007 Challenge

6

Star wars wage over a single point.
Five or six?
Six is easier to draw.
Two triangles
In reverse cowgirl.
Real stars are distant.
Abhor company.
Cards without address
But sexed.
How many points have women?
How many men?
 
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7

The door here is hollow.
Everyone hears
Night terrors.
Everyone feels
The tremble of the late
Date. So of course!
Winking witnesses
Guard the stoop.
No better friends than
Gargoyles.
 
001

A fire cannot be built from bones, alone.
The scout must further fuel the pile to flame
With love, with hate, with hope one may atone
For human debts accrued in human blame.
No match can bite a bone to make it light
Despite the fantasy of wrong or right
Despite the air, the wind, the reckless night.
No legacy but bone rewards this fight.
No fire can feed on memory. No cause
Withstands the legacy of mal intent.
We stand, we walk, we speak, we write our laws
And pray that is enough to circumvent
A cold that can't be warmed by wood alone.
The marrow does not justify the bone.
 
Fifteen minutes was all I gave
time compressed
in the heart beat of sorrow
the crack of her voice cradled in my ear
as she swears that she can still feel him
in her marrow
still sets two plates for dinner
and still buys him a paper every day

old habits of a life shared
before time erodes
and cancer comes knocking

I'm sorry that all I have to offer
is platitudes and a hope that it gets easier
because I don't really know you

your pain
hurts me deep
so I give you all I can
 
Sawdust
gravel
concrete

shitty imagery shotgunned in fragments
so you don't know what I'm really saying
becaue the whimsy of poetry
is being able to hide in the shadow
of misdirections
hide yourself in the I

concealed in sawdust swirling through
the dirvish of words alight
on the whims of run on sentences

Punctuation can eat a dick!
because commas can fuck up the whole flow,
or it upsets the minds of those, so...anal
it makes them have siezures.

And it all needs to be spelled correctly
and it all needs to be edited
and it all needs to be

NEEDS something...
more than I can give
in conrete terminology
or hardened metaphors
a good euphemism
or screw it
because what am I bothering for

It feels as if I'm out of sequence
ranting on the...at the page
with my two piece gravel-rashed mind
trying to find
words
words that stick
words that say something

Like

Sawdust
gravel
concrete
 
Ran a blade across my arm today
to make sure I'm alive
still here
still flesh and blood and bone

I'm stretched tight
an over inflated baloon
waiting for pressure
to bulge against the sides
and rupture
the startled bang

I would give anything
to be able to fall apart
but I'm held together
with scartissue
and Unpretty stitching
 
I've drawn some conclusions
in the last couple of days,

stick figures mostly
fucking or killing each other

drawn them in permenant ink
on the side of a bus
on the road in bold
childrens chalk

scratched them into the drive through
window of macdonalds

I concluded
that I can't draw
and everything in my head
is petty
 
A riddle is posed....
How far can the mind stretch
bend its fathomed depths
till light can't reach

air is stale
taste the dust
tongued pallette
rogue thoughts play here

are they keys?
my keys?

sharks dredge these wrecked remnants
schooling fish flit
awaiting jaws to crunch
down
down

light flickers have ceased
held here like breath
in the dark
 
withered down
hunched
bent before time has made a dent
or is it us that makes the dent....

in all the prospects, the things to know
it's too far away and yet too close
the sense of our own demise
none of us get off this ride
till it's run its course

distract me from myself
naked thoughts are heavy things

boulders rolling down perpetual hills
it was fun once
before too long
you notice what you've wasted
what you'll never get back

regret tastes like bile,
like cigar-ash-whiskey-shots
of thoughts gone freight train
with no breaks

someone derail me
so I can keep the casualties to a minimum
toast marshmellows
on my smouldering remains

breathe in the caustic air
and hope to be better than the bitter
acerbic sting of worthlessness
that epitomizes
the time left
dregs in my glass
I want a refill
before another train comes
 
Sometimes I feel I'm on another
wave length
a different point
in
the time
it takes
to get through the stilted
reading
of broken
fragments

you've forgotten that I thought
I was on another wave---leng-
th,

Interviewing the white spaces
looking for the right placements
finding deeper thoughts
that can't be fathomed in short stories
but too much for the poetic

so I stick in the mid range

Neither a poet
Nor a penner of prose
but some fucked up hybrid
that thinks he knows more
than the less he used to know
back when it mattered
less than the more it shouldn't


I wonder if that shit
is convuluted enough
to wipe my ass with?

doesn't matter much anyway
beacause it's all manure to fodder away
the storage space of a website
soon to be drowned
in the next run on
of diarrhea

still it's soothing
tapping buttons
dropping thoughts that were heavier
than they seemed at the time
hopefully the air that's left up there
can help me float away

Because as peaceful as drowning is
my life raft in this sea
of neverending salt water
is a cozy fucking place
to wither away
 
3-1

They call it settling


“You settle for less than fascination
A few drinks later you're not so choosy”
Down to You - Joni Mitchell


Clearing the land of trees and people, then claim it’s ours
Waiting for a miracle, accepting good luck
Hoping to be a hero, accepting good guy role
First score over ninety-five, now regressing to the mean
Our sex once electric, now comfortable
A good line for a poem till it became a list
Politics once radical, these days best called conflicted
Yet thoughts of you still raise my pulse, yes I remain addicted.
 
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7-1

Best Served Cold

Now you are alone
in the house you'd never repair,
alone with the falling roof,
the broken appliances, wreckage
of our life together
and the emotional wreckage
that was never repaired
by either of us.

