I know that I will never marry Jimmy Fallon or Donald Glover or Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I know that despite the myths, Brussels sprouts taste awesome.
I know that one too many tequila shots will automatically turn you into a philosopher.
I know that the sun sets in the East and rises in the West (or is it the other way around?)
I know that I am most happiest when I'm surrounded by amazing friends in the unseasonably warm March sun and a banjo is playing.
I know that a smile straightens everything out.
I know that although you can't forget the past, you can't let it dictate your future.
I know that having *** for the first time is weird, and so is ****.
I know that my hair is golden, my eyes are blue and I will never be stick-thin as hard as I try.
I know that there are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week and 12 months in a year. But it never seems to be enough time to figure out who you are.
I know that people come and go but those that love and care for you will stay glued next to you no matter what.
I know that as much as it hurts, you will get over love.
I know that I will never have the courage to rap publicly.
I know that Kim Kardashian's *** is most likely not real.
I know that travel truly broadens the mind.
I know that I'm insecure and over analytical and anxious and easily frustrated.
But I know that I'm also passionate and determined and a hopeless romantic and a picky eater and a restless sleeper.
And above all:
I know that when I look at you I see past your eyes.
I know that when you're around I smile wider and laugh louder and flip my hair more often.
I know I dress nicer to remind you how beautiful you think I am.
I know that I forget to inhale and that the butterfly on my shoulder has to fly up to my ear and remind me to breathe.
I know that I care about you more than anyone.
I know that I let you into every pore of my body, every opening: my heart, my head, my...
I know that I am willing to jump in with my whole body and risk being drenched in water for you.
I know that I can make you as happy as you make me
But I know that you're scared and vulnerable and hurt
But if I'm sure of anything (and mind you, I'm not sure of much)
I know that I will hurt and be afraid and breathe with you to make you love me.

I've given poetry readings where less than a handful of people were present. It's a humbling experience. It’s also a deeply familiar experience.

"Poetry is useless," poet Geoffrey ****** said in a 2013 interview, "but it is useless the way the soul is useless—it is unnecessary, but we would not be what we are without it."

I was raised a Roman Catholic, and though I don’t go to Mass regularly anymore, I still remember early mornings during Advent when I went to liturgies at my parochial school. It was part of my offering—the sacrifice I made to honor the impending birth of the Savior—along with giving up candy at Lent. So few people attended at that hour that the priest turned on only a few lights near the altar. Approaching the front of the church, my plastic book bag rustling against my winter coat, I felt as if I were nearing the seashore at sunrise: the silhouettes of old widows on their kneelers at low tide, waiting for the priest to come in, starting the ritual in plain, unsung vernacular. No organist to blast us into reverence. No procession.

Every day, all over the world, these sparsely attended ceremonies still happen. Masses are said. Poetry is read. Poems are written on screens and scraps of paper. When I retire for the day, I move into a meditative, solitary, poetic space. These are the central filaments burning through my life, and the longer I live, the more they seem to be fused together.

Poetry is marginal, thankless, untethered from fame and fortune; it's also gut level, urgent, private yet yearning for connection. In all these ways, it's like prayer for me. I’m a not-quite-lapsed Catholic with Zen leanings, but I’ll always pray—and I’ll always write poems. Writing hasn’t brought me the Poetry Jackpot I once pursued, but it draws on the same inner wiring that flickers when I pray.        

• • •

In the 2012 collection A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, nineteen contemporary American poets, from Buddhist to Wiccan to Christian, discuss how their artistic and spiritual lives inform one another. Kazim Ali, who was raised a Shia Muslim, observes in his essay “Doubt and Seeking”:

[Prayer is] speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you're allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you're allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don't really think you're going to be answered. You'll either get what you want or you won't.

You could replace the word "prayer" with "poetry" with little or no loss of meaning. I'd even go so far as to say that submitting my work to a journal often feels like this, too. Sometimes, when I get an answer in the form of an acceptance, I'm stunned.

"I never think of a possible God reading my poems, although the gods used to love the arts,” writes ***** Howe in her essay "Footsteps over Ground." She adds:

Poetry could be spoken into a well, of course, and drop like a penny into the black water. Sometimes I think that there is a heaven for poems and novels and music and dance and paintings, but they might only be hard-worked sparks off a great mill, which may add up to a whole-cloth in the infinite.

And here, you could easily replace the word "poetry" with "prayer." The penny falling to the bottom of a well is more often what we experience. But both poetry and prayer are things humans have learned to do in order to go on. Doubt is a given, but we do get to choose what it is we doubt.

