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Jason Cirkovic Apr 2014
My mother should be an author
She carves her soul into millions of pieces
Leaving it behind all of the family photos
When I see my mother
I see a woman
Who wants to hide her soul in a needle
Just so the screaming can stop in her mind,
These bottles are rattling in the living room
You see they have put shackles on her heart,
She can't love anymore
Without having ***** in her water bottle.

Where is she hiding her beer?
I feel like my mother is giving me a scavenger hunt
From the shards of glass that were left on the baseball fields
My mother used to take me to.

You know she always wasn't like this
She was strong minded and had a big heart
Tonight I will tell you the story of a woman
Who lost her soul to the Keystones to the Miller Lites
To the ****** Mary’s.
Let's rewind time
See ******* the soul in ten years

10- I look into my mother's eyes and I start to cry
Because I'm looking at a woman who I don't know anymore

9- I refused to bail her out of jail again
Because I'm afraid her kidney will fail if she drinks again

8- My mother staggered into the theater and disrupted the whole play,
My cast mates turned to me and asked, isn't that your mother?

7- I had to hold my mothers hand
Because she was throwing up the cocktail of drugs and alcohol

6- Daddy had to get mom out of jail she was drinking again

5- My mother throws the bottle across the room
And told me the reason why she drinks is because I'm Autistic

4- My mother overslept for my piano recital,
I didn't think it was a big deal
But I remember she spent the whole night crying
With a wine glass in her hand.

3- Mommy I didn't know your prescription came in a needle

2- Mommy the prescription say 2 pills a day
why are you taking 6?

1- My mother went to the doctor
Found out that she has Rheumatoid Arthritis
I don't know what that means,
But I know she will still be strong right?

0- She took me to a Dodger game for my birthday.
I remember Sammy Sosa hitting a home run that game
She told me that the only person that can **** your soul is yourself
love runs deep
and true like the Isar

flowing as an
amorous stream

immersing lovers
in the surge of
golden currents

its thrilling
buoyancy
lifting the
beloved

reaching sanctuaries
on soft grassy banks

finding solace
in trickling eddies

sustaining the
most hungry
of hearts

Isar springs
from a far off
continental
pinnacle

tipping from the
mystic peaks of
mythical Valhallan
tables

royally set to feast
the unabashed love
of Tristan and Isolde

she
pours
as an
ambrosial
libation
brewed
by master
Brewmeisters

coursing through
the veins of all
Bavarians
she sweeps across
lush Alpine meadows
anointing the water
with nectarous
edelweiss fragrance
and budding sprigs
of mountain laurel

generous streams
gently cascade
down the Alp’s,
sloping through
picturesque
valleys,
sustaining the
blue on white
Maypoles of
busy hamlets
crafting the
things of life

the glacial melt
of Spring swells
the flows of
a rising Isar

bringing new things
from far off places
heralding arrivals
revealing epiphanies
washing the
deepest stains
carrying away
the unholy flotsam
of loved
starved souls

proclaiming fidelity
tributaries are joined
in a holy union

once submerged
hidden doubts
yearnings and
unrequited
longings
are banished
in a mornings
lifting mist
charting new
courses for
companionship

summer reveals
sparkling waters
winding its way
through beds
of polished stones

during the
easy season
the river offers
respite from
pressing heat

clear waters
invite bathers
to dip a toe,
wade deep or
fully submerge
oneself in pools
of rejuvenation

British Gardens
offer spectacle
of self affirmed
nudists and
surfers tacking
atop waves,
while spectators
marvel from
protected alcoves
yearning to
peel off
extraneous
layers of cloths
to experience
the joy of naked
freedom

during gay times
carefree summer
lovers intoxicated by
the sweet scent of
blooming tulip trees
rendezvous in
hidden glades

breathlessly
relishing the
intimate reveries
of seclusion
embracing
renewed
discoveries of
fathomless desire

along canals
laborers find
the recompence
of a well earned
day of rest

families lay blankets
to define the space
where circles of trust
are assembled,
where identity
is sculpted
and family folklore
is handed down,
entrusted to the  
guardianship of
a new generation

the boughs of
broad leaf trees
seat heralds
of songbirds,
gracefully shading
the resting with
a welcomed lullaby
while shielding loungers
from the remorseless
hum of a busy city

water and
love unite
forming a base
compound element
nurturing companionship
gleaned on the gentle ebbs
of a green river calling  
its estuaries to rejoin
its fluxing host

in Autumn
the foliage of
the glorious season
paints a Monet
masterpiece
a life of love
has wrought

dazzling
watercolor portraits
are splayed onto the
glass surface of her
magnificent face

revealing
the depth
and dimension
of loves full
pallet of life's
seasons
beheld
in living
color for all
to behold

