August 15, 1958

You were six
What a hot bossy day
When you were six
Our family hike up that cross canyon trail
You were six
That coming fall you would be starting school
When you were six
I remember your pretty face
You were six
I remember boss terror in your eyes
When you were six
Fate crossed us as you fixed on me
You were six
I was the last thing you saw
When you were six
Clutched in my horrified mother's arms
You were six
You both were seized and tossed in that frigid swell
When you were six
Swept away over that bossy eighty foot waterfall
You were six
Icy rushing water with its cross kiss of death
When you were six
My unflossed memory of such fear in your eyes
You were six
I was only four
When you were six
Me standing on the mossy edge of that raging torrent
You were six
I remember boss horror fixed on our mother's face
When you were six
That instant as you both plunged over that unforgivable edge
You were six
No lost memories of that tragic moment and I recall speaking
When you were six
"If I were Superman I would save you"
You were six
Our older sister screaming
When you were six
She was eight
When you were six
What a hot August day in those rugged Rocky Mountains
You were six
August tragedy up costly Johnston canyon
When you were six
I remember terror crowding your angel face
You were six
That last lost thing you saw
When you were six
One last second staring into each other's eyes
You were six
I still toss and dream of you
When you were six
You're still attached to my accosted soul
You were six
Now I'm a mossy sixty-five
You were only six.

my eyes
my open eyes
i wake
i stir and wake
my lungs
my needy lungs
i breathe
i inhale and breathe
my feet
my naked feet
such sharp cinders
those burning embers
hot sand 
hot sand beneath my bare feet
my arms
my empty arms
wanting to hold you
longing to hold you
my mouth
my open mouth
so dry
so parched and dry
no love songs
no happy poems
all those empty words
my heart
my broken heart
wanting to love you
waiting to love you
my pursed lips
my parched lips
wanting to kiss you
needing to kiss you
the sun
the moon
the planets
our needy hearts
the careless wind has blinded us
the heartless wind has swept love away
my mind
my mind
my sorry mind

Haiku Tuesday

This mass extinction

Our planet is in peril

We'd better wise up

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Folk must realize

Fukushima is fatal

Destroying our Earth

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Honesty and truth

Where do we find the answers?

Dreams our Soul tells us

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You have no vision

You call yourself a leader

Why are you so blind?

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So for the moment

So moments can be fleeting

So fleeting moments

There are no straight lines in space
A plethora of eternal curves
Everything in its own plane
What a loveless marriage
Striving for the upper hand
One curve ball after another
Another deceptive parallelogram
We'll never see that far around the bend
Featuring inceptive curves
All those blind corners
All those drive-by's and fly-by's
One projectile's plan
Swerving when we can
Correctable lines
One straight path here
A strand of sandy beach
A crumbling road there
Speculatively roaming each curve
Deliberate Rome always in the centre
Discovering the world and the senate aren't flat
Poems and curves and the legislated universe
No straight lines bordering this worthy riddle
We're piddling away crooked time
Exponentially each rook goes
Expounding along some unfounded circle
Every sound thing revolving
Striving to curve away from resistance
Elevated sunsets
Relevant moonrises
Orbits around the full circle
Each spectral spiral
Every expectant vortex
Beyond imaginary straight lines
Mixtures of glub assets
Politics are inevitable
Cream swirling to the latte top
Galaxies of rich toppings
Viral contamination of the archaic and old
So many verbal clouds and stumbling blocks
All those mysterious neutron stars and abnormal black holes
Everything revolving around the same shrouded center
Circling one reflective universe into the next
Never the same impressive scene
Seeming to cogitate and change forever
All these curved lines
So many rigid pledges
We're doting along that arc of the world
Curvature of the edgeless earth
Smashed pumpkins along a country road
Scattering something seeds
From ditch to ditch
Glaciers arcing side to side
A multitude of blocks and arches
That magical place where life itself starts
Like a marvelous macrocosm of word and light
Marking points along each articulated arc
Gravity and some vermicular warp
Then another sharp atomic curve
Brilliant rings around the brightest star
Illuminating creation within each mighty coil
Deviating to the worldly left
Spirals and twists and existent elbows
Dodging to the fantastic right
Exhibiting a nebula of rainbow arches
Radiance and every far reaching ray of light