A God in the House Book Cover
Quite a few authors in A God in the House (Howe, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirschfield, Christian Wiman) invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." This sounds like the Zen concept of mindfulness. And it broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness. We mostly use words in the practical world to persuade or communicate, but prayers in various religious traditions can be lamentations of great sorrow. Help me, save me, take this pain away—I am in agony. In a church or a temple or a mosque, such prayerful lamentation is viewed as a form of expression for its own good, even when it doesn't lead immediately to a change of emotional state.

Perhaps the unmixed attention Weil wrote of is a unity of intention and utterance that’s far too rare in our own lives. We seldom match what we think or feel with what we actually say. When it happens spontaneously in poetry or prayer—Allen Ginsberg's "First thought, best thought" ideal —it feels like a miracle, as do all the moments when I manage to get out of my own way as a poet.

Many people who pray don’t envision a clear image of whom or what they’re praying to. But poets often have some sense of their potential readers. There are authorities whose approval I've tried to win or simply people I've tried to please: teachers, fellow writers, editors, contest judges—even my uncle, who actually reads my poems when they appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he used to work.

And yet, my most immersed writing is not done with those real faces in mind. I write to the same general entity to which I pray. It's as if the dome of my skull extends to the ceiling of the room I'm in, then to the dome of the sky and outward. It’s like the musings I had as a child lying awake at night, when my imagination took me to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But then I emerge from this wide-open state and begin thinking about possible readers—and the faces appear.

This might also be where the magic ends.

• • •

I write poetry because it’s what I do, just as frogs croak and mathematicians ponder numbers. Poetry draws on something in me that has persisted over time, even as I’ve distracted myself with other goals, demands, and purposes; even as I’ve been forced by circumstance to strip writing poetry of certain expectations.

"Life on a Lily Pad" © Michelle Tribe
"Life on a Lily Pad"
© Michelle Tribe
At 21, I was sure I’d publish my first book before I was 25. I’m past my forties now and have yet to find a publisher for a book-length collection, though I've published more than a hundred individual poems and two chapbooks. So, if a “real” book is the equivalent of receiving indisputable evidence that your prayers are being answered, I’m still waiting.

It hasn’t been easy to shed the bitter urgency I’ve felt on learning that one of my manuscripts was a finalist in this or that contest, but was not the winner. Writing in order to attain external success can be as tainted and brittle as saying a prayer that, in truth, is more like a command: (Please), God, let me get through this difficulty (or else)—

Or else what? It’s a false threat, if there’s little else left to do but pray. When my partner is in the ICU, his lungs full of fluid backed up from a defective aortic valve; when my nephew is deployed to Afghanistan; when an ex is drowning in his addiction; when I hit a dead end in my job and don’t think I can do it one more day—every effort to imagine that these things might be gotten through is a kind of prayer that helps me weather a life over which I have little control.

Repeated disappointment in my quest to hit the Poetry Jackpot has taught me to recast the jackpot in the lowercase—locating it not in the outcome but in the act of writing itself, sorting out the healthy from the unhealthy intentions for doing it. Of course, this shift in perspective was not as neat as the preceding sentence makes it seem. There were years of thrashing about, of turning over stones and even throwing them, then moments of exhaustion when I just barely heard the message from within:

This is too fragile and fraught to be something that guides your whole life.

I didn't hear those words, exactly—and this is important. For decades, I’ve made my living as a writer. But I can't manipulate or edit total gut realizations. I can throw words at them, but it would be like shaking a water bottle at a forest fire; at best, I can chase the feeling with metaphors: It's like this—no, like this—or like this.

So, odd as this sounds for a poet, I now seek wordlessness. When I meditate, I intercept hundreds of times the impulse to shape a perception into words. Reduced to basics, the challenge facing any writer is knowing what to say—and what not to.

• • •

To read or listen to poetry requires unmixed attention just as writing it does. And when a poem is read aloud, there's a communal, at times ritualistic, element that can make a reading feel like collective prayer, even if there are only a few listeners in the audience or I’m listening by myself.

"Allen Ginsberg" © MDCArchives
Allen Ginsberg
© MDCArchives
When I want to feel moved and enlarged, all I have to do is play Patti Smith's rendition of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl." His long list poem from 1955 gathers people, places, objects, and abstractions onto a single exuberant altar. It’s certainly a prayer, one that opens this way:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and **** and hand and ******* holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

Some parts of Ginsberg's list ("forgiveness! charity! faith! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!") belong in any conventional catalogue of what a prayer celebrates as sacred. Other profane elements ("the ***** of the grandfathers of Kansas!") gain admission because they are swept up into his ritualistic roll call.

