"higgledy" poems
They began without notice, in the city of Mombasa
By the Al shabab shooting baby Osinya in the head,
Killed the mother, leaving a slug stuck in Osinya’s head
Killing and mauling many others macabrously,
Killing for no other reason, but tribe and faith,
Their victims confess different religion and ethnicity.
They had initially lynched the West Gate Mall
In Nairobi, killing the aged and seasoned darling
Of African poetry and true fountain of peace
The dearest Kofi Awonor, in full watch of his son,
Confirming a trail of the ghastly curse of fate and death
That totted him arduously from his home in the west
Of the tropical gulag that makes the land of Africa
From where the terror maestro ; Boko haram reign scot free
Mayheming, Killing, ****** and kidnapping harmless virgins
Killing For no other reason but tribe and faith,
Their victims confess different religion and ethnicity.
They have now killed fifty peasants in Mpeketon town,
****** them in circles to puncture their virginity
and brutally kidnapping those that are not *****
Using the AK 47 and the Ak 74 to shoot and ****
Without reason nor course but failure of mind
Botched down by authenticity of holy diversity
Heavenly packaged in God’s idea of tribe,
Uhm! An African man with a gun is a brute of brutes,
Giving an African a gun is simple mess of the world
In to helter-skelter poise tilting peace higgledy-piggledy,
Killing one another like animals premised by Charles Darwin
As overtly seen in the warring Congo and CAR,
Where Africans **** one another in a stupid dint,
To ape Rwanda or no! To outshine the Jewish Massacre
In the Ammonium chambers of fuehrer Adolf ******
This stupid Africans baser than wild beasts,
Who told you that your greatness will come
from killing your neighbours; the fellow peasants?
These African men are the modern homoguerrillus,
Which one call cheap war making man
They and **** ! **** **** **** **** **** ****
For no other reason but faith and tribe,
Their victims confess different religion and ethnicity.
Gunshots of the gunmen in Africa are not
A song of the caged bird, no whatsoever,
They are cowardly maneuvers of the weak
As the weak and cowards rarely forgive,
They arm themselves to the teeth
With deadly weapons from Russia or wherever
Only to shoot and **** the old and malnourished
Peasant women, killing the likes of baby Osinya
Shooting a suckling baby to prove your heroism,
These African men are really a Whiteman’s burden,
They **** their fellows from cockcrow to chick roost
For no other reason but tribe and faith,
Their victims confess different religion and ethnicity.
Jun 18, 2014
Jun 18, 2014 at 9:45 AM UTC
Hops and topsy-turvy jumps ― blurred movement
muddles across the dewy meadow floor,
as though dawn brushes away the sandman’s magic
from the corner of sleepy eyes,
to cast an enchanting spell
A sudden hazy yet abrupt stop…
hastily, halting , frozen motionless
Stillness, as if some final destination has been reached…
Neck stretched and craning,
tilted with an eye to mother earth ;
a canted focus beyond interruption
In the blink of an eye,
with a vigor too rapid to capture,
as the nowness of urgency flashes ―
She stretches the earthworm
with the grasp of subsistence
knowing after fall becomes the long winterlude.
The morning sun illuminates the glow of the native Maple’s
glorious fiery orange and yellow color palette
A steady stream of animation rushes in and out
of the giant tree’s golden splendor
Abundance perishes with the seasonal gardens decay.
Mornings of blueberry and strawberry feasts
have left the red breasted robbers foraging
for the last rotting apples the deer have left behind.
Harbingers of spring…
Blueberry sneakers…
Gleaners of fall and winter..
“Teeek” “tuk” “tuk” “Tseep”....
fills the overhead air
with a beautifully chaotic verve
The flock returns repeatedly to and fro the towering Maple
to the ripened cornucopia of scarlet berry clusters of the Mountain Ash
The Robin’s flock ravage and gorge on the plentiful delights
Soon the crimson berries fuel of flight will disappear
as if it were only an unspoken allusion
of the passing seasons
The pearl gray sky is an ominous backdrop
for the fickle fleeting migrants
Daylight fades as the flock disappears
into a break in the clouds
fleeting unto the ominous pending winter sky…
In the blink of an eye ... life’s senescent seasons
transform the stormy whirling winds of change
bearing the golden Autumn leave’s splendor
across the rolling vista
like a higgledy-piggledy murmuration
of a migrating beautiful mess
The naked rooted scaffold’s branches stretch
across the sprawling tapestry of the wooded sanctuary.
