"foreknowledge" poems
~
a strange place to start
having not truly begun,
already beat down by the
lowdown
own a million rose colored words,
but some assembly required,
that's when the foreknowledge truth~rules
burns brain holes
easy is never
free,
poetry writing is
cussing hard work
~
spring rains cloaking warmth,
summer's stunning sunsets
demand submissive awed silence,
autumnal leave drops anointing
your refreshed humanity,
and yet,
one more time,
it is only within winter's white bitterness
lip tasting,
million tear-shaped snowflaked words,
is the crowning visible
of the head of
a newborn babe poet
~
hard.
Capital Hard.
in the beginning,
there was one,
a first work
and the knowing,
if it wasn't hard,
it could not be
any good,
makes it possible
to ease on
down
this fearful
revelationary road
trip
May 22, 2015
May 22, 2015 at 5:15 PM UTC
I am Janus, born and lived of two faces.
One, a tragic Hero; who loved for all and forsook fame for honor.
A paragon whose powers and skills remained dormant, forgotten.
Created from a darkness so black that light could only ever be the way forward.
He, so loving the world and resigned to protect; would fall at the strength of his own sword to keep the Villain at bay.
His other face, the frightening Villain; he thirsts for the unparalleled fear in the eyes of the unprepared masses, who wide awaken their darkest fear before their very eyes, at his presence.
Forged from the evil of a holy goodness ripped too sweetly from his purpose, and with much foreknowledge of the searing light;
He merely wishes to satiate his amusement, by enslaving the Hero to defend against his endless onslaught.
I am Janus, cloven in two;
Heart and Soul, Mind and Body.
Apr 19, 2013
Apr 19, 2013 at 1:50 PM UTC
I know that I will at times struggle for words…or even use too many to say too little. Expect this. It is part of me. I will try to connect myself to the world, to circumstance, to people, with words. I attempt to stitch my fingertips to what I touch, see, and feel, with what I say. I attack with words. I defend with words. I seek, run, build and dismantle with words. There is sometimes in me a necessity for silence. But it does not come often enough. Why? It is because I fear it. I fear what silence means, because words are tangible, hey can be defined, put in boxes, made to be straight or curved, applied in context, and analyzed even for meaning separate of context. But silence? Silence can mean so many things. There are clues with softer edges that require much more foreknowledge to obtain. Silence can be shaped by emotion into something in the mind of the beholder that it is not to the one who sits quiet. Words too can be misconceived, but with words, things are definable and misconception is almost always evident to one or the other. With silence, misconception is often left in ignorance. Both the silent and the listener are unaware of the other’s thoughts and intentions with silence. Silence is at least as powerful a tool as words. They may both change the courses of lives. There is a time for silence and for speaking. But it is my mind which fails to know when silence is more necessary, because my mind almost by nature uses words to explain or ascribe meaning to almost everything and anything I experience. See how long this single entry is? To explain words and their role and importance to me I am using words, because in my emotions, words are bridges, and silences are those bridges burning. I am using words, but I will learn to use silence.
Jan 26, 2013
Jan 26, 2013 at 4:31 PM UTC
Do it!
Don't ******* ***** to me about doing it.
Just ******* do it!
Regret comes later.
We'll have time to deal with that when you're bleeding out because her boyfriend didn't appreciate the sentiment in you pleasing pretty girls with full foreknowledge and a divine purpose.
She hurt you?!
Well lets ruin that ******* life.
Where does she live?
I can take us there right now.
Now don't ******* tweet without dropping a name, just go light her ******* lawn and we'll laugh while we ***** up blood from that disgusting ******* ***
I'm so alone.
Man **** you!
You had three girlfriends by the time you were sixteen
I had you.
So when I slept early it's because I was busy crying because the other kids got ahead of me and I had to replace handjobs with poetry a fact I fail to regret to this day.
They rock!
Imagine how cool a stage dive would be.
Get up here.
I'll fall first and you just follow me.
Metalhead ******* cheering for me when I can't even distinguish the words that are written to make me feel angry, someone ******* drop me just so I can hit somebody.
**** the system.
Or just don't be a ******* tool.
You're all generic as ****
Why argue the fact?
There are so many reasons to own a ******* pocket watch and because society wears one on it's fat, ******* wrist isn't one I'll accept as perfectly valid.
