I'd like to catch a songbird when I visit.
One that only lives near your house,
One I've never heard.
I'd like to catch a songbird,
And have it sing for me
The songs you hear each morning.

I'd like to watch the moon when it rises.
Lifting itself over the earth, reflecting
As it passes my window.
I'd like to watch the moon,
The same white moon
That you might be watching tonight.

I'd like to hold the wind in a mason jar.
The warm little south wind
That chuckles and breezes northward.
I'd like to hold it down,
Whisper my hellos into its gales,
And let it go darting off northwards -
Whistling and running like a fugitive
To you.

goaded by a stereophonic monotone:
a flumine voice waxes with lovelorn dregs.

i heard the plump word of rescue
dangle from the heady decibel of song,
winterward, blue-veined and stillicide.

no more, shall the wind traverse the impasse of the verdigris. the incertitude
of beginnings sigh ultimately.

o people, your darling children soldered
to your denims. o rosefrail and sightless
bannerets — we mourn such coming.
it sleuths with a tangle of fingers
underneath fringes of flesh-warmed
draperies with a different temperament
as moderate as climates in squandered tropics, flows with a truth wishing it
more of the untruth:

never shall return, in faraway lands,
never shall look back and lay in prairies
attenuated, continue to sing oblivion.

Oh, Polaris, do you remember
Those days when we ran
Clothed in dew and the skin
Of great conquered beasts?
Do you remember our triumph
In the hello-waving grass
That night we were tickled by
Chaff - and calves licked our
Blood-filled cheeks? Do you
Remember, Polaris? You still
Have so much of the old heat.
Even today, when the freeze of
New memories strikes me, when
I'm snapped by the cold, I
Remember our old days. Oh
Polaris, warm my hands a moment.
You were always so sturdy;
Against your shoulder was the
Perfect resting place for cold
Skulls like mine. Of course,
Your fires often melt the ice
In my eyes. I never stay: I
Need the cold, need the new
Frigid day. Without the bitter
Wind, how could I love the
Steady warmth you hold, Polaris?

Cusp

Once I wrote these words:

Place your ****** hands upon thy chest.
Let them melt thru and come to rest,
Inside, the battle ongoing, under thy breast.
Watch, eyes open, knowing, fearful.
Swiftly, with no hesitation, from within,
Rip open your body, exhaling the best,
And the worst of what you got.

The cool air rushes in,
Stirring the inside stew of:
Infected grime, shameful desires,
Secrets that should not have been exposed,
The ***** stuff of about your life
that you alone know exists.

Contact with the atmosphere makes
Self-pity dies, blue blood turn red,
The TNT tightness explodes,
Ashamed, you have only one escape hatch.

Now, you are ready to write.
(http://hellopoetry.com/poem/now-you-are-ready-to-write/)

so here I am, hands on my chest,
so unready, incapable of writing,

the battle site changed,
sledding to the top of my head,
moved northwards, mush, mush.

just don't have what's required
to melt that mush open,
just don't have the anymore
to finish this Iditarod race
called my Idiot life.

nobody knows the silences
kept in my treasure box.
nobody knows the nail-beds
slept, bloodied, by this
mthrfking depression,
unexpectedly returned to sender,
unable now,
to write, free and clear.

suffused, this words reappears,
you don't get it, the twilight twinkies
below laughing, twinkling,
middle ******* me,
so not suffused,
nah nah nah nah
you don't got it,
you got nothing.

the words supply, torn and  tired
reappears, now escapee prisoners
before flatlining, crashing
as I am currently 20,000 feet over
somewhere above the Eastern Seaboard;

we may land smooth,
but not in any groove
that fits me anymore.

Here's the sorest, sorriest laugh,
what you are about to read
was eons ago born, and today
birthed.

Happy M.F'ing  Birthday #0
don't even, can't complain fresh,
reusing unused words that never got
devoured, so now, used up too,
like me.

cut by thicket's branches
(that in their defense, maim only to self-protect)
calluses of experience
not enough to survive
what is now needed,
new chapters required.

choruses of repetitive choirs fresh,
inspire but land on surfaces
heart-hardened by fear contagion.

who will know and
who will care and who
will make them all go away,
but me...

so touch my self,  
reminder to self is emailed,
beat the odds so man-many times,
one more time, what's the big deal?

fresh differences,
maybe,

words that are new
not in my vocabulary,
maybe.