Winter flocks of Thrush and Robins,
arrive on a frosty new dawn
Red breast feathers puff with the morning sun’s rays,
warming the tree tops leaning toward the southern sky;
Their journey here and now,
from distant mountainous horizons,
is part of a soul’s sacred circle of life…
November rivers ...the final autumn entry of 2017
Nov 3, 2017
Nov 3, 2017 at 10:26 AM UTC
Remember me?
You once called me the apple of your eye
And now you don't call at all.
I can't say we both look upon the same set of stars
because we don't.
And I can't say we both look at the same moon
when I see it from my bedroom window
because I know it is daytime there.
Remember when you taught me
to love the ocean
as we sat out together on the rocks
while you caught fish
and I caught *****
How we would fish until the sun sank into the water
and the tides and the moon rose?
Do you remember?
All of those times you said "I love you"
all the times you hugged me so tightly
How if anyone would ask about me
you'd hold me under your arm
and say, "This is my daughter!"
with the biggest grin on your face.
Do you remember?
All the stories you used to tell
about the first scrambled egg
or the higgledy-piggledy wangra
Are they still there?
Or has the heat of the Sri Lankan sun
and the hum of the ceiling fan
let these memories drift away?
Have you forgotten me?
I let you back into my heart
just so you could break it again
with silence.
You told me how bad it felt
To lose your dad.
Why did you take away mine?
Oct 31, 2012
Oct 31, 2012 at 2:34 AM UTC
I luv my ford fiesta
Her name is princess Elsa
Because she's frozen white
And because she's automatic
To drive her is a delight
We go for miles Elsa am me
Up to the towncentre
On a shopping spree
Down to Dunelms on to Tesco
Where we buy food to eat alfresco
On sunny days we go to buy plants
Sometimes tree's or flowers sweet
Some to plant higgledy piggled
Or some to plant neat
Whatever the weather rain or shine
Me and my Elsa we do just fine
She's good on fuel
And great on looks
She may not be a flashy SAV
With all its arrogant ways
But she's kinder on the environment
And in my book that's what pays
Apr 3, 2017
Apr 3, 2017 at 8:12 AM UTC
i.
Such is their reward, then,
This graceful bridge bisecting the lake at Bemus Point,
Not far from the spot where Bishop Vincent
Parsed the geography of the holy land,
Narrow beaches fronting a higgledy-piggledy of cottages,
Most comfortable but staid,
Though the odd McMansion grotesquerie
Has sprouted here and there,
Courtesy of some frozen-food magnate in Buffalo
Or casino second-in-command from Niagara Falls
(Those more famous waters, apparently,
Insufficient to slake ones thirst for the gaudy)
In any case, likely no more than admired from afar
By those generations of boys
Who, leaving their spot on the line at Crescent Tools
Or fields rife with bumble-striped heifers,
Never returned, drill press unmanned, corn crib unattended.
ii.
You’d been on those waters once, however,
Spending an afternoon both bewitching and idyllic
On a dock fronting a relatively humble beach bungalow
(A friend of a family friend or relative’s place,
The whos and whys lost to the manila folders of recollection)
With a girl of ten, perhaps twelve at the outside,
Beautiful in an untrammeled manner,
Or at least primarily, unconsciously so,
And you remember her having green eyes
Which utterly belied description
(Though that was all long ago,
Such reminiscence likely no more than the rheuminess of memory,
And you have not returned to that shoreline since.)
iii.
Such daydreams are perilous, on many levels,
At seventy miles per hour even more so,
And you shake yourself back to the present
While approaching yet another bridge
(Humble span noting humble beginnings)
Honoring the region’s most famous daughter and her husband,
Who did indeed have much ‘splaining to do,
As you proceed eastbound toward Salamanca
(Wholly owned by the Seneca Nation,
Those non-native descendants of Mertzes and McGillicuddys
Paying rent and fealty to the tribe each year)
And thence to the slump-shouldered hills
Which shelter the sauntering Allegheny,
The pines thick, green, inscrutable,
Beyond our everday squabbles,
Answerable to nothing but time itself.
May 29, 2018
May 29, 2018 at 12:26 PM UTC
I feel like an unsolved rubiks cube;
higgledy-piggledy.
Indecisive and confused,
Chaotic and muddled,
Vague and hazy.