Life's hard.
You don't want to do it any more?
You've been telling me for weeks
But that's what knives were made for.
You have to puncture just a little hole and get a feel for life dripping away and then we move to the big leagues of ****** and suicide and feel entirely free of your immense emotional torture.
But who cares?
The future will still be there.
Just you won't be.
Nobody'll give a ****
I can twist your thoughts and let you see that you'll live on in the grass that grows from that hole we dug for you not that long ago, but just **** that.
You're ******* dead.
Deal with it.
Mar 31, 2014
Mar 31, 2014 at 7:50 PM UTC
It’s a simple, mundane day, yet busy with an absolute slew of schoolwork
I take up a table in the library, high up on the 4th floor, overlooking
The shapes below with different work in the same time and place
There’s a large model airplane, an early model,
Suspended by cables that attach themselves to the far walls,
Yielding the illusion of mid-flight
It appears I wasn’t the only one with the idea to seclude myself this high;
Around me are the detached murmurs of still more students, bent
On the conclusion of their labors, some more eager than I, some less so
And closer to me, on a juxtaposed table, is another student, about my age
Shuffling through what looks like math
But I don’t pride myself much on intrusion, so I let him be
For hours we all toiled, us in the 4th floor and us down below
The music of light concentration, fluttering pages, a utensil,
Swathing through those immobile wings and dwindling on the propeller
The time is rapidly becoming the enemy in all our bingo books
And of the books stacked in the cluster of cases, some of which will no doubt remind one
Of the timeless saying that ‘time waits for no one’
The student of the table next to me is still at work, and I’m still at work
And people file in and out of the door which leads downstairs,
Faces going in with indignance and a foreknowledge of what they’re to do
Faces leaving triumphant, secured in another day’s duty crossed off
I steal a look at the student close to me
I see him pass a tired hand over his eyes
(I agree with his plight)
By now we’ve been swarmed with a million like us
Jumping from table to table to seat to seat, in groups or in respectable solitude
A veritable mosaic of people, a timelapse in ironic real-time, elapsed second onto second
The darkness crowds the unlucky surfaces of the windows, tries to push in
And like lichen stuck to sea rocks amid a terrible tidal storm we remain
Jaded and mentally broken down, but finally we see each other
He looks at me dully, I return it with a shrug and the slightest smirk
And I think we both understand it
Though no words needed to pass through the air, nor signals of the eyebrows,
The hand, the heavy persistent sigh
We’ve seen the lapse, just us and the jetstream of the world unending
And he looks away, and I look away at the suspended plane, still as it ever was
Feb 11, 2013
Feb 11, 2013 at 10:48 PM UTC
Our routine entwines filaments of comfort
Finely woven between gaps of unoccupied time
My hands wrinkle with the loss of my
youth
Cracks and flakes of dryness and Future
I am only 23, but my soul says otherwise
My fingernails grow like tree branches
I cut them down and use them as swords
Battling imaginary creatures who stalk my shadow
Each victory harms my ego
Each trophy an intangible farce
Foreknowledge and foresight allowed me to
forego certain forgotten ceremonies;
I encounter them on the road to Manhood
Avoiding each by traveling the dark impasse
I cloak my yearning in a wool coat and a bright red scarf
Bound by absurdity,
I become the High Priest of Ritual
Anointed with the experience of Curiosity’s fluid influence
I wade in the shallow waters to catch my breath
I see you walking on the pier,
Pensive and lonely
I am too late.
Apr 2, 2013
Apr 2, 2013 at 12:12 AM UTC
one.
we traced outlines of our frames
in chalk on sidewalks
two.
You asked me if I would marry you under the oak tree
in your backyard with fireflies as our
witnesses
I said, I do
three.
We started kindergarten
today and I asked you to
build our future house out of legos
you looked at me like I had three heads and
pushed me down.
They said, Boys will be boys
you said the same thing on my porch that
afternoon but you gave me a flower you picked
from your mother’s garden and said you wouldn’t do it again.
four.
You stopped coming over to catch fireflies
and hold my hand.
My mom said that we grew apart
but I told her that we had promised to get married
in spring in your parents yard under the tree we climbed
that year when I fell and broke my arm.
