"deigning" poems
High up above the open, welcoming door
It hangs, a piece of wood with colours dim.
Once, long ago, it was a waving tree
And knew the sun and shadow through the leaves
Of forest trees, in a thick eastern wood.
The winter snows had bent its branches down,
The spring had swelled its buds with coming flowers,
Summer had run like fire through its veins,
While autumn pelted it with chestnut burrs,
And strewed the leafy ground with acorn cups.
Dark midnight storms had roared and crashed among
Its branches, breaking here and there a limb;
But every now and then broad sunlit days
Lovingly lingered, caught among the leaves.
Yes, it had known all this, and yet to us
It does not speak of mossy forest ways,
Of whispering pine trees or the shimmering birch;
But of quick winds, and the salt, stinging sea!
An artist once, with patient, careful knife,
Had fashioned it like to the untamed sea.
Here waves uprear themselves, their tops blown back
By the gay, sunny wind, which whips the blue
And breaks it into gleams and sparks of light.
Among the flashing waves are two white birds
Which swoop, and soar, and scream for very joy
At the wild sport. Now diving quickly in,
Questing some glistening fish. Now flying up,
Their dripping feathers shining in the sun,
While the wet drops like little glints of light,
Fall pattering backward to the parent sea.
Gliding along the green and foam-flecked hollows,
Or skimming some white crest about to break,
The spirits of the sky deigning to stoop
And play with ocean in a summer mood.
Hanging above the high, wide open door,
It brings to us in quiet, firelit room,
The freedom of the earth's vast solitudes,
Where heaping, sunny waves tumble and roll,
And seabirds scream in wanton happiness.
2.8k
our suffering was human long before you
tried to “humanise” it,
give us the kiss of life,
i am not your wife, i am not your sister
i am not your ******* daughter, sorry to break
all this water
on the embers of you
deigning, for once, to give a ****
what your friends do to us
by imagining we belong
to you — i will demonstrate
how little you know of possession
as i run
my keys along your car
til your mouth unlocks, drops open
and i dive down your throat, walk around
in you, the cage
of your ribs more spacious than
my own, two sizes too small,
zero, counting down to take-off, space
for my heart all taken
with the frenzied tango
of me watching you watching me, behind
my eyes, all winged
and no less trapped for it
vandalism is not violence
i would have snapped
your wrist when you tried to kiss me
just to see if you’d curse quietly
about your shattered iPhone bones
pick up, dust off, shrug shoulders
cold and solar
your belongings increasingly disposable
so when you love me because i could be yours
don’t flinch when i spit
in your eye, scream, cry, take
your name in vain
to leech from myself the pain of your basilisk glance
turning me into rubble, eroding all
the toil and trouble or whatever it is
you fear in me, petrified
perfect specimen, cut and dried
venus de milo on a pedestal
armless, harmless
all legs and bust
soft hewn and lunar, gathering dust
i am not your medusa
victim, your rock, your ***** girl
grain of sand to make a pearl
i am fire, water, air
you cannot hold me
don’t stroke my hair, don’t ******* touch
me, yeah, my fingertips
may turn you to gold
but i’m not here to spin your straw
neither am i some unrefined ore
for you to forge into a wedding ring
stone is bitter cold as metal
though it makes a rougher crown
don’t worry, though, my darling,
the chill will hiss and dissipate
when i come to melt
you down
Feb 18, 2014
Feb 18, 2014 at 10:36 PM UTC
Leaking through my veins,
Seeping past my heart
It freezes my soul,
Can’t get past the cold
air of the dark-
ness
that I breathe in,
Scream to fight off
But it won’t stay off
I’m betrayed and I’m frayed to shards of
an old ghost:
Lost my glow
Lost that elected touch.
Oh I want the goodness,
But the goodness don’t want me.
