caustic homage (draft): 02feb19

A hotel room is a dangerous place
when you are all by your lonesome
Don't it feel like a cell?
esp. when the warmth of a woman has escaped it
The smell of her on the sheets
fades as the night wears on and
you wonder if she were ever there.

Picaresque restaurants close and the last
of the lonely make their way into the night
The servers are eager to hit the club 
So dishes are piled in the sink
to the anger of the breakfast shift.
The crew hold on to one another as they
head off singing a hackneyed 
"Comme d'habitude".

Memories of only the grandest of failure
despite the storied truth
reminesce in the smells of those that came before
and thought the same thing
when they lay in the bed
with a Lark on their lips
and nothing on the TV set
in a town small as this.

The boarders next door stop using the sink
And the entirety of the floor grows quiet
but the frequency hum
of televisions left to keep company

Tomorrow looks to be an unwritten failure
should we meet it
And there's the question again
again as fresh as the first time.

And so it is

Comme d'habitude je vais sourire
Comme d'habitude je vais même rire
Comme d'habitude, enfin je vais vivre

...

...waiting to hibernate...06jan19

intermittent rain

followed by the sun some
grey puddles
wet grass
deep pockets at Boisseranc
cut the turf
a layer of ready mud


neath yellow scrag
missing it
'A long while sick, supposed.'
he didn't look from the shadowed lap
his wiry face
his eyes closed
guilty I say


mine come in cotton shirts
and the smell of Canoe
never tugging on attention
but if I look they are
unencumbered
reminiscent

breathing deep

always there

other spirits come as lighted orbs

their chests raise and fall

but they mock 

the action

mindless

rote

lost

...

vis: pelicula en blanco y negro

clarity writ in dark and light
lines comforting
where cacaphony's a spectrum
an unrelenting array
but here, but three - shadow, white and in between

a soft sweater on a cool day
a buffet against a harsher wind
mellowing it to a light, cool whisper
the fog to separate harshness
otherwise

this or that, or somewhere in between
is all

focus is effortless
edging the primordial
time between day and night
where tremulous we tread
and only breath
and relish the pause

~ 25jun18

poem:"Exemplary"

there's no better signet
pulling star light from night
a precious sparkle in the dark
taking it tenderly
and placing it upon warm skin
allowing its warmth
slip along
and around
leaving nothing untouched

the color violet
upon your wrist
empowers you
as you are
beauty unspent.

poem: AE Housman's "When summer's end is nighing..."

XXXIX (from Last Poems)
- A E Housman, c. 1934

Nina Leen—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

When summer's end is nighing
  And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
  And all the feats I vowed
  When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
  Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
  That looked to Wales away
  And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
  The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
  And hushed the countryside,
  But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall
  In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
  And darkness hard at hand,
  And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy
  The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
  Breathed from beyond the snows,
  And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not
  And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
  That ever can ensue
  Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming
  On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
  For summer's parting sighs,
  And then the heart replies.

poem:Raymond Roy Ruth Herbet

https://letgotravelaustralia.wordpress.com/tag/neil-hargraves-lookout/

"Raymond Roy Ruth Herbet [sic]"
- August 14th 2016

The back of a crudely shorn bookmark, Louise Gluck, "Poems 1962-2012"
Raymond Roy Ruth Herbet

Raymond with a languid finding of the 'a'
Roy and Ruth more sure
And Herbet incomplete
If it only had an 's' to start
A sweeter man he'd be.

...

Crawling back from the blankness
Promised darkness
In a thousand well read lines
But it lacked a colour, it lacks the blush
of light or dark.

The river was deep as it was wide
An ocean to most
Although I knew its shores on either side
Outlined its flow
And it glittered and played
And moved, horrifyingly so,
Its mass unstopped

And, for years, it was such,
And, for years, I was silent
A dam, but I watched
quietly and the shores defined
by the careful method of earth
that is constantly moving
but we simply cannot feel

The dam broke

And the torrents flowed and
We know their course
Perhaps I knew its end
Glorious as it were
The poetry of motion
Its curves, its grace
The momentous, clear
Dark clear

The reveries stilled
And I saw it gone
The blankness came
While in the desert
How apt now that it has come
Upon me, no blush
in lighted memory
But this

The red earth scarred
A chasm in its wake.

...

read:Gentleman Jack

and why the f@ck not

this morning was not to be without you

but here I am

Highway 1 at Huntington 

the sun not yet cleared the mountain

but Catalina illumed

the reds and oranges of early light

bounce off the cargo ships, moored

awaiting their turn in the churn

I woke up in my car and realization

sank me hard

that was it and there would be no more

a little left and a crack

and a gentleman no more

I hoped myself a laugh, maniacal

but nothing came

a wool poncho

and a pair of Reefs' my net worth

stolen from the Marriott (perfect fit)

(an uninvited party)

burping the smoky liquid

while clinging to the chain link 

above the estuary 

a seagull cautiously stares

indignant

write:the Desert

Borrego Springs, 2016

Snippets from the road trip

It's always snippets

A blast of laughter, a verse from a song

An incomplete conversation

But never the full

Like the strand of a violin pull.