Tongue twisted is what I feel
When someone asks;
for I can not say
anything for sure .
I am lost in the galaxy,
wandering through the forests -
I don’t know what path to take
to reach the destination set for me.
Oblivious to what I want
or what to do,
everything feels
unsure and unsteady
“It’s just a phase” is all I say .
For one day I will know,
the floor will not be unsteady
and it will be clear.
For I hold on to the hope
that one day
the rubiks cube will be solved
Jul 24, 2019
Jul 24, 2019 at 1:27 PM UTC
We’d made things once, things of substance:
Copiers, straight-sixes for Chevelles, Novas, Impalas,
And tons of film, of course, loaded into tiny Instamatics
Which accompanied us to everywhere and everything
(Unless they mystifyingly scampered away from pocket or purse,
In which case we drove, cursing and volleying blame to and fro,
Fifteen, twenty, maybe more miles to retrieve them
From the kitchen table or back of the toilet)
To document births and baptisms and weddings,
The in-betweens and hereafters,
(Renderings of children and dogs
Sitting under trees with blossoms of pink and red
The blooms implausibly bright, child and beast stolid yet smiling,
Or tableaus of tux-clad cousins and brothers,
Squinting blankly in the aftermath of a visual right-cross
Courtesy of the supernova-esque emanation
From the blue cube perched on the camera’s top)
So they would not be victims of the vagaries of memory.
All of that is gone--no, taken--from us now,
The means of production having embarked for Memphis or Mumbai,
Those things which sustained us now simply vestigial curiosities,
Like hand-cranked presses or ancient milking machines
We’d tittered at on long-ago school field trips.
The march of time and technology, to be fair,
But it has left us obsolescent as well,
Stranding us without context or clarity,
With access to neither advance or retreat
(The old photographs simply mock us now,
The red-eyed images fading to the soft tones
Of a rose at the end of its summer,
The name of the third man on the left,
Who’d worked on the line with us nearly three full decades,
Refusing to be conjured out of the thin air)
Leaving us diffuse and unordered
As the old and cracked negatives
Stuffed higgledy-piggledy between old snapshots
In an enveloped at the back of an old file drawer.
Feb 21, 2017
Feb 21, 2017 at 7:30 PM UTC
Higgledy Piggledy,
Renaissance Tapestries,
Her Majesty’s superspy spared from the hunt.
Feet of three syllables
name the new festschrift:
“Essays in Honor of Anthony Blunt.”
Dec 9, 2015
Dec 9, 2015 at 12:32 PM UTC
with little difference
prioritize patience
that there is justice
Before the sentence
treat women like KRISTAL
Boyfriend or not, harm or not to PEDESTAL
graciously keep their feelings do not have a crack and KRAK
I learned , I blinked AVOID ANY - RUINED !
Nov 19, 2015
Nov 19, 2015 at 4:23 AM UTC
*since no inspection from the untaming spectator
corruptor said, sinkhole may not have abduction
governing through the skills and power of possession
manipulation of resources gains from the uprising.
hence person of interest
created a Triads of crest
no more - no less
go for it, do mess
fence with a perimeter of staplings indulgence
keeping the dark secret floating by influence
bitter-sweet memories punctuated in by offense
higgledy-piggledy moments
of so true lies to dispense
sense of time and chime framing into a collage
not knowingly the insight of the other conspiring colleague
hot stuffy might get play by the edged ruler
*** of a golden word tightly encoded bolder
dense heritage is one of the hesitancy
privacy of those possibilities dare to disperse
inverse and reinvest the so called benefit of the doubt
sought out the figuring depth of outcome versus rehearse
Mar 13, 2022
Mar 13, 2022 at 3:39 PM UTC
It's better to throw nothing out
say now't
and let them think it's ok.
Maybe today it is
ok, but
tomorrow?
Who knows what disease ferments and grows in the mind of a man,
at times, it's all I can do
to hold back.
The dishes stack up like the odds on it raining,
higgledy piggledy and to think that they think that it's big of me
to bring it all down.
What use to me if all I can see is the end of the line?
what use a train if I don't have the time and in being late to arrive am caught at the gate?
No ticket?
long wait 'til the next one.
As the light flicks its flame across the widow's eyes
she looks up and cries,
speak out,
but again I
say now't.
They don't pay me to talk.
