"genealogy" poems
all i see now are the silent ruin
of words teeming with wisdom
in every trail. you are gleaming
in the moony boondocks,
Ibabá remembers you as you were -
timeless and ruminative,
pursuing the source of rivers.
our sublime versifier,
the crucifixes now tremble without
the fullness of your flesh.
each page is turned without
the hover of your voice yet
stills its resonant message in my mind's premises like redolent graffiti.
striding river-pace,
once in moonlit Orfeo
graced by your sibilant being,
leaving only the strongest of impression
on the surly couch, a toppled glass
of Shiraz remembering your attendance
leaving the clamor of the audiences
real to touch, elusive in thought.
before the war was the ever-present word, and after the fray was
the armistice of the Sun where in
humdrum Sampiro, your fire's genealogy
is in the hands of the muse!
idly go the hours, wading everlong past
Calle Herrán - the bells of Paco Church
tell in this imperfect hour
the roads where you once traversed,
travailed and perhaps beer-maddened,
putting a face in the metaphysical!
in your banquet i partake
the wisdom of your wine
and the reason of your flesh -
the gods delight in you,
o, Manila of all Manila.
Oct 2, 2015
Oct 2, 2015 at 2:05 AM UTC
****** bone feathers and yellow beak imbedded in brain
exposed an aviary corpse when the burial dust settled
the last Dodo fell with eighty eight avocado trees cut
down that day and they fell like tipped cows slow
slow fast thud dirt sprayed like winter breath
but before trees tumbled and avocados
rolled downhill north sawteeth
scratched bark and cut
at one hundred fifty
degree angles
and wedges
pried tree
trunks
while the last Dodo slept in the last inhabited Dodo nest
like the last of a long genealogy abhorring what was left
of a final family
a weak decrepit Jones or Smith
tumbles down stairs
of a two story home
in Maine.
Oct 4, 2010
Oct 4, 2010 at 9:27 PM UTC
*T'is a man's natural bias to ***
as a **** sapiens erectus,
positioned standing up
celebrating the evolutionary advancement
of his genealogy, his ancestors' first
ah ha moment
but as time went on,
and much time did he possess,
in the course of a single life
full of multiple urinations,
to think upon this
deduced that a man peeing,
but a metaphor
for the unpredictably of life
to the right,
to the left,
but never straight ahead,
such is life denatured,
when you think the path is clear,
you *** on yourself unintentionally*
May 21, 2014
May 21, 2014 at 12:33 AM UTC
Seven "Wire" girls
One after the other,
Before being blessed
With our baby brother,
Seven "Wire" girls
The first was Elise,
Followed by Annie
Before Margaret made three,
Ruby arrived in the middle
As the case may be,
Not to be left behind
Along came Mimi,
Sweet Stella and Mary
Brought up the rear,
Before the appearance
Of brother D.G. so dear,
All the children
Of Maggie and J.B.,
Now you know as much as me
About our family genealogy.
August 8, 1995
2k
Everyday I am born to gods relaying
lineage through winged messengers.
****** radiance enkindles immaculate retinas
in solar flares
and picturesque mornings' idolatry.
Tones entrancing, blue jays
or northwest mockingbirds,
their range of majestic differences
eluding attentive innocence,
elation ebbs to pain's perpetual flow,
streaming hypno-suggestive claims
finding me inexorable
to beliefs I've not died.
Impassioned voices usher me through,
by mid-day I've learned
to speak their tongues,
strange hisses
and twisting trebles
an attempted appeasement for
conforming to continued cyclical living,
instinct selection seeking final detention,
rebirth a trapped evolutionary trait.
Dreading each twilight,
coping through whichever maiden
may allow my musings
to conform to her form
for the night,
overlapping until I
am but a shadow
dominated by her presence,
her brilliance illuminating every scar
of the side perpetually left
to the dark,
enlightenment held
in the warmth of her touch
until she too
falls beneath the horizon.
Sun setting upon this silhouette
and whispering tomorrow
in stagnant sleep speak,
settling to sacrifice's sufficience.
I fear this rest.