She told me I fell in love like a child
but
how could i fall in love any other way?
five.
So isn’t it fitting that I fell in love with a Boy
afraid of heights?
Who never even had foreknowledge of what it felt like to fall.
Jul 6, 2013
Jul 6, 2013 at 5:04 PM UTC
Encircling...I dare the Full--
pluck eyes from their nooks,
mind from its niche.
I, incumbent of all lines drawn
and crossed...wear the metaphoric
face of All Things.
My redundant farewell is a galactic
backlog....as memory asks: may I be
excused from these tables?
By light's celerity, light all the more...
One in One, and out of One in One--
foreknowledge to Knowledge.
Encircling...I dare the Full--emissary
to mine own circle, with news so
pressing I stumble into deaths cut to
new forms of life.
I waver my convalescence, discharge
myself from the throes of creation...
a gladdened prophecy...self-fulfilled.
Encircling...I dare the Full.
Jun 10, 2012
Jun 10, 2012 at 2:21 AM UTC
why does
the world have
to look so
beautiful sometimes...
sunlight filters
through trees
kids fling water
up from the creek
to catch light in air
in my ear
smooth
spanish
groove
and it all
makes me
want to cry
because i can't appreciate
a moment
everything beautiful
is so f l e e t i n g
everything hard
and hateful
lingers
and sticks
you can't just
******* have something
good.
you can't.
during a melt
d
o
w
n
in college
i saw a counselor
that told me to face my fear of
the worst possible events happening
use my voice to project the probabilities out loud
would i lay down and die? doubtful. say what you would do.
it doesn't seem so bad when it's specific...
it's a cloud of random doom that seems unthinkable.
you realize it's all do-able
a little at a time
you will survive
but now
that is where i live
in the
subterranean gloom
with well thought through
foreknowledge of the worst
possible events
and my likely
miserable reactions
so i watch my life
c oll Aps e
and i want to
laugh hysterically
**** you. **** you. **** you. and **** you.
what the **** am i supposed to do?
reinvention is jolly,
they say
Ha!
Bah - it was just a job
another will just POP up
any moment
HA!
*(someone seriously help me,
i'm laughing so hard i'm choking)*
Gah!
who needs a mate?
not me!
solitary confinement
sure pumps out poetry
in extreme quantity,
this i will confess
solitude is good
i like quiet
music
movies
writing
reading
wine
but pray tell,
do you realize
how many hours
there are
in
one
*******
day?
when your purpose is
torn from you?
and you are left to wander
the earth alone
to find a new life mission
or the least miserable substitute?
have you felt the
gut-wrenching longing
alone in bed
in
(utter silence)
night
after
night
after
night?
not for love past
but for love new
for lust
for touch
to not feel alone
in the world
at times
i feel like a
person made of
the thinnest glass
with some nasty creature
perched on my shoulder
laughing horribly
sharpest pin always touching me
hammer always raised in the air
ready to strike.
whatever.
you're going to tell me everything is going to be fine, right?
yeah.
Aug 24, 2013
Aug 24, 2013 at 8:45 PM UTC
The pain is unrelenting,
and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come-
not in a day,
an hour,
a month,
or a minute.
If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary;
more pain will follow.
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs,
shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying-
or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity-
but moving from pain to pain.
One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails,
but is attached to it wherever one goes.
Mar 24, 2015
Mar 24, 2015 at 4:01 PM UTC
In Ulzana's Raid,
the Native- and European-American concepts of property
ownership and rights
are incompatible and irresolvable. McIntosh
had no illusions about that. He said hating Apaches for killing
whites
is like hating the desert for having no water.
I suspect the movie's not a good source of anthropological
data
and overlooks the commonalities among human communities
to focus on just a few bold characters
as all art must.
I consider McIntosh fortunate
to have died commensurate with the way he lived his life,
rolling a final cigarette, nothing between him and the desert,
and no gravediggers waiting, jesting, defecating. Also,
he is lucky to have had one last, dispassionate friend
to whom there is nothing left to say, the Chiracahua tracher
Kah-ti-nay.
Last night's performance of Beauty and the Beast
may have been the most victorious, ecstatic, cohesive
moment in our little school's history. Emily was Beauty, a
filament of energy
who doesn't like to be touched and has been known to punch
boys hard. She had memorized her lines until she was hardly
Emily but only Beauty in a blue dress unselfconsciously
hiking up her tights between the Beast's advances.
