Best Archival Poems
Cristiano Ronaldo.
Born in Funchal, Madeira's archipelago.
Played for Real Madrid and Man United.
Now his flair gets Al Nassr fans excited.
Messi is Ronaldo's biggest rival,
always vying to give fans an eyeful.
With a flick and a trick,
both make football look slick,
adding awards into their archival.
Although Messi has the Ballon d'Or awards record,
no one can match the goals Ronaldo has scored.
He started as a winger, but now plays as a centre forward.
When he misses a chance he's known to scream a swear word!
Raindrops keep falling on my head
Long after I think I am dead;
With a chest of iron and legs of steel,
I have a body I just can’t kill.
Rain drops cover the gut in the bin,
And I am powered by a motor within.
Far cheaper than a positronic brain,
Is a ‘borg with a mind hazed by pain.
When the raindrops fell in my heart
I rose-up and tore myself apart.
They came and put me back together,
And guaranteed me to last forever.
Originally published:
Clarke, R. (Ed) The Mentor 85, January 1995, fanzine published by Ron Clarke, Sydney, Australia, [Archival copy available online at http://efanzines.com/Mentor/TM85COMP.pdf].
When the war of worlds' was done
And the Colonists owned the sun,
The old miner from Sirius One
Gleaned the galaxy for his son.
He sought the brave boy he knew
He'd disowned in four thousand & two.
Though the surviving rebels were few,
he had word of his boy's crew.
Hurrying to the caverns of Lithmulu,
A prodigal father faced a boy in blue,
But it was too late his dream to realise,
For a parasite looked out of the wild eyes.
Originally Published:
Clarke, R. (Ed) The Mentor 83, July 1994, fanzine published by Ron Clarke, Sydney, Australia, [Archival copy available online at http://efanzines.com/Mentor/TM83COMP.pdf].
Rain rushed in like a concert audience.
There’s nothing calm about Spring’s arrival.
The specter gusts regrets and survival,
Strip limbs for whips — a sore obedience.
A path cut through, a cold subservience.
The robin’s heavy breast with cheep revival.*
A rose depressed in past Spring’s archival.
Absence of warmth, enrages audience.
A sip of dandelion wine — desire
spurs wholesome cheat, complete with snowy seeds.
Remembrance of unwrinkled hands - youth’s lore,
A marshmallow on spit, and rosy fire.
Enhance the peace and love of daisy beads.
Unwind the twister’s coil, unleash Spring’s core.
3/21/2018
Greg Cornish’s Petrarchan Sonnet contest
cheep - to utter faint shrill sounds : peep, to utter a single word or sound
(from Merriam Webster dictionary) Also mimics the word “cheap”
You call up and say:
“Hello, how are you today?”
I’m dead and rottin’ away,
But my droid is pretty bright,
It answers “I’m all right!”
You celebrate the bi-centennial,
And call up your oldest serving menial:
My spirit is hardly congenial,
But my droid is going strong;
It accepts congratulations from the throng.
So when all is said and done,
I’ve been dust on the floor of sub-station one
Twenty-three revolutions of the sun.
Your polite query is replied,
By the droid who inherited my pride.
Originally published:
Clarke, R. (Ed) The Mentor 87, July 1995, fanzine published by Ron Clarke, Sydney, Australia, [Archival copy available online at http://efanzines.com/Mentor/TM87COMP.pdf].
Emotionless, the doctor applied tools.
The foetus extracted,
they wheeled her away.
Although she could not move,
and could not relieve herself,
they did not check upon her
until the next day.
The Aerobus arrived
to take her to the
nursery planet,
where she would tend her offspring;
The matriarch checking
daily, weekly,
to see that she did so.
She did not rest.
She could not heal.
But there was no help for her,
fertility was more valuable every day;
and she had resigned her rights
when she had chosen
to join the gene pool.
Better than a row of test tubes,
were these living,
breathing incubators.
Once a gift to all humanity -
part of a lost cultural phenomenon
called ‘the family’;
Reproduction was now a rarity.
Originally published as "Childbirth on a Civilised Planet"
Clarke, R. (Ed) The Mentor 85, January 1995, fanzine published by Ron Clarke, Sydney, Australia, [Archival copy available online at http://efanzines.com/Mentor/TM85COMP.pdf].