Gleaning premise from barbaric genealogy
qualitated as residual spatial pandemic,
leaving this life cycle
reduced to just one more death.
Oct 21, 2012
Oct 21, 2012 at 9:17 PM UTC
You turned me into a paperweight.
Ambling out of your genealogy,
you chiseled me to the marrowbone;
walk tall with your invisible chains.
You turned me into a paperweight
marooned on polished mahogany –
conquered West-Indian trees;
walk tall while your mastery wanes.
You turned me into a paperweight.
From your bottomless, two-ton
tongue came my disfigured heart –
walk tall, you pyrite suzerain.
You turned me into a paperweight,
deserted on paperwork seas,
ball-and-chained to the wooden beach –
walk tall in your insidious vein.
You turned me into a paperweight.
I fell, clutching the snowflakes,
and held your whole ********* useless life together –
walk tall, play that catchpenny game.
Jan 13, 2013
Jan 13, 2013 at 12:35 PM UTC
She sailed across in 1882,
From a town in Cork called Skibbereen.
To work and save was all she knew;
Just a lass she was, only eighteen.
She wed a fellow **** a charming sort,
He sired three children, then he left.
She had no lawyer had no resort;
He left her broke, marooned, bereft.
My mother told me stories of her Irish Gran;
She said the woman had a brogue;
When she got old her hair was white as sand;
The no-good husband was a rogue.
My mother asked her many times about her life;
“What was your childhood like in Skibbereen?”
“Ach, it was nothing but hardship and strife;
The times were harsh, and meals were lean.”
She never went back across the sea;
Never set foot in her country again;
Lost touch with the whole of her family;
Was penniless at her life’s end.
And now my mother too is gone;
She died with one regret;
She never got to see the place;
The house where her grandmother slept.
My mother, I did what you could not,
I made this trip for you.
I touch the stone in the very spot
Where the root of our family grew.
It’s nothing much to look at, a ruin in a field;
But I take a moment and grieve;
This is where our fate was sealed;
When that girl decided to leave.
She left her homeland, all she knew;
Sailed off to the great beyond;
The one thing she could never undo
Was the rupturing of the family bond.
My mother, you made us hold our family dear,
To promise our love so strong;
Was it because you saw so clear
Your grandmother’s pain so long?
I bow my head and say a prayer,
And ask for a portion of grace;
For you and her, travelers over there,
In a foreign, mysterious place.
I hope you’ve met her in that land,
And maybe now you understand.
Jul 22, 2013
Jul 22, 2013 at 7:14 PM UTC
Incendiary asperity:
The world's existentiality
Agony, the Merciless & Mercenary
Scourging me entirely.
The Angst of the Aeons
Are the pedigree, the genealogy, the history borne to emancipate Me as a Vessel of Sanctity
For the valiant souls
Are the souls of transcendence, who revere in remembrance
The Amour of the Yore
My Vestibule Heart
Expands, contracts, being consecrated demands just as
Starry-Wombed the Cosmos, we
Must grow, burgeon through our learning & yearning, deserving & pining for the Promise of Morrow
For we were not formed
To wallow in sorrow.
As I gaze to the heavens
O, ***** and Gomorrah I remember
The Wife of Lot looks back forever: emblazoned as a Petrified December,
Then Fire & Sulphur descended, mankind nearly ended;
What is the lesson?
Of faith we are descendants.
Why do you
Roil my ravaged and brutally savaged soul?
Must bitterness be the wage for days spent having prayed
On my knees, for armistice, by The Empyrean One’s decree?
Though I have fallen,
I shall rise up
For the Fate’s Auric Visage radiates light upon the leaven,
Dost ferment the flesh dominating mine spirit.
Hearkening to
The susurrus of the Sovereign of Songbird’s Sacrosanct Love.
Let the Ethereal Tides of Time
Bathe me in baptismal & divine tribulation, trial
For a writhing while,
Sacrality is a war,
The Primal Instinct’s Immemorial Diminuendo.
Where has fake paradise of the Sylvan Shine
Those forested, emerald Eyes
That glisten in mine dreams gone?
Your visage twas my divine.
