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Tark Wain Jun 2014
What if aliens existed?
what if Ufo’s flew so fast that if we blinked we’d miss it?
what if we do not know of their presence
because we was
excuse me we were
not looking in the right place
what if you as well as I were an alien life?
together we would travel the galaxies
like pieties
striving for peace
with no reprieve
but what if aliens did not exist?
(maybe the better question)
The notion that we are alone on this abyss
that it’s 7 billion strong against
unimaginably long miles of what we know as just space
where human thoughts such as distance and time hold no place
but why think a thought so daunting
and instead ask
What if aliens existed?
Wk kortas Nov 2017
It was not, by any means, a loss of faith;
Indeed, her devotion was a boundless, unfettered thing
Beyond proscription, beyond rote chant and catechism,
And what she found as a novitiate
Were shuttered gates and gossipy confessionals,
Standoffish priests, pig-eyed and pinch-lipped
Sisters who thought life’s commerce
No more than mechanical prayer and spotless linens,
The whole enterprise
Smacking of the exclusion of Heaven’s bounty.
So she demurred when the time came to take her orders,
And she returned to the world of pavements and lesser pieties,
Free to seek God on park swings and barstools,
In pleasures of the pastoral and the profane,
Though her faith is no Dionysian walkabout,
As she is passionate to the cusp of maniacal
When it comes to the Book of James’ admonition upon works;
She is often found among the sisters she once tiptoed alongside
At food pantries and clothing drives
(She is scrupulous about ministering to only secular needs,
As the Bishop is not happily disposed towards those
Who choose not to take the veil,
And the specter of excommunication is a prospect
Too awful to contemplate)
Afterwards clambering onto some vaguely roadworthy MTA bus
Back to her studio apartment in Green Island,
Where she often walks down to the Erie Canal lock nearby,
Praying for those who have travelled  near and upon the water,
Convenience store clerks and ragged Irishmen fleeing famine,
Feral kittens and insufficiently mourned mules.
There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself --
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A grey wall now, clawed and ******.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.

This red wall winces continually:
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two grey, papery bags --
This is what i am made of, this, and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and rain of pieties.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel their heads and cry.
There is no talk of immorality amoun these!
Cold blanks approach us:
They move in a hurry.
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a ****-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are *****, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining *******
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
   By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
   Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
   The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?
I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,
   And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
   In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof
   Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
       A brooklet, scarce espied:

Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
   Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass;
   Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
   Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
   At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:
       The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
       His Psyche true!

O latest born and loveliest vision far
   Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Ph{oe}be's sapphire-region'd star,
   Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
       Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
Nor ******-choir to make delicious moan
       Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
   From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
   Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
   Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
   Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retir'd
   From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
   Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
       Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
   From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
   Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
   In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
   Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
   Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
   The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
   With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
   Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
   That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
   To let the warm Love in!
Madeline Harper Oct 2018
As these forlorn cadences await- unfold
To compose a disbanded vow
Yielding unto harrows of gates untold
Charms death to disdainful plow

Death is plowed to a forgiving halt
While silver moonlight and whiskey dances remain
Glittering gold in this crimson vault-
Feeble souls conjure grace as graceless minds abstain

Counterfeit conceits ravish this open cellar
As the night’s last dance ceases to a disgraceful plea
The dweller’s disdain is akin to my killer
And heaven yields blood to salt the earth for thee

Come away now with your anguishing defeats
Seek not a jagged spike as the heaven’s conspire and wake
Glory and gold may turn us black as deceit
But deception admonishes the dancers in their quake

Spellbound nuances of this reality await at every turn
Mourning and fighting the finality of this grave
Orchestrated knives are rosined like honey, beckoning our blood to burn
At last, a burning reckoning comes to ravage the brave

But refrain, oh killer- host of this crimson vault
Enlist a memoir for our sins
Recalling the pieties of our gracious faults,
Enough to make this blood go thin.
This poem was abstractly written to describe a scene of death among ballroom dance and the last dancer responsible for the tragedy.
As the world stands now,
Full of not what we need
Than what we need most,

Full of terrorist Arabs,
Perpetrating punctured civilization,
Of senseless Islam,
In the arsenal  state of ISIS,
Foolishly in ghastly infringement
Of the voiceless poor folks
With their solid foolery
They call the Islamic state,

