Gads...If I had known what I was getting into, I certainly wouldn't have named the website 'Democracy in Action'. Or, perhaps, it is too appropriate...not sure. In any case, I do like to diddle out poetry. Not that I've even been published or follow a rhyme scheme, because both of those words are far too hard to spell correctly.

My favorite poets? Hmm..e.e. cumming, Yeats, Byron, Whitman, Dickinson, Hughes, Merton...to name a few. I guess I'm not really selective. I like the way certain poems roll off the tongues of those reciting. Poems, you must remember, were meant to be read out loud. I'm going to throw a bunch out there, because I can. Because I am now a blogger...

For Michael

The lavender has toppled its crown to the sun
And spread its roots about the dirt;
And now breathes lustrous fragrance through the air.
It is a living thing.
At nightfall, I shall gaze into his brown eyes,
As they narrow with sleep,
And think of him as lavender, slowly veiling close.
That he should sleep with deepest root incumbent.
Upon the morn, he’ll rise before me
And lift his hands above his head in praise of day.
He’ll bow to bed as I doze and whisper
Green things in my head.

I wake after he leaves…
And every morning, I cry out, hoping
He is near.
My dear one has gone on. Only silence meets
My ear. There is, however,
That subliminal memory of his kiss.
So that I can go outside and watch the lavender
Begin the dance, again, and know
My brown-eyed love will be with me at dusk,
Telling me green things that whirl in my head.

**
Tribute to the Two Trees

The fairy queen long ago dropped
The Glass of God.
The marred spurs of fragments shattered
And sliced the flesh of mortals.
We gazed upon each other with disgust
as reflections turned all bad out.

The glass was never mended; too many angels
Drew blood upon the slivers, and so humans are left to walk
About with shards in our pupils.
Tears gather when gazing upon the truth of things.

Long ago, the glass was whole and filtered out the wrongs
Of man. God let us go upon that green hill and hither we ran.
The fairy queen, a beast of beauty, did see the glass as vain.
Though God’s own creation, she drew it near her heart
And pondered her own fairness. In turn,
Her hands grew clumsy and let slip the mirror, gilded.
The demons clutched for the shards and narrowly missing,
Threw darts into the sides of men. And women shed the blood
Of all those misplaced horrors. And so it goes:

We are left to walk about with shards in our pupils,
Glass in our heart, and eternal mending in our soul.
But so is God mysterious, reflected near each evil
We commit, each crime upon each other. God slivers
Into the Truth, as well the fairy queen, and both look
Out upon the Universe created, a place of things
Both good and bad, generous and mean.

So it is that the fairy queen, in selfish acts of hell,
Did bring ruin to mankind but also unleashed God.
And now God is with us, each time we gaze upon the bitter glass,[Yeats]
Our souls mirrored in haze amongst our dire humanity,
Our blessing mixed with curses, our curses tinged with grief.
**
Had I known that love would
Shelter me in such mundane ways—
Had I heard your voice a year before,
Had I closed my eyes in the sunshine—
Why, had these things occurred,
Then Love itself would be as orchestrated
As it has been chaotic.

I am relieved I have the rest of my life
To fine-tune this wonderful
Unforseeable
Impeccable emotion.

Life’s Anxieties

For those of you diagnosed with
The following:
Schizoprenia, Depression, Mania, Anxiety:

Heed me when I tell you
Do not stop taking those little white pills, for
Those pills contain the peace of modern living.

Why, the other week, I stopped
Taking my little white pills and instantly
Felt dizzy and sad about
The terrors of this modern world from
The Middle East to the mushy brakes
Of my Korean car.

It was all too much for me to bear.
I had to call off work and stay home,
Wrestling with the demons of this life.
After a day or so of this,
I came to see:
My anxieties are no threat to anyone.
I am not crazy, merely somewhat more afflicted
By the news, the sad deaths of children, the abuse
Of power in Office,
The mushy brakes of my Korean car.

If you are one who comes to view the television
For ambient light and noise and not
The threat that it truly is,
You do not need these little white pills.
The rest of us, however,
Desire a different kind of relaxation, and so
We must resort to
Those little white pills.

II.

Night comes, and I lie awake on top
Of the covers. He rests besides me, asleep as fast
As a wink, blink, and nod.

I, however, must take a different route to sleep:
I must imagine flowers. There are bright flowers to chase
Away any flies of sadness, and there are vines wrapping
About the Soul, cradles of soothing.