The power of time travel lies
In the laughter of your eyes.
It lifts me up and takes me away
Ten years ago today.
The demons in the past
Fade pale and fast,
As we re-enter childhood
To settle in the land of ‘could’.
But I cry out in fear
For sixteen again dear,
I have a heart to give
And ten hard years to live.
Originally published:
Clarke, R. (Ed) The Mentor 87, July 1995, fanzine published by Ron Clarke, Sydney, Australia, [Archival copy available online at http://efanzines.com/Mentor/TM87COMP.pdf].
As I was walkin’ down the street
I thought I saw him ahead,
I followed on trembling feet
wherever he led.
We threaded through the crowd
And entered a dark lane.
The sun blushed behind a cloud
As I leapt into his arms again.
Tear blind eyes freed my senses
To see the monster manning the trap.
I halted at the hyper-spatial fences,
Poised to take a step back...
Come, thou Demond of Delgon,
Appear as my lover again for me.
I know not where he is gone,
And I may be consumed by thee.
Originally published:
Clarke, R. (Ed) The Mentor 85, January 1995, fanzine published by Ron Clarke, Sydney, Australia, [Archival copy available online at http://efanzines.com/Mentor/TM85COMP.pdf].
I weep, I weep, I weep;
And volunteer for long term Cryo-sleep.
If in five hundred years’ time
I am full and in my prime,
He and she will be but a dream
Imprinted upon the wall by my last scream.
At the dawn of a new day
Five centuries are dewed away.
A butterfly, I will uncurl
Open the lid, the tubes unfurl,
And over a planet I will stand
Earth’s dream at my command.
Originally published:
Clarke, R. (Ed) The Mentor 85, January 1995, fanzine published by Ron Clarke, Sydney, Australia, [Archival copy available online at http://efanzines.com/Mentor/TM85COMP.pdf].
In the orchard
under the stars,
I have the kind of company
I never had before.
The creature I came here with
appeared to be human,
but my hands feel a scaly back,
and stiff fur pricks my chest.
A hooked beak tears at my mouth
destroying its sweetness.
Lifeless, I am encircled by claws.
I submit
believing I am doomed.
Originally published as "“Sweet seventeen and never been kissed”,
Clarke, R. (Ed) The Mentor 84, October 1994, fanzine published by Ron Clarke, Sydney, Australia, [Archival copy available online at http://efanzines.com/Mentor/TM84COMP.pdf].
That I came back to live
in the region both
my parents died into
that I will die into
if I have nothing else
I have this and
it's not morbid
to think this way
to see things in time
to understand I'll be gone
that the future is already
some where
I'm in that somewhere
and what of it
it's ok to see these things
to be the way they are
I can be them
have been them
will be there, soon
I know why I came here
to be back here
where my parents went
I know that I'll be there
to join them soon
it's ok to think this way
why shouldn't I
whose gonna say I shouldn't
a doctor, some friend
I have no wife in this
at night, late, the dark
myself at the ceiling
the arguments continue
I'm with it, it's with me
I am quelque chose
something with birds in it
a storm high above Albany
I am ghost brain I
sister to all things cruelty
the mouse-back gray
of every afternoon
and your sorrowing
now that you're gone
and I'm here or now
that you're here and
I'm gone or now
that you're gone and
I'm gone what
did we learn
what did we take
from that oh
always dilating
now that you're here
and also gone
I am just learning
that threshold
and changing light
a leafy-shaped blue
drifting above
an upstate New York
Mohican light
a tungsten light
boxcar lights
an oaken table-rapping
archival light
burnt over, shaking
Soul Sanctuary
Wandering through a moveable museum of memories columnar
Dusting off exhibits of moments held fast in watercolors gossamer
Milestones chiseled into fleeting moments of atonement,
Soft edges of first love painted in golden moments –
Brushing aside gauzy cobwebs on photo negatives confessions
Blushing with pastel transparency of opaque blended impressions
Images emerge into negative space awash with nude opinions
Perspective layered into hard edges from edgy palette dominions;
Meandering through silent salons shaded dusky murals in shadows of rose
Lending sienna tints and hues to luminosity’s prisms in afterglow;
A sacred place vibrating in clear cerulean hues –
Holy space of signed wax relics - a chancel of still life in blooms;
Drifting through galleries of jigsaw puzzled passages
Fantasies spattered in bold black and white sketched with color assuage;
Visions staring back unblinking at lost victories buried in the abstract
Untouched prints, tattooed in rust, restored –restoration intact;
Still furnishing this sacred place
With an ever expanding collection displayed
Fragments of umber magic captured – deckled grief fading –
Portraits of choice set in unforgettable, studies of raw strangled cries invading;
Browsing hand in hand with free form time -
Lost in mazes of archival, acid free, displays in fine lines;
Within twisted illustrations featureless faces hidden -
Born out of the gasping barren abyss of flat washes in rhythm;
Framed in this breathing womb tiny points of pigment wait
Nurtured! Protected! Nourished! Building up a portrait;
Unfinished infinite design revealing watermarks
Cherished by the eternal conservancy in soaring arcs;
And in the brush strokes of this secret sanctuary place
Abides the master plan of the divine intimate grace.
Version #2 of Sanctuary – 7-27-21
Seven minutes lingered, an interim of residue,
a trembling partition between continuance and conclusion.
The body rehearsed survival, a theatre of reflex and delay.
Then the stage went silent,
a horizon drawn flat, an axis without a pulse,
and the world sank into a white silence.
Afterward, an emergence.
Not awakening, but reclassification.
not darkness, but a chamber of neutrality,
where remnants of existence drifted in an ordered abyss.
No faces, only the abstraction of record:
gestures catalogued, errors weighed beside their opposites,
the arithmetic of a lifetime balanced without judgment.
No weeping, no pleading, just the hollow patience of cattle.
An attendant present neither stern nor merciful, only procedural,
spoke as if reading an inventory.
Then a designation was issued.
At first numerical, then nominal.
Identification persisted, even as the self no longer did.
The chamber resembled judgment,
yet nothing of judgment occurred.
Records lay in sequence: notations, erasures, marginalia.
"An account, not a verdict." The clerk read,
Errors and kindnesses balanced in two columns.
The result: Passable.
A new dossier appeared.
Families arranged in archival order,
faces attached for reference.
Instruction: Choose.
The choice was not preference, but compliance
the necessity of continuation.
From abstraction into assignment,
from absence into recurrence.
Thus the cycle proceeds:
not reward, not punishment, but iteration.
Existence drafted again,
not as consequence but as mechanism.
The soul does not inherit.
The soul does not stumble.
The soul is allocated, reinserted,
until the ledger of moral requires no more.
Chronicler of History
History goes back as you might guess
Through vast tracks of time out there to be cataloged and measured
And a couple minutes more, before the universe was born
It discovered Hobo Jack at home within one millisecond
Put him to work to make a list of dark matter, plants and planets
(Planets are the smaller ones)
And all solid things that mattered and had form
Hobo Jack was given birth and raised on Earth
His first love was lamps and gold
Accounting became a knack in natural fashion
With a history of his own
And as a matter of fact he was good at keeping books
Lists of animals he encountered were quickly jotted down
From dinosaurs to platypus
Geiger counters became a fad
So ancient coins, doubloons
Spanish treasures made his day
Hobo Jack and his long white beard
Led their way through history
Among archival masters Jack was the best
He chronicled everything in life then passed away
Low void on the high end
Teared fists in midst of Tears of mist
Tarried sand on the solo voyage twist
Of the cause, and still the reason
Between the terrain and the everlasting rains
An unfolded mind of upholstery
It could be ease; this life could have been easier
Only under the generalization of the new age
The barrier and frontier
And the archival of the old ages
Living a Promise, Praying a will
Will all be as is, as is seen from will,
Never to regard it therefore as a wheel ,
For it never turns as expected,
One more number added, one more increment of increase
Another appreciation to be said , another honor to manifest
A gift at hour, worth a gift in life time
Since cultivated at hour, for life or more
Less or least, west or east
Emotions are sagging beast, dwelling coast
Tag dragged to make and live you crying
Straight out the heart crawling
It wasn’t farewell , it was hope to meet in future
And a courage to lose attachment ,the desire to ignore existence.