"inversion" poems
In a midwinter night’s dream
i found myself lost again,
or was it even this year ?
It may even go back farther
than yesterdays out of reach,
older than an ancient pyramid stone
Before the rebirth of past life deposits,
unborn orphaned motherless sediment,
flotsam of the ages adrift,
unknown for more than a thousand years
... waiting for so long to see beyond the bounds
High atop a slippery edge-cliff
i clung ―
Searching for a deeper understanding
of who i am;
Roosting like a starving bird of prey
with a broken wing
born alone ... holding on
With a fear in his eyes
that only i could comprehend
Staring way down deep in the pith,
into an internal pitch black abyss,
just begging to see beyond ―
Mindful it's so hard looking
into the eye of a storm
Intimately parsing the recurrent source
of reigning pain
Where the perpetual fog of isolation dwells;
an inversion, preventing dispersion
of the nimbus cold and dark
In the darkness, there bides a suffocating
emptiness,
A swelling silence what loudly knells,
leeching through a perennial ache
An abating voice within hollers unheard,
invisible as a bitter cold wind howling
relentlessly through the hollow pang;
Echoing the subsiding say
(squeezed out) ... of an orphaned soul
deep beneath the light
Awakening to realize ― once i was alive
and
i could feel me holding on to you
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Dec 30, 2017
Dec 30, 2017 at 7:11 PM UTC
Look up and breathe it all in
The sky is crying, exploding
with a torrential waterfall.
Inhale natures’ showering
an unblemished symphony
The black cloud’s unavowed weight
lingers invigoratingly overhead
Emotions ebb and flow
with the moment’s
immanent spirit of light;
there is a liberating sensation
that excites anticipation
of the sky’s impending
purposefully fated release ...
Heavens… flood down holy water
in a drenching act of baptism
a merciful drowning in a river
of celestial tears
Dowsing rains wash over
in a cleansing rain
Refresh the dust and ashes
the fallow summer leavings
What once was a blossoming presence,
evolving into a dimming
cold winter reign...
Now all that remains is but
a shadow of what once was;
hearts and bones nearly eroded away
by the years of fallen tears
To rinse away unrequited love’s
stagnant inversion, washing away
the invisible bonds that bind
to the loathsome heavy ball
of an unforgiving chain ...
Know the cleansing rain
is the spirit of love, washing over
a malnourished heart of soul;
exposed and bared naked
to a remiss world
Looking out with thoughtful eyes
into the boundless universe
Never to stop believing
rejuvenating dreams course beyond
this long road
Imagine the storm clouds
parting in the ominous
threatening sky
as an uplifting awakening light
comes shining through;
renewing the promise
that surrendering to love
shall renew purpose
and it feels like rain...
baby can you feel it (?)
December 2012 © harlon rivers ... all rights reserved .
Oct 5, 2016
Oct 5, 2016 at 7:24 PM UTC
It is so measured that rising arpeggio, only to fall and rise again in quicker values, through the dominant seventh to the heartache moment of that minor ninth, a very apogee of dissonance. Then it goes higher still to the fifth, holding to that Phrygian harmony before returning to the tonic minor and a measured fall in the bass. This is a deliberate descent to the sub-mediant, and Bach’s touch of magic, the equivalence with the dominant minor ninth. But then he gives us hope: an extended and joyful play through sequences that rise and fall within each bar, to rest finally on the mediant’s echo of that opening, that measured rise and the quickening fall. We have hardly smiled with relief when Bach pulls us back into the insecurity of the dominant of the subdominant, that V of IV acting like a bridge to a long, long discourse in the dominant, a pedal E holding firmly to itself whilst rising arpeggios and falling decorations and sequences pull and pull through innocently related keys. Longer and longer play the rising passages until short motives of imitation interrupt, treble to bass, tenor to alto, until: a first inversion arpeggio of the dominant seventh measures out the opening rhythm. This happens twice in short succession, as though holding the progress of the music to account. A questioning perhaps before a four-fold sequence asserts the dominant and a chorded caesura. There is a pregnant, though faintly resonant silence as Bach spins the dice of tonality and chooses the subdominant to bring the music towards a waiting Allemande. The music moves through a play of subdominant to dominant, minor to major, the mix of flattened fifth and flattened ninth. It is those intervals that determine Bach as the father of ambiguity in the 20C school of jazz harmony, Arpeggio then a falling scale, and repeat and repeat again, but moving ever higher by sequence. At last five chords – merely a shorthand for closure via the expectation of a right display of the performer’s improvisatory prowess. They prepare us reverently for the tonic minor before the stately Allemande leads the music into the elegant steps of its walking dance.
