Best Tamping Poems
I am a party animal, my heritage is mixed
quite content to lounge about when conditions remain fixed.
Suppose that’s the nobility which Krypton must provide,
maintaining stiff upper lip when I’m all buzzed inside.
Then too, I’m mostly nitrogen, which is very stable,
tamping volatility of oxygen: it’s able
to combine with hydrogen (that’s also in my make up).
Uncontrolled? Oh that would lead to an explosive break up.
Carbon Dioxide? Its percentage varies night and day:
vegetative respiration, or so the boffins say.
I wonder why I don’t glow multicoloured in a storm:
my neon, argon, radon being Vegas lighting norm.
If I had more Helium the humans would sound squeaky.
I imagine the attraction of that chap Enrique
Would suffer greatly from affliction. He’d become mundane,
and prove downright offensive if I gave him more methane.
I’ve also Nitrogen Oxide, not Nitrous NO2,
and a soupçon of ozone which had once protected you
from harmful rays from Out There much more than now is measured.
It seems that humans cannot see what really should be treasured.
I’m moved by friction of the Earth and pressure off the bat
while Coriolis effect pushes me this way and that:
north and south of the equator, the opposite I spin.
Any other speculations, my friends, are simply wind.
The feeders were empty, dejected, forlorn.
The lady who filled them had suddenly gone.
Her time here now ended, she wakened no more:
Gone from her gardens, departed her door.
This little much mattered to birds on the wing,
With winter now over, well into the spring.
All busy with nesting, caught up in new life.
No hunger in summer, no cold, bitter strife.
New homes to be built: sturdy and staid.
Songs to be sung and eggs to be laid.
Sheltered and nurtured; the young ones appear.
A sure rite of passage in the spring of each year.
Fledglings near grown will be taught how to fly
And soar past the tree tops up into the sky.
They will learn of the hawk and its hunger for flesh:
Of wicked, sly felines that hide in the brush.
Then late summer grows weary and tired of play.
It goes to bed earlier and earlier each day.
The fall time all golden and valued the more;
Birds sense coming peril past winter’s cold door.
Those who remain for new season’s sharp sting,
Grow restless, uneasy, not choosing to sing.
Old feeders hang empty, no seed to be found . .
Below only barren, forbidding, cold ground.
Blue jays and the doves, all the species of finch,
Chickadees, titmice, now feel winter's pinch.
Woodpeckers, nuthatches, cardinals and crows,
Will all group together to face winter woes.
Then a morning arrives with white flakes in the air.
Frigid and stark; the day reeks of despair.
First jay to arrive at the earliest light,
Gives out a sharp cry to all others in flight.
There's someone out tending the feeders below,
Tamping the snow where the cracked corn will go.
And filling the hollow in that old rotten stump:
Sunflower, suet, dried fruit and some nuts.
Bleak landscape has kidnapped the scene down below,
But all’s right in the hemlock, as well as the snow.
New feeders abound, where old feeders once hung
And with someone to fill them, let the new winter come.
AWAITING SNOWFLAKES
ALONE TAMPING BEATEN TRAIL IRREPRESSIBLY HEARTBROKEN
MENACING SKY TORMENT A PERIPATETIC DISENCHANTED SOUL
TEARY EYED SHE PONDERS FORSAKEN WISH LONG FORGOTTEN
COURAGE TRANSCEND DEFEAT AWATING SNOWFLAKES TO FALL
12/19/2013
2:54 p.m.
W.P.B Florida
Barely above a breathe
My identity dissolves
I am a freakish clown of weak display
Remnants of noble motions ripple flatter and wider along the lake
I am quieting everything, like tamping countless steam pipes
And so if these pipes sang they would sing, what?:
…there would be nothing
A dark translucent knuckle of vagaries
And twisted dreams
Dreamed-out and frosty falsehoods
I feel less love
As this stomping ox
Chained by the neck
Gazing through a moldy window
Shrieking from my patio chair
Sweet roseate little flower
The evergreen bush princess
Dancing on a gentle breeze air
your scent in my breast nestles
to the recesses of my heart ,it travels
Dripping honeyed nectar, my blood it ripples.