enthralled we
marvel at the
wondrous
portraiture
nature
composed
urging us to wade
into the golden pools
baptized by the grace
of reconciliations from
the dislocations of
expired seasons

as the hard times of winter arrives
serrated edges of ice floes creep
across the snow laced stones
reminding us how jagged
seasons may be

the gray steel water challenges
the warmest hearts of love

but elegant bridges
crowned with
statuesque keystones
arch across the water
joining the river walkways

the knowing statuary
of a city's mythic guardians
are ever watchful
assuring the Isar’s flow
remains unimpeded
and uncorrupted

the beloved of
Munchen sleep well
during the harshest
Bavarian nights
knowing the Angel of Hope
gleams through the darkness
her fluttering wings
sounding surety
to the faithful

her protective pinions
sprinkle gold upon the frozen river
planting the hopeful seeds of spring
whispering reassurances that
love will never be extinguished

Music Selection:
Bette Midler, The Rose

Composed for the marriage
of Maxine and Glendon McCallum
Munchen
7/4/14
Composed for the marriage
of Maxine and Glendon McCallum
Munchen
7/4/14
Silence, and it's again with the eerie,
if you're
like me and getting weary of the eerie
what you need to do is scream loud enough
to wake the dead,

that being said
prepare yourself for the zombie apocalypse.
A metallic flash of crushing energy and voracious sound exploded through the facade of the Union Station. The sleek classical columns and Constantinian Archways crumbled into a zephyr of advancing smoke and billows of dust. It was like watching the collapse of Sampson after a haircut at Delilah's.

A flash of light
and thunderous sound
knocked all the people
to the ground

chunks and bits
of concrete flew
the Union Station
in a whiff just blew

apart into pieces
dust and jagged glass
nothing withstood
the tumult of the blast

scattered and broken
in desolation lives ended
innocents slaughtered
dreams suspended

what vexed and angry force
could light this terrible torch?
crumbling arches tearing keystones
this iconoclastic scorch

a sickness you say
of body, mind and spirit
too aggrieved and resentful
derangement gets the credit

ghostly shadow's gather
specters of force and might
pervasive threats devastate
some will not return home this night

happenstance of time
fickleness of fate
strange coincidentals
all pass through this gate

Who set this fuse?
who lit the torch?
that blew apart
our country's heart

a mind of ugly sickness
and a soul full of pain
a heart bent on malice
the definition of insane

does the culprit stand in glee
at the carnage of this act
does that type feel anything
for this murderous attack?

What profit them
from the agony of terror
holding our imagination hostage
only compensates the bearer

Before this dreadful perversity
all sat well in the land of plenty
freedoms serenity guaranteed
citizens crowned with sanctioned liberty

but the evil doers hate us
for our beliefs and what we have
this heinous deed of mayhem
alone shall make them glad

whoever lit this fuse
and lobbed this bomb
rest assured ****** terrorists
we'll place you in your tomb

The sirens blared throughout the plaza of the station littered with debris.

"*******. *******."

"What happened?"

"Whaaa"

Sirens blared.

Cries lifted up to the Lord. Moans and groans of incomprehensible injury were uttered.

"Where is she?"

"Donna!!"

A young cop came running from across the street. Unable to comprehend what he was witnessing looked on with shock and awe overwhelmed at the extent of the damage. He stood astride a dust covered cabbage patch doll. He kicked it aside.

"Jesus Christ." he gulped.

"What happened.?"

Boom Boom!!!!!!!!!!!

Indeed, what happened?

John Lee ******
Boom, Boom

Washington DC
8/2/09
jbm
Rob Rutledge Oct 2012
These halls seem somewhat hollow,
Whose walls once knelled with
Wit, charm and sorrow.
The silence erodes the keystones' arch
Subdued subjects that once did sing
Depart.

That ancient bell tied to towers steeple,
No longer speaks for the wants
And needs of it's people.
For no man, woman or child
Could be found and riled
To hold fast and grasp the rope.
Hold firm and ring the bells of hope.

The sound of truth cuts fine.
Old lies no longer aloof.
When smoke does rise
From thatched houses roof,
We may live to see the proof attached,
Foundations subsiding.
Revolutions confiding
Inside the very stone itself.
Mortar fights Mortar
Till neither has health.
Candelabra arbitrates,
Fiery death from water.
The dual will slaughter us all.

It shall last till the hall can not past the moment of the present.
All its tenants cast out to the depths of mortal unrepentant.
A more pleasant alternative to uncertain death
May stray your way in an unwanted effigy
Cunningly disguised as yourself
As you drink to good health
Comfortably delved into the
Abode of bliss.
A delusional  apotheosis.
Orion Hernandez May 2014
Laying my ear upon a noise, so distant.
Constantly shaking the walls that stand in the way of progress. All keystones withheld from view, looking over the fact my shirt’s distorting my panorama.

