~
Step into the moment
with bated breath,
There will come
the beguilement
and whispered shadows at play,
they seem to congeal around
conflagration of wills
and spirits considered outré.

And if it should rain
within these walls,
we'll advance south and sneak
under cover.
Fingers will find,
lips will linger and remind.
It will be a slow
recovery this time.

The places we travel go beyond
the arms reach,
they war for supremacy,
they alter and spasm,
they're random, but hover
between us in unity.

This dance we make
is an intimate ballet,
this push and pull
a blissful menagerie,
a wrinkle in time
we call ecstasy.
In kisses christened as luminaries,
appointing our own ceiling
— a mural painted in the keen
colors of craving.

The years of such sweet communion
have built this shelter, this nest,
and here together we rest.
And we are no less surrendering
to them than straddling the heavens
— the gauze of time,
timber and tranquility enmeshed,
and wishing it never ends.
~

Eating strange things at odd moments
Peeing all hours of the night
Being mean to the ones you love
Hands on your lower back
And walking luck a duck
Painting blue, yellow, or pink
Memories of nesting
Pregnancy is a many splendored thing.

i, night, hung about thy cheeks more splendored
beams crisper and wholly brisk with wind
than even winter could. i stroked about the
penultimate hour of your face the little and
stranger carelessly perfect lips of my face
and drinking so stilly the sky is abrupt
with normally clothed stars; **** and playfully
abundant. i lay my heart with thee and i am
increased. i lay hands with thee and i am
between the velour of your not-covered thighs
making, with you, an errant child like Demeter
and Poseidon (who hangs his restless skin upon
the nape of the coiled neon streets. hinted
at his edges just; the circlet of the bay, i wander
in thee night.)

Above the alabaster clouds,
and ever changing canvas skies
Along a stream of golden pearls,
encased in dreams and wayward sighs

Of glowing share and sunset cues,
where fate does fold on satin sheet
Beside the ripples carved in time
with effervescent moments sweet

There waits for you in splendored joy
that which you seek on endless days
To light the way of darkened shore
a path through oleander haze

Where held so tight with fingers pure
in satin robe of pristine style
By one who lives within your heart
know heaven holds for you smile

See me, this one says, see me, look you
in the eye, eh, thinking,

spring, the season, the greening of
the playa's ancient shore, east of me,

east of my evergreen valley, barely
any bare gray wintery bushes and trees,

flash of magnificence once manifested,
on the shoulders of the priest-kings,
infectious proud flesh pomp and
circumstance, watch the war
god-man made glorious in
storied, seen once,
not invisioned, imaged
from tiny feathers, adhering
to a topological fabricated
RED FLAG FLASH
humming bird head
feathered serpent cape,
on a bright day signaled by the hummer
- see, I have returned,
- this is like heaven to me.

the one from now, same code, same init
see me, look, see, once this was the most

vibrant, slow mode, inspiring light imaged,

portrayed, cloaking the priest-king god-rep
more lustrous than any high summer
cathedral rood crossing patterns,
in undeniable beauty and artistical luc-if-ity

windborn grammarless, musical, meanings,
mid point, saddle points between waves
that reflect from hummingbird feathers,

indicating fair weather weathered the storms,

fretted not a second on the journey, yep
when I get to Pep's porch, there'll be
sugar in the feeder, two minutes later.

After I remind a mind is a many splendored thing,
but none more splendored in prophesy than making
sacred hopes formed from the fi NAND gated mythos,

whither men and hummingbirds mind meld, tune in,
to imagine the effort required, to tilt your head,

just right, to flash my muse. Let time pass.

(spring come

                       )come spring

                                    spring come wetly
                                        out the freezing serious
                                          hair o' winter come
                                            spring
         ­                                 thy greenest countenance
                                           come lathered
                                         (Spring in
                                         thy poppy and
                                           thy clovered
                                        divine thighs)
                                         O spring i,
                                       in thy many
                                        splendored love, in
                                                              ­            thy loose and carefree
                                                        ­                  shapely plush pocket
                                                          ­               ,will lay in heaped
                                                          ­              crushing wafts of
                                                              ­        june bugs and
                                                             apples and gods
                                                       (the wilting rind
                                                   of day will kiss
                                                     plummeting eve
                                                         upon the tousled
                                                         ­     breach of sky andEarth
                                                        ­     will sorely muster
                                                          ­  russet flecked charming
                                                        ­   slatterned trees about
                                                          m­y careful self
                                                            ­ )and your *****
                                                           ­     pleasant smell
                                                           ­    willto meander
                                                         ­    in the failing
                                                         ­  hues of
                                                              ­unsnowed languid
                                                         ­  hillocks
                                                        ­be most a riotous
                                                         ­ silent crudeness
                                                      a­nd i will love you most
                                                       roughly Spring
                                                         i'll tear away the careful
                                                     pretty clothing
                                                  flower­s and with
                                               your crudlovely
                                                  nake­d salt
                                                     i will
                                                               play,
                                                           ­        .
                                                               ­        '
                                                               ­     .
                                                          ­    ,

                                                          ­        '
                                                       ­   ,


                                              ,


        ­                                           .