Struggle, long lived,
is the status quo,
** **, don't you know,
nobody tole ya?

world's axis is tilted
you can fall off
a familiar horse,
get off course,
so east easy
a gravitational force so subtle,
clueless you're drowning
till the riptide
has liberated your
pockets possessions,
pathetic borrowings
of unoriginal thoughts
you thought you actually owned!
now you realize
new inspirational how to books
keep getting writ,
published for experienced suckers
like you.

so here at the pointed cusp
a crescent shaped tangent,
lines crossed, intersection of a curveball
turning inwards, retracing prior paths,
familiar but tho the forecasts predict
being on the cusp of something,
crystal ball reveals nothing at all.

I fold the little have learned
into a handkerchief
folded three times over,
tied cusp to cusp
with a trefoil knot,
which while
mathematically correct,  
is too easy as my hanky is almost empty
and hobo heart journey scary is thinking
done.

woke the woman at 7:00am Sabbath morning to save my life for overnight,  my body had ripped ribbed crack’d apart,
no spider web sized stains but cracks of crater size on both legs heading up northwards, gut and muscle revealing, spreading,
renting apart my chest and head and forecasting that
my twin two’s, eyes ears arms and nostrils,
destined half to the east and half to the west,
leaving the leftovers for the basement temple altar furnace burning
for the divorce division so rapid, death’s relief nearby

begging her to hold me despite my body
unwashed and face three day unshaven,
my body stink-stanking stench decaying,
so parched my chords, my eyes my beseechers,
for a stammering pus yellowed whisper barely could I issue

if she held me tight perhaps
the spreadsheet cataloguing my cracks divisible
would cease expanding, halting my perishment inevitable

summoned surgeons three but were so excited to see my
own red sea splitting and my ultimatum of egyptian drowning fast approaching, spellbound and helpless, all they did
was take cell phone videos to show on the doctor **** channel for $12.99

and she said,

*holding you now too late, the man flesh-eating disease
can be defeated if you know the cause;
all night I hear you pace and tread the boundaries of our
tiny shelter, needing the resting that comes when you note the hour, the sign of writ and done, for all I hear is you
struggle-seeking to release the words disordered,
hurricane hail haunting the caverns of you,
depositories of misrouted, mis-sorted sounds and the thunderous cracking now is their sound of their desperation
at your failure to form them, all they seek is the wholeness of formation and are force fleeing your leaking containership
through the cracks of their desperation

I will pack your body in ice, lay upon it all day, melting the water
into every orifice new and old, hydraulic hydrating then sealing
the apertures and lead you to your own promised land,
to thy Jerusalem capitol, where you may sing new songs,
teaching the Kohanim and the Levites new prayers

promise you the sleep of exhaustion with the sounds of
Canon in D to soothe, and when the night-frights
have passed, will feed you with writing utensils,
to teach that inspiration comes even by daylight, even to you

your best dreams of dying will be your best writing schemes,
when you awake, the sky cracks of inspiration come unfiltered lean,
and for heaven’s sake, for our sake, for your words sake,
then, chest will freely open and fully formed, thy poems will emerge
content and complete

and when you hear them sing:

“And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had”^

you will knowingly, be laughing, unafraid

The air, superheated, cocoons us
and we drive,
northwards into the heartland
of the desert.

You, black shirted,
your smooth denims
an intrinsic part
of the landscape.
You were born into dust.

I, crisp and white,
a polarised pair
of mirrors for my eyes.

Your hands on the wheel
guide us into the belly of time.
Intent upon a road with no end.

Sunlight hits chrome,
bleeding flashes of forever
into the gaze of any who glance upon us.

The roof pulled down,
my hat is given up
to a vortex of spinning air,
whipping tiny tornadoes
of grit and long-dead weeds
into a dancing frenzy of celebration.

We have no gold on our fingers.
Our teeth shall not itch
with the sugar of a wedding cake.
And we’ll never look back.

A four way crossroad
A decision to make
Each one leads onward
Which one should I take?

The one that goes deskwards
A pencil in my hands
Words shall flow like water
from the tip onto the pad

The one that goes skywards
My dream I shall grasp
Villagers call my
Stethoscope to their hearts

The one that goes northwards
Riches I await
Meet people from around the globe
Maybe that's my fate

Or the one that will go everywhere
No destination I shall have
Stories from here and there
A camera for a pal

A four way crossroad
A decision to make
Each one leads onward
Which one should I take?