But at last, with some aid, I’ve come across an ear’s aid. Laying this sense upon a noise, at first so distant. The walls now speaking the word that is “progress.”
The walls are a' crackin'!
I am a refugee from the City upon a Hill.

My homeland once a resounding light to the nations; has become a convulsing black hole, threatening to devour any semblance of civility.

My City, once a radiant promontory of enlightenment, its illumination of liberty’s searing torch revered, it’s practical striving for democratic wisdom shaping the long arc of the moral universe emulated by people of good will across the globe; now lies in state as a mordant corpse, serenaded by a funereal chorus of laughing griffins, a dead patriarch surrounded by the ruins of a once opulent now sacked city, a bygone home to the scattered disassemblage of a once noble people.

I recoil from the rancor of extreme partisanship, the gerrymandered apportionment of citizenship rights, the buoyant vindictiveness celebrated by small minded ignorance.

The blind allegiance to jingoistic nationalism, the adulation of Blueline authoritarianism, the fealty to imperial militarism and the dangerous trajectory of it’s awful consequence yet to come, enthralls me with dread.

Compelled patriotism enforced by threats of faux patriots, amoral ammosexuals, their small hands stroking quick triggers of long guns, genuflecting in mastabutory glee to the preeminence of 2nd Amendment atrocities, angling crosshairs of resentments to firmly fix a promise of ghoulish body counts, a rationalized apocalypse a captive people must suffer to underwrite profiteering gunrunners who blindly defile the constitutional tenets of life, liberty and happiness, the blood splattered keystones of our true exceptionalism.

Xenophobia and racialism, are stoked and celebrated by the City’s chief executive, his impish smile mouths Blood and Soil sloganeering, he solemnly salutes the Confederate flag while cheering torchlight processions of enraged White Nationalists marching to the drum of the Grand Republic’s midnight dirge along the once hallowed trail of Jeffersonian Democracy and a sacred place of secular enlightenment and higher learning. His gleeful decrees tweet the destruction of families and his police agents mouth holy scriptures to justify the imprisonment of children.  These vandals rhapsodically paint images of phantasmagoric nightmares trampling and mocking democratic ideals, resurrecting long settled conflicts, terrible tests a once great City rose to extinguish, now swelling numbers of craven citizens ardently embrace Klansmen, insurrectionists and ****’s as righteous brethren.

The madness of chauvinism and racial supremacy has fully metastasized within the body politic, polluting the mind, infecting the bloodline with a virulent strain of a white blood cell disease coursing through the veins of republican citizenship.

A City stolen from the Native inhabitants, ethnically cleansed and its former inhabitants remanded to the prisons of reservations, a City constructed on the backs of chattel slaves, erected on the graves of exploited wage laborers, provisioned by the ruthless denigration of the earth’s bounty, law and order mandated by criminalizing the marginalized, repressing the civil liberties of outliers and subjecting women to a perpetual status as the second *** underclass; has failed to repent and steadfastly refuses to make reparations for its sinful past has made the City uninhabitable.

The embrace of tolerance and diversity is the balm, the curate that can salve the oozing sores crippling the City. Nativist prejudice is a long protracted path that City citizen’s find impossible to exit. The malevolence that consumes the mind and moves the soul of a desperately spiteful people, who take delight and find it necessary to dehumanize and imprison alien races and creeds to maintain vapid notions of superiority, profane the ideals of a republican calling. They ruefully ignore the beacon of light warning of the dangerous shoals that lay ahead. The ideals of the great democratic experiment on course to be dashed on the jagged rocks of ignorance, fear, and anger. The doomed City has set a course that endangers its embargoed citizens. Travelling in steerage, a captive body, believing they are on a course for the rebirth of the City’s greatness are emboldened and chained by the delusions of their self destructive steadfast resentments.

My home City has become unknown to me.  I have become a stranger in this strange land. What was once beloved has become insufferable. What was once treasured has become burdensome. The familiar has become fully alien. A terrible avenging apparition haunts and mocks people of good will. My heart is disheveled. My spirit bruised. My body literally aches from the wounds exacted from the deconstruction of my beloved metropolis.

I stand stranded at the border of incivility. Bewildered I peer through a protective wall of concertina wire, eyeing the imprisoned haughty souls of fully enfranchised citizens, bellowing self righteous psalms, singing interminable lamentations of terminal ignorance.

Condemned by their belief in the salvation of violence and recrimination, secure in their faith that their moat of self righteousness shelters them from the gulags of perdition they eagerly proclaim for others, feeling recused from the bane of sinfulness by meager tithes, tumidity and scriptural specificity and the sweet delusional conviction they are the chosen tribe of God’s favor; their aspirations viscerally dashed in blizzards of metaphysical illusion strewn like meaningless confetti onto a passing parade of barbarians who have taken the City as its grandest prize.