I can easily parody Ginsberg's litany: Holy the Dairy Queen, holy the barns of the Amish where cheese is releasing its ambitious stench, holy the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Internet. But reading the poem aloud feels to me the way putting on ritual garments must to a shaman or rabbi or priest. Watching Patti Smith perform the poem (various versions are available on YouTube), I get shivers seeing how it transforms her, and it's clear why she titled her treatment of the poem "Spell."

A parody can't do that. It can't manifest as the palpable unity of intention and utterance. It can't do what Emily Dickinson famously said that poetry did to her:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only [ways] I know it. Is there any other way.

Like the process of prayer—to God, to a better and bigger self, to the atmosphere—writing can be a step toward unifying heart, mind, body, universe. Ginsberg's frenzied catalogue ends on "brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul"; Eliot's The Waste Land on "shantih," or "the peace that surpasseth understanding." Neither bang nor whimper, endings like these are at once humble and tenacious. They say "Amen" and step aside so that a greater wordlessness can work its magic.

The night has been commissioned
to awaken in me
the ubiquitous longing for your touch.
The mindlessness consumes me
when I wander from dream to dream,
fantasizing the ever after
that’ll mysteriously become present
once you touch.

The exuberant charm in every swipe
of the breeze broadens a smile,
reminding me of the endless passion
for good humor and intense delight
that you decree in large measures
whilst I quail in love.    

It is diabolical, this game you play
of keeping in shadows
while I wither,
in the unremitting glare of the sun
that keeps me on the banks of the dark lake
leaving me with only
a few drops to wet my hand.

I will implore to have an end
to this ceaseless battle of restraint and abandon,
But am only left with a tremulous belief,
it is all not false what I see,
in the glorious mist that night casts,
I do not only sleep.

When I think back now to when I was little (to when I was young)
The words "I love you" I don't think were ever spoken, not in our house anyway (now I could be wrong)
It would have been something silly to say
That was something you'd only hear in a Hollywood movie
Between glamorous movie stars, glamorous people
It wasn't part of our reality
If you were feeling anxious about something and needed comforting
You'd be told not to worry, that you were being silly
You'd be given a hug maybe or 'a treat' something nice
Usually something sweet, a biscuit and a hot cup of sugary tea or cocoa
A chocolate sweet if there were any
You'd be allowed to stay up late and watch the late shows on TV
Me! I was always a terrible worrier just like my Mom
Food most often was the comforter, the soother, the remedy to all
(Some say our relationship with food is the closest relationship we ever have in Life).

Yea! I don't think the words "I love you" were spoken where we grew up
Our parents they loved us as best they could
But they didn't have the words, the words to say it
It was strange...it was almost like they were forbidden to.
Of course, you could love your neighbor alright and your neighbor's neighbor
And your neighbor's neighbors neighbor's neighbor
And all the feckin' neighbors in the whole feckin' world
But the one thing you couldn't, you mustn't do
Was love yourself, this was the Big No No, the Big taboo, the Great Evil
It was the one thing you must never do,
And every Sunday at church, the priest way up on his pulpit
He'd never tire of telling us
How evil and selfish and bad the Self was
And all the bad things it got up to
Yea, your neighbor was always better than you were
Put your neighbor above yourself always
Love your neighbor and you'd be alright
That was the message loud and clear.

                               2

So, so we got treats instead of words of love when we were little
On Friday nights when Dad would come home from work and the pub
He'd always have with him lovely Apple Turnover buns
And a bag of crisps for each of us
And so, we'd all sit there together in the evening in front of the telly
After the maelstrom of the school week with  its lessons and scary teacher
Trying so hard to understand and get your homework done,
And despite all we'd laugh and enjoy the TV shows
And this... this was Love, us all just sitting there with our buns and munching our crisps just watching the TV together
Knowing we belonged and that we were loved kind of...as best they could
And that we had a couple of days off, days of freedom
Before we'd have to go back to school again,
It didn't get any better than this.

