Best Runnels Poems

Yosemite’s Ephemeral Autumn Falls

Bald giants of swift water smoothed pale granite
Mark deep clefts for tumbling summer snowmelt
Rush released from frozen streams once frostbit
Silver swells - Ribbon Falls in pure ice melt -
Ephemeral streams slowed beneath Orion’s belt.

Thin tulle mist from autumn’s gossamer Bridal Veil
Flutters, bathing...

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A river folds upon its banks 
with waters deep and cold.
Its molten flow rolls endlessly
from aquifers untold.

It ripples over ancient stones
placed when the earth was cast.
Each sheared and formed the bedrock's course
'neath outflows bold and fast.

Swift currents know of time's slow ebb,
and legends never told.
Its...

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BRIEF  ROMANCE


Fell for a Scottish girl long ago.  Pretty as a picture,  but
Heart  as cold as an empty Edinburgh street  on a wet
January Monday morning, when the chiseled 
Craigleith sandstone blackened by smoke 
Repels  the rain from the Forth,
And...

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I have forged
light of distant
stars into galaxies
scattering diamonds trailing
meteor dreams sweeping
empty nights clean
of flame bursting
into a million
shards of white-
hot carbon poured 
down runnels to
hell from where
voices clamor for
air and slag 
burns fissures into 
stygian voids of 
inference pulled into  
the vortex of doubt 
shimmering in particles of light 
suspended from 
whence we...

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ALONG

loch-studded moorland

bogs and runnels

and o'er the Highland Pass

antennae alert
I'll twist the wind

            to
              feed
       ...

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I awake, dull crusted in shadows,

to the swelling roar of hard rain on shingles
wetly dripp'd down rusted gutters,

air thick with cool moisture,
ozone sharp razor clean,

somehow, the sod grew a deep green coat in one night
as dogwoods shed blossoms like fragrant dandruff,

when did spring arrive?
my mind...

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Orpheus' long, slow, crawl out of Hell
Has left him nothing -- not even himself!

Long had he traveled, sorrowing, with his bride,
and many terrors endured, and now

Unslings his lyre, and looks at her too soon!*
He rushes back... she meets him... calm... forbidding...

"Eurydice, My Love, so sad,...

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Dinosaurs waiting for stone to erode,
their skeletons covered, uncovered again,
iron that's forgotten the blood where it flowed
and phosphorous leached from a primitive brain--

delicate sabers of soft-stepping cats
enshrouded in shimmering oceans of sand,
strata of relative sediment that's 
concealing the bones of the earliest man--

visible traces of...

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Celestial weeping - angel tears,
pouring from Arcadian spheres,
liquid sunshine from Gods own eye,
I kiss the rain as clouds drip dry.

Rich pearly drops - heavenly bliss,
quench the fire of my souls abyss,
crystalline rills that gush from high,
I kiss the rain as clouds drip dry.

Gentle runnels -...

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I am new lava flow
covered in dense sand,
the Mojave Desert of the soul.
I am the arid places,
the barren areas,
the well packed pebbles
too tight for seeds.
And in rare events,
when rain releases a prayer,
I quickly 
let the waters blow
though my hardened runnels
and glow like a nude vegetable.



Dean...

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this middle aged rue stirring bummer
   haint no stranger to cold,
when dark hen stormy wintry days
   eggs hit from Arctic portal en fold
ding Atlantic Seaboard

   in a blizzard of bitterly, blindingly, and
   brutally sub zero temperatures
 ...

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On the subject of an unwanted water feature...

Water, water, everywhere
In rushing rivers down the wall
As loud as grand Niagara’s Fall
In to the Wobbly Bog
Pouring, pouring, endlessly
Insistent flow of running stream
Unwanted runnels carved through dream 
Swelling the Wobbly Bog
Soaking, soaking, soggily
The puddle deep, the muddy ground
‘Tis...

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Word Fantasy in F Sharp Minor  (3 Movements)

1

(Andante con moto)

Hey man. Take this.

I got it last night,
under a fractured street light,
with shattered pieces of clear glass, scattered
at the nexus of an obscure dark freeway offramp,
way down there in magical San Pedro by the river,...

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And down came the rain
in senseless disarray
     chaotic runnels twisting
in sullen contentious gray

tides high in tempest
pounding pounding
     wrathful turbulence churning
stinging riptide biting

then came the winds
bending trees to splinter backs
      calling forth a...

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(Sanatoga, Pennsylvania location)

I luxuriated as inkling of spring 2021
offered sneak preview today
March third as temperatures
reached low fifties Fahrenheit.

Yours truly began reading
one paperback book
(I purchased three),
and absorbed daily dose of Vitamin D
while secretly ensconced
within favorite nook.

This middle aged rue stirring bummer
favors warmth, boot haint no stranger...

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