Sadly I must withdraw from my beloved City. I retreat to a refuge where the barbarians dare not enter. Their ignorance and stasis weds them to a place far from my sanctuary of choice. May my sanctuary restoreth my soul!

I find refuge in the temples of jazz. I sing arias of lucent improvisation. The freedom of unbridled expression reinvigorates the mind, alighting the emanation of our better angels. The music calibrates my soul with the syncopated beat of an irrepressible life force, the humanity of my welling heart swells on the sonorous oxygen of a lyrical free spirit.

I take refuge in our vanishing mountain wilderness. The natural world offers a solace of solitude, a unrequited impression of scale and a transcendent communion immune from the trampling cacophony of gleeful vandals running rampant through the streets of the City. In winter the summits are capped in crowns of viginal snow, spring awakens a dormant flora, autumn leaves shout the chorus of a seasons glory and summer flowers bloom in multitudes of brilliant colors marking a startling contrast to the fifty shades of gray tattooed onto the City’s restive souls by the purveyors of power.

I find respite on the friendly banks of rivers and breeze swept ocean shores. The perfume wafting along a rivers streaming eddies or a briney snort gulped from the foam of a cresting wave invigorates the lungs, strengthens the heart and clears the mind. The flow of living water heals lifes wounded spirit. It quenches a thirst for justice and nourishes the hope of freedom for all incarcerated souls. The ceaseless roll of the ocean waves prove the enduring power and inevitability of liberty.

I find a good refuge in books. Here I discover a fleeting glimpse of our forgotten love of knowledge and pursuit of truth and rational thought. Enlightenment is the plot of every storyline.

I take refuge in art. I escape into the multiple dimensions of aesthetic beauty trouncing the twittering banality of fad, pornographic affectations and consumer fethishism. Glimpsing beauty while beauty is there to behold and the diligent practice of its creation is an answer to a higher calling.

I take refuge in my dog. Unconditional love and trusted friendship are values at peril in a transactional world; virtues nobily demonstrated and freely given by our canine and feline friends.

I take refuge in late night comedy. Working the midnight shift, whistling past the graveyard with a hearty laugh helps to while away the desperate hours. The rancid fruits of our labor leave a bitter taste in our mouths, humor is the bread of life that clears the palate and makes the terrible sufferable.

My lasting sanctuary is the stronghold of faith, forbearance and tolerance. I trust the long arc of justice will bend toward the righteous and offer a pathway of redemption for all desecrated souls.

I take refuge in the Blues. Let my lamentations turn to songs of joy and deliverance.

I take refuge in prayer. May my places of exile restore and heal my denigration. May God deliver us to a good destination. May our generational wanderings in the desert of desolation end in the discovery of a good place of habitation.

In the solitude of prayer may I experience catharsis, may my petitions find an open ear, may I achieve clarification, may my pious supplication be genuine , my conviction firm, a direction found, a decision made, a call to action clear.  May I become a healer of the breach.

May Your grace be sufficient for me.

I declare my exile over. I will return to my City. I will attempt to rekindle the extinguished flame of liberty to dispel the darkness enveloping my City.

Selah.

Mark Almond: The City

Puyallup
6/30/18
jbm
Tony Tweedy Jul 2019
I envy you who awakes to welcome the birthing of a new day.
Where family, friends, love and hope are the keystones of your way.

Once I too had those things and could welcome each rising sun.
And like you too I did all I could to hold those things hard won.

I never thought of my life in terms of what it had cost.
Never understood the value of having it until it all was lost.

I never even thought that it could all be lost in the way it was.
To end up living life when the sun rises and that my only "because".

To have a life with meaning and where you can have some good.
Yes I still remember it and I would turn my time back if I could.

I hope you can forgive my envy and know I bear no ill will to you.
But hear, please my en-treatment, your world is fragile too.

Do not take for granted that things will always last.
Better those things in your future than only in your past.
Not a good day today...
Robert Poff Feb 2020
On a cold night
I drive around
With my windows cracked
Smoking cigarettes
And tossing keystones
Out the window.
I drive around
The dead end neighborhoods
Tossing keystones
Out the window
Wondering why there’s nothing
Better to do.
Sure I could get laid
Cause a girl asked me over.
Sure I could go see a friend
And talk about how little
I want,
Or I could
try to laugh a little.
But tonight there’s no point
To any of that.
Driving around
In the cold
Getting drunk
Is the only thing
That makes any sense.
Soon I’ll head home
And go to sleep.
Tomorrow might be different
Like tonight might have been
If I cared about all those things
That seem to keep
Everyone else going.

— The End —