And when we'd be going down the country to see our Uncle John
My Dad would always stop off to visit a pub
And he'd get us a Club orange and a packet of crisps
It couldn't get any better than this... this was Love
The lovely sweet taste of that fizzy Club orange juice
And those wonderful salty cheese and onion flavoured (potato) crisps or maybe salt and vinegar flavour
Or later on, lovely smokey bacon flavour,
As we'd sit there Dad would be talking to the barman or some of the locals
But we didn't care what was being said, it didn't matter to us
It didn't get any better than this
This was heaven... this was Bliss.

Sometimes during the summer months before we could get summer jobs
Maybe it'd be raining outside and we'd be stuck indoors and bored
But then Mum would up and say "I know I'll make some chips"
Now Mum's chips were really something special, they'd be lovely big chunky potato chips, hand cut
And maybe she'd have beans in tomato sauce with them,
And maybe there'd be a good film on in the afternoon
Well, this was it, nothing could top that, a good film and a plate of Mum's big chunky chips and beans
Sometimes she'd even make these lovely mince beef pies
With minced beef and flour and onions, salt and pepper on them
And they were really something else
It couldn't get any better than this... and this... this was Love
(I can still remember the kind of meals we ate
And my Mum in the kitchen, and my Dad).

                            3

It's how people grow up in the end I suppose
They find someone inspiring, some teacher or book that makes a strong impression on them (if their lucky)
Or a partner who broadens their horizons, makes them question things and expands their vision of life and all its wondrous possibilities
But what if you don't find those good books, those inspiring teachers
Those voices that'd offer you a better vision of tomorrow and what this life could be
What if you only found bad books, bad books purporting to be good
That'd rob you and leave you lost and desolate, fearful and confused
What if some of your teachers turned out to be alcoholics
That some even done away with themselves
What if the people you met were even more lost than you were yourself...

And you'd go to a job interview and the man, he'd look at you and say
"So, what are your aspirations in Life, what are your values, your goals, where do you see yourself a few years from now ?"
And you'd look back at him blankly, Aspirations! Values! Goals!
What are these words, what's he talking about...
What am I looking for in Life ?
To have some fun I suppose...maybe (if having fun was still legal now as an adult)
Fun!!! Whatever that was now ?
Or to get drunk and stay drunk, escape this grim world I'm in somehow
What am I looking for ?
You tell me...I don't know, what is there
For all I knew I may as well have said
"A Club orange and a packet of crisps".

                              4

Now the faces they have all faded away, the voices too, have all gone
There's only me here alone in this room
It's Friday evening and I've got a readymade dinner from the supermarket
Just need to pop it in the oven for a few minutes
And I got a Dvd from the Dvd store,
So I sit there and eat my dinner, I savour every bite
But still it doesn't last very long
And I can lick my plate but it doesn't make any difference
I can lick it all I like
But I can't make it last, and I can't bring them back again
Those people that are gone;
And the food, it doesn't taste the same, doesn't taste as good as it tasted back then
And the movies too, their not like the ones we used to watch...

When I die it'll probably be like that movie Citizen Kane, at the end his last words "Rosebud"
The name of his beloved childhood sleigh
He used slide on in the snow,
I'll say on my death bed "I too have a memory of Love and Joy, Yea!
A Club orange and a packet of crisps".

His eyes squinted
carefully scanning
three hazy photos
taken in black and white
undated of two mountains
rising behind a bridge
crossing a river

Was it France?
Arizona, Dakota
Probably not Dakota
Few hills there
Maybe along the Danube
Yet no signs of vineyards
along the river banks

Travel broadens one
with indistinct memories
Places that inspired
yesterday and today
remain as slight fabrics
and experiences
absorbed and fuzzy
resting in a corner
of his mind

Some lack the intelligence to question.
Successfully saturated in meaningless pleasure.
Content with the everyday.
Is the answer found in ignorance?
In Bliss?
No, it is only constant escape.
A blindfold of euphoria.
The alpha enjoys life but never feels the need to understand fully.

In this new age there are those.
Those who bestow false titles on themselves.
Titles to distract for what they deem is personal happiness.

Happiness is a chemical distraction.
The avoidance of happiness lays bare the foundations of life.
Depression broadens the mind but overwhelms the individual.
Substance expands the mind.
New thoughts, new processes.
The key is not found in fungi.
Through it, the introduction to the question is bestowed.