Jan 5, 2013
Jan 5, 2013 at 3:13 AM UTC
Suicide is not an option
Everything has to be done with caution
Be it wrong accusation or depression
Taking your life will reduce our population
Believe me, all you need is affection
Speak to someone who'll relieve you of your oppression
Who'll give you nothing but compassion
You may need trust and care in addition
When facing life challenges and tribulation
Take not suicide for a compensation
Try to have a little comprehension
Of the afterlife using your discretion
And also have a little conversation
Involving you and your intuition
Considering suicide may be as a result of impression
Or thought in abstraction
Or even to punish a relation
No matter the condition
It doesn't worth your life as a rendition
If you do plan of taking this action
I beg you take this into consideration
And do a bit of cogitation
That suicide is not an option
Though, it's taking it toll on the nation
Leading many to quick expiration
My fella, suicide is not an option
Try to do some reconciliation
And make sure to somebody you mention
To get your mind in a good position
Or perhaps it might change your situation
And set you in a new direction
Again I say suicide is not an option
Take this into admonition
That your afterlife may as well be in inversion
That live each day with vision
Devote smile to your face a portion
Do activities in admiration and jubilation
And in you life begins a resurrection
Thereby killing the ulterior notion
And also averting a possible perdition
Because suicide is never an option.
Jan 29, 2019
Jan 29, 2019 at 5:07 AM UTC
i'm sure
life was a peach
til he was born breach
but the inversion of his excursion
into the hands of the surgeon left him worse an'
the immersive submersion
in perversive subversion
was only urgin'
the incursion
of aspersions
for subversive diversion
as
an apparition with volition
wishin for position transition
fishin for recognition
of ambitious cognition
this in addition
to the malicious conditions
that stitched in repetitions
of neurochemical
composition
transmissions
entailing
the intensity of his propensity
to find immense suspense in the
density of a tense city hence did he
commence in the dispensary
of sound condensed sensory
sensory sensory sensory.
said the intensity of his propensity
to find immense suspense in the
density of a tense city hence did he
commence in the dispensary
of sound condensed sensory
sensory sensory.
Mar 31, 2012
Mar 31, 2012 at 7:33 PM UTC
She doesn’t let herself think about it anymore. She has a schedule now, a timetable, something that might look like a life if you don’t scratch the surface too hard.
Wake up, call the hospital. Tend her garden, call the hospital. Get driven to the hospital and sit with Dean for hours, hours, hours, go home, cry. Lather, rinse, repeat. The only thing that changes in her life is the sky and the inversion it brings.
She walks on the sky when it clouds, because it’s more solid and sure under her feet than the traitorous ground that swallowed her children whole.
She bargains when it rains, to God or Big Brother or Allah or the deity of the day, because if the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right and their god is a merciful god, He will give her family back.
Once there was an earthquake and she smiled so wide she thought her face would hurt, stood between two rickety, heavy bookcases, prayed that she would die.
The most tragic part of her life is that she doesn’t. She knows this, knows it runs through the marrow of every bone in her body, which has to be why they all ache when they see the sunrise, as if to say another day, another tragedy .
Today she wakes before the sun and hugs her knees to her chest, sits there for a good three hours after he’s called the hospital and heard the same thing as always - the only thing that changes in her life is the sky - “We’re sorry, Mrs. N----, he’s the same.” Every day it’s the same, the same, the same-
-but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Same dingy cab, same crotchety driver, same stale cigarette smell. She lets herself smoke in here because if she’s lucky that’ll **** her first, but she doesn’t fool herself into believing that. Her luck ran out the moment she heard that shot from the door, heard her husband scream and saw all the blood staining the foyer-
But she’s not thinking about that. She’s smoking and she’s listening to the sound of the tires pummeling the ground mercilessly and she’s thinking maybe I should be that ground and she’s not making much sense at all, because she doesn’t sleep anymore and she thinks she might be halfway to insane by now.
They pull up outside the hospital. She’s always surprised her feet haven’t worn a track in the ground yet that leads straight to Dean’s room. She supposes she doesn’t need one.
She pushes the door open and the spark of hope he can never suppress dies with a silent scream, because Dean is the same, her life is the same, she’s the same and the same and the same and she hates it.
