"patternless" poems
Pi, at the end of its endless decimals' grandeur,
meets a human being—who holds a mirror!
Until now, the number, knowing only sway,
has been lost in discovery’s polished way.
No more: it begins—on a human—in front of its eye.
Patterns and unique precision, patternless waves,
new math tides soar, pivot at the cosmos' height,
only to bag the ultimate truth:
Fathima—the first spiritual woman—mooned there first!
Fathima steps forward where nature falls behind,
across the dead end, the irrational chasm she strides.
For the cosmos' deep mind, Earth, the ocean is but a drop;
the rope to the top is the lead—the feminine Fathima’s lock!
Raw Fathima moves; in shadow, nature follows,
clustering atoms span between the two,
only to witness her encrypted, secured fashion—
intact, uncharted, yet fully functioning,
in Makkah and Medina, while she lived.
The red fairies at midday’s spot-on,
the black swans arching rainbows in wonder—
marvel how Fathima deduces, straw by straw,
the maestros’ dream of ascension,
potion-polished, taking Ma pauses in liminal crescendos,
between past and future, here and hereafter—a circular duo.
Limning out chiaroscuro in light and shadow—
nothing like it exists, in plain sight or the world in toto!
Rainbows shaded in, sparking out,
the scent of roses in her veiled black hair:
the cosmos anew glinting off her edge,
deeper quintessence than dark matter!
The blueprint, the intelligent pre-design, rests in her elements.
The breakthrough exponent—hidden in her eyes.
Yet beyond the masses’ gaze,
she remains Zahra—light upon the original way.
Truly, only one feminine form has reached across
the other end of the cosmos' endless highway,
zooming past nature’s hidden gems—the irrational Pi,
the complex chasm—a mathematical goldmine.
Beyond the masses’ eyes and their painted canvases,
shine the daylight and the glowing fireflies of the night.
Viva Mankind! Fathima is the Moon at the highest high!
Dec 12, 2021
Dec 12, 2021 at 11:53 PM UTC
nothing flights these skies tonite
nothing burns above our heads
or crackles in the air
or glows in the houses about us
as we pace the cool and empty
the alleys and the meatless streets
and the clean scaleless cobbles
carry our patternless birch-bare feet
a sail less nite
but a kite to the imagination
a bringer of new
lighter beings
osmosis
through our faultless immigration
Previously published [Show Thieves 2010 : An Anthology Of Contemporary Montreal Poetry - 8TH HOUSE PUBLISHING]
Nov 6, 2015
Nov 6, 2015 at 10:05 PM UTC
Cascades were dripping outside of this moving vehicle
White noise, patternless and arrhythmic
like magnified sounds of nails on a concrete wall,
made by souls desperate to cleave their way to dryness
This public utility vehicle holds spirits successful in finding this temporary heaven
Weathered, soaked and almost drowned
like panting dogs that managed to swim ashore from a shipwreck
caused by the iceberg that is the eye of the storm
This safe haven holds champions in a world of misshapen men
A woman clutches tightly on a bag of lime and her ever waning youth
Tired, but not eager to face Death
still closing her windows to his cat burglars
that come faster than the downpour of Typhon's tears
A homeless child comfortably sleeps on the far end of this ride
His innocence tested by fate
Too experienced for someone his age
instead of just playing in the streets he calls home
The jeepney driver has eyes on the road painted by Van Gogh
Unabashed, industrious and assiduous
determined to serve,
provide for a family whose stomachs hunger not but they hunger for his return
This other dimension nurtures alien thoughts and parallel thinking among beat down men
I do not know them but I can hear the cries of their emotions,
their longing to be felt and empathized with
Their voiceless cries are guns with a silenced nozzle
shooting at anyone ignorant who curiously stare at this minefield of a passenger jeep
Dec 19, 2015
Dec 19, 2015 at 12:19 PM UTC
No one born too far from Niedersachsen, said Oma,
ever quite captures their sing-song intonation.
Characterized by subtleties, like an umlauted vowel,
all non-native imitations sound inevitably as ******
as would a cry of “ello, guv’nah!” in a London coffee shop.
Her Plattdeutsch instincts neutered
by decades abroad, married to a son of Milwaukee,
her permanent, dormant longing for Salzgitter awakes only
to trigger hunger pangs of irreconcilable nostalgia
at the passing whiff of a Germantown bakery.