"To all the fallen Kids, Heroes and Sheroes that fell victim to the massacre of June 16 1960, Sharpeville, Soweto…
Callings for new Seeds and Haloes, we pray for new Victors and Messiahs…coz still we ask “So where to?”*


Worthy knowledge deserves the one who will acknowledge, it found another, he was in shortage, threatened, he found joy in carnage.
Retaliation turned sour, as we shed tears for fallen heroes. Rest in peace to all the Petersens, the Malcolms and the Bikos.
Great minds edify and think beyond limits and sky.
This systematic routine of life laced with politics and economy infiltrates us numb, living in a liberated space and yet at times feeling so dumb.
To equip oneself with the truth, the past, broadens the mind with a quality that will seize to last.
A continent, must be God’s definition of art, beautifully authentic ancient dark civilization…envy must’ve burned the heart.
Propaganda made victims, a disease intended to chronic; now all that’s seen is reversed conscious, invincible and sonic.
Pride is you, continent, head up, chest up, we becoming confident. Mother of the soil shining naturally yet shining somewhat redundancy.
Reconciliation over retribution, an astounding virtue, still forging a social democracy.
Peace will be hard to find in this pandemonium world.
True healing comes from divine providence, I was told.
Male and female, human beings, we need to perceive each other like nature, true identity knows no stranger.

You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.

It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;

A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent:

Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought

Should banded unions persecute
Opinion, and induce a time
When single thought is civil crime,
And individual freedom mute;

Tho' Power should make from land to land
The name of Britain trebly great--
Tho' every channel of the State
Should fill and choke with golden sand--

Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,
Wild wind! I seek a warmer sky,
And I will see before I die
The palms and temples of the South.

I too will go to you, says the son
to the face of the father.

He broadens his smile
thin and gathering dust for long
as if to acknowledge
he always knew
one day his son would stand before him
resigned and weary
willing to join on his route.

The son sees his father's lips
move in the briefest prayer..

Welcome.

The revolution that burst out the rose of wind in the sand,
And for which Anemone bled in the field

Is now led by grave wisdom
Filling our lungs with incense’s rotten fume …

Birds are alarmed by the hissing of the leaves
The mole broadens the strategy of the pit,
And announces today the birth of his (nightly) ninety-ninth party
While, from a thousand sheds, echoes Surat The Merciful.

Tireless hours fleeting away with more vigor now than before
Tedium, wallowing helplessly, while I use my pick and keep digging
I’m digging to find the hidden agenda, the reason for me to survive
I’m digging to bury my past incarnation, I’m digging to conceal my life
My actions don’t follow me, they’ve blocked off the exit from the mine
And the shafts that hold the lumbering earth at bay seem indifferent
My self is the true menace
It despises my flesh and recants my existence
It lunges at me in the darkness, striking at me with its claws
My eyes glow ice blue in the reflection when I see him
And I tepidly back into the wall
As clods first break off and larger chunks follow
The grey skin of my self shimmers and the beast broadens its shoulders
He pounces as the ground crashes in all around us
My death is his beginning

The grey
Weeping hill breathes heavy for
A winter cloud

Inside heated houses
Your hair rests just behind your shoulders,
Tucked around the ear for safe measure while
The cold hill looks for its instrument

Every garden has been paved for gasoline structures
The mighty rose has
Collapsed

I and you
Clean the kitchen metal repeatedly

Where is the song to
Be hymned from
Your desolate crow eyed hill

It finds the instrument beneath frozen soil
Where a pure oak grows for
April perils

We recite lullabies to Angels already woken
& write pollen poems for the white and trepid wood

Rats feel holy in New York where a carnival of stone encircles their tufts

******* glimpsed in the crack of
Yellow blinds
a versed blonde will recount across the street
Somethin' out of "Rear Window"
Minus the broken leg

"Romanticism is the emphasized or passionately overblown image or feeling in art or as emotional expression. Romantic art emphasizes reality and attempts at imitating the divine. We have idealized love as being more than it is as a means to cope with the reality in which love isnt as special as we have blown it up to be-

-this unreachable expectation we place on the human experience is combatted by the romantic which broadens our distance between the reality of our perceptions and experiences VS the romantic ideal. It draws attention to its own lacking"
-
This is the palace for naked ghosts.

   A time of enticement has passed
   To make room for Dadaism
       & a lackluser sensibility for medicine instructions
       I have become haunted and naive
       With frequent prophetic snapshot dreams
       Detailing crimson hotels where the hardwood floor is sinking with rot
       & past loves appear and try to
       Converse with me as my legs shake
      
       The kaleidoscopic halls sweat with
       An earthly pressure
      
"I wanted to apologize for hurting you"

"I appreciate that dear but we are sinking
We need to go"

"No no listen to me!"