The road goes by.

The naked stone, the ancient stone

Piled high upon more and more

Triple digit heat doesn't hit

Until after the mount and coming

back through switchbacks.

The rocks barely care.

Nothing moves after 11

The shadows are gone

Except under rock and root

The sand is still, the air has stopped

As you move through the heat

It feels like your face to a furnace.

You are nothing in the heat

You are nothing to the desert.

The cicadas own the day.

read:"bespoke in the ravenous desires of the day"

bespoke
in the ravenous desires of the day
that man cannot merely sustain upon material course
for the soul invariably seeks beyond the
safe confines of sustenance
to the lofty
and divine

the stone thrown as declarative
the dust rose as epigram
and you, the same, exampled
by feeding from the same strange stage
where, lunatics all, expel their cordial exaltations
that provide where all other forms of fancy fail
and the heart hungers
to ingest

lines aloud from trembling ink
(or we fail where our minds outraces the form)
desire to fill the spaces bread cannot sate:
a repast fulfilled
from passion's pate.

- a poem for H---- in response to a conversation regarding open mic nights and Dizzee Rascal at Huntington Library, 22nd August 2014

poem:Crumbs from Feast, the Poisonous Beast

Insidious, yet only in the tense past
as a shadow, only sighted whence we turn
Grew behind me like a veiled whisper
Brilliant in its disguise
Fatigue it fained, confusion fed me
Sight poisoned, passions drained
I would not turn, I refused it
Until the shade and the sun's light
Were no different, impossibly indistinguishable
And we are
Human
After all.

How are we to defend the slow worm's draw
When we are poisoned in crumbs and not in feasts?
Only seen when I mine eyes were no longer straight
Drowning for the fathom above me
Drowning until I saw, twice in error
And the body convulsed and my eyes opened
My head turned
And it can no longer hide
Reveling in the damage it has done.

Daemon.
The ancients would care for their names,
Divining them in parchment and smoke
But nothing matters so little in this.
Turn upon the shadow and see
Veiled whispers and shadow
Made true.

...here is proven that indifferent cruelty...

Here is proven that indifference
The uncaring, the cruelty, the muted heart
Written in your fragility,
That gentle hair lapped by soulless waters
Greeted by repulsion
The outrage would last but a day
Perhaps two if we can turn our eyes toward this
This...then where?
Where shall our eyes turn to tomorrow?
And this casket, it is woeful small

But it is a home

The patter above is not of rain
A father who sought only a peaceful shore
A promise he said a thousand times
A promise like a prayer
Into your ears

Saint Pancras

And you, just happy to hear that serious tenor
As it tickled in your head
And you beamed
Like a light
I must protect you a thousand times

The shore was reached.

You were owed a modicum of consolation
But not there, not here
You came from an asylum writ large: unstable sands
Broken walls
Sanity spilled out in red finality
These are children pursued and swallowed
By monsters
How shall we make account but by a census
Of the chattering teeth of Baal
As he swallows endlessly
And he is fed?

{Pancras knew, a child himself,
The indifferent works of Diocletian
Then Saint, martyred well, where shall we set our hand
For vengeful peace and fated justice?}

Give for the Syrian Refugees
http://www.ifrc.org/syria-crisis
http://www.churchinneed.org/site/TR/Events/UnitedInFaith?fr_id=1100&pg=entry
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/07/has-the-world-looked-the-other-way-while-christians-are-killed/

...Robert Frost...the Heat Wave...12sep14...

My parents returned from Vermont a week ago and brought back with them a copy of Robert Frost's Poems.  A simple paperback copy from St. Martin's Press (1971 version).  Thankfully I received a present I find enriching.  As I am sweating at my desk in the break of the historical record of heat, I came across his Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.  How it awakens the frost long forgotten otherwise.  The type of snow that silently falls, as gentle as nothing else along our hair and skin.

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

 - 1922

As a stone, through lifeless lids, track the monotone horizon

The fire extinguished, the sun black marble

The memory lost.

The cold no different than cold flesh, covered frost

My breath no different in the air

Thoughts decay.

All to ice, the tracks undisclosed, layer upon layer,

Hardened upon itself, a clear glue

The heart last.

- 2014

Haze

Intertwined like gloss on your lips
The crystal hue of your eyes animated in the flashes
Of grey sunlight

The smell
Of soda, dark, in your hair from where
We opened it

It is hyper cherry blast
The sugar is what flew wet into the wheat dark
Near the end, where it meets your neck

I should not smell it
But are there rules?
I look at the china cabinet
That hasn't said a word since I arrived
I bow faceously and return to snack.