Or could it be I’ve fought
for too long, now it
seems i’m not as strong due to
desensibility, ******* the passion out of me
I’m made to resonate kindness
Emulate a bright bliss
But I grab for transience,
Trading that omniscient light for a couple cents
In comparison, where’s that dream of intelligence
busting from my heart and spirit’s senses,
Now I spend my days hopping fences,
breathing relentlessly heaving from thinking,
endlessly drinking, my mind has been sinking
and I am seemingly drowned out,
Found out,
I’m nothing without some fearlessness,
I called out some where in the Out There
My ears shut out the world,
at last, my last inch of hope is straining
to pick up a sound,
gracefully deigning to
reach me:
I’m not a lost soul,
adrift in some dark cold
sea on an isolated glacier
composed of only lonesomeness,
and ice water.
Oct 11, 2010
Oct 11, 2010 at 1:51 PM UTC
O but how tepidly tired and dour,
How furiously, phallically fetid its flower.
Monotonously, mirthlessly humming along,
His listless life like a moribund song,
Sodden with pitifully petulant skulking,
Not deigning to die, but dreams of their sulking
Pervaded his psyche as fifty-five fleas
Formicate wildly, stinging suicide-bees.
Three years of contented, ire-inducing idleness,
Vacuous days lacking life’s latent vitalness.
Entitlement, cowardice, perhaps the antithesis
Is he of a man. Singed with syphilis,
****** from sentiment, his is the brain
Of one who breathes indignant disdain
For all those who threaten his thinly-veiled comfort.
The thespian of truth, he’d play the faux jumper.
May 26, 2016
May 26, 2016 at 12:13 AM UTC
~~~
"Fact about me: You design me"
line from a poem published here on Nov. 30, 2013
part I of a trilogy
nml
~~~
6:33am
9 minutes left
in the AM hour of my tribulation,
the re-design time,
redoing my outer shell
legs pounding,
towel sodden soggy,
soon return to home
do my morning ablutions
followed by a frosty walk
to the multiple screens
for trading things
makeover, do-over,
but you can only easy
shed and cleanse
exterior surfaces,
shape and appearance,
the inside stuff,
that's the gut wrencher
don't be so hard on yourself
kid!
nah ain't gonna
kid
myself
too old, too much a wise guy
to show much forgiveness to self,
of untruly yours,
whose design was only 50% mine
someone is dying,^
my cocktail of
words and emotions
more muddled than my
usual abnormal,
while sweating off
the golden baddies
to the golden oldies
so where exactly is the
truth burden?^^
somewhere between sad
and a curt "no cares"
my physical reformation,
is part and parceled,
of my regeneration,
the one who gave me
the desire to die before my time,
is dead before her time,
and I don't know the clear water truth
of my variable emotions
design me?
she is deigning to
design me still
with her untimely death
so I cycle even harder
to release the anxiety of
mis-everything
regretting what was lost,
now missed,
that too was, and is,
part of my design,
part of
burden of truths
that design who we
were, are, and yet
may be
Feb 11, 2016
Feb 11, 2016 at 5:01 PM UTC
To hold a candle in one's palm
And let the wax drop into a soul that yearns for brightness;
To polish off a set of silverware
That is set in the back of the china cabinet;
To these actions does one owe the breadth of sincerity
Reached only by the mobile and task-less mind.
When I was a young child,
Cloud scanning was naught but a foolish game
That only the sloth did chance to play.
Yet white pirate ships and marshmallow fantasies
Would still laugh and dance just out of my stunted reach
Until my tangled shoelaces tripped my idleness into
An emerald green oblivion as my knees met ground.
Parallels exist when one matures;
It's just as easy to trip over a pair of high heels.
To what end, then, do we owe the dusting off
Of the old mahogany boxes of memories?
To which source do we credit the rolling film
That replays childlike nostalgia through a sepia tinted lens?
To the wonders of the mind and the memories within,
We owe our deigning to produce and beginning to dream.
Oct 5, 2016
Oct 5, 2016 at 2:00 PM UTC
We behave like gods deigning to walk into the rain
We walk through these manicured fragments of nature on our way from one slab of concrete to the next
Reigning over our kingdom of manufactured marvels and artificial light
So tonight as I walked into the rain I turned my face up to the sky
I praised the cold, gentle touch of the universe upon my skin
And relished in my humble mortality
Jun 10, 2018
Jun 10, 2018 at 11:50 PM UTC
MORNING'S MINION
The kestrel
threw its shadow
on the path
that ran away from me
vanishing into the sun
before it could enter my eyes.