(Here come the saxophones
And rhapsodic lights tearing this noctuary down)

She has left
     We are causing the silence
    
(tragedy is the divine and enamoured image)

Another flash of color underside of
The stairwell in my hotel

(DREAM #2)

A neighborhood follows itself quietly
With garage sales & sleeping cupids,
A man drives down the sky
With his dog on his lap smiling, carrier in the backseat

& piano is reintroduced just in time for the post office to go on strike

..And I took to violet rooms with perplexing
Polka dotted floors & black and white &
worn-down coffee table & I have a headache & someone smells like karaoke sounds/

The sunset company thru the window is
A nice arrangement despite this,
Frank O'Hara is reading Ode to Joy in my head.

.............

-as being sensual, orgiastic and purely relating to the destruction of the self as means to experience a complete lack of individuation. A loss of reality and a more cosmic and expansive transcendentalism, experienced without the desire to have more than itself. Its a state of being which exists outside of the longing for something better
(relating to "The Birth of Tragedy")

...........

(DREAM #3)

Exotic spaces
With several
simultaneous heart attacks

The ambulance is late

A harp is one floor below us

It doesn't matter now

Do not worry for the director of
This scene has also died

      A valley of copious harmonials
      Waits for us
      
      The feeling is easy


...........

Suddenly
I am sprouting from the icy hilltop
Instrument in hand
We can stop with our obsession for cleanliness

I am unsure whether I am still asleep

"Share the complete pleasure in mere appearance and in seeing, yet at the same time he negates this pleasure and finds a still higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of mere appearance"

The philosopher's essays continue !

Day's intensity
thrills the valley to living
Without wine or prayer

I can swallow a raindrop & laugh
Having never desired the silence
Of dust
                      Here we dance in Dionysian
                      Ecstasy
                      Jewelled with feathers
                      Untouched


It's okay to be afraid of snow
And thank you/
We are all elusive at heart

Why bother with math,
When English is more exciting?
Why do the same old thing,
When English broadens your horizons
Imagination is set free,
Leading to plentiful ideas
That will expand into our future,
Effecting our daily lives.
You say math is the basis of life,
But that is a lie.
What is math without English?
Without ideas, math is nothing.
Numbers go to waste,
Science would never be put to the test,
History would be long forgotten.
English is the basis of life,
Nothing more.
For without ideas,
Where would our world be?

Pain is long and deep, it broadens itself, at self-will, running wild

      motivating any artist to dream, poets dream long and before acting with
grandeur and in youth, there’s nothing but dreams,

                                      as lust doesn’t cost a thing    until all that youth drys up

and the ability to stop dreaming isn’t felt, just aging

to achieve harmony in this life, one must struggle for years, especially in poetry, where they can all articulate love, like the Tenor or the Cellist, over composed symphonies. And the ******’s praise them all.

                               my heart is in my hand, because it’s pierced
                               those who have content, are the ones who
                               dared to live in the first place and I’m still hung
                               up on you, because those who’ve lived, seem
                               to have experienced love, my heart is caught
                               providing a helping hand to write any poem.


      People had made love without poetry, because lust is easier.

                              And when awareness kicks in, it will be too late and poets join time to mock them with heavy laughter.


    
                  I grow tired of waiting, fatigued after actions with efforts of affection


Life goes on


No-one likes the lovers lost in love, because it reminds them,
of what they don’t have, wondering if the love is wild and roaring
or if it took their youth to tame. No one likes the lovers lost
in love, because it can devalue any romantic piece, those
lovers in ****** acts, intimately fusing their souls together,
getting to know the ecstasy of illumination and addicted to
sparking awakening in each other. For no one likes anyone
in love, for their souls are free and without void and despair,
so they shun those lovers out, in return those lovers build
a world of their own, forgetting the earth for the rest of
humanity, never to fit in again. Can you love a smile? Can
you love a glance? Holding hands? Would you tame beauty?
For without love, the law means nothing and the poets will
turn out as serial killers. For no one likes people being truly
in love, because it reminds them what’s without.