At a time we need scientists,
In Einstein’s mental stature,
To open the microbes
And hopefully decimate,
Their germ of Ebola,
And her ancestors;
Aids and scrotal Cancer,

Arabs are all over Africa,
Preaching their chauvinism,
Which they call Islam, mental mire in extreme,
They grabbed and annexed North Africa,
They gave it Arabic name; The Maghreb,
Now the fountain of terrorism
And tomfoolery of religion
Devoid in dual logic
Of reason and humanity,
Converting Somali in to beehive,
Of al shabab and Al gaeda drones,
Killing the poor people,
For no reason nor emotion,

We need more Jews than Arabs in the Maghreb,
To convert Mauritania into New York,
And Somali into Moscow,
Egypt into Germany,
Tunisia into France
And Libya into Chicago,
For Africa needs Technology
And property for its people,
But not the religious sludge
In the likes of Islam, Buddhism and Christo-mania,

The world needs more Jews than Arabs,
For the sake of science,
Geo-space adventure,
Viable ideologies,
Like Marxism, reverse capitalism,
Bill Gatism and all of these stuff,
But not funny pieties of the Turban,
From peasants like Al Amin Mohammed,
The **** of Mecca before Adrenalin for Hajira,

Arabs better walk backwards,
To the days before in the antiques,
And revive Al Jebra, the glory of their past,
Make dhows and sail the world,
With Rubiyats of Omar Al Khayyam,
In their hands, burying their beards,
In the rubiyat of the wine and the ******,

The world needs more Greeks than English men,
For sake of succor from vacuum of logic,
We wallow in today,
To relish Aristotle, Plato and Socrates,
Homer and Hesiod,
For more Iliad and Odyssey,
Apology and Crito, Phaeto,
Alexander and Archimedes,
But not colonialism mongering
****** English men,
With no culture to sell,
Other than colonialism,
Infallibility of the queen,
Shakespeare’s fear of ***,
And Churchill’s mental deficiency,

We need more Russians than white Americans,
To entertain and astound the world,
With uniqueness of confidence,
And charm of moon visiting science,
With literary spark in the size of Leo Tolstoy,
Maxim Gorgi and Nikolai Gogol,
With the sweetness of cloaked dead souls,
To stune the world with political shrewdness,
In the fathom of Vladimir Putin,
Pricking capitalism from diurnal somnambulism,
We need more Germans than Italians,
For the sake of sense of reason
Positive aggressiveness,
Stern thought pattern,
Feasible ideology,
And systematic prudence,

We need more black Africans than Indians,
To carry forward the battle of civil rights,
Sports culture and heavyweight boxing,
To sire tough sires,
That can survive climate change,
But not Indians,
Opening shops all over,
Falling in love with corrupt powers,
For filthy sake of merchandizing freedom,

Wee need more Jews than Arabs,
To counter the spiral forces,
Of Chinese capitalism,
Caterwauling the world,
Into crazy whirlpool,
Of yellow civilization,
Making it thus fit,
To stop at stark truth,
That a dead Arab terrorist,
Is better than thoughts of democracy.
The big teetotum twirls,
And epochs wax and wane
As chance subsides or swirls;
But of the loss and gain
The sum is always plain.
Read on the mighty pall,
The **** of funeral
That covers praise and blame,
The -isms and the -anities,
Magnificence and shame:--
"O Vanity of Vanities!"

The Fates are subtle girls!
They give us chaff for grain.
And Time, the Thunderer, hurls,
Like bolted death, disdain
At all that heart and brain
Conceive, or great or small,
Upon this earthly ball.
Would you be knight and dame?
Or woo the sweet humanities?
Or illustrate a name?
O Vanity of Vanities!

We sound the sea for pearls,
Or drown them in a drain;
We flute it with the merles,
Or tug and sweat and strain;
We grovel, or we reign;
We saunter, or we brawl;
We search the stars for Fame,
Or sink her subterranities;
The legend's still the same:--
"O Vanity of Vanities!"

Here at the wine one birls,
There some one clanks a chain.
The flag that this man furls
That man to float is fain.
Pleasure gives place to pain:
These in the kennel crawl,
While others take the wall.
She has a glorious aim,
He lives for the inanities.
What come of every claim?
O Vanity of Vanities!