Mercy is a many splendored thing
What would it build?
What won't it bring?
Joy, sorrow, pain or fruition
incarnadine love
or tenebrous loathing.

for sister, Marcia and brother, Jim

What Kind of Fool
Am I, Blue Christmas?
A Fool for Love - That's All.

You Are Love -

The Song is You Belong to
Me and my Shadow.

So What(s)                  
The Use of Wonderin’ (If)                
What I Did For Love
Is Sweeping the Country?  

Be My (Endless) Love
Is a Many Splendored Thing!

Be My Love
Till the End of Time.

June, 2007

i
sweetlycrimson those
             c
            h
              e
            e
              k
            s
of a porcelain daughter
              h
               a
              n
               g
               i
               n
             g
in the splendored languor
  of a sugar light
dusting her
  with a powdered kiss
exact t
         e
       a
          r
s
rivulet down her soft landscape
           i give my
sinew strewn arms to a clutch
about her gentle a
                                 r
                                   c
                                  s
as her quavering tremble
gasps

a

broken

Holding smoke in your lungs will **** you
At least that's what They say
But my grandma smoked for 60 years an she's still alive today
They say laughter cures everything but it doesn't hurt any less when you laugh at my faults and mistakes, tearing me down crushing my soul day after day

So what are their words good for?

They say love is a many splendored thing 
But when I gave you my love you told me I was spoiled and wasn't good for any thing
They say that big girls don't cry
Then why is my heart crying out through my eyes that our love is just a bunch of lies? 
and They say that you've got to work for the things you want 
but what if the working isn't making you hold on to what we had 
So I SAY that today is the day I start being happy 
and THEY can go shove thier words where the sun don't shine because they say it's all my fault 
and I'm a bad example 
and I'm what's wrong with the world today 
but if they started saying I maybe the world would stop judging so hard maybe we could all share a slice of what they call humble pie and start keeping our noses to ourselves and eat together in peace not pieces.

awe in sometimes stillness is
the connotation of infinity
whose splendored temporal verses
snugly fold my mind
into the breathless divinity
of each careful line

~

Above the alabaster clouds,
and ever changing canvas skies
Along a stream of golden pearls,
encased in dreams and wayward sighs

Of glowing share and sunset cues,
where fate does fold on satin sheet
Beside the ripples carved in time
with effervescent moments sweet

There waits for you in splendored joy
that which you seek on endless days
To light the way of darkened shore
a path through oleander haze

Where held so tight with fingers pure
in crimson robe of pristine style
By one who lives within your heart
*alive within your precious smile

The wind whistles past the songs delicate trumpet haze
sizzling between words of wonder, awed at love
and its any splendored languages, cruise control
step down hard, the pulse races, I reach for your hand.

Oh my God, your hair is free and floating in the liquid light
of this great summer day
Are your eyes always blue? They sparkle deeper today.

Your hand is warm and griping tight. Message?
Yes. I slow down, pull over, park.
Hands around you I pull you closer to the kiss
Hmmmmm. Cannot let you go now!

What is it in the way you look dreamy
snuggle  in this sequence?
There must be a much deeper connection
with our lives entangled in some distant past?
That's the mystery that baffles us!

We kiss again and drive into a future
of unknown territories.

Stay with me Love.

The trumpet tones down into dulcet soul.

What are you thinking?

Author Notes

Optional
© Marshall Gass. All rights reserved, 20 days ago

Being in love also
Is a many splendored thing.

Radiant,joyous,oxygen.
Repeatedly felt kernel of life...

Once you meet it
You can't live without it.

It beats with your heart
Breathes with your lungs...

Delve deep into it
And scoop up
The delight
With which
It lights up all your moments!

Joy is a many splendored being
In joy we forget all our grievances
Hope appears as a bright star in our
Darkest moments to say: I am truth
Joy will come again.  Remember:
Joy in deepest grief.  Do not cease
To believe.  Do not forget Joy.  Know
You will rise again as He has promised
That the sons of man   they shall know
His Love for then is without end. So I
Say to you again Believe and Remember
Joy

She wore her boots in the house
After playing in the rain.
Melancholy’s an addiction.
Girl, I’ll help you find a vein.

I’m a connoisseur of tears;
Your strain won’t go unheard.
There’s no foreplay in a deluge;
A scotch mist is what’s preferred.

This piece reverberates with the hit.
Visceral melodies all the way down the lungs.
She pretends she doesn’t hear the whispers:
The lovers curled in smoke and tongues.