Mar 18, 2016
Mar 18, 2016 at 2:28 AM UTC
Not so many moons ago dwelt a swain
Whom beyond doubt bore the fairest maiden
And they loved with a love that no other creature
Ever did or shall ever bear the same love-mixture.
Dreaming dreams of forevermore together,
But as all men know, love, as light as a feather,
As fickle as unfathomable weather,
From his maiden's heart did fell and wither.
Higgledy-piggledy, the winds of conundrums
Drove him unto mighty shores of doldrums
Where waves of regrets buffeted his pale face
Whilst he sank neath sorrow-sands deep as space.
Oh, now didst blissful memories of the past
Of golden honeyed moments that couldn't last
Upon his soul's skin hung like ebony plumes
As those found by shadowy sorcerer's rooms.
Eternity paused, for neither moon nor star
In shimmering garments were beheld afar.
Nostalgic winds sang him a dissonant melody
Whilst tides of despair swished by and by.
©Kikodinho Edward Alexandros,
Los Angels, California, USA.
4th/Dec/2018.
Dec 4, 2018
Dec 4, 2018 at 10:46 PM UTC
Its color sat somewhere on the spectrum between brown and gray
(Such things being dependent on vagaries of the light,
And the perspective of the beholder)
And it served as a testament
To the muted benefits of near adequacy,
Being too thin for the portentous winds of December,
And too warm for the capricious sunshine of May,
Its threadbare functionality emblematic of its owner,
Whose relationship with those around him
(Indeed mankind and his universe in general)
Vacillated between an affronted indifference
And an implacable if somewhat muted contempt,
His commerce with his fellow man,
Excepting that required to provide him
With the basics of sustenance and shelter,
Carried on in an epistolary fashion,
Through letters he wrote,
Sometimes to those he encountered on a daily basis,
More often to mankind and the unheeding cosmos in general,
Which were stuffed higgledy-piggledy into his coat pockets.
These missives were not humdrum laundry lists
Of those slights and injuries, be they petty or mortal,
But rather soaring and high-flown in nature and tone,
More kin of the sermon than the scolding,
Celebrations of life’s splendors great and small,
More often than not those he knew little or nothing of first-hand.
He’d no intention of sharing these dispatches
With the world at large or anyone in particular;
He’d simply empty his pockets once they were full enough
To present an inconvenience,
And he’d laundered any number of them
On more than one occasion,
And when he’d passed behind this earthly veil,
All but unnoticed and unmourned,
His landlady had simply emptied the contents of the coat's pockets
And consigned them to the trash,
Believing the garment barely fit for charitable purposes
Washed and given a goodly airing out,
Let alone burdened with the detritus of another man’s life.
Jul 28, 2017
Jul 28, 2017 at 3:02 PM UTC
The truck was crushed and dented
Almost beyond recognition
When the county boys reached the scene
(Though, as one of the deputies remarked,
Having seen the vehicle tottering around town
For virtually all his born days
Still ain’t much worse than when it started)
Apparently having slid off the Stamford Road
Then down the embankment
Where it had made an unhappy embrace
Of a utility pole near the old Ulster and Delaware tracks,
A rather unhappy ending to what had been
An arguably equally unhappy existence,
Though old Doc Benner had surmised
The junkman had probably been dead
Before the truck had made the shoulder,
Or so he had said at the graveside service
(He being one of the three or four in attendance
Feeling that one who’d been a common thread
In the existence of so many for so long
Should not go without some commemoration
In this already frayed-at-the-edged little town)
And he remarked that the old man had once told him,
When the doc noted the old saw
That one man’s trash was another’s treasure,
*The main diff’rnce ‘tween trash and treasure
Is just a matter of expectation*,
And it would have been most poetic if,
After the reverend’s perfunctory hand-off to the Almighty,
The clouds had broken and a thin shaft of light
Had fallen upon the junkman’s stone,
Or perhaps a gentle rain commenced
To heal the disturbed sod,
But the skies remained a slate-gray truculence
As the sexton’s ancient pickup tottered away,
The ropes and shovels tossed higgledy-piggledy
Under an ancient and somewhat watertight old tarpaulin.
May 10, 2021
May 10, 2021 at 3:46 PM UTC
Higgledy piggledy
Hither and yon
Feeding and
Nesting and
Breeding and
Gone
Higgledy piggledy
Hither and yon
Dropping on blanket
And picnic
Undone
Apr 26, 2019
Apr 26, 2019 at 3:32 AM UTC