"telos" poems
Enamored of the possible, and racing,
Through a winding maze of endless choices,
Daunted by the obstacles we're facing, and
Dizzied by the clamor's many voices,
Shackled by a heavy chain of causes,
Binding us to all we've ever known,
The many paths before us give us pause, as
We struggle to define which are our own,
Within a world that's not of our own making
We anxiously await the day we'll find,
A journey worthy of our undertaking, so
That purpose in our lives may be defined, but
Perhaps our fate condemns us all to wander, and
Our lives are merely mysteries to ponder
Mar 23, 2016
Mar 23, 2016 at 10:35 AM UTC
Prescient, her essence
Casts a demure persuasion,
Endowed with verve and vision;
Concept to consummation,
The serenely possessed,
Creator, originator,
Allusion to the eternal azure,
Logos of abstraction,
Word and image collision.
Tonal palette of faith infused reason
Beauty and sublimity,
Serve to season
Verse, canvas and film,
Mediating aesthetic, seminal senses blossom,
Lyrical each permutation,
Seeds of vibrant chroma diffusing the mystical.
Visage and hair, her figure haunted
With perfection - a work of Art
Nurtured and lived invocation,
The canon of taste;
Crystal for the *****
Devotional fragrance ,
Holistic ethos, melodic invention,
Animated, pure -
The embodiment of redemption.
Transcending form, parenthetically
(Merely) the decorative,
Allure, artistry and symmetry
Superlative complexity,
Her erudition satiates, supplanting
Winds of constructive banality.
Purveyor of an uncommon savor,
She collaborates in the peculiar
Pursuit and reward,
Encounter with depth, explored,
Human and divine, prosaic meets sublime
Igniting within an Eros
Passion for truth, being and Telos.
Visionary of grace and peace
Transforming our earthbound dissonance;
Our caprice,
Hope and abundance, the myth of scarcity,
She narrates the Good.
Pen, lens, color and stage
Vulnerable, unrepressed, effusive
Romantic articulation,
The reservoir deep,
Innately primed conduit of Love.
Beyond plebeian, cosmetic, the trite
Woman of substance, pulchritude
And delight.
Effervescent - her smile exquisite,
Eclipsing suffering,
Wordless expression, understood language.
I am transported, my imagination replete,
Sonya Rose -
Art personified; unabridged, complete.
©2008 & 2013 W.S . Warner
Mar 28, 2013
Mar 28, 2013 at 12:28 PM UTC
terrestrial siren call out
to me with your irresistible
song, ground me on the Earth
in the clouds, alone, I will go mad
alone without your melodies
to lure me back to a port
where I can furl my sails
and rest in your grounding solace
a song unlike the siren songs
Odysseus heard strapped to the mast
to resist temptation—he had only Penelope
while I have only you
you pull my ship back on course
away from the tangents I am prone
I want nothing more
than to bring
you aboard my ship
I know your telos
is rooted amidst the Earth
to heal and flourish
the ailing land
my telos to sail the sky
charting the heavens in search
of a key to turn the tumbler
of the lock to the universe
it tears my heart to be away
from your terrestrial song…
know: you will always be the port
where I return—for no reason other
than to hear your sweet song
one day, I will
roll my sails
un-step my mast
let the shrouds
hang loose
anchor my ship
permanently out
in the waters
of the celestial bodies
walk upon the Earth amongst trees, plants, and rock
rooting myself alongside you—ears open, listening,
solace in your song, in the port we built together
Dec 2, 2013
Dec 2, 2013 at 12:47 AM UTC
1.
My mother hates me!
My father hates me!
Oedipus screams to the
stealthily silent Sphinx.
He scatters riddles like laurel leaves
waiting to be braided into
a playwright's crown. It is too
grandiose to fit his cracked. cramped cranium.
His unconscious mind flies open
like the Sphinx rocketing to the sky.
Sacred haunches soar. Wings beat
steadily to reach titanic heights.
Blind to his murderous fate, Oedipus
cannot know himself. Before the
Delphic Oracle, his life shrivels,
unexamined by his bleeding eyes.
2.
Freud exults in triumph.
Maternal love births eternal love:
endless comfort and affection
for the newly bloomed beloved.
Soon, comfort metamorphoses
into feral eros, unspeakable, unthinkable,
beyond the bounds of catastrophic evil.
Submerged desire sullies the chastest kiss.
Jacosta embraces her son
as her new living king, her husband's
royal blood bubbling brazenly
on the bitter road to Thebes.
His hands stained, Oedipus strives
to transmute his trauma as our own.
We become him when Freud deigns
to interpret our darkest, direst dreams.
Blindly, we mimic him: carnal union
with the mother, lethal rage against
the father. Mourning Becomes Electra
beckons to the wary second ***
3.
The Sphinx belies its own riddle:
How can prophecy spring from
the sculpted, smooth stone
of these perfect *******
Only blind Teiresias plumbs the depths
of Oedipus' fate: Judgement lies blinded,
action lies blinded by the ventricles of
violence, the twisted telos of the mind.
Humans sin against the world, against
nature, siphoned of joy. They sin without
a sacred perch to rise from. Blood and *****
mud and blindness fashion their Oedipal souls.
