The remaining solitary hours
huddle isolated in your mausoleum house.
And, at that moment when light is ebbing
when the wind begins to rise,
one hears your sad sighs moving far off
a barely audible murmur stirring a distant sea,
where cloud banks shuffle shoreward
like mourners approaching the open grave that is today:
gray with discontent the city's tone poem
mournfully mounts the tree covered hillsides
beneath the nocturnal rains.
CEASELESSLY
STRIVING
Ceaselessly striving at their cruel task
dragging rocks from the quarry
to the pyramid of Choreopsis.
The red rock reflects
against dusty white legs and limbs
that have grown limb thin with labor.
Their evening steps falter,
their despairing spirits sag;
until, the crescent moon
who was hiding behind the distant hills
rises in an astonishing sky,
where resplendent constellations
reel around our solar axis.
So the generations, accompanied
by their fine illusions,
fall into the abyss
where we all must one day go.
The dawn breaks bright and clear
sending the diamond stars scurrying
to their beds. The first, bus pulls up
and out pour the tourists. A tour guide says,
Ladies and gentlemen, come this way."
MOTHER NATURE,
there she is, standing radiant before us:
the only trouble is our vanity refuses to recognizes her,
in all her varied aspects,
so she remains an enigma.
There's the alpine meadow,
complete with cool clear springs
and wildflowers whose fragrance is nectar sweet,
and bogs filled with decay and nightshade.
And, the faint trace of sound
that the wailing wind makes,
like a siren lost in the distance,
through the trembling fringes of firs.
Up above, over the forest covered ridges,
variegated gray clouds race by,
while below their silent shadows
bound across the implacable mountain's calm expression.
I see angry allegory, the bleak vissitudes
of the Creator's seed cast upon
barren expanses of hate blighted ground.
Mother Earth, of only you would stop your charade!
Our existence rests on nothing more than
a sparkling dust mote of the Sun;
but, you are also, a blue sapphire star,
brightly burning with God's love.
I'VE NEVER CONQUERED YOUR LANGUAGE
Cretins, I've never conquered your language,
free of solecisms, I've managed to mangle metaphors
over cocktails; but, small talk with culinary delights
like Chataubriand and flaming duck, with its flavor of domesticity,
that could never comprehend the flight of eagles,
leaves me peering at the table telescopically
each agonizing second stretching into infinity and beyond.
Linguistically, its been over a decade
since I was exiled here in my homeland
and even to this moment I am content
to live where the shadows and the stones know my name.
After all just because someone wanders
doesn't necessarily mean that they are lost.
While I was busy preparing myself,
you had already started stalking me
that being the sordid business of head hunters;
today's contemporary cannibals.
Though its gratifying, to one's ego,
to be regarded even by you,
as some sort of hero, I, in turn,
emulated you especially as a negative image -
in part to preserve our past continuance,
with its beautiful sails in danger of loosing
the race to obsolescence; but, also to obscure the future
becalmed with its empty bellied sails.
Continents can become cruel enemies of grammar,
specially the present one presented, sadistically
out of syntax, in Braille. And, immigrants are but flights
into empty emphatic causalities.
Have you noticed the transformation of features -
life lived in the looking glass.
Here even the native are immigrants from some vast and distant past.
And now some little talk of me.
To you I am the flag within the flag.
In today's great American past time,
"and he drove down 33rd two times last night..."-
watching my every move
you know that I strive for the past participle,
no more than I desire the gerundive
on the Fourth of July, beneath a canopy of fireworks,
the moon slowly rising above a silhouette of trees
against an indigo sky heavy with its immensity,
like the name God written in a cryptic script.
I struggle with its meaning
without either a legend or cipher,
even though I've never studied orthography.
And anyway, a halo is encircling the moon
obliterating the meaning. Or, is that part of it?
ARISING TIDE
As the Sun sets behind the West Hills
and the Earth is bathed in a burnished golden haze,
the diffuse light settles from a pale opal sky
across a World devoid of brilliance and darkness.
Lost in pensive reflection,
I listen to the birds nest for night
and the city prepare for bed;
while, the shadows grow long in the evening air,
and, the heaven and river gradually darken
into a somber red, as though
all innocent victims' blood
where running past at my feet.
Irresistibly, the night slowly settles, deeper and deeper,
silently burying beneath a dark shroud
all the visible forms and colors; until, everything
is ensconced in a rising tide of impalpable blackness.
GAIN
What is the gain
if your clothes are proud
and your pockets empty,
the Sun itself shines through
tears in the clouds,
honor not pride
is the best adornment of the soul;
just as the mockingbird,
though not as pretty
as the blue bird,
thrills with the beauty of its song.
MORNING STAR
Your eyes are more beautiful
than the star strewn sky,
buildings topple and mountains crumble
whenever they blink.
They've taught me more about love
than the rest of the World:
without their light
my day would turn to night.
I HAVE PEERED DEEP
into the dark tunnel of their days;
and, have plumbed their depths
in actions and dreams.
I've teetered on the precipice
that borders the abyss that is their heart,
and for one eternally
brief moment
stood in astonished disbelief;
and, my soul rejected what it saw,
it was so black and corrupt.
But pity them!
They are shadows without form.
ITS FALL,
colors have crept across the hillsides,
until now, they blaze with
reds, yellows, oranges, bronzes and browns.