Alike are clods and earls.
For sot, and seer, and swain,
For emperors and for churls,
For antidote and bane,
There is but one refrain:
But one for king and thrall,
For David and for Saul,
For fleet of foot and lame,
For pieties and profanities,
The picture and the frame:--
"O Vanity of Vanities!"

Life is a smoke that curls--
Curls in a flickering skein,
That winds and whisks and whirls,
A figment thin and vain,
Into the vast Inane.
One end for hut and hall!
One end for cell and stall!
Burned in one common flame
Are wisdoms and insanities.
For this alone we came:--
"O Vanity of Vanities!"

Envoy
Prince, pride must have a fall.
What is the worth of all
Your state's supreme urbanities?
Bad at the best's the game.
Well might the Sage exclaim:--
"O Vanity of Vanities!"
The big teetotum twirls,
And epochs wax and wane
As chance subsides or swirls;
But of the loss and gain
The sum is always plain.
Read on the mighty pall,
The **** of funeral
That covers praise and blame,
The--isms and the--anities,
Magnificence and shame:--
'O Vanity of Vanities!'

The Fates are subtile girls!
They give us chaff for grain.
And Time, the Thunderer, hurls,
Like bolted death, disdain
At all that heart and brain
Conceive, or great or small,
Upon this earthly ball.
Would you be knight and dame?
Or woo the sweet humanities?
Or illustrate a name?
O Vanity of Vanities!

We sound the sea for pearls,
Or drown them in a drain;
We flute it with the merles,
Or tug and sweat and strain;
We grovel, or we reign;
We saunter, or we brawl;
We answer, or we call;
We search the stars for Fame,
Or sink her subterranities;
The legend's still the same:--
'O Vanity of Vanities!'

Here at the wine one birls,
There some one clanks a chain.
The flag that this man furls
That man to float is fain.
Pleasure gives place to pain:
These in the kennel crawl,
While others take the wall.
She has a glorious aim,
He lives for the inanities.
What comes of every claim?
O Vanity of Vanities!

Alike are clods and earls.
For sot, and seer, and swain,
For emperors and for churls,
For antidote and bane,
There is but one refrain:
But one for king and thrall,
For David and for Saul,
For fleet of foot and lame,
For pieties and profanities,
The picture and the frame:--
'O Vanity of Vanities!'

Life is a smoke that curls--
Curls in a flickering skein,
That winds and whisks and whirls
A figment thin and vain,
Into the vast Inane.
One end for hut and hall!
One end for cell and stall!
Burned in one common flame
Are wisdoms and insanities.
For this alone we came:--
'O Vanity of Vanities!'

Envoy

Prince, pride must have a fall.
What is the worth of all
Your state's supreme urbanities?
Bad at the best's the game.
Well might the Sage exclaim:--
'O Vanity of Vanities!'
betterdays Sep 2015
Ragged breath
pushed through  lips
paperthin and dry

Clouded moons
in once sparkling  eyes

Skin of face
folded and creased
by years of laughter

Age has wearied you
beyond repair

Your first foot treads
heavily upon heavens stair

And in this pastel room
the reward for a life of care

As we come to usher you away
to your final, hopeful jubilee day

All have come, none have missed
the opportunity to thank you
for, the gifts you gave...

One word of kindness, from your lips
ripples through the lives you touched
and all your students learnt well
to live, love and give freely,
of caring humanities touch.

In this pastel room, we stand,
touching one last time,
the gnarled and giving hand

And when we leave, we do weep
for loss, but also joy....
knowing your soul does keep
to the pieties of love.