Feb 21, 2020
Feb 21, 2020 at 3:21 PM UTC
The colour red strewn through the rocks
Iron rusting over years
Untainted by The touch of man
With exception of tourists
Oils slowly eroding, but untouched
By our prided advancements
Miles of peaks attracting the world
Though, still wild in the sense we define
A refuge from the bustle of life
We ascribe ourselves to
At least to me, it is a place to be alone, to meditate
With acres of trees, existing and feeling with them
Pulling from their ancient wisdom
To sit high upon a peak
With notebook in hand and a pen in the other
My only defense against the human condition
Peering out as far as my feeble eyes will allow
Clouds paint elegant watercolours
With the rays of the sun
Storms creating drama and feeling
But I am above it all as Zarathustra was
But I am compelled to return
As was he, back to the hives of my birth
To the city that Jack and his cohorts
Loved so much, as do myself
This place that has more sun
Than the marketed beaches of paradise
It may snow here, but that is the beauty of it all
The variety of seasons, it is not all-arctic wasteland
In the winter months
One day I may be swathed in layers
Against the cold, the next
I can walk around open to the elements,
What other place is the weather so differentiable?
A couple hours’ drive and you can be
In a winter wonderland or arid city
An arctic paradise with acres of fresh powder
That many do not take the time to sit,
Just sit; in a supple seat.
Perfectly formed to the contours of your body
And look out; simply look out.
At what is surround you; high above everything
Too often do we become obsessed
With the tiny oases of ski resorts
And forget the solitude and beauty of its telos
It’s not the resorts I love,
But the mountains themselves; that is my attraction.
A place to carve your own path, to find yourself
This is my home, a sojourn for the Beaten
As they traveled this country,
for those on the trail settling from sea to shining sea
Facing the fortress of rock, ice, and pine
I may stray for spans of time, travel the word and sea,
But I shall always come back to pay homage
To the place that has sculpted me
And given me sanctuary from society
Colorado
Feb 28, 2013
Feb 28, 2013 at 12:40 PM UTC
The frozen meadow
is a hard, white
**** carpet.
Seven wild turkeys
arrayed in a
gobbling skirmish line
pick their way
carefully across it.
I stand silently
on the frozen deck
in my bare feet
and watch.
The algid world
contains us all,
no exceptions.
Strutting fowl,
the flaneur
who watches,
no one escapes
this brumal vista.
The God of heaven
is simultaneously
the God of phenomena.
Skepsis slips away
when your toes
are cold.
- mce
Apr 10, 2015
Apr 10, 2015 at 7:15 PM UTC
Marx was a poet who sung in divinely wrought cadences
If I'd have been alive then I'd have begged to have been acquaintances
A creator-icon who remade the world in the image of his heart's genius
Attesting to his mind's pure telos, it's generosity and cleanness
He revolutionised Love in to a radical democracy between souls
The superfluous bourgeois emotion with its poverty appals
He knew Hearts are created equal, but corrupt by society
Which poisons and prisons the soul in its entirety
The abolition of possession will liberate the spirit
From the bars and chains that inhabit it
And all will love in passionate idealism which transcends the material game
Love in the age of socialism is marvellous, aflame.
Feb 16, 2017
Feb 16, 2017 at 4:21 AM UTC
I do not know how
they have aged so well
having to carry such
obnoxious facades
outlining the garments
of their sleeves
every night, wondering
if it's too small or too large
succumbing
to the thought of misfits,
with the color they have
grown weary of
dark times
that made them feeble;
enough to make them grow
lips that sparks war
telos or end;
to finally defend that
black cats are not bad omens
and so are black people
Oct 16, 2020
Oct 16, 2020 at 10:42 AM UTC
I am my
self and your
self and her
self and his
off-rhyme of a frayed encyclopedia—
the crippling arch of a fingertip and the kink of its self-
awareness.
I’d like to keep me trapped
in the amber of this moment
but I find myself,
in chemical waste—
and fumigation of my miscommunication—
tasting the smoke,
ripe and ripping up
soil and self .
I am my
self if the self you are
is you and her self,
is her and his self is
the afterthought of a decomposed anthology—
made mechanically—
the wrapping of roots.
The dipping of leaves
into steamed puddles on
cement streets, evaporating,
************
mechanically.
I’d like to be
a rock,
excellently.
The telos of my terrain trembles
beneath the benign boredom of being
myself,
excellently.
Mar 21, 2017
Mar 21, 2017 at 8:58 PM UTC
Who dares do this?
[in the future from 01/19/22
the final night forty years hence
thence two years more makes now
12/12/2024… but I wished it happy early]
My gig is what? I read. Seriously,
sincerely
Poetic License
Speaking truth
to truth's power,
Magic Moment's You Looked Me
in the eyes, e-yes, I will, I expect…
I, the ne'er-do-much,
- be live for now,
thinking,
if the peace I take is metered out,
a measure
for a measure, ***
for tat, eye
for eye,
worth a minute, any time
my word on it init
all that had a meaning,
once,
I imagine,
rituals were kata, steps
in a danced how story, why I know
first step, emerge, be in time, aware
there are others of a sort I am sorted on,
male, confirmed, white,
circumcised, to snip a bit
there off the tip, for no reason, we just
do it
so
it may have held common sense once,
now it seems a secret reason, lost
in evolution
of the mind
of man,
measurer
of all things, sorter
of odds and evens, pull
to push, act react mimesis,
as we see
we think we do,
mirror neurons, telos, reason, cause
sui causal are we? Nay?
We appear,
and be as if formed
to a pattern,
framed as a fine sail… a
wind catcher,
hook burr grip, like a virus or
a sycamore ball. Yeah.
echoing yeh yehey hey, not that way.
watch the beach ripple in the clouds,
there is such a pattern, in beautiful places
and I grew old in one, surrounded
by grand children laughing into teen years.
This would seem heaven to many, init.
I happened as a part of it on earth, happened
around an artistical Tophet gift init getting easy
Apr 19, 2025
Apr 19, 2025 at 11:00 PM UTC