The air is cold and damp,
the feeble Sun is old, its light has no strength.
How similar we are to the passing year.
Each season providing us
with different pleasures.
Its odd how everything is
in a constant state of flux, and
that every thing has a beginning,
exists for its duration, and then
begins to decay. And,
yet out of all these
ancient things constantly
changing and rearranging:
the Earth continues always new.
PETULANT BREEZE
Petulant breeze
that buries the parched land
beneath a blizzard of white petals;
and, hanging in the pellucid sky
a pale crescent moon
fades away into oblivion.
Terrified trees tremble,
their thin fingers vainly clutching
at fleeting moments of life;
feral events,
shadowy oceans, shaking
with today's putative things;
during these worried hours
the firs frantically grasp,
with their toes
at the Earth's igneous bones;
and, on the shore,
where I am marooned
an island erupting from the foaming
jaws of the sea, and in the arid air
a distillation of every essence,
no longer a furled frond
exploding into emptiness:
I gaze down from the cloud's embrace
and feel the torment of all root bound things.
RUMOR MILL
Rumor Mill says it has reason to believe that the
recent incident involving a missionary family shot down over Peru was a
contrived event manufactured for the propaganda machine. Recent exposures
of misconduct by the field operatives of the radical right including the
systematic sexual abuse of children, the perverting of targeted citizens,
and the violation of most of the behaviors categorized as morally abhorrent
in the eyes of the Lord such as slander, adultery by their paid prostitutes,
extortion, family affairs, blasphemous usurpation of human rights and murder
have alienated non fanatical elements of the conservative religious community.
Precedents utilizing religion as a pretense for pursueing the factional
interests of the radical right have increased public cynicism. The
radical right's known lucrative monopoly of the heroin and cocaine traffic
in South America raises serious questions about the legitimacy of stories
like this. If true the murder of missionaries and ensuing association
of that act with the "drug" traffic is an effort to forge a false impression
in the minds of the American public.
Regardless of one's personal opinion about the recreational
use of drugs, these manufactured violent events are wrong, as is the deliberate
deceit of the American public. It's one of history's many ironies
that Christianity is being set up in an adversarial role to the recreational
use of drugs. Christ was the World's first historical hippie, who
preached peace and love and used drugs; and, Christianity initially was,
in part, a drug taking cult according to original source documents from
the Middle East. The article stated that isolated missionaries where
at risk from "drug traffickers" in spite of the fact that it was a Peruvian
government jet that shot down the missionary family, and in over 50 years
there have been no incidents of the sort that the Rumor Mill is aware of.
Any attack on U.S. missionaries would create an adversarial back lash disadvantageous
to those involved in the trade. Thus, the smugglers would not attack
missionaries unless something else were involved. The idea of missionaries
in countries that have for centuries been staunchly Christian is another
ironic element to this story. What this kind of event does do is
attract public attention to a phenomenon that only effects about 1/2 %
of the U.S. population that is how many Americans use either cocaine or
heroin. Arguably, the vast majority of American's can't get excited
over such a small scale phenomenon. Unfortunately, the failed policies
surrounding this social phenomenon that resulted in such widespread greed
and corruption, which we've already briefly outlined, are starting to ask
if the costs and oppression are worth the benefits.
How better to shore up softening public support
than to manufacture a series of events that can then be used for propaganda
purposes ie. drugs vrs. missionaries. It is designed to shore up
sagging support, while distracting the public from other issues like tax
cuts that bankrupt Social Security and Medicare and impair our ability
to buy down the national debt and lower interest rates further still, the
exploitation of our national parks and public lands, the oil shortages,
and the recession generating economic policies of the Republicans.
Also, this is supposed to compensate for the moral bankruptcy and wicked
and sinful behavior of the radical right's domestic field operatives.
Rumor Mill thinks that its one more level of corruption
designed to cover up previous mistakes. Consider how the radical
right destabilized targeted adults and induced them into attacking children
studying, praying and playing at churches in L.A. and Texas in a series
of escalating violent incidents, while publicly posturing that they were
supporters of children and defenders of the faith. It is said that
hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and here it certainly appears
to be so. Also, in using missionaries to arm and organize a civil war in
Mexico, a fact which they have publicly admitted doing in American newspapers.
The radical right having first murdered over 1,000 citizens then told the
people on the side who were being killed that the leader of the revolutionaries
was dressed as a women and hiding out in a church. The result was
a massacre of women and children in a Catholic Church, and criticism against
those who attacked the church: and not those who set up the individuals
who assaulted the alleged leader in the church and the women and children
praying there! These are but two examples of the radical right creating
incidents and then deceitfully using them for their own propaganda purposes.
The list of like abuses is quite extensive. So contends the Rumor
Mill.
It is not the intent of the Rumor Mill to promote
anything other than reason, liberty, prosperity, Democracy, safety and
happiness. If, the Rumor Mill's hypothesis is true, and they can
expose the radical right for greed and corruption; then, it is hoped that
no benefit will be obtained by the radical right for these terrible events
in terms of propaganda. Perhaps the public will be a safer place
and can attend to other issues that effect more people like a fully funded
Social Security and Medicare instead of a free ride to their insurance
industry and mutual funds, or, good schools for all children, or, adequate
energy programs instead of another example of corporate welfare.
And, perhaps we will realize that great American ideal expressed in our
pledge of allegiance to God, "with liberty and justice for all".