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Robert Ronnow Nov 2015
1

Sunrise, late winter
skunk smell
turkey flock
playful otter, too.

The white heron
a great blue,
white phase,
in the abandoned ****** pond.

Purple clematis
its long-awned achenes
in globose heads
spidery, fiery, extravagant fruit!

To identify or classify
birds by
the complexity or beauty
of their songs.

And so
what is over that
ridge or hill
a sink-hole, a sand dune, a steep bluff.

2

What must I do. Organize
the heretofore unorganized. The rabble
of unemployed child abusers.
Molesters of their intimates.

Are there dysfunctional bird families?
Simply put, they do not survive.
We have hope
that everyone alive is essential,

consequential. We classify
and specify.
The commonplace and everyday
is sanctified.

What happens everyday?
Morning is quiet, everyone at work.
Home writing, watching birds.
Afternoon, kids come back from school.

Evening, watch tv.
Scotch and Star Trek.
Captain Picard's problems eclipse
ours who stayed behind.

3

Pray to Allah
and maybe he will spare you
when he sets the world
on fire.

Where or with who
will I be on that day?
And how many people and adventures
will I find in the wind storm and rubble?

I may live, but will it matter
whether or not I help anyone else to live?
This is no Last Judgement.
Those who have learned or who still know how to live

will survive.
Nobody will go to hell, they will just die.
There is no limbo either.
Anyone who didn't find a way to be immortal is just dead.

So, what am I trying to do.
Organize the unemployed, the welfare mothers
and alcoholics
into a flying chevron of purposeful explorers?

4

The doctor's conscious, organized,
naive attempt to do good,
his legacy, versus the randomness
of the road and the war zone.

There his legacy is his rectitude and natural
rough compassion for the damaged people
he encounters. The difference
between planning a legacy

as if you knew enough to control events
and letting the legacy arise
from events themselves, controlling,
insofar as you are able, only

your own actions and reactions.
The doctor's leadership role such as it was
grew out of not his material possessions
like the car

but his mission, his personal quest
to find the young doctors he had naively trained
and sent into the war zone
where all died.

5

July-a cold city
not as great or as gritty
as I thought, summer theater left
the shoe shine bereft of customers

eyes cold as a bureaucrat's
except for our soles
and their leather. Sweat-soaked
girls, the beautiful ones left town.

Emotionless as a bus.
Sparrows, no chickadees.
All that's important happens indoors.
Exercise to philosophies.

You get what you see.
The panhandlers ask
just once, won't risk
friendship, justice.

No sale today
in the finite city
where, for the shoe shine,
pedestrians are infinite, times two shoes.

6

Faith = wait + trust.
But don't anticipate.
Popper prohibits prediction.
Niebuhr expects destruction.

I believe in God
doesn't mean there's a sketch
of a man in my head. It must mean
all will be well in the end.

Satisfied with snow
or summer. And now
with dying old or younger.
Gold or paper clips. Gulps or sips.

In the final resting place
in the city of the dead
are there all night card games
and sometimes open swims?

Each inch, square, or cube of Earth
brim with grasses and sedges, dragonflies and spiders, sparrows and
      eagles.
The tiger lily and the water lily and the lily of the valley, the calla lily.
When a ******* a bicycle smiles, that is a smile.
www.ronnowpoetry.com
Neobotanist Aug 2021
eating figs
eating ***
eating flesh

i swim through my mother's veins
and peel back layers,
distinctly feminine.

i see me.
i feel me.
i taste me.

we hold delicate
yet strong and vibrant lovers
in our mouths,
inflated candy eggs—cosmic nectar.

foolishly gazing at our sordid massacres:
flesh upon flesh
seed upon fleshy seed

visions of nightquests
sing-songing liquidly

i vanish into wormholes,
fiery transformations,
and bitter leaves,
which weep through silver pores.

feverishly, we pick apart the stems,
dropping them away.
hurry, hurry!
we're so impatient to get these figs
into our mouths.

heads crane forward
and tongues ****** first.
hands follow, fingers last.
crush down once, thrice
on earth maternal—
it's not juice, it's cream.

siddhis speculatively come forward
and burn triangle patterns behind our eyelids.
she is freed again from past recollections,
elegantly fighting off disease—cellularly—while drumming solos,
gnashing figs,
and caressing twigs with toes.