Lots of little leaves lend their thoughts through me, invasive, intricately they thwart thousands of flicking fluttering flapjacks that narrowly nest northwards in insightful intricacies.  My own correlation to the devastation of my excommunication comes circling psychotically through territory taken by thieves.  Listen to me.  Me,  the sea winding, crashing, lashing, smashing in the sand.  Shells wash shamelessly ashore.  Incoherent attitudes to the longitudes and latitudes of my bicameral mind melt biogenetically with generous gentrification and gratitude.  Knights that know nothing note notorious faults with the mechanical bull bellowing ballads of Bart Simpson's big brained battles.  Believing in a higher power that showers us with praise and rain and pain and flames is an astonishing attitude taken timelessly through history.  Histories mysteries made matching the mourning Mormons march maddeningly on netted walkways wandering wirelessly in the digital age.  Rage, sage, six billion constellations on one page, intuitive notions of nectarines and oranges that float directly through subconscious space into the place were the human race lost its face, bending backwards hopelessly heaving to find It.  Us, the story of story of stories.  Last but not least the golden fleece made by hand of the man who lost control of the audience blinking stupidly through the dim lighting in a Victorian era theater.  Money makes men mad, women whistle tunes on the rocks as the clocks tick down to our collective doom eternity falsity.  Lighting matches of the patches that reconnect the lashes lavishly lacerating loyal little people who dance dumbly and deftly as an affirmative acceleration of the Nation brings out the worst in us.  Millions marching miraculously on nation capital investment in the predicted earnings of what we can sell to the horribly under educated balding obese men with learning disabilities due to the undisclosed demonstration of lack of nutrients needed to make more mean men smart.  Lost at darts.  Joan of Arc.  Queen Diamond brings crime to silent Simon sitting on the dock of the bay.  We waste away.  Watching rivers rolling round the ******* bend that banishes blatant blasphemies of the self.  Sea me sinking seemingly shrinking in the distance of your one good eye.  Lost green waves washing worlds wary of the New Age.  But in my head it can't be said any other way than the way it repeats and relapses and redirects my attention to it when I try to sleep and eat and drink and sweat and sigh and sing and slink.  The twisting tangled thought that terrifies my tortured terrace (aka my also known as counterpart playing in the dark with lost fingers finding time to rhyme lines in the mosaic of my mind: my heart).  But I'll just tell you later.

brittle leaves swing with windchime thrills
scattering minature fairy hats northwards
bristle tops of seeded whimsy
light strokes branches of resilience
revealing notches and furrows filled with courage
warmed and hazelnut tones of sap and towering elegance
in the end flourishing into taffeta skirts of green
plumes, plums and sour-apple caterpillars

We are wild and raw for it
Here, in a blazing land,
Sand-burning beaches,
The low colossal sky,
The slow fading of our evenings into night.

Night, when the lapwing calls the world home again
And out of the bay the white gulls fall
Into the ocean, the sea's crawling surge,
Northwards, by currents temperate
And tropical,
The long winding range
That loses its footing in the coastal flats,
In the desert's vast and undulating stride
We are wild and raw for it.

With a sky so blue that you could fall forever
And falling, never fall so far as into its red heart,
Its pumping core, and the majesty
Of bodies skin-tight, raw and moving
In this distant nether-world.
Where the real world ends, our hearts
Plunge fountain-flow into the dance of dreams,
We hold the dancer close, we spin,
Star-tipped and wild beyond the clasp and call,
Beyond the river's bend,
Beyond the treeless hill,
We are wild and raw for it.

Migrating white butterflies
Like snowflakes in mid-summer
Dancing on heat waves of January skies
Thousands upon thousands,
Can't tell one from another
This must be the celebration to summer.

Like some mystic fable they appear by magic
Their wild scattered bouncy flight
Springs chaos amongst all city logic
For they paint a rural innocent insight
To the mysteries of summer's secrets.

Their cascade is tumbling northwards
Like bubbles blown from a gypsy child
Hidden in these concrete woods
Hearts wild yet breath so mild
They simply pass as lacey summer reflection.

The girl with the fan
goes up the bridge
the water reflects
her slender image

The gentlemen peer
casually ahead -
to the girl with the fan
who wants to be wed

The girl with the fan
is silently beckoning
the ruffles rustle
what she is thinking

The gentlemen stare
as they portly squire
their fair-haired wives
in fancy attire

The crickets chirping
their love songs westwards

(The girl is hopping
there to the pastures)

The crickets chirping
amidst the flowers

(The gentlemen are
still walking northwards)

A rounded globe milky white in the center, crispier as it travels northwards
to the heaven
A valley of bones, Brittle with tightly stretched skin, a dark path

The night sky
speckled with brown
and dusted with roses
Softly contouring, dipping, dancing flowing up, up like a river backwards

Gentle curves and sharp inclines,
fiercely calm plateaus
waiting for you to catch
your breath