                          I can read any poem, for such things as love, is not written,
   only expressed in actions, whispered in the ears of night,
                                 spoken by the mouths, who’ve been to the horizon
                                 and back.
Only in love, where it can strip anyone down to the ****, bearing to the world, all their faults, sins, mistakes and regrets, revealing all their secrets and transcend into a saint. A Muse for the world. I don’t know about you, to what I think about those first kisses between yourself and your lover, is conversation  between Angels, closing lips, each other’s breathes felt lightly pressed upon skin, and the Angels sing when the lips are closed, holding hands and finally the delicate souls can meet and begins to feel safe for the first time.
             And everyday sounds, turn into love songs, that we’ve grown to accustom
  to listen to, without knowing their meaning. Living now, like life ends at the end of the day, you can blame fate for falling in love or you could just go out and experience love. It’s a place that we all ache to go, twinge at the sight of it, love involves the energy of any supernova that births beauty on site, creating memories for poets, adding
charm to this present, parenting the future, dragging things up from the heart, when we dared not to and finally for the first time, you shrug your shoulders and let go.

                            As for anyone telling that you have to work for love.
                            Slap them as hard as you can. Than recommend them
                            a good lawyer and a young lover for their spouse.

(knowledge variable)

If my words could paint you in colour
They'd portray no saint, nor scholar
I'd hazard to say
That to paint you this way
Would do you and I no favours
I'll savour- the best of you always
And all your little ways
In all your raggedy, shaggedy
Scrawny glory
Charmless charming, harmless
How you could tell a good story
All the while
That cheeky smile
Broadens wide
Up mostly the left side of your face
At the insulting joke you just cracked
Humour was one thing you never lacked
That scruffy beard that
You'd shave once a year
It was rare you'd be seen
All trimmed and pristine
Your footie shirts all bright and baggy
Hang loose on thin frame- all saggy
I'm always reminded
Of your pose when confounded
Skinny shoulders shrugged up pinned up
to your jaw line
That bottom lip pouted out, image burned in my mind

When was the first time
You stood on the sideline
And ignited unmatched passion?
Flaming crazed enthusiasm
Your supreme love for that game
An infatuation that bordered on insane!
You could have every detail memorised
You could recount, recite and itemise
Every player, every score, you knew it all
My word did you love football!

You loved animals too,
The farmer’s life would’ve suited you
Wish you could go back and stay
Somewhere you could drive tractors all day


It was easy to lose sight of you
Both you and I sometimes lost you from view
Now I won't let go of you ever
But we must let go of guilt forever
Remember good times we shared
Times we both showed we cared
Your good heart was easy to find
When you were clear in mind
The imprint you've left on my soul
Makes me a better me, makes whole
My life now has a hole that I cannot fill
But my heart always had you
And always will

My verse is free
******, malleable, ever changing
From sadness, to peace
The cavernous confines expand
And my heart is lit aflame

My words are simple
Visions, prophesies, fortunes
From death, to life
The time between dilates
And my soul is lit aflame

My tone is steady
Musical, poetic, evolving
From anger, to gratitude
The space between magnifies
And my voice is lit aflame

My steps are fast
Running, wild, assured
From sedation, to waking
The road in front broadens
My body is lit aflame

I have bee through what others seem to say tragedies, however, I could not image being so small minded as many are, without pure struggle of existence. The bad things are what toughens your skin and soul. It broadens your mind and ambitions. It moves you. There will be bad but, the good is ******* good.

I don't fear Betrayal, for it broadens my understanding on Trust.
I don't fear Enemies, for they were once Friends.
I don't fear Hate, for it is envy disguised as Love.
I don't fear Pain, for it's unpleasant sensation gives me Pleasure.
I don't fear Hunger, for it is a shadow of Satiation.
I don't fear Death, for it is freedom from the troubles of Life.
I don't fear Sadness, for it opens my soul to yearn for Happiness.
I don't fear Wars, for they are conflicts that bring Peace.
I don't fear Failures, for they are simply the foundation of Success.
I don't fear the Dark, for is the hidden form of Light.
I don't fear the Future, for my present made peace with my Past.
What I fear is being Fearless, for fear is afraid of itself like I am afraid of Myself.

