In the dimming light
those shadows start to fall
disintegrating as the sun sets
The scene begins to shift.

There's a guy in a trench coat
he has no pants
There's a woman in a wolf mask
she recently went into a trance
she started writing poetry
she started thinking she could dance
putting on the mask
put her into that trance.

Her husband's in the back
watching ***** movies
thinking he must be the one
but she knows he
doesn't have a chance.
It's why she wears the mask
she'll wake up too late from her trance.

There is a singer on the stage
naked as before
battling that stage fright
he's seeing you in your drawers
every time he starts to sing
a coyote is running around the room
he's always laughing at you
every time you think you're doing fine.

The librarian dressed in scarlet
has a **** story to tell
and you are the star
on
the walk of fame
everybody you say knows your name
while in neon on the avenue
their all laughing
and claiming your shame.

There's a smirking sycophant
begging for a war
no humility
usually means
a shadowed soul
and a tiny ***** to go along.

If you wake up screaming
from a dream
a shadow figure is hidden in your brain
their all screaming your name
go ahead and scream
you'd better
while the old crone
laughs and laughs and laughs.

Better zip it up
put it away
Halloween only comes but once a year
it's then shadows are free to appear
better put away the gear
take off those flowered knickers
all those shadows
they hold all your fears
one of these days
will they commandeer your soul
who knows?
Well you know.

There's no escape
turn on the lights
open the door
open the window
close your eyes
the dawn has come
all shadows will disappear
put on your pants
Walk out the door
pause for a moment
look around
it's all as it was before
that's a big sigh of relief
I've heard it before
I know that sound
it's the sound before
those shadows started to fall. . .

/// ;;;;              
))        • ||            
<>            
                                             0
                                              /\
                                               :::::::::
WE
--
In silent shadowlands I go

IN THE STILLNESS OF THY LATENT SORROW
I SEE

THE DREAMS

I am only today -- my purpose is to recover
Everyone

From the lifelessness
That has invaded and is destroying
The sanctity

OH YES !
GENTLE WARRIOR!

BREASTED VISION
HOLY MOTHER

EVERY CHILD
YES !  I SEE !

---
---
---

Pomegranates and wine

In the cafe below the mountain

Timelessly they move around & thru us

Ancient wisdom that does not fade

---
---
---

Will you question !
Can I answer ?

I AM THE ETERNAL CHILD
ALL I DO

IS BE RE -BORN AND THEN AGAIN I DIE

Will you hold me to the fire ?
Will you guide me thru the fear ?

Do you really truly know me ?
Will you see my Love as your own ?

IN THE HEART

IN THE WILD BEATING

IN THE UNIVERSAL
BREATHING AND SPEAKING

IN THE SENSE OF PURPOSE

EVERYONE

---
---
---

On quiet beaches in Spain

Amid the peasant fishermen
And their daughters

Below a hot sun yet
It seems like rain

Oh PICASSO
Oh DALI !

within the wars
You call my name

---
---
---

Will we find our humanness ?
What is it really that I'm seeking ?
What is the meaning in what I'm seeing ?
What am I ?

What am I becoming ?

OH I SEE HER SPREAD HER WINGS !
SO ANGELIC

SO BECOMING

I CAN SEE HER REACH BEYOND
ALL THE SELF - IMPOSED
BOUNDARIES

---
---
---

In the Greenwich Village
Sactuary

The New York City of today
And yesterday

The old hippies and hobos and poets and saints

Are there

Can you see yourself ?

Can you see me ?

