"tracts" poems
Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude.
You are far away too, oh farther than anyone.
Thinking, freeing birds, dissolving images,
burying lamps.
Belfry of fogs, how far away, up there!
Stifling laments, milling shadowy hopes,
taciturn miller,
night falls on you face downward, far from the city.
Your presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing.
I think, I explore great tracts of my life before you.
My life before anyone, my harsh life.
The shout facing the sea, among the rocks,
running free, mad, in the sea-spray.
The sad rage, the shout, the solitude of the sea.
Headlong, violent, stretched towards the sky.
You, woman, what were you there, what ray, what vane
of that immense fan? You were as far as you are now.
Fire in the forest! Burn in blue crosses.
Burn, burn, flame up, sparkle in trees of light.
It collapses, crackling. Fire. Fire.
And my soul dances, seared with curls of fire.
Who calls? What silence peopled with echoes?
Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude.
Hour that is mine from among them all!
Megaphone in which the wind passes singing.
Such a passion of weeping tied to my body.
Shaking of all the roots,
attack of all the waves!
My soul wandered, happy, sad, unending.
Thinking, burying lamps in the deep solitude.
Who are you, who are you?
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Faking Bad
In anticipation of my
Evaluation to be declared
Non Compos Mentos
I slept under a bridge
For three days
"Getting into character,"
But on the morning of
My intake interview
My hair fell perfectly,
I mean I looked like
A ******* rock star.
College girls on the bus
Were giving me their
Numbers and my skin,
Which I'd purposely sunburnt
And caked in the finest filth,
Glowed like an Australian
Chippendale dancer named Weegie
And even the female Assisstant D.A.
Who had busted me for vagrancy
Waved her ******* from
The third story building
Of the Courthouse.
No matter how much I
Tried to speak gibberish
Poetry and philosophical
Tracts spewed from my mouth.
Shuffling past the park
I beat eight
Grand Masters
At chess on move 1
Inadvertently I solved
The Phi Epsilom Theorem
By kicking stones
Into an algorythym.
When I arrived they didn't
Make me wait at all.
My caseworker giggled like
A schoolgirl while I told her
Each day was like an endless shift
In a Chinese fish- gutting
Sweatshop and every one of my fellow
Employees was motivationalist
Richard Simmons.
She ungirdled her enormous
**** and as they spilled
Like fishguts onto the desk
She began to howl
**** me, **** me, oh ****
Me right here in
Front of the open window
On State Street as everyone
Watches me ******* the strongest,
Healthiest, smartest, most popular,
Well-adjusted man in the world.
The rest of the examination was
Also a success.
But as I left the Mental HealthCenter
feeling marvelous
I accidentally bumped
An old woman with the door:
"Watch out you manic-depressive
Schizoid with Socially Avoidant
Features klutz."
-Thomas L. Vaultonburg
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 5:05 PM UTC
XV. TO HERACLES THE LION-HEARTED (9 lines)
(ll. 1-8) I will sing of Heracles, the son of Zeus and much the
mightiest of men on earth. Alcmena bare him in Thebes, the city
of lovely dances, when the dark-clouded Son of Cronos had lain
with her. Once he used to wander over unmeasured tracts of land
and sea at the bidding of King Eurystheus, and himself did many
deeds of violence and endured many; but now he lives happily in
the glorious home of snowy Olympus, and has neat-ankled **** for
his wife.
(l. 9) Hail, lord, son of Zeus! Give me success and prosperity.
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Self-esteem forms a comparison,
One that is typically a brutal report.
Giving yourself a low grade,
A rating which crushes confidence.
Analyzing tracts through superficiality,
Viewing self from a blurry lens.
Seeing ugliness when beauty shines likes a princess,
Detecting stupidity when the mind is as sharp as a knife.
The flaws you catch in the mirror are false deception,
Witnessing myths of your imagination.
Mar 30, 2017
Mar 30, 2017 at 7:02 AM UTC
**via woodland trail, along deciduous dale
amid a rocky terrain, through geographic chicane
meandrous no longer, smoky waters beleaguered
upwelling they burble, in deep tracts they gurgle
hypnotic they swirl, then turgidly whorl
the rivers egress, from caverns sub-aqueous
bereft of surrender, outpours now in splendour
the Wharfe expelled from the strid.
