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Nat Lipstadt Oct 2016
~for bd~

there is a well in our backyard,
a cooperative well of sorts,
for the water source is a
earth stream deep, an east-west latitudinal,
attitudinal canal,
well traversed, intercontinental and interoceanic,
belonging to no one, free to those who
drink with their eyes

given its diversity,
it's salty sweet earthy soiled provenance,
strike me strange, strikes me well,
its fiercest flavor is its
mundanity,
the plainest cool of tasteless, clear, fresh water,
so easy taken for granted

but therein lies the rub,
for the mundane is the gold vein,
from which we mine our greatest stories,
the best crumbs,
the mineral origins of our words,
to capture the gift of needed inspirational,
for our daily living hymnal
songbook

the aging parental care-taking
wisely and sadly seceded,
the golden child learns lessons of
illness and passing, renewal and replacement,
how to mourn and how to love anew,
when one pet goes, and another comes to
roost and roam in his youthful heart,
and a lover ages and so does she,
for tandem is the ever-changing, graying color of their
fierce attached tenacity

a professor supervises the household management,
grading student papers, grading life,
secretly writing love paeans to celebrate
what it's all about, the visible so oft ignored,
recorded, recored, reordered,
in the observatory of
bed crumb starry words

I,
a stranger never to be seen,
a million miles from the scene,
smile and weep, loving the shallow for its deep,
finding amazement in the complexity
that only humans have the capacity to commit,
all of us captains of the capital we store,
in the small hallmarks of every day living,
and in an overdue,
catchup e-transmission,
a well wish comes true,
a poem born,
a kindness to myself,
the best gift of and to,
those who are both,
well,
friends and strangers

who remind us that hope too,
is a
well

~~~~~
The Message

Hello Natty man....we are all well...but it has been a busy and difficult year, Mum finally went into residentail care, very busy at work, the golden boy grows in leaps and bounds, my surfer dude grows more grey hairs as do I....sadly there has been a shift change in the demigods of the house the little blue cat, got sick (bowel cancer)...and after much heartache..we made the decision to let him go with dignity and he was put to sleep...We are now presided over by a little tuxedo boy (still a devon rex)....whose energy is sometimes insurmountable....he and the golden boy have bonded....*

hope all is well your end
Take care...and be kind to you
I read a message, I write a poem...
Sydney Victoria Dec 2012
The Song Of Loneliness Whistles In The Breeze,
Soft And Gentle, Make It End Please,
The Broken Recored Of Misery Repeats Your Name,
Sadly This Record Is Stuck On The Needle,
A High Status Of Fame,
My DNA Entwined With That Of The Divine,
Yet I Am Cold And Alone,
Haunted By Ruthless Demons Nipping At My Nape,
I Sit By A Frigid Glassed Window,
Paned By My Tears Of Pain,
I'm Sick Of Awkward Conversation,
And Honestly I'm Terrified,
Because The Sound Of Your Rhythmic Breathing,
Becoming Closer,
Is Chilling To The Bone,
And I Can Already See Your Face In The Stands,
Because I'm So Broken,
And I Am Distraught,
Because I Can Already Hear The Sound Of,
The Music Of Misery
Shelby Bates Feb 2012
Insomnia had come knocking.
Insomnia is a Southerner, a belle who's smooth words and honied utterances trapped me in her company.

I was laying swathed in sheets, attempting to persuade Miss. Sleepless Night to call on some other hapless soul. Upon realizing a lost cause, I turned to the walls that had become my entertainment on evenings such as this.
Blobs of ink twisted into ribbons, which lopped into figures who jived and waltzed through the room.
They flirted, they fought, they played hide and seek like children, delighting with seemingly spontaneity.

But the charm was gone tonight.

The walls replayed the same stories, the same wispy characters mingling with the same friends.
It was like a over used recored, beloved, but dull.

I teetered on the verge of exhausted tears, why couldn't that wrenched ghost let me shut my eyes, and sleep?

What was sleep anyways? Was it really just a biological means of repair, of converting the day into data?
Or was it something more then that?
Was it a spirt of some higher being, the avatar of it's loving side?
The peace bringer, the soother, the safe guard from troubles.

If there was such a thing, I'd like to shake it's hand, I mused, and offer it a life long customer, and a desperate one at that.

Something stopped me though, half way through my theoretical business deal.
It was the jolt of surprise that coursed through Insomnia's veins. The kind of surprise that only occurs when your convinced you've got something snug in your grasp, and ****.
It's slipped away.

There was a new shadow on the wall, a shadow that all the other inky dancers respected highly. You could tell by the slight bow of their nebulous heads, and the atmosphere of admiration.

I propped myself up against downy pillows, not quite believing what I was seeing.
This cloud like creature was winding it's way across the ceiling, a deep grey mass. Paralyzed by it's presence, I gaped as it stopped right in front of me.
It looked like liquid smoke, with two gleaming wings and twin small, delicately curved horns, wrapped in a light breeze. It had no mouth, but owl like eyes, bright with deep, calming wisdom.

The moment this otherworldly being looked at me, I immediately felt a sense of relief. Insomnia was being called away, she had to pack up her sticky invitations and leave.  HE had told her to mind her own troubles, and she didn't want to meddle with the boss man, now did she?
A discontented huff, and that was all that remained of my genteel personal demon.

It appeared that was the end of the winged sprites visit too, for he was nowhere to be found.

Not that I searched too hard.
I, finally, fell into the Land of Nod.
TOD HOWARD HAWKS Jun 2020
Buddha was not the only one who understood the relationship between suffering and nirvana. Jorge Luis Borges once said the most important task of a human being's life was to learn how to transmute pain into compassion. Perhaps every human being, even if unconsciously, spends her/his life doing what Buddha did with his. As everyone knows, it is not an easy journey, but it is vital humanity takes it successfully. For millennia, however, humanity has, for the vast majority of time, failed to make spiritual progress. For example, for the past 3,400 years of recored history, most scholars have found that only 200 of those years could be deemed peaceful;  the rest were fraught with wars after wars after wars. Buddha, Borges, and most of the rest of us wish there were continual Peace on Earth, but sadly we see that sanguine phrase only a couple of weeks a year on Christmas cards.  

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.

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