Bathe me in your pain doll,
So that I know I’m not the only one alive.
Tell me you’ll take my shame
Right when the ****** crux arrives.

There’s clout in the touch
Of our despondent souls.
Call it a brain blast mind massacre:
The splendored splice of two becoming whole.

Don’t think I can’t hear your solitude
When we’re separated by a screen.
It screams out from your nuance;
Tells me she’s a shadow-queen.

Sad girls I adore,
Especially when they let me in their shell.
Cause the same water in their room
Is flooding mine as well.

The magic of Glory unfurls in splendor -
     Shouting with glee from majestic mountains
     Or whispering noble truths in the
tranquil murmur of a sylvan spring.

Glory shines in the wrinkled brows
     Of our ancient ones - seasoned
By the patient school of time.

Glory trembles in the stormy roar
     Of a virulent summer shower
     That brings life - sustaining rain
To every strain of flora and fauna.

We hear Glory in the ecstasy of children
     Giggling down the grassy hills
Under a sun-splendored sky.

In deepest night we gaze upward
     At the mysterious canopy
     Where the moon dances between the stars
And tunes us to our grateful anthem:

Soli Deo Gloria!

Roses are many hues,
Violets are well purply blue,
They say love is a many splendored thing,
I say lets have a rip roaring fling!

Charcoal, silver, sea-blue clouds muscle up
in clumps of dark impasto, caking the arch
of the spherical nave of the northwestern sky.
Cloaked in clusters of paler blue, the gods

of Olympia push eastward. They buckle under
the weight of this mortal firmament that hems
them in with the force of towering thunderheads.
Perhaps only Titanic heroes can survive the

titillating sizzle of lightning strikes. Naked
filaments of electricity hurl holograms of color:
a tangle of negative ions, radical brush strokes,
and Nietzsche's will-to power. Eradicate and destroy.

Golden-green fields of ripened wheat ripple
in the dying sunset, the final line that fierce
Titanic warriors dare not cross. They no
longer belong to the Earth: The mortal-divine

divide that once made them flourish now opens
into an absurdly widening chasm. No landing
place, no welcome space. Redundancy redounds.
So they don their ancient armor and pointed helmets

again, swinging butcher-sharp broadswords
in the sky. Achilles drags his blood-smeared blade
through the clouds around and around Priam’s
blood-rich frame, mocking the way Hector's

ravaged corpse circled mindlessly in the sands
of Troy. Today, such hate-hewed heroics are but
buried shards, fragments battered with blatant
disregard. Now, these violent vistas lie visible

only to the Tiresiases of millennia past. Savagery
has sown the wind, reaped the whirlwind: cyclones
of blind, wild urges cutting up moral character
into bite-sized portions. Rank desolation flees,

sublimated, subjugated to the mind's many-
splendored mansions of poetry. Homer chants
hymns to Troy, to the Hades-bound heroes, experts
in evisceration, in swift evasion, in black-blood death.

The glory of war today rots into nothingness,
sputtering under charcoal clouds pouring rain.
Once Leda waddled behind Zeus like an imprinted
cygnet. No longer. Below the sunset, humans hover

free above their handiwork, suffering from the humid
heat, striving to attain a semblance of household pride.
Their gods-slain ghosts adorn the family crest, as they enlarge
the world's unbelieving chasm with each new shock of wheat.

To Nora men were ***-mad perverts. She never initiated contact. To her: love was a many- splendored-what's-her-name. She had been briefly infatuated with the dog-catcher till she discovered that he was an s.-m. p. {***-mad pervert}. So for 2 years, as beauty betrayed her, Nora hagged copiously & shamefully. She grew gnarled and ugly. No man would have her for in the short expanse of 2 years she aged 30, mainly because of defective age-defying cold cream. Help was a fruit cake away. It may as well have been like that all along till Kevin, the land-locked town's only ocean-certified lifeguard, appeared.
  “Oh, Kevin,” Nora moaned, “can't it ever be like it used
to be when we were so mooch in love with each other?”
   “What?

Love is a many-splendored thing
and our attempt to capture such vibrancy
eventually disintegrates entire kingdoms into ashes
leaving us shadowed by the moon and wondering
whether the sky shall ever spark again
with the brilliance of another pair of yearning eyes and longing skin,
high mountain trees flourishing with heavy touches of ripe adoration,
a blossoming sunrise that emerges from deep inside,
the richest reward for the hungriest heart.

Awoken from a nightmarish telltale that Affianced me to Agony, splendored persuasion had me second guessing the reality I'm pursuing, or was reality slowly escaping my grasp, was I on the edge of catastrophe overlooking a treacherous shore?

Wrestling with my thoughts inside the broken barriers of my mind, I can't relate my gut instinct with what I am believing like a torn family within my soul, her habituation has scorned her soul and stigmatized her family, the hole inside of her was always craving more.