Though I am forlorn,
The Cosmo-Plexus of Empyreal Love hath sworn
To the Days of Yore
That I shall soar once more.
To my Enfettered Soul,
Excelsior.
Jan 1, 2019
Jan 1, 2019 at 1:20 PM UTC
You can surely decipher the scratches
On my interior wall, just inside the pile of bones.
There are hieroglyphic reliefs on my brow;
My simian eyes are the windows to my genealogy.
I am refurbished, re-modeled, re-drawn, re-worked;
I am not born again.
Along the hollow trunk, dragged to the bone pile,
Scratches and claw marks attest to the competitions.
On the flip side of the tablet, evidence the wax impressions
Of migrant refugees landing in Hibernia.
Nuclear scan my revealing contours
Of imperishable, ingrained, indelible markings
To unearth former loves,
Parsed and re-read in the morning light,
Not unlike outlines of Mesolithic settlements.
The male landscape is as seismic as the plates beneath the seas,
Where no winds sculpt, no suns scorch, no moons shade:
Only the timeless, steady, relentless currents.
Feb 14, 2019
Feb 14, 2019 at 10:31 AM UTC
Everyone is anxious
For Chekhov’s gun is still on the wall
It has not been fired
And we are soon approaching the next act
What do they wait for?
A provocation?!
Dear college age white boy
(Not unlike myself)
Your pseudo-nihilism bores them
We all know these things are just for show
Besides we see how much of an elitist you are
And how little you understand the words you are saying
If Nietzsche’s life were recast
You’d be the man beating the Turin Horse
Why does he say such things?
Does he understand the human mind, the human condition?!
We all wait for the collapse to come
And all of its children to return home
For we are already all aliens to each other
And we know what sweet flowers can grow from ashes
If life is to be a garden
I intend to be a worm
Does he really mean that?
We can see in his eyes he is not convinced
How long have we been going in these circles?
Or is it true that I am unique in this regard alone?
Every philosopher
Every poet
Every self perpetuating artist has their bag of tricks
I have whatever I can pillage
Everything that can be said
Has already been said
He am going back into the gallery
And drawing mustaches on all the faces
And as the audience leaves
Chekhov’s gun remains untouched, suspended by a thread
And this time only
There are no deeper meanings
Aug 30, 2018
Aug 30, 2018 at 2:11 PM UTC
all my poems are unique general principles
~for Helene Mendelsohn~
“A general principle never comes to life in my mind except by exhibiting itself in various special forms and in
crowds of instances for each form":
R.G. Collingwood
each a construct - an arch-i-texture,
each a crowd of a single instance
special forum, a dialogue differentiation,
a conjugate particle,
forming up, in marching order,
a singular troop, a base case singular,
a soldier especially demanding,
“Of Me, Write, Write”
for within my insight,
a one-off sighting,
one glinting wave reflecting,
its one millisecond exactitude of existence,
reforming unseemly, a new but not!
a seemingly similar shifted shape,
but no wave is a precision repetition,
perhaps a passing familiarity
of its precedents, antecedents,
at best
an instance borrowed and paid back
to the generosity of time
for a fully developed statement of a
general principle,
even a primary secondary textual emendation,
requires a unique naming definition
being born and dead dying while you are blinking,
does not understate absolute value,
a principle exists to give absolution,
so the moments resets,
perpetually,
but its own resolution is n’err forgotten
do you see the crowd of inferences
herein contained?
the principal unique,
poem plucked from passing sun ray,
a tickling hair of a brazen breeze,
one wave, one wave reconstituting a
millennium of preceding lives,
deriving its abbreviated genealogy
of droplets of prior principles
forever reinterpreted
so I gave you back
words you knew
but in a new combination
establishing this poem,
its constituents,
as a unique general principle
there is a prior poem, new, unique
in everything
Jul 21, 2019
Jul 21, 2019 at 10:06 AM UTC
Embarrassment.
We all know what it is.
It's the son of Mr. Miscommunication
and the lovely Ms. Stupidity
Embarrassment isn't a kind thing
It crawls into your stomach and pokes at you
only to remind you
of your misfortune mis-step.