... ... ...**
Jun 20, 2012
Jun 20, 2012 at 12:26 PM UTC
each schoolboy used to know the saw
laid deep in tracts of Danish lore
Forkbeards pious son and heir
Cnut the great, konungr,
his throne set to the boiling awe
somewhere along a Hampshire shore
but was it somewhat further north
he faced down scorned Ægir’s bore
his person kissed by Trisantona
upon her banks at Gainsborough
Feb 20, 2015
Feb 20, 2015 at 7:54 AM UTC
This room smells of cigarettes and ******* (“My daily cologne,”)
Before it was bought, this place was a home—
But now it’s just storage—
A place to get horizontal.
You don’t have a religion (“This isn’t adultery,”)
You proudly show your body
You’re not afraid of sin
You’re not afraid of this intense heat (“I’ll let you **** me thin.”).
I can reach you at *69
Being away makes everything hard.
It’s a 1-800 number—
Payable by cash or card.
Even when we were teens (“When you were sixteen,”)
You could always pleasure me (“And I was fourteen,”).
Even though I’m married (“It was the best time for me.”),
You’re the one I need.
You’re the angel in these bed sheets (“The devil with my chains.”),
The local roaming God—
We down whole bottles of sweet Champagne (“You didn’t even have this at your wedding,”)
And stand up on the balcony (“Having *** in the rain.”).
Sweat glints on your body in this smoke-filled light
And shimmers on your neck.
(“My eyes are open so I can remember,”) My eyes are closed so I can
Forget, forget, forget.
You won’t change yourself (“Come away with me,”),
And I know that you won’t cry (“I can make you happy,”),
But even though my eyes are closed (“The tract marks will disappear-”),
I like to pretend you try (“We can live forever if we make it past thirty.”).
This room smells of alcohol and ******* (“The scent my wife just knows.”),
Know that I remember and love you (“I don’t want a wife, I want”),
But you’re not just mine to have (“you to be with me.”),
Just try to save some time for me.
This romance of ours is deep (“We’re not going to make it.”),
Even if it’s two hundred and hour—
You were always worth the money
Saying the one is me (“Even if we try,”).
We’re going to die here together,
Just you and I (“The tracts are way too deep.”),
We’ll be in each other’s arms
In life we couldn’t do that (“But in death we’ll **** well try”).
Sep 30, 2010
Sep 30, 2010 at 5:23 PM UTC
He hated all the poor and then
He must have even hated Jews
Really that should be in the news
If all I read were right wing tracts
I would accept the above as fact
May 8, 2012
May 8, 2012 at 9:46 PM UTC
In Farmington the misfit suffers the jukebox and dances to an unknown song. He dances on the pool table. He wears black—black skull cap, black
duster, black shirt, black slacks, black boots. He's in Farmington and
the women here drink Bud Light. He dances slow. It's similar to a dance
you've seen before. You have that friend that climbs on couches after a few and half staggers, half sways. The women here watch him with unhappy eyes and hands stained blue from the textile mill. He seems to mouth the words although he clearly doesn't know the song. They, the women, dig their elbows into the bar. Pocked and graffiti'd, the bar soaks up spilled beer and ash and nail polish. Behind the bar a sign reads: Free Beer Tomorrow. And for some reason, you must admit, this sign's effect never dulls. The Misfit pantomimes a dance with a pool cue. His face is severe, serious. He's in Farmington dancing with a pool cue on a pool table to a song he doesn't know like a drunk friend of yours and the women are watching. Next, he does something amazing. He removes his cap. He's got shocks of bleached hair and burn scars run like rivulets between the patches. He tosses the cap toward the bar. One lucky woman catches it and summons herself to the pool table. You want them to have a bit of dialogue here, to say something oblique and innocent. Instead the lucky woman dances at the man's feet. He surrenders a smile and he's got small tracts of bleached hair and burn scars and he's in all black and he's dancing. The lucky woman, she's in a canary yellow patch dress. Her dance, although clumsy, still mesmerizes you. It's without ego, without shame. She is a child. She is the light in the room. She is, in this moment, the world entire. He pulls her onto the table. It's time to appoint the Misfit and the lucky woman names, you think. His name shall be Joshua. Her name shall be Anna. Palms together, her head resting on his chest, they sway. The smoke and the tracers of light meld and Joshua and Anna's outlines become muddied. Their bodies merge and they are both yellow and black and covered in burn scars and bleached hair and the women are still watching. As the song starts to fade, someone—maybe it's you—drops a few coins in the jukebox and it begins again.