She taught me the word “sehnsucht” over lukewarm coffee
and a pause in our conversation: a compound word
that no well-intentioned English translation
could render faithfully.
It isn’t the same as just longing, she sighed— longing is curable.
Sehnsucht holds the fragments
of an imperfect world and laments
that they are patternless. How the soul
yearns vaguely for a home
remembered only in the residual ache
of incomplete childhood fancies;
futile as the ruins
of an ancient, annihilated people.
How life’s staccato joys soothe
a heart sore from the world,
yet the existential hunger, gnawing
from the malnourished stomach
of the bruised human psyche, remains—
insatiable, eternal.
Long enough ago, a reasonably-priced bus ride away
from the red-roofed apartment in which she babbled her first words,
a kindly old man in a pharmacy asked her
about her peculiar, exotic accent. Once inevitably prompted
with the question of where she was from, she responded only
that she was a tourist off the beaten track.
And when I pointed out, to my immediate regret,
that she gets the same question back here in Ohio,
I realized then that, not once, has she ever referred to the way
the people of her pined-for hometown spoke
as though she had ever belonged to it.
Sep 29, 2015
Sep 29, 2015 at 2:21 PM UTC
The smell of mint and clorox steaming across the face,
Under the epidermis,
Flying in the room like swarming mad no-see-ums,
Shooting up the nose and around the nasal hairs in blasts.
A distant garble, advantage one.
Pulling from limb and lattice of the mind, scavenging, advantage two.
The prediction and observation, advantage three.
Assertively convinced, advantage four.
Being rooted, advantage five.
The smell of mint and clorox,
So patternless,
So striving and belligerent.
May 22, 2014
May 22, 2014 at 6:26 PM UTC
These are my thoughts,
On life, and love.
Life is so trivial,
Random and patternless,
Or is it?
Life is so unimportant,
But yet important enough,
To have an underlying meaning,
An underlying pattern.
But so unimportant,
Unless you have something to live for.
Love,
Another trivial thing, maybe,
But together,
Life and love,
The most important.
What's even crazier,
Is I'm crazy for someone I don't even know,
But yet,
I know it's not lust.
This I know,
Because I don't have the physical urge,
This I know,
Because I want to get to know her.
It's not lust,
But, it's not love,
Because I don't even know her,
To early to tell.
But I think about her everyday,
I've never thought more about someone who I don't even know,
Am I crazy?
Maybe.
But,
Even though I don't know her,
It feels like I've known her my entire life,
And I will tell her that,
Just not in the first conversation,
Or maybe I will.
I once heard though,
That you don't give up on someone,
If you think about them everyday,
So, I won't give up.
I'll just finally introduce myself,
See where it takes me,
See where it takes us,
'Cause I've got a good feeling about her,
About this possibility.
First things first,
"Hello, I'm Doug Fruin, and I believe we've met before."
Jan 16, 2010
Jan 16, 2010 at 4:39 PM UTC
The dust settles on your bare back while you sleep. Sometimes tries to bond back to the skin, but in the morning you shake it again as you rise. It shimmers in the sunlight like smoke. Though patternless, it does not look lost.
Nov 5, 2012
Nov 5, 2012 at 4:38 PM UTC
Hyperbolic ceiling
Of patternless white paint:
Massive human herd.
Fumbling over itself: a mountain
Climbing, climbing, climbing, the bodies
The zombies
And super-imposed on the moving and falling
Of all of us Sisyphus
Are two faces, one mine
Teeth biting lip
Tongue in throat
Intimately, privately,
Darkness on white space.
“I’m an immensely private person,” Michael said,
His hand clasped in mine, the bodies
Moving across the white skin of his face, too—he
Stuttered—and then he
Stopped—
Remaining.
I nodded as things passed
From blue to red to back; as things
Throbbed, everything so ******
Blood pulsing
Into my body from his, from
The veins in the ceiling.
Oneness, omphalos, the knife faltered
His
Chest was my chest, like his hand, and I
Felt his inhale,
His lungs my lungs expanding contracting,
The human herd still
Dancing dialectically
In sync with the moving mouths and kissing lips
Of super-imposition.
Oct 6, 2014
Oct 6, 2014 at 11:34 AM UTC
Seeing someone every day
is not seeing them,
not in the way of knowing
ourselves, marked by a milestone on a rocky trail
or a spring growing back with azaleas and pollen
and a canopy of elms.