We come and fade
We go - we reappear

We love live die and leave behind an
Unerasable trace of human courage

We transcend space and time
And find the real world

Though hidden

Still with the beauty

Still alive

---
---
---

In the silent shadowlands I go

YES I KNOW
YES WE ALL KNOW

AND FOREVER WE WILL BE THERE

HOLY MOTHER AND HER CHILDREN

BREASTED GENTLE WARRIOR

ON YOUR OWN

AND FOREVER WE WILL FOLLOW
AND FOREVER WE WILL FOLLOW

Ringed by a tall, told wood,
A meadow pond dearly stood,
Deep and dark, the branched lands
Of childhood reaching to forever,
Throughout the growing seasons,
Rich in pines, bane ivy, hemlocks,
Naked columns of the freed bark,
To shelter the treed imaginations
Of running youth, where creatures
Became fabled to the wide open
Eyes tearing into the overgrowths,
Heading by the shudders of caul,
In the shades of the woody owl,
Greatly horned was the sly song,
The never present wails of cold, lost
Nightingale nor snout of woodcock,
Camouflaged in the browned leaves,
The gracing sun smoked in the morn,
And flamed forgotten in leafy eves,
In the needled myths of the roaming
Creatures, the dandy pheasant struts,
The brawned hind in the foraging doe,
Painted turtles, helmeted above ripples
Of parapet stone in soft water breached,
Sparking stars reigned with swirling fireflies
And glow of moon, as ever appeared, shook
The playful fear within, without, belongings
Of the child who spun his own tales, so held,
This, then was begun paradise in a sleepy waterlog
Of vale, outward from the shadowlands of creep age,
Kept, for daze, won, dreamed, in the torrid torching
Stalks, sunlit hold, the flash of painted face, knotty
Brilliance set free, the unmatched strike in reeds.

Ringed by a tall, told wood,
A meadow pond dearly stood,
Deep and dark, the branched lands
Of childhood reaching to forever,
Throughout the growing seasons,
Rich in pines, bane ivy, hemlocks,
Naked columns of the freed bark,
To shelter the treed imaginations
Of running youth, where creatures
Became fabled to the wide open
Eyes tearing into the overgrowths,
Heading by the shudders of caul,
In the shades of the woody owl,
Greatly horned was the sly song,
The never present wails of cold, lost
Nightingale nor snout of woodcock,
Camouflaged in the browned leaves,
The gracing sun smoked in the morn,
And flamed forgotten in leafy eves,
In the needled myths of the roaming
Creatures, the dandy pheasant struts,
The brawned hind in the foraging doe,
Painted turtles, helmeted above ripples
Of parapet stone in soft water breached,
Sparking stars reigned with swirling fireflies
And glow of moon, as ever appeared, shook
The playful fear within, without, belongings
Of the child who spun his own tales, so held,
This, then was begun paradise in a sleepy waterlog
Of vale, outward from the shadowlands of creep age,
Kept, for daze, won, dreamed, in the torrid torching
Stalks, sunlit hold, the flash of painted face, knotty
Brilliance set free, the unmatched strike in reeds.

Stirring

••

We at the bottom of it all

---

Rising

Into the realm of knowing

What we are feeling

(THE SANCTITY OF LAW)

••

One unto another our attention is returning

(Seeing  the pain)

Talking til we know to what the sages are referring

(Taking control again)

Waiting until all dead emotions are gone

••

COME AND LOVE ME NOW

FORGET WHO IS THE ENEMY

(It is the loveless one)

COME AND LOVE ME NOW

DON'T HEED THE LIES THAT THEY ARE TELLING

(And the hatred that they spawn)

••

Stirring

We

From shadowlands emerging

Into the Sun

Into the Sun

••

Rising

Into the bright eyes shining

Within everyone

Everyone

Within everyone

Tales of decadence
Mar the flight
Of
Angelic warriors

(True Lovers)

Who try to find

You and all your friends

SOMEWHERE
----

Hidden!

(Or hiding?)

WHO CAN SAY
-----

Who can tell if you are waiting

For true love
Or
Love's fantacy?
-----

Songs streak across the sky

Explode!
Shatter!

Fall and die
...
Decadence in full color remains

In its hold?

YOU AND I
---

Angelic warriors

In the shadowlands

Hopes are shattered

There is no light
Not guide them to our hiding place

We've been lost so long
We can at least
Pretend that here
We're surely safe
---
Decadence
Is all that remains

Within lost images
And
Forgotten names

Yeah, I'm different
Lyrically imprisoned
Afraid that someone with sensitive ears just might listen
Unorthodox
Simple
My sexuality is something I'm going through
I'm the only one that knows what's best for me
It seems like every human being is testing me
'Oh! Ye thy highness praise thee unorthodox queen'
It's ashamed how I hate every human being
But hey! I'm just being me
Love to read the lines in between....like
Two witches, twitches stuck like glue
Stuck in the shadowlands wonderin' what I'm gonna do
I'm just ashamed
Afraid of wonderin' if I'm gonna change
What's wrong with my brain?
Everything I do or think is just totally insane!