If every night, I dreamt of flowers,
My mind unhindered
The days could be lighter.

Yesterday, a bomb exploded and killed forty-seven people and counting
In London. The world was shocked.
If I dreamt of flowers, I would not wonder
Why the world was shocked, for that many and more die
Everyday in other terrified nations…everyday.

These are the things I think about lying
On top of the covers,
Imagining a garden of flowers
Where there is usually only a dust of indifference.

III.

The cat has got her claw stuck
To her tail. She looks
Like a breakdancer, scrubbing the floor in a circle,
That one rogue claw hanging on to black fur, not relenting.

We laugh at this; it’s funny! She has great determination
To free herself from her own grip yet she is doing
Nothing more than squirming about in a circle.

She is probably very frustrated about the situation and wishes
Someone would help her instead of laughing.
This is how I feel when I am perturbed at politics;
People laugh at my seriousness but I am not funny.
I am angrily twitching about, hoping
Something will change if I can just get my claw
Out of my own ass.

IV.

Summer rain comes fast
Fallen petals wash downstream
The sky is steel gray

Damp soil freshens herbs
Lavender stretches to sky
Purple blooms on high

Willow tree bends down
Kissing wind and tall soft grass
Long boughs melt with earth

Ice Blue

The blue eyes of children lost stare at me behind a curtain—
A glaze of something more insidious than any overt
Evil. These are the girls and boys, the devotees of
Crank, ice, crystal meth.
It is almost like a Grimm’s fairy tale.
These children (so many of these children) are walking
Through a deep forest, and they are lost. The children
Hold hands; some of the children are older and lead
The others to a safe warm place, a kitchen, an oven.
There is an oven in the woods, baking
The strangest cookies of all.
And the children with the blue eyes begin eating
These cookies, wondering if parents will look for them.

The parents are standing at the edge of the woods, with
Hands on hips, looking disgruntled. No one wants to go
Into the woods, but all recognize they should be in the wood.
No one takes a step.

The children eat the mysterious cookies baked in the black
Smoking, lecherous oven in the wood. The older children begin
To bake other cookies, and the younger children watch
Diligently. And soon, all ingest these cookies with
The appetite of ravenous baby birds. They are helpless.

And the parents look at each other as the sun sets
On the dark forest, and they consider:
What could they be doing?
We gave her everything!
I was a good mother.
I was a good father.
And a strong wind whispers back:
You weren’t good enough.

The children with the blue eyes, the brown eyes, the green eyes
Begin to fill with the cookies while their bodies break down.
Sores open on their arms, like a plague from God. The children age
Under a horrible curse; suddenly, they look like wrinkled ghosts.
The cheeks are sunken. The bones protrude. The skin
Mottles. And a horrible, stinking monster is lurking
In the background, behind the greasy belching oven.

The children are dying. They lie in the arms of one another,
Like death camp victims. The parents have wandered into
The wood and smell the death, like burnt hair, like rotting flesh.
Some of the children with the blue eyes are alive; they whimper
At the foot of the great oven, and the monster spikes
His feathers and stomps a great hoof. The noise hurts
The ears of the children with the blue eyes, and the parents,
Finally, finally, but far too late,
Rush to their children, gather them up, hurtle them away from
The monster, who is crunching the bones of the dead in
His teeth.

The children with the blue eyes are brought to me,
And left for me to supervise. I make sure they go to classes
About the disease they have, this addiction.
When they go into the woods for more, I put them behind
Bars. When they cry for help, I listen with half-interest.
Most of them will succumb to the monsters in the wood.
I cannot help them, even though the children stare
At me, pleading with me, begging me to make
A valiant effort to defeat the monster lodged within.

The parents beg me, demand of me, to keep the children
With the blue eyes out of the wood, away from the monster.
When the children are found once again near the great black oven,
The parents come to me with a shaking fist and anger bursting
Through their red-lined skin.
Why haven’t you stopped this?
Where are the programs to help my child?
This is your fault; you knew he would use again!

I listen carefully, and after the parents are done yelling
And begin crying, I explain to the parents:
The chance of the children with the blue eyes
To be free of this monster is very small. Most of them
Will die, crazed old people in young bodies.
Most of them will have cancer. Many of them
Will be incontinent. They have used up their
Body and left only a shell of who they once were.
I’m sorry. I clasp my hands in front of me.
Inside, I am screaming:

Where were you when the children with the blue eyes
Wandered away?
Where were you?