Dec 22, 2016
Dec 22, 2016 at 12:13 PM UTC
Her little face is like a walnut shell
With wrinkling lines; her soft, white hair adorns
Her withered brows in quaint, straight curls, like horns;
And all about her clings an old, sweet smell.
Prim is her gown and quakerlike her shawl.
Well might her bonnets have been born on her.
Can you conceive a Fairy Godmother
The subject of a strong religious call?
In snow or shine, from bed to bed she runs,
All twinkling smiles and texts and pious tales,
Her mittened hands, that ever give or pray,
Bearing a sheaf of tracts, a bag of buns:
A wee old maid that sweeps the Bridegroom's way,
Strong in a cheerful trust that never fails.
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Parasitic queen dressed in gold and black,
we made love among hyacinth
tracts and the morning dew
then parted.
I’d thought it through but
venom proved stronger than
my ire as
memories of you wormed about;
your racing touch and
erasing much to finally burst
my head.
The larval feelings spun
themselves up in
little white silk
lies
And what wiggles out,
though formed and fed
off my mind and husk,
Resembles you, winged
and rue
hungry for a meal anew.
Feb 18, 2013
Feb 18, 2013 at 2:02 PM UTC
it saws old rain in my skull
and your thoughts take a tour; wet and heavy
and quietly, the dirt shifts in the metal tracts
*you break me every single time
my internal spilling is entangled
hopelessly*
my summer-psyche enmeshed in your season
and forever swallows a few more ribs
don't wake the children of the light
for their feathers will burn beneath my nails
a storm hangs patiently on the wall
like a delighted painting made from frantic crystals
and I skitter from your towering moods
yet the moon dances in and out of every calm abyss
the lid is no more vacant than my veins cursed with
your silence
like algae, I slip on
my terror squeaks like a vehicle possessed
cheeks go ashen in my gay smiles
you will blush, in secret at what I will do
to you
sails lift on garlicky air in a port where ships don't wait
and my tongue loosens another melody only doubt hears
I'm completely in your hands
and willing for that crush
my acts for coins fall meaningless in embedded frustration
don't come to the table, then
keep the shades drawn
only the sense of phantoms
will be hanging in my smoke
intoxicating me to radiance
racing through to the ripples in your day
I'll keep lancing pebbles across the ocean's surface
they will never really reach the riverbed
frosty comes in agonising diamonds
a feast of distress sitting urgently
a shudder flutters through me, imperceptible
reduction of sweetness
a date with the cherubs from a netherworld
my nose feels the snows you carry
and I know you constrict still
my language falters and thinking shatters
and although slumped and vulnerable, it flourishes.
Nov 29, 2014
Nov 29, 2014 at 7:31 AM UTC
A few blooms in Bohemia
for your hair do a duty
and make their red heavier
to fit the brown of your beauty.
But how many gallows
morals have built along the trees!
Joyful sin, tell me, in their shadow,
are flowers allowed to please?
The burdock and nettles
are growing as every year
and so people of Protectus settle
with their tracts everyone's ear.
Praying is just a waste
as it was at the time I was born.
The blooming aloe is my taste
of your black hair adorned.
Jul 11, 2016
Jul 11, 2016 at 9:24 PM UTC
Above our Earth so high
The Hubble telescope now hangs
Beyond our vault-like sky:
An all embracing eye;
Now showing us the universe
In all her glory.
Those swirling galaxies give way to seemingly endless
Tracts of quasars, dust and gas.
