Part To Part

Echoic minnesingers of the spirit realm
Left the taste of rusty iron
On the tip of my tongue
Stayed by the bright sufferers
And their broken arrows
Embraced by the fear in autumn skies
Enhanced by none but the weary

When we dine by candlelight
When we part to part the night
With the gift of life in sight
Such fear finds the means to an end
Victory contrasts the shades of grey
Till there illumes a new day
Bound by no one, and nothing

Frozen

Back before the clock struck 1942 I was a nine-year-old boy, my brother eight, and my sister twelve. We lived a life protected from the war by a dirt road and endless pine trees.
The soldiers from Ft. Bragg were always training in the deep woods and were a comfort, since in my imagination I could see rows and rows of black boots goose stepping toward our house to gather us up for a long trip. We didn't know then about where those trips went.

The war was on the lips of the older ones; and in the shadows and the open spaces where all the older boys used to stand, walk, and run.
It was in the way we used to save our toothpaste tubes and roll tires up to the depot on collection day.

There was another war in those days, as I recall; or as recalls me.
That dirt road was our world in a nutshell. We knew every tree, fencepost and ditch.
We rode our bikes up to the pavement and down to the invisible borderline that separated
what I was to learn about impoverished spirits from skin color and hair texture.

My brother and I relished the insults hurled at the colored kids, especially that older girl,
who passed through our territory on the way to their school, just up and over from our house.

In our world they had their own doctor, their own school, their own church, and their own cemetery, where mysteriously a headstone or two would occasionally be toppled over.

The fact that they shared the same dirt road, the same patched clothing, and the same stream for water never occurred to us. I doubt that it would have made any difference anyhow.

One day my brother and sister and I were riding our bikes. My brother was riding on my handlebars and we were chasing our sister down the road. An old truck came sliding around the corner and ran over our sister, right before our eyes. My brother jumped off and ran home screaming, but I just stood there, frozen in time.

The old colored man got out and stumbled around in front of his truck, and fell to his knees; sobbing and holding my sisters head in his hands.

The next hour or so was a blur; my mother running up, crying. My oldest sister and her boyfriend yelling at the old man....too much noise to recall.

The old man just stood there, as did I, alone, also frozen in time.
My uncle was the county sheriff and showed up with his deputy and I remember them asking him a lot of questions and putting him in their car.
All he said to my Mama was, "drunk."

I never saw him again except in my frozen nightmares.
He took from me the one person in the world that represented sweetness, and hope for something besides this dusty road and the war in my little nine year old head.

About a year later, that older colored girl walked up our road as always with her little brothers and sisters. We hated them even more now, and we threw rocks at them and called the usual taunts.
Through my tears I screamed "You killed my sister! You killed her!"
She yelled back "well, she shouldn't have been in the road!"

I was so angry that I screamed as loud as I could "NIGGER!!!"
She turned around and glared at me and gave me the middle finger and said;
"what is you, but that"

...Some wounds never heal. Never.
Slavery of the spirit will follow a course along a dry river bed; through a treeless forest;
into a birdless sky; within a vengeful heart.

As the poet said, Life goes on within you, or without you.

 oldviolin wrote: 

oculis prospiciens

Why? Why.
He feels the time is right.
He feels the fruit is ripe.
He has his allies by default.
He has his faulting lines.
Distracting deflecting diffracting
He has his faltered minds

He has his climate manifesto
It's signed in iron and blood
He has his soft boned adversaries mired in heaping mud.
All is not forecast if nothing is ever square
Derivative of focus set in fixed maculary stare
Seeing is believing and belief? it isn't there
not a polar symbol not a pallid prayer

A man in his space, working with dead trees
Bones of trees
He speaks in terms of oak and poplar, cherry and black walnut,
maple and pine
Woody artful expressions like graceful and elegant,
rich and forgiving, ease and relief ...grain
Worn of hands and brow, the carpenter sculpted the shapes and shards
of tree bones, lived long and darkened rings
Of those he most loved, and refined their lines with the
solemn fusions he carried in his heart...

Wordle

ANGER
HAVEN
PATCH
BATCH
MATCH
LATCH
SORRY

Anybody know what time it is?