i invite you to breathe me in—
soft, solid air,
stale with anticipation
but honey-lemon sweet,
and empty besides.

we pour sweet broths into banana-leaf cups
and drink beetles out of sugarcones,
traces of ectoplasm dribbling down our chins,
violetly forgetting the echoes of
peppermint vapors,
and nourishing our bellies
with heavy, pregnant plant mothers.

i long for excess,
and i can never get enough.
besides,
it is the summer of figs,
and we cry openly
at the beads of sweat
forever forming on glassy surfaces.

i taste-touch with my fingers
and feel-taste with my tongue,
and still i feel that we aren't close enough,
so i invite it to enter me and become me,
and now
i am fig.

it's as if the cilia-seeds
and tender pink spots
expect the pressure.

it's true:
we expect this solid, gravitational pressure
and they rip off wings,
just to bathe in our nectar.

she hadn't known true ecstasy
until this violation of figs,
until her madness imploded secretly
like their demure insides,
and all she could think about
was jelly pulp and pale achenes.

so saccharine, you say,
wiping your mouth with a sticky hand,
and wiping your hand on stiff denim,
but really there's even more sweet to come later.

green-plump
violet-plump
pink-pulp
swallow

i hear it before my ears do.
i see it before my eyes do.

i swimmingly tesselate
and wade through the liquid air,
particles dissolving around me.

there's some give,
and i'm able, you see,
to be here in this palace of
pent-up pleasures and lastly,
comes stillness.

she weeps hatred from her body
so it doesn't seep
into her half-digested fig:
the fig of all figs.

caked with dried mud and chocolate,
we emerge
and fall off effortlessly
into angles of light.

dust rises like a prism
along pre-choreographed
provocations of smoke—
steps cascading for spirits of anjeer
to patter down
into our realm.

feed me, they say.
and so we do.

we break open the figs
with childish fingers,
tasting before offering
on little plates carved out of spoons,
melting coconut lashes and spidermilk
in the process.

the oven creaks quietly,
and raindrops lift gauzy veils
from drowsy eyelids
on sleepy mornings.

pulling waterwords
from unification,
fiery feelings die down
until they're just a glimmer—
a glimmer of softness,
with wet embers tantalizingly
dripping fireworks,
like childhood.

waves murmur something secret,
and the whispers only take 5,000 years
before they reach your ears,
yet you still startle and awaken,
sweat on the brow,
and glisten your way through,
splashing sloppily through
paper screens
to deliver messages.

iron tea kettles sit in dying ashes for far too long.

in my visions,
i saw ripe, bursting figs
hurtling across starlit skies,
blossoming beautifully
before dropping heavily and with sound.

and suddenly it was summer—
radiant, glowing summer—
with our skin dissolving upwards
in the golden heat,
sparkling dramatically
in the decaying light.

i wanted to pull something out of me
but the strings were tied to my organs.

slippery insides meant less danger,
so we tiptoed on grains of sand
and grains of rice,
and black beads,
and black beans,
and pearls,
and magnets.

we tripped through hours,
while minutes crawled to a close,
and sifted fine blue watersilk
until it exploded with mollusks.

i am a clam
and you are a gallon of fir tree sap,
delivered every wednesday,
to embellish our
fried and crispy things.

almond-shaped plumes and
majestic, purple heliochromes
blaze saturn rings coldly,
while the fruit falls apart—
first at the center—
and our gaze lingers on mother:
she is
dancing,
and dancing.
SkinlessFrank Oct 2016
i’ve left
bean pods
on the plants
to dry
tiger lily
capsules to mature
achenes on the lettuce
tomato and pepper
fruits in the sun

the frosts will arrive
next week
but the freezer
is full now

and the seeds
will sit in jars
resting
the work of
so many before me

i will never be able
to repay them
Sylindrythrae Sep 10
Strawberry jam leaking its achenes on tastebuds swollen by the scarcity of interdependence; natural redness oscillating with the intention to bite my tongue.

A special note to a former homeboy (happy birthday)

Your hoodie's borrowed my skin, texture diffused in fragrance of my fleeting tendencies, wingspan of my overwhelm drew extrinsic lines, a vermillion signature of insecurity.
Looking back at a bond I had with a former best friend; struggling to fit in, washed by guilt, past wounds, and the innocent desire of wishing him would've seen my reconciliation intentions as pure; alas, we both were barely afloat.

— The End —