Four (4) new items
Test of Strength
There’s pressure building up inside the rotary phone,
Steam billowing out of the tea kettle,
Smoke escaping from the chimney,
Air manipulated by bellows
That have never seen the light of day.
I am forced to run barefoot across hot coals,
But my calluses are so thick
That I can scarcely feel anything.
If the mind can focus on the limbs without wavering,
A double jointed escape from a straitjacket
Becomes suddenly possible.
People rarely tell you why they have to go,
But the waiting room empties as they grow impatient
And turn to leave for their fallow homes.
The last lie has been spoken;
The final fib has been told.
A poem’s lines can come out of the page
Seemingly unrelated to one another,
Just as a cube can reveal six different perspectives at once.
This is my manifesto, written in bile on the walls.
Those who refuse to heed it may judge me a charlatan
But I write for the hint of ears willing to understand.
The Odin Portal
A door to the world appears,
Light shooting into his bright green eyes
And the sweet smell of summer
Filling up his nose which is far more powerful
Than a mere human can begin to imagine.
The gully is for roaming,
For reaching far back into his ancestral past
To achieve the pinnacle of felinity.
But the noontime sun is too hot
And so he wanders back into his domicile
And drifts off to sweet mousy dreams.
The portal opens and shuts by a power
That he cannot understand.
This same source of power provides food and water,
Which he gladly laps up without comprehending
Just where it came from.
Not quite conscious but merely subtly registering
The things that happen to him,
He settles in the lap of his adopted mother,
Having lazed away another day
In this permanent romp he calls life.
Bread Puppetry
It finally feels like ten years
Since I was a bread puppeteer.
I think back through time
And write a new rhyme
Just so the dead men can hear.
Dew
We all need a context in which to live. My memory is long and wide enough to form a cavern to dwell in, and points in time are not fixed: yesterday and a thousand years ago can easily swap places. We gather together now like dew on the dead dandelions, diaphragms dangling. They have excised the beast from my heart, and my beloved trauma has been repressed, replaced instead with the casualties of normalcy, the ordinary and sterile. I walk this premeditated path until such time as I can hatch from the egg, ascend into the sky, and find the true meaning of the dominion of suffering as noted by the gurus. They knew what was going on, without the distraction of the assembly line. We build airplanes and steamships to carry cargo from continent to continent, coast to coast, ignorant all the while that the real currency can be found in the heart.
There’s pressure building up inside the rotary phone,
Steam billowing out of the tea kettle,
Smoke escaping from the chimney,
Air manipulated by bellows
That have never seen the light of day.
I am forced to run barefoot across hot coals,
But my calluses are so thick
That I can scarcely feel anything.
If the mind can focus on the limbs without wavering,
A double jointed escape from a straitjacket
Becomes suddenly possible.
People rarely tell you why they have to go,
But the waiting room empties as they grow impatient
And turn to leave for their fallow homes.
The last lie has been spoken;
The final fib has been told.
A poem’s lines can come out of the page
Seemingly unrelated to one another,
Just as a cube can reveal six different perspectives at once.
This is my manifesto, written in bile on the walls.
Those who refuse to heed it may judge me a charlatan
But I write for the hint of ears willing to understand.
The Odin Portal
A door to the world appears,
Light shooting into his bright green eyes
And the sweet smell of summer
Filling up his nose which is far more powerful
Than a mere human can begin to imagine.
The gully is for roaming,
For reaching far back into his ancestral past
To achieve the pinnacle of felinity.
But the noontime sun is too hot
And so he wanders back into his domicile
And drifts off to sweet mousy dreams.
The portal opens and shuts by a power
That he cannot understand.
This same source of power provides food and water,
Which he gladly laps up without comprehending
Just where it came from.
Not quite conscious but merely subtly registering
The things that happen to him,
He settles in the lap of his adopted mother,
Having lazed away another day
In this permanent romp he calls life.
Bread Puppetry
It finally feels like ten years
Since I was a bread puppeteer.
I think back through time
And write a new rhyme
Just so the dead men can hear.
Dew
We all need a context in which to live. My memory is long and wide enough to form a cavern to dwell in, and points in time are not fixed: yesterday and a thousand years ago can easily swap places. We gather together now like dew on the dead dandelions, diaphragms dangling. They have excised the beast from my heart, and my beloved trauma has been repressed, replaced instead with the casualties of normalcy, the ordinary and sterile. I walk this premeditated path until such time as I can hatch from the egg, ascend into the sky, and find the true meaning of the dominion of suffering as noted by the gurus. They knew what was going on, without the distraction of the assembly line. We build airplanes and steamships to carry cargo from continent to continent, coast to coast, ignorant all the while that the real currency can be found in the heart.