"processions" poems
Funeral processions
Spontaneous
Money, Money, Money
Bridges to Neverland should exist.
Wedding party
Music
Fall leaves
Breaks winter.
Intuition floods the sauna of life gated in
By the strong arms of the whispering trees.
******** profit, taking advantage of the sheltered
Wallets of men plagued by the insensitivity and greed
of the less mature.
**** you, sir, for charging innocent minds and hungry souls
To enjoy the entrancement of the world
Far older than you
Nov 29, 2012
Nov 29, 2012 at 9:59 AM UTC
I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;
I see that the word of my city is that word up there,
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb, with tall and wonderful spires,
Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships—an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets—high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies;
Tide swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,
The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas,
The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model’d;
The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business—the houses of business of the ship-merchants, and money-brokers—the river-streets;
Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week;
The carts hauling goods—the manly race of drivers of horses—the brown-faced sailors;
The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft;
The winter snows, the sleigh-bells—the broken ice in the river, passing along, up or down, with the flood tide or ebb-tide;
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes;
Trottoirs throng’d—vehicles—Broadway—the women—the shops and shows,
The parades, processions, bugles playing, flags flying, drums beating;
A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men;
The free city! no slaves! no owners of slaves!
The beautiful city, the city of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts!
The city nested in bays! my city!
The city of such women, I am mad to be with them! I will return after death to be with them!
The city of such young men, I swear I cannot live happy, without I often go talk, walk, eat, drink, sleep, with them!
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Ghosts of all my lovely sins,
Who attend too well my pillow,
Gay the wanton rain begins;
Hide the limp and tearful willow.
Turn aside your eyes and ears,
Trail away your robes of sorrow,
You shall have my further years-
You shall walk with me tomorrow.
I am sister to the rain;
Fey and sudden and unholy,
Petulant at the windowpane,
Quickly lost, remembered slowly.
I have lived with shades, a shade;
I am hung with graveyard flowers.
Let me be tonight arrayed
In the silver of the showers.
Every fragile thing shall rust;
When another April passes
I may be a furry dust,
Sifting through the brittle grasses.
All sweet sins shall be forgot;
Who will live to tell their siring?
Hear me now, nor let me rot
Wistful still, and still aspiring.
Ghosts of dear temptations, heed;
I am frail, be you forgiving.
See you not that I have need
To be living with the living?
Sail, tonight, the Styx's breast;
Glide among the dim processions
Of the exquisite unblest,
Spirits of my shared transgressions,
Roam with young Persephone.
Plucking poppies for your slumber . . .
With the morrow, there shall be
One more wraith among your number.
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I cannot escape you
your voices haunt me
in the quiet of summer mornings
when I expect only the sound
of gentle breezes through my ash, my oak
when I would, if I could, close my eyes
and enter the world, of forgetting
your dirges call forth
the delirious dances of the dead
those slain in the summer fields, of my youth
without your mourning song
to honor their passing
without the praying processions,
the grandiloquent eulogies,
they had
only the sizzling silence
after the staccato storm
of our rapid rifle fire
until now, when I thought
my guilt was assuaged
until I listened, and
heard your doleful cries
Jun 12, 2013
Jun 12, 2013 at 1:19 PM UTC
Close-mouthed you sat five thousand years and never
let out a whisper.
Processions came by, marchers, asking questions you
answered with grey eyes never blinking, shut lips
never talking.
Not one croak of anything you know has come from your
cat crouch of ages.
I am one of those who know all you know and I keep my
questions: I know the answers you hold.
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( Sonnet )
I once caught you naked by the sea,
No one noticed, such noble shyness,
Invited to worlds, aloof as sun breeze,
Of purple sands, heathered highness.
In novae of your eyes was shipwreck,
Forlorn beacon chiding the weary lost
Of new worlds lumbered on the decks,
Seabirds caroled up wing, heavens' loft.
Skin, fleshy of netted eel, salt and foam,
Was hide for a brigand, lubbers sessions,
Sheered by sheen, blinding sky of gloam,
Stars runged on their draped processions.
My seal, now fate, cloak within jubilance;
Coral sea wave, slips under moon dance.
Feb 4, 2017
Feb 4, 2017 at 2:21 PM UTC
///
One day these bricks and buildings were meadows
These fields the processions of spring garden
One day on these meadows used to play the cowboy’s melancholy flute
These fields the playground of the furious grasshoppers
These bricks were rivers
These buildings processions of water
In these rivers the moon's dispersion played on the uprising waves,
How softly the sailor sang his lonely song, disappearing within the shadows!
Travelers,
Have I told you a fairy tale?
///
Oct 17, 2014
Oct 17, 2014 at 2:25 AM UTC
PROCESSIONS that lack high stilts have nothing that
catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were
twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern Stalks
upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence
or a fire.
Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, ake
but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon This
timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at
the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to
chisel and plane.
Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.
All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the
dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.
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In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blindman followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older
Soon it will be fifteen years
He was old he will have fallen into his eyes
I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name
Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say
He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass
I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay
He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water
We are the echo of the future
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live
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Animal House
Sweeping dust
storm,
Gazelles leap.
Careening reach,
dizzy heights
Shy Giraffes
necking in
undergrowth.
Creeping tide
menageries
mystic sloths
limb and oath.
Sea mist
breaking wave
Sun prancing
Dolphins
embraceable
moonbeams.
Lizards
shedding skins.
Trine children,
Pan animals.
Golden gleaming
processions
growling purrs
Carnivores
give
Herbivores
last rites
confessions.
We are
the animal house
the hourglass
menageries.
bleating hearts
imminent deaths,
fleeting breaths,
unimaginable
love.
Jun 22, 2015
Jun 22, 2015 at 11:43 PM UTC
Love.
Of course, the great spirit said that word
when he set down the majesty of mountains
thus, spread curling softness through the seas,
sending little creatures wriggling, crawling, mewling, howling,
oh ye little fish and fowl, doodled up the dinosaurs,
a lumbering jurassic joke, then unleashed leviathan
from just a speck, and made some others walk *****
Love.
That word we need to hear
and the word that hurts so much.
It comes crowned with garlands, glistening
with the dew of pleasure. And underneath, the horn thrusts up
Dionysius and Venus, processions of Priapus, frenzied satyriasis
blind Baccus, luscious Pan and Zeus.
Ah yes. The juice.
Love.
And who has not recklessly ignored this word
or squandered it on abandoned, neon nights
that paled before the coming of cold mornings,
and who has not held back this word
from loved ones,
cowards of commitment,
circumcelliate, averruncate and absquatulate?
Love.
That little, mighty word that dominates our lives.
But what can we require of life and how can we survive
indifference in the barren waste and stay alive outside
without its whisper, without its cry and shout? And how can we aspire
to ecstasy without the tumult and whirlwind of its desire,
without its warmth, without its fire? So, we must turn again
to love's softness and love's pain. Again. And yet again.
Love.
It's easy, really. So go on, say it.
It's time. Why not? It's for the mothers and the lovers,
the fathers, it's for all the children who blindly seek.
It's for the teenagers and trembling old and the outcast and the isolate.
Even the soldier with the gun. Especially. It's for everyone.
The grave is lonely, deep and cold. By giving love before it's too late
those soft wings of the dove of peace unfold.
Love is the playmate. Enjoy, reciprocate.
This is the message I communicate.
Oct 31, 2012
Oct 31, 2012 at 5:55 PM UTC
Random mortar shells in the afternoon.
Sparkling, steel jacketed rain drops,
Glinting rainbows of reflected sunlight.
Plastic explosive seat cushions upon which passers-by,
Rest their weary bones.
C-4 candy bars, nuclear toothpaste,
****** for dessert.
Orphanage flambe', hospital hash, blood pudding.
Human burgers sizzling on a smart bomb bar-b-que grill.
Finger food, toe jam, baby-back ribs.
Bureaucratic double talkers,
Sugar coated body counts,
Colateral stew.
Really deplorable, awfully sorry,
But it was their own faults trying to put on raincoats.
They declined our invitation to the cook-out.
Bad luck to open an umbrella in the house.
Remotely piloted funeral processions.
Radar guided hearses.
Televised in real time.
Precision, surgical,
neutralized, deterrent, disarmed,
Deactivated, stand down, eliminate.
Living pawns on a battlefield checkerboard.
Strategic, defensive,
Dominate, annihilate,
Acceptable loss, public opinion pole.
Listen to the tinkling of sabre blades,
Rattling windchimes,
In the warm breeze of the shockwave,
Accompanied by the drumbeat of detonation and concussion.
Rock...
...and heads will roll.
Holy, blessed,
Patriotic, brave,
Courageous, dedicated,
Heroic, dutiful,
Self sacrificing...
******
May 16, 2014
May 16, 2014 at 10:28 AM UTC
And yet you know that you remember me
whoever I am and it is to me
you speak as you used to and we are sure of it
and you remember the child being saved
by some kind of mother from whatever
she insists he will never be able
to do when he has done it easily
the light has not changed at all on that one
falling in front of you as you look through it
and decades of explaining are a fan
that opens against the light here and there
proving something that then darkens again
they are at hand but even closer than they are
is the grandmother who entrusted you
with her old Baedecker to take along
on the Normandy landing where it turned out
to have powers and a time of its own
but the names fade out leaving the faces
weddings and processions anonymous
where is it that the sudden tears well up from
as you see faces turning in silence
though if they were here now it would still be
hard for you to hear what they said to you
and you lean forward and confide in me
as when you arrived once at some finely
wrought conclusion in the old days
that what interests you most of all now is birdsong
you have a plan to take some birds with you
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Nola I came crawling
fingernails scratching at your broken concrete
blast-ridden ears numb to
Music at your center -
Now I lay myself down in your canals
Along your muddy parks
naked; indiscreet
I swirl in trumpet music
Eddy down echo streets
With funeral processions -
celebrations of Lives worth living
Again and again.
I would fold myself neatly
In lines like paper airplanes
to cut through your wet air
like a deft tongue parting lips
gasp and gasp again,
I want to deep dive in cerulean.
Apr 21, 2016
Apr 21, 2016 at 8:35 PM UTC
( Sonnet )
I once caught you naked by the sea,
No one noticed, such noble shyness,
Invited to worlds, aloof as sun breeze,
Of purple sands, heathered highness.
In novae of your eyes was shipwreck,
Forlorn beacon chiding the weary lost
Of new worlds lumbered on the decks,
Seabirds caroled up wing, heavens' loft.
Skin, fleshy of netted eel, salt and foam,
Was hide for a brigand, lubbers sessions,
Sheered by sheen, blinding sky of gloam,
Stars runged on their draped processions.
My seal, now fate, cloak within jubilance;
Coral sea wave, slips under moon dance.
Apr 25, 2015
Apr 25, 2015 at 3:01 PM UTC
FLAT lands on the end of town where real estate men are crying new subdivisions,
The sunsets pour blood and fire over you hundreds and hundreds of nights, flat lands-blood and fire of sunsets thousands of years have been pouring over you.
And the stars follow the sunsets. One gold star. A shower of blue stars. Blurs of white and gray stars. Vast marching processions of stars arching over you flat lands where frogs sob this April night.
"Lots for Sale-Easy Terms" run letters painted on a board-and the stars wheel onward, the frogs sob this April night.
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the people swarm like ants
that’s what they say, isn’t it?
but they’re not like ants
at all, really.
ants have a purpose, a structure
they scrabble across the pavement as the sun beats down
with a common goal
carrying huge leaves between them
thousands of times their weight
nor are people like wildebeest
who stampede wildly across the plains:
LIONS! RUN!
their purpose is logical
their goal is survival
but people
people swarm in great swarthy swathes
sweating their way through the summer
slipping and
shivering their way through the snow
there are so many of them, and
their goals are so individual
so complex
not for them the ingrained logical processions
not for them the sole desperate stampede away from danger
no.
they have a society
have a culture
and wrapped in the cloaks of their conforms and their norms
they slither through the daylight
take up the space around them
give no heed to how they’re filling it
or who must take it next.
it’s why i like the early mornings
and the late night times
when the world is empty
barren
silent and pure
untainted by the congestion of the day.
Jun 23, 2015
Jun 23, 2015 at 10:28 AM UTC
We yield for funeral processions;
not for the living,
skulls and bones;
sells just as much as *** these days.
Our shiny teeth;
buried in the fruit to our gums,
vve glorify this dovvnfall:
consume,
consume,
consumate.
May 3, 2016
May 3, 2016 at 2:15 PM UTC
The darkened corners of forgotten yesterdays clouded the view as the gaping maw of need stared across the chasm at necessity . Almost as if there was a reason for it’s contiguous constituency it reflected the myriad animations of it’s creator . Crystalline forms in infinite diversity beyond the subjective sublimations of mass crowded the integral forms of it’s subjugated spontaneities perversions as the well of it’s unity sang of the cause for it’s being .
The single-mindedness of it’s recumbent beginnings were all but lost to the ramifications of itself as the children of it’s repulsion waxed and waned .
The twinkling of an eye , the integration of ages , countless extrapolations of it’s *********** vanished into the nature of their being as the tainted refuse of their wanton progressions began their mutual processions back to the source , or wandered through the surrealistic ethereum of their eternally predestined nothingness .
Causalities purity reigned as all became the reason for it’s own creation , and vanished into the implosion of it’s own ***********
Jan 22, 2013
Jan 22, 2013 at 3:54 AM UTC
this is a depth bomb cutting,
a midnight message for me,
a Zola accusatory,
“You make me think about death and doorways and sleep”
no mere paper cut incision,
bandaid and triple bacterial,
a forehead kiss
and an-on-your-way
nope serious business
*death and doorways and sleep
and all that is in between,
nightly rehanging the me-moon,
on that curved tip
the onerous tasks of child raising,
you, the perp, the perpetual kid,
the holy version victim trinitized
too?
hanging your self right on that shining orbital,
leads to unquestionable answer processions
ahead of the unanswerable, they ask,
what’s behind the screen door of
death and doorways and sleep*
life is hard,
but without questions,
it is unquestionably
harder
find the doorways.
this explains so little
and so more much.
reminder: make doorways - open them
11:10pm 4-10-19 ~ 10:31am 4-16-19
~for AH~
Apr 16, 2019
Apr 16, 2019 at 10:45 AM UTC
THE bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Linc-
oln Park
Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr
by in long processions going somewhere to keep ap-
pointment for dinner and matinees and buying and
selling
Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are
piling
On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near
by
And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs
and guns of the storm.
I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow
is falling.
Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow,
his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the new-
sies crying forty thousand men are dead along the
Yser, his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar
of the city at his bronze feet.
A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with
long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they
hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their
pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight
and into the dawn.
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leave me
Look at the way I've been brought up,
Processions sounding like song I've never wrote.
Horrid horrid
"How could you let her die?"
I swear it wasn't me.
All I've ever wanted-
watch the sun sleeping under the moon
Now that you're free to observe
Tell me about the noises in the dark
Stutter at my doorstep
As you try to convice me that this God of yours didn't take my little Rosie without a purpose.
Give me the reason why he took her
And why everyone blames me.
Hear me in some fashion,
Something fashionable,
I'm not pretidctable.
It's early tonight
I've been drinking all the words out my mouth.
But that wolf tooke the salt from the breeze
Hit the ground running
Los Angeles
I never fell so soon.
Find another naïve arm to twist.
May 3, 2016
May 3, 2016 at 11:57 AM UTC
Pain is getting old, nuisance slug
of toothpaste on a morning suit,
crest of daylight over dry eyes
at the first itch of addiction, processions
of commonplace panic begin
before the kettle comes to boil.
Pain ****** me like an alpha,
chained me to the kitchen sink. The brink
of insanity - messianic car-crashes, dead poets,
and cult leaders occupied our lives. Pain
lived inside, petroleum on fish-scale,
bone upon bone, a lie amongst lies.
Pain came to doctor the fairytale,
black-faced censorship, attention to detail
when forcing guilt under hysterical skies,
a cumulus jury, the persecution of 'I'.
Pain came to go over old grievances,
the people I knew, the friends that I missed.
Jan 7, 2015
Jan 7, 2015 at 1:03 PM UTC
I like to sit by the calm evening bright with stars,
seven old warm stars.
vast marching processions of stars fulfil their round in
marriage. he was a thoughtful expression the smaller and by noon
of his half-weary race,
of whom thou hearst
thou rather pure ethereal presence---i am but a voice;
the rest, we live
without you. a shadow on with a conquering laughter,
drink and song, was done.
Sep 25, 2011
Sep 25, 2011 at 11:05 AM UTC