With all of Embarrasment's toying
you become uncomfortable
you sweat
you fidget
but it's still there
that, hopeless feeling of stupidity that
eats at you.
Embarrasment's quite flexible,
he likes to move around
the more you think, the farther he goes
from your stomach's trouble to your chest
where he hurts your heart
and lodges your lungs
At this point,
we all know what happens
but
I'm far too embarrassed to explain it.
Sep 22, 2013
Sep 22, 2013 at 11:53 PM UTC
POEM - PAPER FILES-II
Clumps of paper around my nest
What can be worse, and what is best?
No one’ll ever think me a genius
They think I’m just a total fanabulistus.
Files and records dwell in our living space
We'll be in a turmoil until most are erased
Much good info is contained here.
Files of many - you have no idea!
The Doomsday Clock now spins toward its close
Around the world one sees many foes
Rumors of war are rumors no more
Papers, files, all over the floor!
Learning new words, many new laws
The most recent gives me much pause
Transhumanism - Do check it on Google
This’ll surely leave your head in a noodle!
People live in my files all day long
I have poets, paupers, authors, Nazis, a full throng
I’ve got murderers, seducers, files of White Magic,
These tales, including emails, reveal much that is tragic.
Scandals abound to be found in my files
Even histories of those known very well
They’ve traveled a long way from us
Surely, now, dwelling in Hell.
Genealogy takes much space in 4-drawer files
The information stretches for miles and miles
Why must I collect dead dust no one sees?
Would that I toss ’em all, just like dead leaves.
Reading does nothing but make me write
Why o why can’t I finish this fight?
I create more as I go along.
Never, never, time for a song.
Writing gets better, but quite like a curse
Everything's quite good, but could get much worse
The Writer's game is not very cozy
Sometimes it appears to be pretty ****** lousy
The hall and bedroom, closets and all
Never see Light - Spring, Summer + Fall
Boxes, old clothing, day/night sight unseen
Time to get over it, and clean, clean clean!
Carol Rae Bradford-Amended 5:17 a.m.
Sunday, 4:00-4:34 a.m. Nov. 23, 2014
Apr 25, 2015
Apr 25, 2015 at 7:40 AM UTC
I’ve been fighting, my whole life
As I see you enjoy your time
I can’t help to wonder
Of who you truly are
You know you’ve been playing life
On easy
While the rest of us try to fight our way
To the top
You’re out here looking to the bottom
As if you’re immune to the fall
Don’t worry it won’t hurt at all
The accuser works hard
But you need to work harder
And if you’re scared then remember
At least you won’t make it past the bottom
“These days seem so dull”
Can’t say I can relate to your problem
Wondering of what you could be
I’m out here pinching pennies
Just to make it through the mourning
Let me hate you from afar
It’s what cowards do
Wishing you could join their misery
And marinate in hate
No one understands them
For only they have the right
To rule the world
Your struggles never mattered
It’s not what they focus on
They’ll keep on tossing and turning
Wishing they could be just you
But for now just enjoy your privilege
Before the tides turn
Life wasn’t always fair for them
But life wasn’t always fair to you too
Jan 21, 2021
Jan 21, 2021 at 5:23 AM UTC
Stuck inside for quite a few days
After the sky hurled down the ice, snow and freezing rain
Leaving bitter-cold temperatures that are quite frightening to hear
All the news reports suggest “staying inside and being safe”
I've decided to spend the days reading some on my collection of books
On presidents such as Lincoln, Truman, and Kennedy.
Sifting through information I've received of family stories and genealogy
Writing letters to an old home-bound friend in another state named Dot
Sipping hot chocolate and Cinnamon toast by the roaring fireplace
Copyright 2014
All Rights Reserved
Really I’m sitting by a cold sliding glass door wearing two sets of clothes writing this free-verse poem.
Jan 6, 2014
Jan 6, 2014 at 10:37 AM UTC
Dynastic lineage
Of
Kindred people
Our
Family tree
humanity
Genealogy.
May 21, 2014
May 21, 2014 at 3:35 PM UTC
The world was wandering.