I saw and did not see it.
I had only ever seen it
in words
the poet's lines
hovering in my mind
until here upon my arm
in a football ground
deigning to allow us
in its presence
gazing into
and beyond
my tiny humanity.
Jan 6, 2019
Jan 6, 2019 at 9:49 AM UTC
Morning Spider
What were you trying to say
from down the dry well
of the German coffee maker?
A brusque “guten Morgan”
unworthy of the finesse required
to defeat the hinged plastic lid,
****** off mate” belying
the English taste for tea,
begging bus fare for the Silk Road
transparent even without a bracing first cup.
A caution, then?
Don’t leave bags unattended,
know the warning signs of stroke,
sleep like a baby
with two-step authentication?
Choirmaster alone in the apse,
dwarfed by vaulting cathedral walls
soaring seamless into heavenly gloom,
where I hover on high, indifferent
god commanding flood water, bestowing
the random fly of mercy, deigning
to lower a spoon of salvation
while you weave a gossamer chorale, perhaps,
working the tiny shuttles your batons.
Mar 8, 2017
Mar 8, 2017 at 9:22 AM UTC
Her beauty broke my brain.
Short hair, ***** blond
soft to the touch
which is what I longed
to do.
It is a thing of confusing dimensions
but she made my heart
stranger then abstract art.
The pink and purple petals
melted like liquid metal
then dripped like pastel paints,
diluting the cool blue pool
with strange smoky colors
that mirrored my pleasurable pain.
She crushed my skull
on glittering stones
before the steps that descend
deigning by design to end
in my workplace parking lot.
Slender figure form
with slightly sagging sections,
but she was strange and enticing
delicious as cake icing
and I was oh so hungry.
Yellow stained
and chipped teeth
she was so sickly sweet
and addicting
like candy ****
With her strange personality
loving Star Wars fantasies
and all those horror movies
she stole
my dignity and self-control
swallowing the remnants
of a painfully broken soul.
Dec 22, 2017
Dec 22, 2017 at 8:06 AM UTC
Vespers
What were you chanting
from down the dry well
of our German coffee maker?
A brusque Gute Nacht masking
the finesse required to defeat
the hinged plastic lid?
Begging bus fare
for the Silk Road
transparent,
even without mornings
bracing first cup.
A caution, then?
Don’t leave bags unattended?
Know the warning signs of stroke?
Sleep like a baby, use two-step
authentication?
Your cloistered solitude,
fringed bulb of abdomen
whispered tonsure,
solitary choirmaster dwarfed
by cathedral walls
soaring graduated
into heavenly gloom
where I hovered on high,
my nightly routine
to summon The Flood,
deigning to lower
a spoon of salvation
while you wove a gossamer
chorale,
working
the eight tiny shuttles
of your batons.
Mar 17, 2017
Mar 17, 2017 at 8:23 AM UTC
Morning Spider
What were you trying to say
from down the dry well
of our German coffee maker?
A brusque “guten Morgan”,
unworthy of the finesse required
to defeat the hinged plastic lid,
****** off mate” belying
the English taste for tea,
begging bus fare for the Silk Road
transparent, even without a bracing first cup.
A caution, then?
Don’t leave bags unattended,
know the warning signs of stroke,
sleep like a baby with two-step
authentication?
But your solitude, small bare bulb
of abdomen, put me in mind
of a monks tonsure, choirmaster
alone in the apse, dwarfed
by vaulting cathedral walls
soaring seamless into heavenly gloom,
where I hover on high, indifferent
god commanding the flood waters,
bestowing random flies of mercy,
deigning to lower a spoon of salvation
while you weave a gossamer chorale,
working the tiny shuttles of your batons.
Mar 8, 2017
Mar 8, 2017 at 5:58 PM UTC
MORNING'S MINION
The kestrel
threw its shadow
on the path
that ran away from me
vanishing into the sun
before it could enter my eyes.
I saw and did not see it.
I had only ever seen it
in words
the poet's lines
hovering in my mind
until here upon my arm
in a football ground
deigning to allow us
in its presence
gazing into
and beyond
my tiny humanity.
Jan 6, 2018
Jan 6, 2018 at 1:58 PM UTC