It was the corner of E.Colfax and Humboldt
Southwest I remember
Cold Thanksgiving
Colder that December
Small room off the side
shared it with my dog, a pallet, and a slide
down on the parallel lines
Offset beveled and conical splines
Rounded men by bashing rocks
falling down the mountain...

Anything
anymore
sign the lease
hit the door
giving thanks 
metaphor

I was an ant at a time
when time was unbent
I walked my way through
the maze fate had set
but failed to note
the roads without end
the things that could have been
were I made to think of them
but I wasn't 
so there I was 
at the end
of a life well spent,
or so I thought, 
at the time 

Verse Two Plus B Part and Chorus

Just trying to keep it real ya'll
trying to relate
Keeping light prescribed 
not to pontificate
Staying in the long view and living on the plain
a black and white stand on a pallet blue pain
 
(Let me proclaim! Let me explain! Let me exclaim!)

Been a hip hop life yo
a hip hop life
Changes come with strife it's a hip hop life...

A new way to measure wealth in other than accrued on paper
or cyber systems of increasingly artificial intelligence
might be in the satisfaction of status postponed until
a guy 
or a girl or
the ghost of either
or even neither
runs the express check-out
12 items max only please
No checks. No chokes
No bad puns.
Holy smokes.
So much fun
So little time

Max 
Who?

The
Line
Formed
On
The
Sand
Where
Waves
Feathered
The
Shore
Are
Littered
With
Bits
Of
Haste
And
Waste
And
The
Broken
Shells
Of
Broken
Animals
At
Once
Bathed
In
Foam
And
Salt
And
Silent
Screams
Of
Meaning
And
The
Ears
And
Eyes
Of
Innocent
Children
Yearning
To
Be
Free
Of
Boundaries
Under
The
Sun
And
Within
The
Music
Of
The
Night
Echoing
Off
The
Open
Sky
And
Reaching
Down
To
The
Bottom
Of
An
Empty
Well
Called
The
Ocean
Of
Denial

I saw the sun come up
I saw the sun go down
I had a coffee and drunk it down
It kept me up all night
Until the sun showed it light
And it showed me my plight

Render me riddles
Render me time
Render me laughter as I'm waiting in line

Render me bread
Render me wine
Render me music in every rendered rhyme...

Big Words And Things

A large black salamander guards the area of the spigot
He seems satisfied there, under paving stones and incidental life water
Not inconsequentially, his kingdom boasts survival

So spank me already!
I ate your chicken samich
and drank your flat beer
and binged myself on your cable.
So spank me already
I've been a bad bad boy.

Under the tortured memory tree
I saw you; you saw me
Under the stain of pride and grief
Trust is slain by rusted teeth
Being hunger; bade the strife
Beyond the tender breath of life
For the love of tatters and broader shoals
Wading the textured waters...

Cardinal Seen

He comes to the feast every day
fungal eye and matted crown
His red feathered body bleached by disease
His beak deformed and flaking
Quietly I watch him struggle to crack sunflower seeds
and listen intently to his joyous cheeps
Marvelous the sight, I fret
knowing he is not long for this world

Edit:

The weeks passed since those words
He thrives
Appearing as a miniature vulture, red feathered and completely bald now
the growth from his upper beak at least an inch long
he tips his head to the side
and scoops sunflower seed, 
and ever so gently
places it in the mouth of a female companion
How? Why?
Marvelously so

sick sad been had words and rhymes
freedoms chimes lemons limes
empty trains and empty talk
acids rain on stammered walk
a glancing blow a timing light
four in the floor good Friday night
based on not much these mud pies stick
to gather the eye bone a tell of the trick...

Like riding a bicycle,
playing card clipped to the front forks
with mother supplied clothespin.
Like Steve McQueen's great escape;
suddenly tangled in a barbed wire fantasy
of freedom.
Must have been the Joker...

Yeah I'm a bad boy, but I coulda been worse.
Coulda scuffed your shoes, and wrecked your hearse.
Coulda soured your wedding, and forgotten a verse.
Just waiting for the ax to fall;
that birthday you fell from the sky.

It goes this way; then darker. Then dark.
Death on a street sign, then hitting the mark.
Shadows of children; the sign of a spark.
Three suns down,  just under a stall.
That birthday we fell from the sky.