Art
All this sin and lust
All this idolatry
All this art
We open our eyes
Open our ears
Open our minds
Such greedy strokes
A plain
A window
A palette
Some hint of colour
Some touch of dimension
Such didactic texture
Hanging in the Louvre
Hanging in the Prado
Hanging from the Gallows
Losing one's mind
Losing one's grip
Losing one's head
Like Charles the first
Like a lover of secondary art
Like a poised third party
Reconnoitering elegance
Tired arrogance portraying art
Fine lines and expensive pigments
Fine silk and powdery faces
Such dashing beauty and nonchalant poses
All that poetic magnificence
In a word
Art

Before I die
I want to write another ten thousand poems
I want to slash my wrists
Pour my blood over every page
Gouge deep furrows into my fertile soul
Write intrepid words and phrases
Behold bursting stars and fiery comets
Witness flaming asteroids and incorrigible dreams
Stream along shafts of supernatural light
Discover ship wrecks and deserted islands
Foster the wanting mindful kind
Mindful of my copper patina and metallic thought
Everything breathing more intensely now
Creatures creeping from that swamp I call my mind
Cultivated by the full moon on a harvest night
I'm mining words from the deepest tunnels that I find
Sluicing magnetic sand over phlegmatic rills
Tumbling poems through the expectant ball mill
A watery ditch along my arcane existence
Respectful of that furrowed edge
Flakes of magnetite and emotional iron weigh me down
I'm searching for tempered steel and gleaming gold
Glittering emeralds and jewels I'd like to find
Hope diamonds come marching two by two
One mesmerizing facet after another
Those entrancing Eldorados and valleys full of Lapis Lazuli
Herds of trumpeting Emu and wild rubies
Flocks of humble birds and lofty Muse
All that literary attraction
All that radio-active migration
Isotopes searching for foreign beaches and pacific recreation
Stratified lightning bolting through our veins
Corruption that can never be deciphered
Reciphering an electric discussion of importunity
A pyramid of fortune seeking amphibians
Coming for pleasure and to lay their emblematic eggs
So much world and opportunity
All those deep rivers and rushing waterways
All those magnificent king salmon
Royal milt and servant roe
Schools of fish worth a million words
Creation spilling down every riffle
Complex surging over every waterfall
Slow sad words and blessed sacred water
What impossible mission is this?
The flood gates are open
The dam has broken
Bequest a raging overflow of random thought
Sounding beyond ageless depth and stature
Respecting boundaries of trim electrons
Atoms zipping through our veins
Spewing conjecture and ripped fantasy
Gripping phantasms haunting every aisle and street
Crimson molecules colliding with the consuming world
Bloody spectres creeping out as poems
Ten thousand bloody poems later
A vampire entity might find me again
Conspire in some other world
Awake to remind myself
I am one apostrophe
Stenciled amongst a billion pages
One curved comma
Tendered in this lengthy human novel
Rendering detachment and unfounded trauma perhaps
Expounding some folksy roving rhyme
Beastial ink dripping across every timely page
I'm engaging myself
Awash in letters and this creative flood
Rejoicing in all this fabricated play
Reveling in all that spilled ink and blood
Composing poetry every provocative day 

2019-09-09
Too late
I find myself waiting
Waiting for the sun to shine
Waiting for the rain to end
Number nine
Number nine
Number nine
Waiting for the night to end
Waiting for the day to come
Waiting for the rainbow's end
Number nine
Number nine
Number nine
Waiting for my heart to feel again
Waiting for Archangel Raphael to help me heal
Waiting for the Grim Reaper to visit again
Number nine
Number nine
Number nine
Waiting for destiny to come knocking
Waiting for my broken heart to mend
Waiting for fate to come stalking
Number nine
Number nine
Number nine
Too late
2019-09-10