And finally
a bud of dusky muted midnight,
grabbed and forgotten
Left to be broken

Growing up as a lil' kid,
I had no father figure to look up to
He wasn't dead, he wasn't just there
I watched my mama hustle like she was 2 in 1
Looking at me now, I hope she can boldly say she's won
And I'm just getting started mum
I've got my hands on the ladder, moving northwards

As a kid, I missed out on all the cartoons
(No Tom & Jerry, No Lion King)
I was always on the street with older dudes listening to Biggie and Pac
I guess that's where I found my love for rap
I was told that I once rapped to 2pac in my sleep

I have huge love and respect for my mum
A single mother that played dual roles
She deprived herself a lot of things
in order to provide for her son
No parties, no friends, no expensive clothing or jewellery
Her son was/is her most precious jewel

School fees were uneasy to pay but she paid
One hurdle after the other but she scaled them all
Oh boy, what a brave & go-get-it woman!
She instilled in me the go-get-it mindset
No one can take her place in my heart

But I still have big respect for my dad
Even though he's back, he still watches from afar
He's a provider, adviser from arm's length
But I guess half presence is better than nada

Isn't it sad that there're countless
similar scenarios all around the globe
Mothers shouldn't be fathering kids
Absent fathers delay societal progress
There are cases of runaway mothers
So no party is exempt

Kudos to all the parents around the world
that are playing their parts
May you excel in raising your kids to excel
And at the end, may you reap the fruits of your earnest labour.

Now my window is opened,
So is my tender heart.  
Uninvited again the early
Morning breeze rushes in,
And in agony my candle flame cries out.
It bends and uncoils like we did
When we kissed the night before.
Dawn will soon come
And ****** away the darkness.
It will chase away the icy nasty nightly wind.

In seconds, clothes well ironed
And books properly read
Will be heading northwards –
7-hour drive from wild wide west
Like eternity from my new found love.
Cupid arrows deep within my veins
Pain and pleasure –
The inseparable twins of love
Are here like the August visitors.
Do they visit you too?

Last night the angry wind
Had come like a thief
Unblinking, bold and stubborn.
But it met me in you and you in me.
The fire in your beautiful tearful eyes
Brought out the man in me.
Last night, the ****** drums
In our hearts trembled, rocked
And exploded with reckless abandon
To the sweet rhythm of love.

Don't go crazy for me
I'm in love with another
My heart, my everything
Belongs to my better half
Please, seek love northwards

Your pain in my heart
I know that feeling
You can't be the king of my jungle
Nor I the Queen of your empire
Like a royal, my path was set

Truth, "Oja okunkun ni igbeyawo"
But, I have chosen my path
We were but friends
I'm sorry if you fell in love
And this, a final goodbye

The Plague Wall system in
Provence was devised by
the local aristocrats in an
attempt to halt the virus
spreading from Marseille
where it began, northwards.
Despite not knowing exactly
what was causing it, these
stone constructions, many of
which are still visible, did
actually halt the epidemic.
That occurred circa 1600s.

                 <>
Poliomyelitis or Polio as it
is commonly known, was a
1950's epidemic in Ireland.
Back then, before a vaccine
was discovered, it devastated
the country and again, as the
plague, nobody knew what
was causing it. In hindsight it
is know known that the spread
was due to flushing of toilets
directly on to railway tracks,
hence permitting it to travel
from town to town.

                   <>

Today as I was engrossed in
Ulysses, an out of the box
thought occurred to me when
I heard the metal flap on our
door recoil with a loud clink.
What if, (was my deduction)
our postman was a carrier of
Covid - 19, Corona Post ?
With his ungloved hands and
runny nose on these frosty
mornings, he or she, could be
one of the main contributors
to this current pandemic.

Ps.

For example, I had to go to our
local Garda Station to have a
paper from the French Pension
office signed and stamped, to
prove that I was a living entity
for eligibility. Social distancing
at the barracks, was in evidence
and respected: But, when I handed
in my form via the glass window,
the Garda took my Biro to complete
his task as a state representative
during this lockdown isolation
period of vigilance and hygiene.

THE RED NECKLACE
When l behold some friends around, l feel
I'm not alone to face my straying mind
that takes me northwards where it is too cold
or southwads where the sun scorches my skin.

I am one in a group, all are quite lost,
but each is happy that he's not alone.
A straying man among a group that strays
will think how strange are those but not himself.

Let me see you around, my dearest friends.
I'll be so glad with you, and you with me.
When sheep are taken to the slaughterhouse,
they don't care much for that blood red necklace.
BY JOSEPH ZENIEH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
____________