Is this done in every American town and the world
over so there's no need to feel lost or lonely
ever?
There is no context for a man
outside the platoon or raiding party, home or shop.
When violence comes to the neighborhood,
the hierarchy of communicants will hold or fold
it is then the peace work proves relevant. I noticed McIntosh,
grizzled as he was, accepted the given hierarchy, a raw
lieutenant's orders,
as he did the desert and Apaches, with a shrug and
foreknowledge
of the outcome.
If there's anywhere with no Emily or Beauty
we should bring them such blessings at the point of a
gun. But there is no place without Emily, not
the least-known prison in deepest space as long
as we do not hate or hurt or shun
the Beast.
Aug 10, 2015
Aug 10, 2015 at 6:41 AM UTC
I fell in love with you
similarly to how people fall in love
with Winter.
With foreknowledge that they will eventually
tire of the cold.
Jul 6, 2013
Jul 6, 2013 at 4:25 PM UTC
Don't know how to tell you this, but somehow it must be
that someone tells us something and I guess today that's me.
I've thought up lots of somethings and of all the thoughts I've got
the ones I could be sharing are the one's I'd rather not.
See I've made a lot of choices from the dull part of my brain
most without foreknowledge, and of course some caused me pain.
So I go about my business since I'm hired, this is true
when assigned you'd best be following the leader, and I do.
But when I'm free to think alone, I look out on the fields
and contemplate my choices now and how the future yields.
There are things you plan ahead in life and trust, though God is good,
that other folks will treat you well around the neighborhood.
Things we count on, days and nights, the seasons and the years
but words are gold, be bold and God will surely quell your fears.
The best book I am reading, besides the Bible's Truth
the story of George Washington, our founder, from his youth.
Considering the past is wise and don't repeat mistakes
do your best to state your quest, and stay away from flakes.
Give when you are able, do the right thing as it's said
a good man can't be faulted though he's human, heaven led.
Use your gifts, 'a future and a hope' He's promised man
Be wise, get wisdom, realize your time is in His Hand.
Oct 1, 2013
Oct 1, 2013 at 11:59 PM UTC
Let Saharan
songbirds attempt
If I were Hemingway, I would regale you with Mediterranean love and war, peace and harmony and depression; watch sparrows flock and block the horizon with their spectral manoeuvres; if I were Hemingway I would **** the bull myself just to spend another shallow evening staring into the finest contours of your visage and finding beauty in every imperfection.
to spell
If I were Fioravanti, I would keep my trio of siblings out of the rain and let no one know of their existence, except for you, would you allow me to hold your hand on a baked beach or kiss the malignancy from your lips or point out your flaws in the hope of somehow persuading you that you could not possibly do any better than me, when, as we all know, I am the ogre to your princess.
your
If I were Schrödinger, I would have put nothing inside the box and established that our perceptions are meaningless without the foreknowledge of earlier parameters; that were I to tell you that nothing existed within the box and you opened it, finding nothing, would that prove me right or prove to you that I take reality too seriously?
name with
If I were Plath, I would have written the name of a ghost using the blood of the miscarriage; the ghost of you haunting the dying hallways of my imperialistic mind, the ghost of you creaking on the rickety floorboards of the basement in my head, shuffling with empowerment as you frighten me to believe in the sempiternal illogical.
the finest
of
If I were Doolittle, I would uncover that song's measure and attach your name in soporifics betwixt the lines of Pound and the tantalising folds within the amerciable sapphic relations that only experience and true appreciation of the human body could ever prescribe.
detail.
Oct 8, 2015
Oct 8, 2015 at 11:53 AM UTC
The acquisition of a son
With an adequate corporeality, albeit with certain caveats,
Certain limitations in terms of progeny and posterity,
Had awaken something in the old man,
Certain forces leading him to the altar
And, subsequently, to the nursery once more
(A second son, brought to bear in the established manner.
With a minimum of drama and fanfare.)
The child was loved, in a rudimentary fashion;
While his flesh-and-blood bona fides were beyond question,
He was a consumer, a thing of constant need
More akin to a hardship than his celebrated half-sibling,
Whose command of the spotlight
Served as a gravitational pull for parental affections.