Reading takes you places
It ignites the imagination
Broadens your mind
And enlightens the sensation
Reading gives you a vision and a purpose
Along with knowledge and understanding
Enjoy the journey with literature
So you can achieve and be outstanding

The stars twinkle in the beautiful sky tonight
Four stand out
To my eyes
Show me beautiful sights

The first star is
The brightest in the sky
In the deep and dark night
Looks perfectly shaped
Perfect
Makes me feel that inside
Some time we miss
When the sky does not align with my eye

This second is
The most gorgeous star in the sky
Looks can fly
And they do through my eyes
Once my eyes go inside
The lack of depth
It appears
Dark at the heart
Deceives does this beautiful shooting star

This star
Number three
Illuminates me
It does not always appear
Flickers with light
In the blackened sky
When it does shine
Its so bright
It hurts my insides
I bask in the light
Makes me ache
I miss this star some times

The last star is unusually small in size
Sparkles from afar
Lights up my eye
Slowly building trust
Knowing its always there

What I need to find is my sunshine
The sun that shines consistently through the sky
Finds its way through the darkest clouds
Creating spotlight where ever she shines
Enhancing colours
Takes my breath away
Impregnates Feelings
Displaying different experiences
Helps me to create
Broadens my insides
Helps me fight
To see the light
And beauty in all that surrounds

How sweet she sounds

I will wait until your found
My beautiful sunshine

***** infested words
spew from my fingertips
having been dug
deep
from within my soul
the whiskey
loosens my thoughts
giving false bravado
to what i feel
must be said
there's no love here
none that's lost
the pit of loneliness
broadens
the tender caress
of drunkenness
offers warmth
and companionship
to a once vacant
heart
and i'll swim
in a sea of intoxication
kept afloat
by an imagined life vest
provided
by an alcohol soaked
mind.

Colors primarily exist knowing one specific hue,
Neutral in a sense, knowing nothing of the vivid expectation that exists outside of itself.
Then comes the brush revealing more than meets the eye.
Each bristle moist with enlightenment.
The innocence of a sudden touch brimming at the edge of comfort,
discussing need to further exploration.
This expectation which broadens the spectrum.
A social anxiety now left behind but still lives in fear.
This is where you come in,
The zest of something new.
Experiences otherwise thought about, yet never acted upon.
The distance between the colors are filled by the brush,
creating something totally new altogether.
Although the color is either brighter or darker,
The experience is still the same.
The intensity of longing for one another, no longer alone.
Peeping behind a glass curious about the what if's of curiosity.
Adding large detail to the picture painted on the grains of canvas
Expanding in contrast to which point of view is used to view the picture
But still lost in a nervous jitter of being lost in a feeling that's altogether brand new.
This broad spectrum of mixing colors to make something brand new.
Committing to the outside world for better or worse upon the criticism of dark hues that make shadows out of the light cast on one another.
This spectrum between you and I.
Whose color can be a favorite if we both dwell in delight,
The simple awe of one another, no longer viewing things as one sided
but in the broad spectrum for things provided by you

Beauty blinds the eye
Kind words deafen the recipient
Sweetness numbs the taste
Sensation paralyzes touch

The grotesque expands vision
Hate speech amplifies thoughts
Bitterness broadens the tongue
Hedonism frees ****** tension

You musn’t not control
Be supple as a newborn
This simple wisdom is flow

Flow

Flow

Flow

Like the widest of rivers
Carning not of the next bend to come
Not resisting allowing the water to pass

Be the river and all things are possible

push down-
claws tighten around thinning arms
heavy-
grasp until they graze the bone
sinking-
no bandaging to camouflage a scar
branded by burning red worry in waiting
slow-
no cure for calming relentless waves
slow-
a recipe for burdening left to cool
as eyes glaze over with inconsistency
slow-
back broadens until shoulder blades realign
slow-
muscles take their time to redefine
themselves amongst the plethora of shrinking cells
slow

slow

stop.

collect the fragments flung beneath floorboards
piece together the puzzle once again
and sit
patient
silent
for the imminent swell

Reading broadens the mind
Opinions, feelings, thoughts entwined
Philosophy, concept, psychology, sociology
A fascinating anthology
Of life, beings, humans, being
Seeing
Further than the horizon
To what you can’t see
And what you don’t understand
A different land
Or a different time in a different place
We all face
Trials and Tribulations
Of the human race
Everything living is designed to survive
So why
Are we determined to end lives
Why does cruelty conflict
When so much tragedy already exists
Why are we conditioned to believe
That love and peace is so naive
Consumed by corruption and greed
When childhood lessons planted this seed
When we were young, when we were free
Before responsibility
I clearly see
I don’t fully understand economy
Inflation is easy
But when it comes to selling ammunition and guns
And murdering toddlers with the funds
Destroying entire communities
Thriving on disunities
Revealing in the privileged immunities
Gaining from murderous opportunities
I simply cannot comprehend
How we just pretend
Out of sight, out of mind
Or conveniently blind
Assigned to monotony
Resigned to the powers that be
You are a product of your environment, you see
I never gave you permission to speak for me