Through Hubble we look back through time,
At remnants of the Big Bang:
The Birth, they tell us, of Creation,
That might be repeated,
Over and over again.
Yet, before this satellite was launched,
Or telescopes invented,
Just what did humans know?
What did the Aztecs know of England,
Or fourteenth century English folk know of America?
As technological advances have
Been swift, so our state of ignorance
Has been revealed for all to see.
For no-one knows The Purpose of Life.
Why?
Oh Why!
Do We Live
To Die
Why?
For we will Die
Not Knowing Why.
Ask Christ they say,
He’ll show The Way.
Ask God and He will too.
Ask Allah, Buddha,
Anyone you like;
And Me, I’ll tell you just to Hope,
For Love will see us through.
Jan 22, 2011
Jan 22, 2011 at 5:17 AM UTC
But
Love hung on a tree
Bruised body
blood flowed
Love died for my shame
Love didn't look at skin or color
Love didn't look at nationality,
legality
Love look at souls
and said we're brothers
Blood flowed
for every nation,
tribe and
tongue
But we've forgotten.
And now
the prophets of the streets
crying like Pentecostal priests
Beating chests and
stomping feet
Begging
those choosing blindness
to see
See our pain
Feel our fury
Our righteous anger
rages
against injustices you pretend can
remain unseen
You were born with this freedom
to close your eyes
We were born into a world
stabbing us from behind
So don't
bring your Bibles,
shove your tracts
drag us down aisles
You weren't here from the beginning
Fighting to break chains and
set captives free
"We have nothing to lose but our chains"
Our battle cry is freedom
justice,
equality for all
Jew and Gentile
Slave and free
Now the verses can read
Black and white
Upper class and lower
College educated, GED
You know, He's crying with us
shouting, marching
Beating chest and
stomping feet
Don't think you're bringing Jesus to us
He's already here,
on the streets
Prophecy of protests
Righteous rage against
iniquity
Jesus, the revolutionary
God with us
On the ground with us
Love doesn't look at
skin or color
And love hung from
a tree
It is our duty to fight for our freedom
Love has already won the day
And we have nothing to lose but our chains
We will fight to lose our chains
Dec 13, 2014
Dec 13, 2014 at 11:19 PM UTC
Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;
But trust that those we call the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;
Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place,
If so he type this work of time
Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown'd with attributes of woe
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom
To shape and use. Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
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Where has gone the lands we knew?
Of waving grass and glistening dew
All fallen to the housing plan
Devised by an educated city man
Educated!!!!
Those once green green fields and woodland tracts
Have succumbed to bulldozer blades and felling axe
No more the places where as kids we played
On those beautiful sunlit days
Now landfill sites and city dumps
Cover the places where we once ate a picnic lunch
Gone are the fields and woodland glades
Where we once spent our sun filled days
Nov 22, 2016
Nov 22, 2016 at 3:31 PM UTC
done turned like the radio dial -
zig zag in its artsy ness on
the afghan blankets, on the
bench seat old tahoe. never have
i ever ****** the gym owner in my
over achiever bally sports bra / or
i lie all the time.
and, like,
you could be the pink alien in tassled chaps
or the singer/poet.
dialed the pizza place and hung up,
dialed the congressman and hung up,
embarrassed -
without a trick to pull out of your
ultracool spacesuit.
Feb 26, 2015
Feb 26, 2015 at 9:02 AM UTC
The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow:
And we with singing cheer'd the way,
And, crown'd with all the season lent,
From April on to April went,
And glad at heart from May to May:
But where the path we walk'd began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended following Hope,
There sat the Shadow fear'd of man;
Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold,
And wrapt thee formless in the fold,
And dull'd the murmur on thy lip,
And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow, tho' I walk in haste,
And think, that somewhere in the waste
The Shadow sits and waits for me.
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Religion can be somewhat stygian
Often is as a matter of fact.
It isn’t all fluffy clouds and saints.
Like in their published tracts.
Not all of the promises made
Will ever come true for you.
The miracles they talk about
Are they facts? Very danged few.