On their own perishable wilderness.
Researching to eradicate the truth.
From the eyes of the people.
They gave them handkerchief.
And the human beings received it.
with gratefulness, they dont know, they' re deceived.
They taught them how to blindfold their vision.
Although, they bump, hurt and wounded.
They smile, knowing that was just fine.
But the Serpent too grinning.
Putting the circuit of brainwashing in their minds.
They dont understand, they were pull away.
From the Way, which give them forever life.
They thought, it was ok to continue.
They fed their children with the same theory.
And the children pass it on to their children.
All through their lifetime, everything will build confusion.
As the end will knock into their doors.
Crying and regret will be their campsite.
Full of darkness and a dungeon of fire.
The light will be absent there.
And this is their worse graveyard.
May 25, 2010
May 25, 2010 at 12:25 AM UTC
To presume to write to someone about courage
and not complaining, don't importune or make dying people cry.
I've always said Leave me alone with autumn.
Don't stand around my bed, I won't be in it.
Over 7 years after he died, I finally looked
through my father's papers. Couple of unclaimed insurance policies,
savings bonds, our genealogy and on graph paper in an engineer's
block lettering quotations from The Seat of the Soul.
Reincarnation and karma are the chicken soup of the soul,
the after life is the reward for our colossal imperfections.
Along with banking instructions, he'd underlined
this: Your soul is immortal. It exists
outside of time. It has no beginning and no end.
Every time you ask for guidance you receive it.
If we are not at home in the world, contributing purpose,
we lose our desire to stay here -- and we die.
The physical world is an unaccountable given in which we
unaccountably
find ourselves and which we strive to dominate to survive
or it is a learning environment created jointly by the souls that share it
and everything that occurs within it serves our learning.
Sin is activity directed toward self rather than toward service
to others. Sickness is sin. Almost any condition can be corrected.
You are part of God, therefore, think in a godly manner.
If you cannot accept this, forget it all. Do not even begin.
The first act of free will: How do I wish to learn?
If we participate in the cause, it is impossible not to participate in the
effect.
We shall come to honor all of life sooner or later.
Until you become aware of the effects of your anger, you will
continue to be an angry person.
Walking is the most commonly suggested exercise. Also, breathing.
"Thy will be done." Concentrate on that!
These expressions of certainty, conjectures and guesses
were inscribed by him in block letters on graph paper.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 6:50 PM UTC
My father lost the balance of his mind
in World War II
& the rest followed from Parkinsons,
Dementia, PTSD, paranoia
& ghosts that haunted him
in the middle of the night.
What did he die for?
So politicians & generals
could manipulate us into believing
that endless war is “normal”?
So bankers could pocket billions
while children starve and sleep in the streets
in this land of so-called liberty?
So veterans can beg for money
with jars draped in red & white flags
outside the grocery store
& we all pitch in the silver?
Someone please tell me that this is not why
I was emotionally orphaned at birth
or why I can not recall his weathered hands
without seeing them tremble.
Aug 25, 2015
Aug 25, 2015 at 6:52 PM UTC
genealogy
family tree treasure hunt—
come to your census
Dec 9, 2019
Dec 9, 2019 at 3:46 PM UTC
You are my dear foreign *******
You have become our watch word
You conquered the whole world
You are a piercing, powerful bird
You are a big vulture
The destroyer of Indian culture
You devoured almost all the other birds
It is very pleasing to hear your words
Once you made the sun never set
Many rules have you got
Have you ever followed them yet?
For the rich and the elite you are a pet
Everybody wants to make friends with you
Why do you bless a chosen few?
Your genealogy is rather difficult to cite
Your access to the rural poor is a pathetic plight
In alien places you come to our rescue
The entire human race looks for you in a queue
The readers wonder who you are.
You may not be a living creature.
