Category: Theme Issues

You’ll find me when the night is dark
You’ll find me shining among the stars
In every time and place that we left a mark.

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You won’t find me waiting just here or there
For you forget I’m a little bit of everywhere.

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You can find me if you search
I am here, I am there, I am Everywhere, but most specifically…
Find Me in your Heart and then for all days we will never part.

My aluminum skin is pristine.
Yet, I walk stiff and my metal joints creak.
The tin shell of the man I am sits upright.
But under my screen, my smile shines not as bright.

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What good does it do
To be a liar, to be untrue?
A mask, a poker face, a permanent smile.
None would ever be worth my while.

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What if I said that under my perfect exterior
My blood is inky black, intestines gushing sulfur?
If my insides are wasted, are putrid, are rotten,
Am I still expected to smile then?

You seem no more mesmeric and beautiful
Than fallen roses in cold winter’s grace,
I’ve grown nonchalant and unmindful
Of your beguiling charms in life’s fast race.
Your words of love and blessed life together,
Again, try to make me their smooth prey
But I move not like a dainty feather,
Though it pains me to stay away.
Life’s other charms astutely call upon me,
Willingly offer so much more!
It’s where I truly need to be, I believe
Oh Why! Hadn’t I seen them before?
At last, I break from your shackles and drift afar
Everything, my dear, is fair in love and war.

There was an old judge in Manhattan
who often misused legal Latin.
As he just wouldn’t leave,
they gave him the heave
along with the chair which he sat in.

Fragmenting light into 7 springs of beams,
Scattered in the plain, yet still unseen,
Gleaming bright like glass on a mural dome,
Furious intensity embedded in stone,
The surface is carved, with perfect notches,
Enlightening colors, carefully dotted,
Onlookers left elated and wanting more,
Silently still, its aura roars,
So Beautiful and priceless, Stars splatter their light,
A phenomenal daze that blossoms out bright,
When rough it’s sought, when carved it’s desired,
Color of the Earth, the water, the fire,
A hundred names, but its value is one,
Lies the glimmering, glamorous, little Gemstone.

My Ukrainian wedding band:
a strip of wood, a sample of lichen,
forest hues hardened in resin

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I tend to tense my fingers
below knuckles, stiffening,
tendons kissing hard,

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an obsessive squeeze for release
which brings the fear, inadvertently,
I’ll crush the ring in time,

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freeing foreign vegetation
from my promised finger,
stasis to alien air

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I chose this one for its floating greens,
a primordial reminder
where we come,

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but I know nothing of
the creator’s home
or the war down the road

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How could I?
How could you,
from here?
If anyone should ask,
it is a frozen wheel of the planet
that made us, our trembling, affectionate guts,

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a chain of mushrooms, leaves, and pumpkin sun,
offerings of a morning after rest, reminders
of turning renewable soil,

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finding lovely sameness,
unbreakable cellular repetition,
clean cancer for the soul.

Poetry is for the fainthearted
The feeble and insecure
Who find shelter in words:

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We are the crippled and infirm
Our hurt coalescing into alphabetical figures
Broken lines on the page

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Vast white spaces
Like the snowstorm that blinds us
And hides the throbbing heat

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Of passions with cooled hands
Cold-trembling skin
And icy hearts.

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Your enduring love
And certain fidelities
Are not the stuff of poetry

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Which can only speak
What is otherwise unspeakable
Too deep to retrieve

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Too profound to understand
Except in the halting speech
Of poets, for found love is mute.