Wail and sing hosanas
Hail to the golden calf.
How to tell who’s bananas?
Separate wheat from chaff?
Give lots of money to churches
Buy many more holy chalices.
We are such a poor country
With far two few golden palaces.
Remember all Christians are holy
No matter the evil they may do.
They just confess it on Sunday
And then they are better than you.
And even though Muslims all came
From the same book up to a point,
They are all heathens and hell bound
No righteous forehead to anoint.
Wail and sing hosanas
Hail to the golden calf.
How to tell who’s bananas?
Separate wheat from chaff?
Give lots of money to churches
Buy many more holy chalices.
We are such a poor country
With far two few golden palaces.
Nobody gets to go to heaven
Unless they are from the right church.
Anyone not in that category will,
The day of atonement, be left in the lurch.
Remember their god is wrathful
And will drown all your children for sure.
So, unless you are “washed in the blood”
You’re going to hell. There’s no cure.
Wail and sing hosanas
Hail to the golden calf.
How to tell who’s bananas?
Separate wheat from chaff?
Give lots of money to churches
Buy many more holy chalices.
We are such a poor country
With far two few golden palaces.
Nov 13, 2016
Nov 13, 2016 at 8:28 PM UTC
I Went To A Funeral Today
Simplistic in its way to say, but
I went to a funeral today.
Our ‘tractor man’ laid in the ground;
I wrote about him year two thousand.
Taking care of all he owned,
Scraping stony muddy snow;
Driving round his tracts of land;
Doing turns that only tractors can
And which, our tractor man was bound to, born to.
Not to milk a tale said once,
Finance, romance, weakness, strength
But tale of more significance
Than in those years when I gave him, his circumstance
No jot,
Well, not a lot of thought,
To make up for it, for I too am démodé,
It’s all-important that I say:
Surreal-ly dreamlike is this life
With time’s phenomenon in strife
With peace we aim for,
Always on the move, at war, divisive.
With no inside proof. It’s tough. Life’s rough.
Death, funerals banal,
My skull a barrel of confusion,
Is it all a grand illusion?
Peer groups going,
I here, with no chance of knowing
What’s in store, no more,
Except to hope that time and fate will favor
Generations, generating
As all beauty queens declare,
“World peace with no death anywhere.”
All this from the lain to rest
Of neighbor passed occasionally,
Known to me but casually.
Respectfully I went to honor
Just to find myself a more intent participator.
I Went To A Funeral Today 11.30.2016
Birth, Death & In Between II; Pure Nakedness;
Arlene Corwin
Dec 2, 2016
Dec 2, 2016 at 2:50 PM UTC
The pile of pine burned with ferocity
While fields of watermellon wore green in generosity
Jerimiah delivered rows of assiduous thoughts
Fertilized in decisions made years ago
Margaret was from Huntsville , working on a divinity degree
She was small , rode a bicycle , studying infinity
Timid , not unlike a titmouse in spring
Margaret had a sister named Judy
Jerimiah left for the mountains of Colorado
He took only his last name Johnson
He spent winters hibernating with the bears
He learned to have no fear and grew a long beard
Tennennessee is in Alabama , just south of Huntsville
A snowslide almost buried Jerimiah
Margaret moved to North Carolina
got married and that's all I know
Jerimiah made tracts in the snow . . . go
He sat above the devide looking down
Sometimes west when the sun went down
But mostly east under the full moon
Howling so forlornly the wolves cry
Margaret looks west every night
Then sheds one tear
Jan 27, 2015
Jan 27, 2015 at 3:21 AM UTC
High wisdom holds my wisdom less,
That I, who gaze with temperate eyes
On glorious insufficiencies,
Set light by narrower perfectness.
But thou, that fillest all the room
Of all my love, art reason why
I seem to cast a careless eye
On souls, the lesser lords of doom.
For what wert thou? some novel power
Sprang up for ever at a touch,
And hope could never hope too much,
In watching thee from hour to hour,
Large elements in order brought,
And tracts of calm from tempest made,
And world-wide fluctuation sway'd
In vassal tides that follow'd thought.
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