The old man passed on after a spell,
Hanging on long enough for his second son
To stumble onto the precipice of adulthood
(His mother had hot-footed it out
Almost immediately after the burial,
Choosing to stage-mother her feted stepchild)
Though his fatherly wisdom
Was limited to matters of his craft, his business,
Which was left to the young man, though grudgingly at that,
As a sop, a means of getting shet of two unwanted encumbrances.
He’d proved to have much of the old man’s gift,
Whittling and carving puppets and toys and dolls
(Though with a certain grim fury making it evident to all
That the work was not a labor of love)
Rarely stopping to speak to or even acknowledge his clientele,
Except if one of them happened to repeat the time-worn chestnut
That the toy chooses the child, in which case he laughed harshly,
All but barking *It’s the purse that closes the deal, not the ****
And then he would return to carving some doll or marionette,
Which would always seem to have a certain wan look
Around the corners of the eyes, the edge of the lips,
The look of a child’s toy equipped with the foreknowledge
That it was destined for the back of some closet shelf,
The bottom of some attic-bound chest.
Aug 28, 2017
Aug 28, 2017 at 9:11 AM UTC
It’s easy to discern the who what where and when
Compared to the divination of why.
Why are we here? Why are we alone?
Why are we tortured with foreknowledge of death?
Stop.
That’s the most important why, perhaps.
For it plucked us from the trees
And set us on course
To make some sense of our shortage of days,
To ****** the brass ring of eternity
If only in the collective memory.
(Let us here pause
And give a moment’s thought
To the countless anonymous
Who sacrificed all their
Fleet-footed hours
And all human joy
For attainment of eternity
In the memory collective
Only to have been
Promptly forgotten
In the first moment of
Posthumous silence.)
But this quest is amoral,
It does not specify
Whether fame or notoriety’s the prize.
This is the apple of Eden
The tree of knowledge.
It is the crux of sentience
(Poor sentience,
robbed by redefinition
of all salience and pride,
Left lying shop-worn and ill-used.)
It’s the fear of time, the root of crime
And our demand for assistance devine.
Are our whole lives a scream of protest
Against the known inevitable?
Can inevitability even be known
Without the benefit of hind legs?
(Why the quadruped bias?
(and what does this have to do with inevitability?)
Any more than four legs would render
‘Hindmost’ as opposed to ‘hind.’
Let us be specific,
Whether or not it’s
Neither here nor there.)
Why can’t we make peace with our fate,
And accede to the eventual silencing of that
Hated, feared, beloved voice within?
What does nothing feel like?
What does nothing sound like?
Who would be there to tell?
Imagine our lives
If foreknowledge of death,
Did not exist.
What would be sustained?
What would be lost?
What would have never become?
(I know that my ask is unreasonable at best,
The bell has already been rung.
But this is my poem and I’ll ask what I will.)
Could you live in such a state
Of innocence edenic?
Of course not; not as you are.
But then, who, what would you need to be?
If innocence were refundable,
What would that voice,
That lives in a certain place
Between your ears
(Would that voice still
be hated, feared, beloved
under the prospective circumstances,
or would it be otherwise?)
Have to say
(Does a voice ‘say,’
Or does it speak
For it’s master?)
When in quietest solitude?
Are you uncomfortable?
Will you turn the page?
Would you prefer to debate
Than to imagine?
Do we know which way the wind blows?
Are there any more weathermen?
Or are we all meteorologists?
Does it matter?
Did it ever?
For those who remain,
Let me welcome you
To the Realm of Poets and Madmen.
A distinction without a difference.
Nov 5, 2018
Nov 5, 2018 at 7:16 AM UTC
as candles
make the altar,
a day's observance
flickers a
foreknowledge
of night.
the way its
outstandingly
bright breadth
seems to blink.
unable to adjust,
to what cannot be
promised to be
sustained.
Jan 12, 2019
Jan 12, 2019 at 7:55 PM UTC
i may be an optimist,
but the truth never escapes me
the soldiers in my chest have long
abandoned their posts
with the foreknowledge that
some wars
will never be won
Apr 29, 2017
Apr 29, 2017 at 8:25 PM UTC