Sep 22, 2012
Sep 22, 2012 at 9:02 PM UTC
Priti Patel's quote on EU migration - whatever it was...
list of common surnames: cropper, cross, crouch,
dabney, dalton, daniels, eads, easton, eccleston,
fairclough, farnham, fay, gardner, garey, garfield,
haight, hanes, hailey, ibbott, irvin, isaacson,
jack, jackson, jacobs, kay, keen, kelsey,
lacey, lacy, lamar, macey, mann, marchand,
neal, nelson, neville... sure pati japati patel -
i'll be an albino in Gujarat
if your play the sitar in a sari;
but your name sounds a bit migrant
revealing, what a weird 'back of the bus'
you seem to stand on -
you want the Mongolians resurrected?
i swear we were being ousted in line
of what Queen Sheba said to Solomon:
'olive skinned throughout the geography
and the unwelcome green men on
sponged-knickers creaming for an ******
a french dessert...'
yes pretty prior, you found home on a
continent when half of the european nations
didn't practice colonial antics -
i guess it's easier to pick on them.
but with a Patel surname you sound british
already, the great experiment worked
the anaesthetic of former colonialism
numbed via recreational Ketamine use
really numbed the skull and jaw mandibles -
i hate, i hate being conscripted into
post-colonial affairs of "why it all failed"
what a waste of the urban hubs of
Manchester or Liverpool -
where once artistic expression thrived -
i hate these post-colonial societies,
it's as if they were castrated en masse,
and they're wondering why no one has a permanent
suntan in scandinavia - maybe the raw herring diet -
cinnamon up your *** magician's trick with
space between fudge of digestion, disappearing trick
but then the cough that blinds you sweetly -
i guess post-colonial nationalism wanted to
listen to non-colonial nationalism -
a former migrant like pretty plated smell
olive skinned exploited inversion of angers
but dunked a footstep into a trip-up
with non-colonial nations -
a bit like the greek bail-out - pretty patel
is a name least likely associated with migration;
you teasing the beast out?
Apr 21, 2016
Apr 21, 2016 at 9:33 PM UTC
When she speaks, you can feel the poetry pouring out of her soul
And all you can do is stare hopelessly into her eyes and wonder
If you have ever crossed her mind
Nov 29, 2013
Nov 29, 2013 at 10:19 PM UTC
*Mirror! Mirror! On the wall
Though art the cause of many a fall
What with them endless hours adjusting and re-adjusting
Visages to desired perfection mindless of the misgiving.
Wearing masks in a variety of color
In a bid to entice a bachelor
With whose heart she’ll most disconcertingly hold ransom
Anticipating a blossom
Of a methodically engineered relationship
Minding her speech lest a Freudian slip
Nips at the bud
Her good “fortune” exposing her as a fraud.
Perfect imperfections, perfectly mirrored
By an imperfect mirror…*absurd.
Dec 11, 2013
Dec 11, 2013 at 9:11 AM UTC
Why do I choose to suffer my freedom?
Is it familiarity? A self-created religion?
I bind myself, to myself, using my own hands.
I struggle to look through my own fingers.
Is it because I can't see? Am I in a dream?
Where is the edge? Where is the seam?
I pretend to be distressed and myself believe
Its all I've ever known, the stories of someone.
I carry on, holding tight, writing more lies
A twisted ******* an inversion of life.
I catch glimpses of release, the gaps in my hands
Yet as soon as I forget, I go back in.
How can you fight something you've created?
How destroy the already annihilated?
Nothing but questions, answers are worthless.
Nothing makes sense, not even these verses.
Nov 5, 2012
Nov 5, 2012 at 3:39 PM UTC
Hands are shaking but I know they won't fail.
Stepping up the the line - my sixty mark.
This is nothing like running on a trail.
Different from hitting out of the park.
The run-up looks easy but it's quite hard.
Counting steps to correctly plant the pole.
To pull myself up, my arms must be barred.
My body must have the strength of a troll.
Powerful kick to get to inversion.
The sensation of being upside down
is nasty and takes complete conversion.
I fly up and over the bar and town.
And the difference between me and you:
my parents are proud of the high I do.
Aug 30, 2014
Aug 30, 2014 at 3:19 PM UTC
A Mass Inversion.
I have lived to witness an Apple
become a juggernaut
see the followers nod their heads in belief,
walking segregated on the streets
unaware of their own worship.
We have not yet realized
that the largest religion in the world
is no longer faith based,
technophiles fill our rural
and metro quintessential sprawl.
Their numbers swell
and burgeon with new converts
that give funding rank and file,
whom are taught to know indulgence
in name only, mistaking desire for need.
This technology based obsession
is without age or gender restrictions,
without race distinction,
it asks not for ethics,
pride,
morality,
intelligence or privacy.
It is all-consuming
just as any ideology-
as any religion,
answering the same fervent questions,
demanding tribute and changing the way you think.