-BARS ❤️

Sad the day
The urchin rags on urban street boys
Mock the naked lovers
In the alleys where

Simple children try dwell in peace
------
I was a policeman once
------------------------
Little Mary is gone
Little Joey is lost
/////
And you?

SILENCE
HAS OVERWHELMED
YOUR
BENIGHTED
DESTINIES!
-----
In the brazen shadowlands
Of
Misery and grief

Everybody trying to invent
Some sort of god or lord

While something we cannot afford to lose
Is lost!

(OUR SOUL!
OUR HEART!)
...
I walk the fulness of
PROMISES made

I am not afraid

I know that soon you shall appear

As best you can you'll soon be here

“I fear that many people are put off by poetry because they don’t know where to start. If I have any advice for them, it is this: find what you like.

Who is to say what guides this process?

In my own case, it has simply been the fact that certain phrases, poems, and figures have acted like flare-lights along the path of my own life. Sometimes you see a flicker in the darkness and know that it is saying something—often something of great importance—and you sense that you have to go toward it, to get near to it, all the time looking out for other lights.

My love of certain poets stems from a single phrase they wrote that hit me like a great freight train of truth.

At other times, I have been attracted to a poem or a poet because I am taken by that feeling of recognition that someone else has felt or thought exactly the way I did. As C.S. Lewis says, as a character in the film Shadowlands, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

Sometimes, we read poets because we want to be like them, or because they are arbiters of good taste, or have been through something we want to know about. Literature—poetry, in particular—offers us a way to become different from what we are or might have been otherwise.

In the end, I suppose the question is: What is the purpose of all this? Why is it worth making our heads into a well-furnished room?

I think it’s because what we have up here—in our heads—is the only thing that cannot be taken. So long as we have memory, we cannot be made into automatons by man or machine…”

Which brings me back to Shakespeare.

The Tempest is the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own. And because of that—and because we know so little about his life that we always look for clues in his work—a lot of autobiography has always been read into the play.

It is about a magician, Prospero, at the end of his magical days. At the end of the play, he promises to drown his magic book and break his staff. It is impossible not to read a certain amount of biography into this, Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage.

Every now and then, somebody comes up with a new theory about Shakespeare. All have been heard before—for example, the vivid description of the sea in The Tempest indicates Shakespeare must have spent time as a sailor.

My response to this? In that case, Shakespeare must also have been a Roman emperor, several English and Scottish kings, a Danish prince, a shepherd boy, a teenage girl in love, a murderer, and almost every other person who ever lived. It is a reductive argument, because it forgets that in the realm of the imagination, you can be all things without actually being them.

And, in any case, at the end, it all disappears, falls apart, and comes together again somewhere else.

This speech, by Prospero, in the fourth act of The Tempest, is the finest farewell of any I know, and one I hope to keep in my own head for many years to come.

**Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep

.



the little people !

( even " these "

Sometimes it seems

Fall


In love ! )


)(

Tea party days !!


Looking for perfection in the shadowlands


/////

Liberty


Still has its own

Pure and generous Song

)(

( but who really

Wants to be free ! )

//


God is great and he loves ME !

AMERICA is great and    ...   here I AM !

She is beauty itself and I'm her MAN !


( ego love !!!!! )

)(


In the middle of the burning fields

Human flesh ( war and death )

//


The story is told


//

So little !

So late !


.

from shadowlands (

We comin ( yeah

•

dressed in the aura of the future wars

~~||~~

) ain't scared no more (

•


We

waitin for youth to see if it appears

With the colors of freedom or of slavery

•

like as in an ugly dream you stumble

;((:

Mumbling inanities

)(
(    )
)  (

faces of heroes drift thru skies

But these are unseen

As you see empty clouds

And talk of their changing shape

And calling it ,,,,,, creativity !

•

Dying all the while

//

we wait

Emerging from hiding places

Dressed in animal skins and hides

Leaving Eden at last

Heading Home

I have seen glimpses of Hell
And glimpses of Heaven
All we can do is live to our best intention
We are far from perfect
We are human
Mistakes will be made
That is certain
It's how we learn from them and how we develop compassion
for those who walk the world
It's not such a straight path
Light and dark at time link hands
Both teach another sun and shadowlands