So in the days to come,
know your grace will live on
through lives and generations
your teaching will be the yardstick
to which our hearts are measured
YOUR WORDS, YOUR LIFE,
REMEMBERED AND TREASURED
One of my earlier teachers, a philanthropist, died over the past week, I was one of many who spent time with him in his last days...
The church overflowed with his past students. He was a simple man, single, but gave his life to his student, teaching lessons far beyond his field of english....and impacting this world a thousandfold by the legacy he leftin each student....In my teaching and my life I aspire to his character...
May he rest now, in peace.
Julian Jan 2016
The ineffaceable stain
Allegorical refrain
Dictates the wily antidotes for a newfound sane
They hector from a distance
Muted but militant resistance
magical hobgoblins the lifeblood of their persistence
Heterodoxy enters the stage
Cognizant of ignominy, a potent repressed rage
Succor sought, corporate media bought
A pyrrhic limelight is certainly not what was sought
I defer to dignified exemplars
I confer with callous company at vapid bars
Concluding thereby the inverse proportionality of authenticity to success
The articulations of divinity imply rigidity
sweltering soul burgeoning with light sweating an evanescent humidity
If blind before, partial and total sight reconstitute the core
omnipresent paparazzi deplores
Past pities insuperable even with pithy witty
Future pieties irrelevant to ineradicable ignominy and purported dignity
Cupid and cupidity must be related
because gold-diggers alerted to my fair share would be elated
Begrudged at every tick, tantalized by a slow torture lurid flit
I cast my ambitions into the fathomless depths
I amass provisions for a restive hibernation, enduring schlep
Redemptive powers yet articulated
Should ease the prospects of being matriculated
But is cloistered suffering an inexcusable plight
When the deep coffers derelict a modest gesture of making grievous inequities once again right?
Must I swim to distant shores
Past the barnacles beneath and the urchins on submerged sand, very sore
Landmines at the beach, pantomimes and their garbled preach
Past scattershot invective fortified by intransigent misers of conscience, the balmy resort out of reach.
Bleak bleats, meek feats, good eats
I think it is about time for a tyrannical psychology to let me off the incapacitating leash, letting me focus on actions rather than on incomprehensible speech
God is perception,
But perception be NOT reality.

Your God, My God, His God, Their God,
All different in their own way.
The God of Kentucky is hardly the God of Malaysia.
This alone proves what I say.

Were God truly universal,
His worship would be no rehearsal.
With each culture getting it wrong
All would believe the same, everlong.

So this is the truth.
God is a state of mind.
He, and indeed, all deities,
Rest in the hearts of man.
Everything else is needless pieties.
Restricting, repressing, regressing, restraining
Our natural desires, the flaming pyres.

What you believe is well and good,
Does not change the way it is.
What is real, what is true,
Is what we know, what we sow.

Whatever one might explain with God,
The laws of our world describe quite nicely.
And if our Truth fulfills the duty.
What need we God for in our modern society?
Can not we take solace in our man-made beauty?
Megan Sherman Aug 2017
And so I cried for Love, it's Love I cried,
In fathoms like an ocean pure and wide,
And who on Earth can, lucky, say they find,
The juicy pulp of Love, its fertile rind,
What laurels are there beautiful enough,
To crown Love's skies, paint them like Van Gogh,
It's as if a mystery to, sultry, spy,
Into truth of her priceless charity,
And so I ride Love's chariot, in to day,
And see saints and angels going on their way,
Weaving Love like golden, magic threads,
Between us going soft with gentle treads,
And who of us can say they've fathomed more,
Than Love, irresistible to adore,
Love a pure and rarest of all oceans,
For Love is life and life a sweet devotion,
And so I cried for Love, no treasure vain,
For passion's flower blossoms for Love's rain,
Who would forgo her tribulations, pains,
For Love without suffering fakes, it feigns,
To be a truism when it's known by all,
That to be lift by love one must first take tumble, fall,
Till Love's light shines, a beatitude hath us rapt in thrall,
Her dearth does the righteous mind appall,
But luscious Love does ever find its way,
To Hearts all charred and scarred by their dismay,
With her music in their hearts the saints uproar,
It's impossible to tell who's singing more,
Her Psalms and pieties to soul devote,
A blessed one never by Love smote,
For being the most ravishing of babes,
Not dark could sully him, nor ravages of age.
Ryan O'Leary Oct 2018
You will reap the benefits of your sacrifices
in later years, when you go and look in your
regret basket and find nothing there.

Those of us with consciences are sometimes
cursed by their constraints, but look around
at the many who have no such barometer
to gauge the differentials between Id and Ego
Ying and Yang, Generosity and its Antonym.

A sacrifice, no matter how little or great, is a
personal bank from where we gift the gratuity’s
and pieties which enable others to survive.

One need look no further than the origins and
reasons for the worlds first bank which was
Banca Monte Dei Paschi di Sienna, enabling
a peasant society to develop with security.

We are all bankers , some people charge
interest, others expect it, yet more decline it.

The person who considers, what their shadow
is covering and depriving of light, will never
find themselves in darkness.

— The End —