-
The View Outside.
Among the whole, the slow mass conversion,
there is occasional dissension,
some who glorify a golden era or fill with nostalgia
for something they may not have even experienced,
an immaterial escapism of the present
furthered by a childish inability to accept ephemerality
and our irregular morality.
Sometimes amid this denial,
this abstaining,
there is a seed of anger that grows with gnarled roots
that twist throughout with nary a cry or shout.
It is a quiet anger,
unconditional and baseless but for an intensity,
a burning sense of being wronged,
an infection that spreads without exception.
And when your self-righteous halo eventually slips to catch
in your now flapping jaw,
your anger will fade as you choke on hard etched resolve.
Dec 21, 2010
Dec 21, 2010 at 9:29 AM UTC
*Covering the wall of my reality,
hangs the mirror of illusion;*
on its quirky plane,
I see reality's lateral inversion.
Jul 16, 2012
Jul 16, 2012 at 9:43 AM UTC
Sunday morning lie-in,
she, ny times newspaper reading,
contentedly dress perusing-shopping,
in the bed both, but separated
by the distance of the electronic void
i am raven tapping poe poems on my diminutive IPhone,
twenty four inches distant from her lips
no notice taken of the man so overcome
writing his Sunday morn poems that are
drawn so deep from places
that make him so so so glad
good quality weeping
can be best performed silently
noticing that
- he writes best when writing of others, mostly, you
- he writes when the rented invisibility cloak covers his face
and
the wellspring offers him a choice;
write weep and tear
or
write weep and bawl
or just quit everything
whimsy laughs at his slo 'mo nonsense
his choices
this tough guy supporting a mountain of others,
the inversion of his inverted triangle,
him holding up the world
the worrisome grief that wears him down
best released in tears when writing about
you, go figger
and you notice stupid stuff
like why we use 'and' when it just ain't necesssry
how the core of 'believe' is lie
that ** ** ** rhymes with woe woe woe
and
that 24 inches is quite the distance when you are
** ** ** weeping and she don't notice
and how hard writing
only love poetry can be
even twenty four inches
from your nose
Apr 2, 2017
Apr 2, 2017 at 10:19 AM UTC
And when I take in this air
The wind mirrors
The currents underneath me.
We're made of the same
Un-cut-able energy.
These under-waves that breathe
In Blooming aneurisms,
Like a great heart
Caught in the rhythm of the moon
And it's steady eyelid.
We are but capsules of this movement
On loan from the ocean.
Void-mother, salt nirvana
Breathing alongside us
And through our many faces.
Deep, hungry, all consuming black,
As the only affront to the abyss.
Her maelstrom-stomach
Now spitting wood and bottles
At the shore.
Before the inversion of her,
Loosening her keen grip on life
She settled to exist in scars
Pounding rhythm into the shore
And singing in many voices.
That masculine sun
Holding her flat, rejecting advancements,
Falls in their dance
And cannot cover her turning.
He flees the storms.
She swallows electric
Giving light to the deeper life
The great glowing thuds returned
She’s waking hearts to contain a fury,
She's making music into movement into us.
And from the movements,
Bubbles take the warmth up
Past the gaze of colossal ones
Living their lives as silhouettes.
Past caryatids in the black,
With curious eyes,
Holding up sponge-lined trenches
Threaded with eels.
Past the sand bed stretches
Thick with silt-eating things
Relishing the mud
That rises on the corners of rocks.
Past a plaice's eye
Which Crawls across his face,
In his short puberty,
Looking for dangerous shadows.
Delicate bubbles turn
Their pressured skins
Up through water currents,
To come burst at my feet,
And in the millionth morning
That comes into its opening
I am rocked like a child
In the movement I’m made of.
So I can just look forward
At the sun-blink.
Mar 8, 2015
Mar 8, 2015 at 1:12 PM UTC
In the heart of the cavern, light
that stands ancient behind time, beyond
phenomena, the observer of melodies;
This is where it all began,
those aeons lost when the mollusc
heeded the call to man.
Inward, stalked by worry and loss,
an inversion of the lines of time:
beyond the zero point of recollection,
where zoom microcosms of possibilities
a realm not realm, but like that
an existence beyond existence.
Here, arose an affliction, in
curled expanses that exist as some among
an infinitude of potentials,
worldlines, some dark and featureless,
others growing and meaningless
and some like here where sentient,
observatory, a shadow grows around
the probing ray of infant awareness.
and so the ascent, from light to light
through alleys of darkness. Vast,
the beginnings and interludes
between phantasmagoria; What
accedes of in slumber, the knowledge
of things and nothings.
