Sunday, March 25, 2018

OTI:25 poems and notes:3/25/18

Happy Birthday, Robert Frost!

Open To Interpretation

Memorial

How can I be someone found
If you are not even looking?
These mean streets
Can be distracting:
Memorial wilted flowers
And tall glass candles
In the sunlight
Surround the base
Of the dark creosote
Telephone pole
With taped colored papers'
Memorial messages written.
I walk by often,
A stranger on the sidewalk,
To a favorite coffee shop's
Greetings and breakfast orders.
Time to time,
The telephone pole grave stone
Has new additions, fresh flowers,
Changes, and is slowly fading,
But has persisted for months.
You dropped me like
Trash on a McDonald's tray.

Numbers

The numbers confuse
There being so many
But then each is a composite
One being made from another
So a familiar family
Save for solitary solitude
Found in each
And the incomprehensible,
Infinity's container.

I could be talking about stars
Or atomic minutiae
Or fish in the sea
Or you and me.

Well, it is
A myopic kind of faith
To know just one language,
My words my Town's talk.
I regard the reports
Of foreign planets
The translators' focused endeavors
But who am I to say
What they see
Is what is there.

Marvel enough
You read this and smile
Even in China.

Cello Player

Oh,
I could be a cello player,
Make those long low slow tones
For the scary movies
Step by step through haunted rooms
 
 
Lost Dogs

Tossed out
Abandoned beside the roads
Or maybe jumped the fences,
However it comes
We're hungry and thirsty.
Soon enough,
Our eyes with a bewildered look,
Found begins an incarceration
With the other refugees
Doomed to a homeless fate.
Cats at night
Dart across in headlights
Wise in the ways of streets.
Us lost dogs
End up
Lost dogs,
However maybe adopted,
Remembering our fear
Of being no one
In no where.
 
 
Archivist

An archivist of my own collection
Scattered musings gathered together
I looked carefully at the beehive nation
See if they are stirring, or their

Queen has perished and so all orphaned.
What does an empty hive portend?
The kitten has just learned to climb,
Startled runs down back to inside home,
On the tip of its tail a bee.
A bric a brac hexagon shadow box
For a librarian taken by honey.
 
 
Funk

I'm in a funk
And taken to my bunk.

In this gloom
I'm surrounded by tombs.

Engraved cement
To graffiti lent.

Passing by ghosts
This graveyard hosts.

Tip tip tip
The stone chisel's lisp.

Tell me where I am
And I'll show you
Where you've been.

We are in the same place
Held in dream lace.

The black mirrored pyramid silhouette
Joins the slow silver bee stars,
A taste in my senses banquette
For my hovering eye cars.

The moon passes over,
Slides down the black slope
And I await the sun to climb the east
And cast the chevron shadow,
Sisyphus' hope.

Terrain
 
What rain can fall on a desert terrain?
Flowers wilted colors.
Oh, what faith have you to perform before empty seats?
I don't know.
Do flowers live for bees
Or bees for flowers?
They don't know too?
Enchanted by the story
I found I had no story time of my own
 
 
Two Caches

Oh,
So, I do have two caches,
Albeit ignoble,
That qualified me
For our prolonged combat:
A stolen self
And magic wand.
With the moon above
The night mirrored crater lake
We rest our arms and consider:
A toppled tree,
A planted seed,
Or branches grown rank.
 
 
On The Leash

This way and that way
On the leash
Until we find
The corbeled corridor-
"Sufi sufi"
We breath evenly,
Fearless of the fumes
 
 
To Be Read

Oh,
To want be read
Rather than dead
And hear it said
Overhead
"Not to be repeated."

Intrinsic

They're intrinsic,
All the things I do
Or not do,
To knowing you.

Cat's Fur

Cat's fur like
A hilly forest of black pines,
The tops dusted with snow.
A purring endothermic
Thermocline.

Miss
 
I miss the ear nibbling.
The punching claw tips
Of incredulity at
Such as me.
 
 
 

No comments: