| Poems: 290317A - March 29th, 2017 |
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| Robert Morpheal (morpheal@yahoo.com) |
2017/03/29 09:56 |
290317A
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Birthdays are the trauma of birth
revisited in peculiar ways,
as to entering a world of pain
where you are given to counting up
the endless varieties of loss.
Held in a perpetual experience
of what is violently torn away
or otherwise ruined and gone;
the trouble with common intimacy
is that it attenuates the grief.
Adding to the guilt ridden realizations
that the semblance received
was not what was needed or wanted,
serving only as attempts at consolation
that console absolutely nothing.
Eventually one gives up
on beating one’s self against it,
the way cloth was once beat with a rock
in efforts to make it come clean
of any traces of real romance.
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290317B
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Precious black currant liqueur
made from the fruit of my parents’ garden,
gathered for the last time
after the Cold War had ended,
and my father had passed away.
The deep reddish purple of the liquid
clinging to the edges of the glass
the way such memories tend to cling
with all their intense nuances of flavors
that evade any full or actual recovery.
One wants it to last forever and ever
knowing it is possible to return to a time
that has taken so very much away
in exchange for everything that it gave
and as to what little has been preserved.
Reminded in that moment of the last morsel
of the very last red currant jelly
that my mother had made for me,
as to how difficult it was to open the jar
and to consume what remained within it.
As I grow older and nearer to an ending
I begin to weep for the currant bushes
the way youth weeps in thwarted passion
failing to realize that it is all about desires
that threaten never to be satisfied.
If only I had known of a way
to save something more
as to something of that part of the world,
that I have become an exile from,
but I knew nothing of that type of salvation.
What is reluctantly measured into a glass
represents a persistent dwindling away
of all that can never be replaced
making one’s self feel as emptied
as the bottle threatens to become.
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290317C (About Writing)
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I question the value of any writing
that no one can really understand
the way I question make work programs
that keep people busy at nothing
and others paid to criticize the work.
Writing a line
is no different than ploughing a furrow
hopeful that the carefully planted seed
might germinate into something
that has more meaning than that effort.
What harms literature the most,
both as to any semblance to truth or beauty,
is that most writers feel absolutely obligated
to write as if they are in fierce competition
with everyone else who uses words.
Writing ceases to be about faith
the moment that a writer suddenly realizes
that writer’s block does not really exist
unless a would be writer believes that it does,
and that leads to all manner of excesses.
Contrary to what some might believe,
I have disciplined myself to think of no one,
(at least no one in particular),
both when I write something,
or when I chance to think something sexual.
Writing demands a peculiar sort of accuracy,
that goes beyond that of an accountant,
and is slightly more that of the mathematician
considering all of the possible answers
to a very complex and variable equation.
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290317D
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There are an infinite number of ways
to ending up feeling utterly cheated out,
in what become the Ponzi schemes of life
where one perpetually invests heavily
in what one never really gets to have and enjoy.
It is always something about the life one got
not being any of the life one really sought to get,
but they would give one a god to blame
for everything that conspired or chanced
to confine to such bondage to contrariness.
There is always the inevitable argument
that one fell too far short in trying to buy into
whatever it was that ought to come for free
in exchange for all the other efforts
proved lingeringly and completely consumptive.
So easy to get utterly spent
on less than a pocketful of vain hopes,
and whatever the prevalent false promises
that are being routinely dished out as bait
until chance to bite on the hook.
It begins with one’s illusions about love,
often ending as who likes or dislikes one’s looks,
while in the midst having no genuine idea
as to who really locked all the doors
that one wanted to know open up to one’s self.
Including all of those unknown directions
that one would have chosen to follow
if one had known anything of real possibility,
even if one could never hope to find any
in endless catalogues, whether chanced or given.
We are too often led toward believing
that what is the worst for our selves is best,
somehow in the unforeseeable long run,
as if someone wise is planning destinations,
despite those being what it is best to avoid.
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