And up even until the day when
the babe says 'mine'.
Apr 9, 2015
Apr 9, 2015 at 5:21 PM UTC
long days end soft
i quietly fold your smirks and raunchy laughter
into a neat pile
slid under the doorframe
legs crossed in a warm room
is it denial or just a sense of security?
i listen to the cars pass
and for once
i try not to think about whether you also
sit quietly in your blanket of personality
i cannot prevent the lingering hope
that you are my sweet inversion
oppositely compatible
puzzle pieces, torn apart
yet i sit here, perhaps my own inversion
enough to complete all of the equations necessary
with nothing but my own racing mind
and beating heart
so i decide not to think of you
and enjoy a moment of pause
in the soft glow of what isn't immediately apparent
Apr 21, 2016
Apr 21, 2016 at 9:36 PM UTC
Cosmic created verse,
A paradox of inversion and introspection,
I am I am...
Less elastic time separating from space,
Snapping back like a rubber-band,
Releasing the ether to expand,
Without keen observation,
All happening at once,
Entanglements preserved,
Lightning strikes not once,
Myriads cluster into singularity,
Birthing God again,
In minds of Hadrons measurements,
Collectors dis-uniting matter,
And matters of self,
Empty is the chamber,
That records such things.
May 14, 2013
May 14, 2013 at 6:19 AM UTC
Being silent doesn't mean I cannot speak
Not talking because I don't have the words is not being willfully ignorant
For if one doesn't understand my silence
My words would be harder to explain
Depression is a deep emotion
Like a weight that is strapped to you
Sometimes light in mass
Sometimes heavy
So so heavy even breathing hurts
Speech imposible and a hug could, even meant well,
Simply break you
An outpouring of emotion to you can be to much to absorb, almost destructive
Your ability to feel dampened, lost
Yet unseen no matter how you battle
That is what some carry
A load they can't shed
So silently they exist.
Oct 31, 2013
Oct 31, 2013 at 9:04 PM UTC
Disdain for
Traditional forms,
A sense of
Detached irony,
Self-reflexivity,
Expressed as a
Flagrant,
Meta-textual
Awareness,
adventurous
typography,
that defies
the common
relational schemes
between text
and margin
The juxtaposition
Of words
Governed by
Syllabic content,
and
freed
from
the
burden
of
syntactical
strictures
Meanings
Changed
Through
Inversion
(now read it upside down)
*
the
poem
recites
itself*
Paralyzed truth
Mimics brave fear,
Abdicating censure, and
Redressing allusion,
Liberation
abounds
in the trough
of a sine wave
Jul 17, 2016
Jul 17, 2016 at 12:11 PM UTC
Upside down in the void.
Annoyed by priests and
politicians who feast at
the trough of the ignorance
of mankind, blind to the
devastation their righteous
proclamations heap upon
Eden’s polluted shore.
Babylon’s ***** holds firm
their fate in her celestial grasp.
Standing before perdition’s
impartial flame, the liar,
the killer, and salvation's thief...
Dante’s imagination could not
conceive a suitable torment for
your lamentable offenses.
Jun 25, 2011
Jun 25, 2011 at 9:07 PM UTC
~
windy inversion
her gusty diversion
from whence is she blowing
and where is she going?
no need to whistle
as she breezes
though town;
a bit self absorbed
she brings one of her own,
drawing her chilly breath
from higher deserts,
hills and dells.
no fury like a
woman scorned,
she laughs at resistance
as she rallys the storm.
she is her own force,
and with wrending power
she renders us powerless,
toppling the powerful,
making boughs beg and
bringing trees to their knees.
we as her subjects
can only follow her bidding,
for she goes where
she wishes.
a woman unfettered,
a goddess unleashed;
she does whatever
she pleases!
~
*post script.
an offshore Pacific low, drains high pressure air over the Pacific NW's eastern deserts, east through its major Cascadian arterial for air and water, the Columbia River Gorge. either way, whichever way she blows, America's windsurfing capital, Hood River, Oregon, wins! out here where she empties into the Willamette valley... not so much! many homes dark tonight, though mine is not one of them.*
Mar 15, 2015
Mar 15, 2015 at 9:49 PM UTC
I look through eyes
Which seem to be blind
Searching for beauty
I cannot find
I listen with ears
That must be impaired
I only hear words
Which make me scared
I think with a mind
That cannot deduce
Why am I here
And what is the use
I feel with a heart
That searches for love
But it’s only you
That I can think of
BOEMS BY JA 544
Jul 19, 2016
Jul 19, 2016 at 9:46 AM UTC