But now she's grounded by the projecting of her false image, now she's laying her cards on the table for all to see, now she's in groups falsely admitting everything wasn't what it seemed, now she's convincing everyone to make believe, now she's pointing to the front with a foot out the back door.

Cautiously I'm riddling the chassis of chaos that once consumed, walking the plank of confidence that shakes, I'm in love again with misery, my withdrawals from grief are withheld, I'm trusting the  braille of dissolution, my misguided faith is lead by the folklore of her encore.

Steadfast into her mendicity I'm to bring a sister to the now toddler, my short sale to bricklay a foundation for us was my courage to endure, a new life into our family was the best path to keep the Demons away, only long enough for duplicity by seduction to implore many more claymores.

From three to four, we are now indebted among each other to hold high responsibilities to one another, I provided all aspects to a glimmering future, in the meantime her mendicity to swindle the mind was my demise to dwindle, a candle burning at both ends by prevarication, this made our family mindful prisoners of war.

My plan to build our castle was slowly coming to fruitation as all events lead to our true freedom, something a fiend will always want, freedom to control by the ways of a narcissist, something that I never imagined to lay with me, slavery of the mind because I'm in love with misery of a maniac, going forward would only become a civil war, slowly isolated and alone I'm planting our future, miles under the sea shore.

Blinded to all truths believing our future is intact indefinitely, I push painful tragedies  aside to continue my love for Bereavement, because death makes me believe, in our new castle with two little seeds made by make believe, being Smitten with Agony I implore, taking our first picture of a perfect family in front of our first castle, standing above her carefully laid trap door.

we were young lads
when we thought so easily
and exclaimed with ignorance
that hate is the other side of love
love, a many splendored thing
isn't the opposite of hate
the two stem from the same tree
they're the same
they're both passionate feelings

if we would pick up a book
leaf through the pages
trying to pinpoint a word
as an equal testament to it
i mean love but going backwards
picked by many is apathy
which is in understandable
however i would disagree
since i have a word already
trying to regress love
appropriately

when somebody loves us
all is beautiful
every second spent together
lives in a lover's heart
yet the opposite of love is not hate it's indifference
love is as love does
hate is as hate does
indifference doesn’t do
it doesn't do anything
love and hate exists
when we do care

allow me to break the news to you
it won't be indifference who'd be breaking the love or the hate of the heart
you will feel it deeply
as deep and as dangerous
as the trenches of war
the one who'll break you and I
is the tug of familiarity
you won't escape and you can't deny

Young Nora was so attractive to men that other women were willing to stab themselves repeatedly just to get a small fraction of the attention that Nora ignored. To Nora men were ***-mad perverts. She never initiated contact. To her: love was a many- splendored-what's-her-name. She had been briefly infatuated with the dog-catcher till she discovered that he was an s.-m. p. {***-mad pervert}. So for 2 years, as beauty betrayed her, Nora hagged copiously & shamefully. She grew gnarled and ugly. No man would have her for in the short expanse of 2 years she aged 30, mainly because of defective age-defying cold cream. Help was a fruit cake away. It may as well have been like that all along till Kevin, the land-locked town's only ocean-certified lifeguard, appeared.
  “Oh, Kevin,” Nora moaned, “can't it ever be like it used
to be when we were so mooch in love with each other?”

To Nora men were ***-mad perverts. She never initiated contact. To her: love was a many- splendored-what's-her-name. She had been briefly infatuated with the dog-catcher till she discovered that he was an s.-m. p. {***-mad pervert}. So for 2 years, as beauty betrayed her, Nora hagged copiously & shamefully. She grew gnarled and ugly. No man would have her for in the short expanse of 2 years she aged 30, mainly because of defective age-defying cold cream. Help was a fruit cake away. It may as well have been like that all along till Kevin, the land-locked town's only ocean-certified lifeguard, appeared.
  “Oh, Kevin,” Nora moaned, “can't it ever be like it used
to be when we were so mooch in love with each other?”

By: Cedric McClester

Though hearts are broken
The  jury has spoken
But they had to be joking
Cos now we all are woken
Our justice system is flawed
Though it once was awed
It’s now thought of as fraud
Not worthy of an applaud

So as not to be unkind
I thought justice was blind
But that was only in my mind
Cos it is not as you shall find
And it needs to be stated
It can be complicated
Or perhaps it’s overrated
It’s not always checkmated

Despite instructions sent
It can be skewed or bent
By the human element
Influenced by the eloquent
Closing arguments
Which can shade the intents
Of all kinds of defendants
Who’ve been freed therefore and hence

There’s a big dichotomy
Between how it’s supposed to be
And the things we actually see
In the courtroom which is key
To the thesis herein rendered
About the apprehended
Because of verdicts that engendered
Outcomes that haven’t been splendored

















Cedric McClester, Copyright © 2021.  All rights reserved.