Haiku Sunday



Folks just want to live

Baking bread and making kids

All those yummy dreams


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Picturing a sound

Words speaking written symbols

Language on paper


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Water so sacred

Elixir of planet Earth

H 2 O is God


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Living life today

People try to be something

Just doing their thing


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Stewie said it best

Rupert you've come back to me

All that love we feel


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Somehow I survived the trenches
Got past all that carpet bombing
Endured whirlwinds of poison gas
Life's just willfully difficult
Inevitably ending up
Still myself all the time
Telling the other me memorable stories
Crazy old man porridge
Oats and glorious grazing with an old ram
Lowing in the high meadow
I dream about flowering dells
Shepherding a glowing ewe and golden lamb
Campfire smoke and a sweet clearing in the wilderness
Sparks and embers
Sparkling northern lights
My stark old cabin burning down
Then I oddly wake rememb'ring
All I find are ashes
Sifting charred bone
A tangle of welded relics
Twisted cast iron remnants
Such a hot wielding number
All those unwieldy memories
Past away in that brazen conflagration
Bright moonlight on a cold winter night
Smoldering sage and aged bits
Sacred herbs and brazed descendants
Razed remnants in righteous graves
Saved leftovers in growing cemeteries
Rows of consummate criers
Crazed fire and its infernal consumption
A blast furnace of roaring flames
Blazing a tornadic path
Volcanoes leaving the clan bewitched
Stitched up man
Wondering where up becomes down
Let us off this precipitous edge
I'm so close to that ridiculous ledge now
Still peril somehow
Survivalist nerves up til now
Frill speech with dead poets
Tea and crumpets
Their marmalade rhymes
Creating marvelous lyric circles
A genetic corn vortex in these farm-aide times
Crop circles and all those crystalline words
Divine fields of cryptic signals and signs
Summons from the edge of the forest
A blessed ivory Unicorn
A summer pledge waiting to be ridden
Hidden Unicorn glory
Shimmering story lines with golden clouds
Looming mysteries with mystical meanings
Rude booms wake historical folk in the gritty night
There's a mighty storm brewing
Provoking the nitty world
Poking closer to the lagging centre now
Far beyond fragmented entrenchment
Eliminating unrepentant carpet bombing
Relinquishing ill meant greed and profit
All that independent penetrating oil
Pacifying patent freedom with liquified gas
Humankind is forever scarred
Marred with old war wounds
Harassed by darting demons and farting gargoyles
Struggles with an apartment past
Still it's not the end of the world
Like that old saying
"Things will look better in the morning"
Still more rhetoric
"Better late than never"
Every place where glory exists
Beyond all those inglorious trenches
Our demented foreign past
All those scandalous bloodied battlefields
Where sad bombs and forlorn gas played
Frayed prayer flags and trying real human progress
Oh give me a home
Where the buffalo roam
Agreeable like the mystical Serengeti
So I'm still a Kilimanjaro pilgrim
John Dunn dreaming
Metaphysical prop circles
Pilgrims stopped up with quizzical thought
Propped up creation down on both knees
Why fear that imminent ledge?
That indiscriminate edge
All that insistent unknown
Digging downward
Into deeper trenches
Entrenched villagers engulfed by fiery change
Tired consuming forests of trees
Assuming some renewable nerve gas
Astrology never conspires or agrees
Free thinking at this astronomical stage
Nominal old farmer's almanac disease
No thanks to blanque cheques and rank cancer
Just dish out frank incense and kindness please
So like the Cube that 'WAS' before time
All those skanky transformations
Tragic teasing and cranking us
Pleasing pranks enduring this rugged life
Treason and tanks transforming love
All those opulent snails and slugs that cross tank trails
All those rank dreams
Spiral shells and cyclonic fires
Flooding streets with crank strife
That bloody allegorical knife
Like ruddy Jinn rising
Straying out of the secret desert
Forever lost in a blistering mirage
Staid dunes of burning sand
Deeper than all those bloody man-made trenches
Pyramids stand marking the land
Mummified Nilotic legions
Miscarriage of truth and dreams over time
All those fairy rings and unreasonable things
What came first the cube or the egg?
A course scientifically rehearsed
Supplicant cube first
Then the compliant versed egg
Hatching terse cubism
Ritual immersive eggism
Egoism at its heady best
Pledge and ritual reasonism
Surviving this edgy test