at all,of being balanced, even remotely in balance, or just ***** and the weights of what is in
side of mean, is always tilting, and one mental gyroscope is working overtime and all the time to keep me satisfied that I will not perish in the next few seconds, though I might!

Ah, those pesky know unknowns, that cause us to expel
our particular soupçons of rambling, transgressing notions
(I don’t think of them as thoughts, just passerby’s, who
of course,can be on or off course, mine, or yours imbibed by
mine eyes, or my decaying hearing, or any of my subpar
sensing sensors,  that are the inviolable flowing blood  of my body/ mind time continuum.

(An aside: the exterior world goes brighter as the sun rises, but in no,way is there clarity; for all is as before, clouded over on earth as it is in the heavens, just a shade, a tad of degrees brighter, so still and always, still transitory, as if that process could ever be halted and frozen into place. Proofs: no animal
movement is visible, no soundings risible,  no activity though we are close,nearby the official morning hour of 6:00AM.

Dear-me! How could I have failed to discuss notation of the measurements of time, markers that are essential to writing down our history.  “For it was at this time” an existential and essential tool, one half of the denoted time and place intersectionality of our white lies and soulful black holes,
some of the most critical  factors in properly aligning ourselves
in the universe relative to where you are thus fixing the distance between us that is the challenge of why we write,
i.e. to bring us ever closer.

(An aside: the moisture of the atmosphere coats the window,
but in strange QR type patterns, but my camera is unable
to successfully open and opening their secret doors.
I fact I AM suddenly sleepy  and will return to this missive
Tat a latrt
time and place as of yet unknown?

so, later.)