poem
Midsummer
I’ll guide you through the gloom
of the lowermost fathom
where the golden flower gathers light
the moment it is seen;
sparks the charge of a lumined heart
from its dormant reality
Loses the rhyme to court opinion
that resists the loop of a beat.
I should make this a garden song
Nature may not know her future hybrids
what signs await
in the warning hues of bright berries:
the conspicuous guides
the subtle guides
pick their sides
August 30, 2021 to September 5, 2021
shocks
His words and deeded shocks, the paradox,
send reckless current rippling through my brain;
firing patterns change to shield-like shapes
sealing intel from his mission of pain.
He’ll write of your imagined devastation
anyway
dock
On the dock of Bear Lake, Michigan, my weightless stick legs bobbing in the teal opaque water; I sat watching my father, almost young again, fish from a pontoon with his best remaining friend.
remant
Ursula’s kingdom was a glittery tree,
a remnant of the Aracariaeae
Too prickly to climb but lovely to see
it’s refusal to be extinct.
rock
The bones stood tall but water is water to rock
Cracks where stacks of slab lay with land
One cosmic shift in the whole honorarium,
the very idea, could buckle and fall. A lean-to
Devotees return to the land
The serotonin from this soil
the very reason to build here
Jock
Jock Camon grew from the bloody fists of Vales in its dirt sun-burned streets where trees once wailed under the axes of men with immediate need for wood. A doorway, stiles and rails of pink chipped paint unfitted in the frame; a plywood panel where a window had been.
published August 27, 2021
Horrors of everyday reality face collective indifference/ routines and ambition/ dollars against indifference/ state of the country/ the persona mask/ guns allow kids to be shot; anyone they’re mad at, shot/ defenseless people identified but not sheltered or soothed/ confrontational device implicates reader/ army of invisible sufferers/ male authority: father. profiteering boss. turncoat angel. god/ inferno: suffering, dislocation, hidden spiritual costs, rapid social transformation/ industrial evolution: altered community, personal identity, social values/ city as darkly paranoid as the remote/ chartered: mapped, liscensed, controlled; choked with commerce/ reserved and rented as buses, boats, planes/ rent your mind/ intellectual property with a rental fee, subscription-based agreement/ own a physical chunk of brain with each purchase/ else streamed for 20% or 15 for complaining; 13 to automate a response/ signs of illness, exhaustion, anxiety, despair; healthcare/ eat what’s bad for you; watch, cry, die what’s bad for you/ rush to the gloried doom/ hereditary authority from the palace to the board room/ proletarian pawn of selfish higher powers/ authentic intelligence/ consumer, consumned, sadly died of consumption
It’s death, it’s always been death; except for when you’re realizing life. From there it’s realizing death, fear of death, avoiding death, and—if we’re lucky—solving death.
~ Maena, from FutureYou
Aspiring angel, tell me enlightenment solves suffering
tell me detachment is true compassion
tell me you know about righteousness
He smells like musk but sucks the freedom from the room with those moods, as if his is the only true anger. He writes of how I wouldn’t understand human’s search for meaning. Pats my head like a good little vessel carrying man’s miracle. It’s 2021, are we still on about breeding machines and sex machines and body parts?
(haiku)
mend the globe, poet
repair our relationships
cure humanity
I put laughter in a time capsule/
you thought the box was empty/ and so it was Everyday I become longer details/
a barricade of What and Where/
the Who more undefined/ still there A road uncircumstantial till it’s gone/ I walk on/ pause to chomp on elder loss and sibling witness/ love & awe, the next meal Time can flick the value of a lesson to come back overgrown in the lusty spring you’ll “take care of it some sunny day,” said the epiphany worth repeating