I don't want make a lot of fuss
It is left to the readers to make a right guess
Dec 27, 2010
Dec 27, 2010 at 6:11 AM UTC
ah, but indeed, the conscious effort, the twin tongues in the eyes making eyes less passive, to talk in remote places of silence, to decode the encoding, and still doubling up the silence, indeed the conscious effort of lost colours with too many contorts, with only a few comparisons to understood mathematics of a U or parabola.
why do i have to read a poem?
why do i have to read a poem?
why can't i just look at it?
why do i have to give you a start
and finish interpretation
with a genealogy of lifting up
the first sound like a crying baby
and laying into the cold earth
with a tombstone of a full stop?
why? why? why?! can't i appreciate
a poem like an x-ray of paintings
with the two opposites? can't i
grasp a poem on the outlines of curves
and attach myself somewhere in between
not necessarily at the beginning
and making me into a river of narration
following you? poetry can't be music
any more, bob dylan tried and was
criticised for attempting a qualifying degree
of the index pointer and a nodding approval;
poetry now akin to painting...
i don't want chronology or genealogy,
i want the scattering, the lost paragraph,
the never attempted paragraph...
where i begin or end is up to me...
disown me poems... i want my poems
to make me an orphan - completely rejected
by the hands that tilled the blanks of
what became unearthed and poached
into pun plump potatoes of eager jaw and
rattling teeth: i want paintings! i don't want music!
Mar 15, 2016
Mar 15, 2016 at 9:35 AM UTC
Sometimes nothing is as it seems.
It may appear like nothing but dreams.
Like a novel, a story, or mystery.
Might not always be happy, but misery.
Enchanting, captivating, thrilling or mesmerizing.
I can sure read, and always been good with memorizing.
reading, writing, spelling,
marketing, wording, and selling.
Like a game of chess, one wins on one side,
like the ocean changes with tide.
As to the novel that reads out in due time.
As can poetry rhyme.
Can be a quip with few words--oh what the hell!
Perhaps a story with witches and wizards casting a spell.
Some ring true to others and others do not.
from copy written lyrics through court battles some fought.
From poems, to letters, a story, or script,
to rhyming, signing, telling or reading lines--do not skip!
From astrology, psychology, genealogy too.
A history pattern developed and a story plays through.
As art to a painter, as student to teacher.
As buyer to seller, as in scripture to preacher.
like a role played by an actor, as a craft that they learn.
like fire is from matches on to paper that burn.
We take on different roles that we write, not just one.
Whatever the story or memory be, it can be fun!
Some are serious, some not and some just with humor.
'Poetry is like magic'- "Oh that's just a rumor!"
Sometimes like a fantasy, or a dream state illusion.
To decipher a code within words, to break up confusion.
Like a detective that finds clues, and puts pieces together,
as to the bride and the groom who stays married forever.
From seasons, to passion, from faith we write.
from heartbreak to storms and the ghost stories that fright.
As the pen is to the paper, in language we know it.
As the rhyming or feeling soul of the poet.
Oct 11, 2017
Oct 11, 2017 at 7:42 PM UTC
around the time Hurricane Matthew was
tearing through Florida, it was 10:34pm in
Divide--
A Coors bottle pressed into your beard,
settled on your bottom lip in contemplation
a boyish reverie spun between us when you spoke
softly relaying the genealogy of the Hatfields & Mccoys,
Ole Ran'l, Devil Anse piping in, your accent seeps through
real Midwestern like--stops when you're on about prayer
trees and La Llorona
But I was deeply introspective,
heavily burdened by a Randy Travis song
how earlier that morning your fingers
had found their way around my hips--
mine around your waistband, down your spine
a helpless explorer driven across the mainland
transversing shoulder blades, fascinated by chains
around your neck, nooses, playthings or jewelry
how around 3 am your gravely voice sought me
out across a sea of torrid thoughts to ask if I was cold
yes. probably.
and when we start the decline, tripping lazily over moss clumps
dead grass, fallen trees, I storm and plow ahead because
when in doubt, race yourself.
Sheltered by the truck gate,
you've come up ahead and stand
in front of me, unassuming
both hands complacent--
so I ask you to kiss me
and there's a fiddle playin'
in my ears, a highway of
country streamin' through
my veins, or,
something
like that.
Nov 20, 2016
Nov 20, 2016 at 4:51 PM UTC