Instead the confetti of moments we’ve traveled together
whirl into the patternless vortex of now
and we don’t know where we find ourselves.
Yet I thought of you the other day
and a painting you gave to me when we first loved.
It showed a man diving into the ocean toward mermaids
Who sat on an island, watching.
Next to the image were words from a Jerry Butler song,
“Isle of the Sirens,” about a ship’s crewman lured by temptation.
"The voices got louder
They sing beautiful things in my ear
I must go to that island of women
I must see these creatures I hear
Love is blind and desires have no fear."
The captain warns him that surrendering
to the siren song is a betrayal.
"Keep course, cried the Captain
Ignore them and let them be
Straight ahead, cried the Captain
Set on by and stay free
Remember laws of mutiny"
The man jumps anyway.
"'Old man, you know nothing
Of temptation
And desires are heaven to me.'
And off he leaped into the sea."
When you showed this to me, at first I thought I
was the man, giving in to temptation.
Only later did I understand that you were the man,
A black woman hearing a siren song
from a white man who lured her with desire and love.
We know the fate of those who leap at the sirens’ lure.
You broke the laws of mutiny.
Something in my daily cogito has kept this memory close,
reminds me that you leapt
And you’re still here.
Here we are now, in the time of COVID-19,
alone together, shut out of the world,
sleeping in each other’s shadow
bored by each other’s demons,
walking past the blank of each other’s mirrors.
But I still hear that song.
Can you still hear it, love?
Would you still make the leap?
Aug 9, 2021
Aug 9, 2021 at 8:58 PM UTC
“Nature wins eventually,” mused my uncle David
as we drove past an overgrown lot
on a barren street, where a struggling Motel 6
had long crumbled under the weight of entropy.
Defying the ghosts of a business
drowned in the unforgiving current
of Dayton’s economy, among
the leasing sign marking their graves,
patternless flora prevailed
effortlessly.
Aug 31, 2015
Aug 31, 2015 at 7:37 PM UTC
light
it whispers in yellow commas--
a piece of waning moon
to grasp
to climb
down from heaven
shards of our abdomen
itching, writhing,
crawling upwards
up
up
like a pillar of caterpillars
piling on caterpillars
fighting to get a view
of
of
of what?
"I tell you, Sir, there's nothing there!"
an echo from an empty room
nothing
nothing
no.
only swirling colors
patternless wandering
the flesh of a lost man
the Earth
is a woMan.
Nov 11, 2019
Nov 11, 2019 at 12:53 AM UTC
Pi, at the end of its endless decimals' grandeur,
meets a human being—who holds a mirror!
Until now, the number, knowing only sway,
has been lost in discovery’s polished way.
No more: it begins—on a human—in front of its eye.
Patterns and unique precision, patternless waves,
new math tides soar, pivot at the cosmos' height,
only to bag the ultimate truth:
Fathima—the first spiritual woman—mooned there first!
Fathima steps forward where nature falls behind,
across the dead end, the irrational chasm she strides.
For the cosmos' deep mind, Earth, the ocean is but a drop;
the rope to the top is the lead—the feminine Fathima’s lock!
Raw Fathima moves; in shadow, nature follows,
clustering atoms span between the two,
only to witness her encrypted, secured fashion—
intact, uncharted, yet fully functioning,
in Makkah and Medina, while she lived.
The red fairies at midday’s spot-on,
the black swans arching rainbows in wonder—
marvel how Fathima deduces, straw by straw,
the maestros’ dream of ascension,
potion-polished, taking Ma pauses in liminal crescendos,
between past and future, here and hereafter—a circular duo.
Limning out chiaroscuro in light and shadow—
nothing like it exists, in plain sight or the world in toto!
Rainbows shaded in, sparking out,
the scent of roses in her veiled black hair:
the cosmos anew glinting off her edge,
deeper quintessence than dark matter!
The blueprint, the intelligent pre-design, rests in her elements.
The breakthrough exponent—hidden in her eyes.
Yet beyond the masses’ gaze,
she remains Zahra—light upon the original way.
Truly, only one feminine form has reached across
the other end of the cosmos' endless highway,
zooming past nature’s hidden gems—the irrational Pi,
the complex chasm—a mathematical goldmine.
Beyond the masses’ eyes and their painted canvases,
shine the daylight and the glowing fireflies of the night.
Viva Mankind! Fathima is the Moon at the highest high!
Apr 25, 2025
Apr 25, 2025 at 9:58 PM UTC