I miss the mezzuzah
that lived on every door
of my grandparents' marriage,
my great-uncle's Kiddush cup,
my mother's music box
and my reference books,
none of which you could find
or so you said. I don't
miss you: no cheerful memory

arises that can penetrate
the dense gray fog I see
between us and to be honest
I rarely even think of you.

When this poem is finished
you'll disappear again.
 
3-2

E pluribus unum


Now it was always
my understanding
that the one in “unum”
meant nation, not family
because that was what
your revolution was about.
But the joker’s wild
and trumps all suits.
 
7-2

Not So Scary After All​

What's in a fear? I've had my fill of thrills,
the spider in my shoe, a Twilight Zone
or two, the time I thought that I might spill,
fall from Space Mountain along with my phone.

But mostly, dear Daddy, I must fault you:
the Cyclone almost made me lose my lunch,
and when you said a coin small as a sou
could kill dropped from a great height? Thanks a bunch!

Of course the really scary stuff is loss:
the looming silence where once was a voice,
the visits to leave stones among the moss,
the emptiness that disregards all choice.

It's midnight. I'm surrounded by my ghosts
and happy (it's the time I like the most).

 
3-3

The other side of faraway, the near side of forever​


The forest is
stark in the brilliant
spring sunlight, the profile
of bare trees, buds yet unbroken
contrasted against a cloudless blue sky.
Underneath lies a jumble of fallen trees, branches
and random limestone erratics with the ground covered
by weathered grey leaves and patches of green moss or ferns
 
7-3

Ekphrastody in Blue

It is my dream
to be taken to the sky
as a bride, to be held
tenderly among flowers
that defy Sun and Earth
to swim rootless in blue-green
moonlight or perhaps

grow from the surrounding
clouds, which protect lovers
from the approbation
of neighbors' empty faces.

In my dream I need not consider
Icarus or any cautionary myth.

There will be no falling here,
only flowers and floating, the smiling
groom who keeps me close
in the blue under the Moon.



lovers-and-sunflowers-trudi-doyle.jpg

~ From Lovers and Sunflowers After Marc Chagall, Trudi Doyle
 
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3-4

Sandworms


Why is it that the best books almost always become the worst movies?
 
7-4

Trumpodactyl

Higgledy-piggledy
Trumpy the President
envisions himself as
Emperor-King

deregulating us
out of a future as
biodiversity
isn't his thing.
 
3-5

Lost Pilate


I am the scribe who spends my day fixing angles to a pin
yet in night dreams I spill my seed despoiling Seraphim.
I am the pilot holding fast to a course that cannot win
I am the finger on the trigger to loose the dread Sarin
but through it all I only feel this icy cold within
and pride in duty honoured, which is my greatest sin.
 
7-5

Mountain Sutras

I am the crumbling being. The mountain looks at me and thinks oh she was the silken
pink flower who shone under the Sun's light, blued luminous for the Moon,

flesh soft and firm, long of limb, of finger, strong in the bone and the heart delighted
in the streams she swam, delighted by her toes in the sea that bubbles on the sand,

she who has forgotten how it feels to be a girl, a woman, a human child of the brine
and good brown loam, perhaps godlike from time to time, enchanted by the universe

that bore her swimming from its thighs and seeking all the truths and lies the world
might tell to savor them like wine, living with light among the razor rust and bricks,

the traffic's serenade and melody of rain, her eyes alight with gleam, rising always
somehow from the pain attendant to each dream she seemed much more.

She seemed much more-- a mountain, not this fragile dying animal tied to a machine.
 
3-6

The Affair


Warm sunny days followed by socked in rainy
days and then ice and snow next morning.
Yes, April was cruel, but it always brought to mind
The Affair, the only one of his indiscretions he’d
capitalize even though it had been August not April.
The wife and kids were at the lake with her folks while
he stayed in the city and young Guinevere flew in from
across the pond. Although it wasn’t Camelot, what with
role reversals and all, they’d had their brief shining moment
if only it had stopped there. Of course, it didn’t; things got
complicated but with counseling and therapy, the
respective families stayed intact on each side of the pond.
Yet with the passing of the spring solstice, he’d wake early
and wonder what could have been, if what was hadn’t been.
 
7-6

State Street Memory

Mrs. Jackson had gentleman callers in her room on six. She liked her gin and took it with limes: always ordered ice and two limes on the side. I was glad of the tip. She had a spiderish quality and eyed me like a snack and I'd back out the door. The whole enterprise seemed a hotel for ghosts with its dusty grand staircase and creaking elevator, old women thin and gray as x-rays and a kindly fellow with a plastic nose taped on his face. I don't miss it except for beautiful Salvatore and his sad Gypsy eyes
 
3-7

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First bike


If it had been the US, it probably would have been a Schwinn but this was Canada so it was a used red CCM* one speed coaster bike. A bit too big for me at eight but I’d grow into it, or so I was told. The first few days were hell as I fell frequently, no training wheels for boys, and once crashed into the back of a parked car. But I persevered and soon was able to enjoy the vastly increased mobility to visit fiends and places that had formerly been out of reach. With our bikes, my friends and I extended our range from the Calgary’s western suburbs (now considered city core) to Nose Hill, Bowness Park, down a gravel path (now a paved bike trail) on the Bow River to the Zoo and even Cochrane. Our adventures were not without perils, once my chain broke going down Nose Hill, which on a coaster bike means NO Brakes, and I was saved from sure disaster only because the chain wrapped around my rear axle and stopped the bike. But we all survived, at least until motorcycles and cars became our mode of transportation.

*Canadian Cycle & Machine Company

** Sincere apologies for backsliding into prose.
 
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