Dazzling, joyous little wren
Soaring uncloudy blue skies
Deeper inside my soul
tamping down lovely fugues
turning every breath I take
a love song of yours.
Winsome, celestial little angel
heavenly wings endlessly beating
every void around roaming
bigger bit of my heart daily gaining
your image in my eyes swelling
your image, my sole known dreaming.
There lies a location with an Emerald Doorway
leading to a shared past.
Waiting for it's own children to visit.
We slipped thru the portal again this summer,
Jacquie, I and another child, her son Joe.
Immediately, I sensed decades of joy surrounding us
And heard the echoes of our horses hoofs
tamping down the path.
Undisturbed, the path lay awaiting our return.
Fertile earth delighting to feel our familiar tread..
The ancient beech, carved with our milestones,
stood sentinel over our clearing.
Sunbeams lighted the moss, remembering long
conversations.
Gnarly grapevines dangling memories of our Grasps,
ready to swing over the ravine, into our past.
Inviting us to a smokey treat, flavored by long ago.
A musical voice...the stream, called to our
remembering and our playfulness...
urging us to slide it blue-smooth slate
Among the creatures, salamanders, crayfish and
minnows, staring in wide-eyed wonder at seeing us again.
into our swimming hole, waiting to baptize us in
the wonderment of nature... to carry with us,
Our childhood home.
l
The heart cries crimson tears that drown the soul
Tamping out passion's flame til it's black coal
Body left empty, jeweled by a thin rope
Foul eternity for love without hope.
Soccer coach and players, from 11 to 16 years old have been trapped in an underground cave for days. They were found many days later in the dark and hungry. Diving seals from their own and other countries have rescued some of them, at the writing of this verse. One diver lost his life.
MAE SAI
claustrophobic quarters
in and out, within
tamping down panic
for raven dark and frightful swim
slow and smooth seals deliver
— Thailand’s born again
7/7/2018
From the walls the voices clamor,
Chasing me away from my solace and contentment,
These laughing phantoms of dreams almost forgotten,
Reminding me of almost and could have been,
Showing me places I can’t quite remember,
Of faces that I think I just might make out,
Voices drifting just beyond my strained hearing,
Vaguely familiar figures perched about,
Despairing moments a cacophony of emotional confusion,
Questioning the validity of its very existence,
Its eluding creation pulls at my sanity,
Amplified only by the constant of time passing,
I hear each note hollered out in darkly,
Every hill climbed each lookout a kaleidoscope,
Meshing and weaving this tapestry of mixing color,
Like the boots of war tamping through a swath of mud,
It is I…the scattered and broken pieces strewn about,
The torn and frayed edges of unwoven thread,
From every corner of every wall the blaring of voices pierces,
Bringing me down bringing me home…bringing me home.
Its the breathing of relax ! which mingle mixes beneath the roof of tamping rain drops, beyond the road salt stained glass, i know ! Its cold, of passing wheels, at early o'clock and the spitting, in crimson, spiralling, crackling music of the metamorphosis into charcoal of long past,chopped very dry logs; early o'clock cloaks me in the revolving whir of the fridge, i cannot hear the spiders feet! although he has eight scurrying in the scullery, or the plop of the tea bag and the bubbling of hot, dropping swilling and brown.
It is the gentle of Bozz and Betti snoring and my goose bumped arms scaffolding a heavy head and drooping eye lids, ah,comfort arrives in many clothes sizes and times.
But, this comfort slips from key white to key black, the dripping morning of disappointed tunes and stamping feet, blurs under the flap of the breezing yawn of letterbox joy, just a jumble of jigsawed letters missing from an eternal alphabet, i am not liking this day, to evening and death.
SheGirl is tamping down her blanket, comfy cattitude.
Pat pat pat pat pat pat, I admire her stealthy attitude.
She has me firmly in my place now, glad I have my popcorn.
We watch The Horrible Bosses movie, both happy, none forlorn.
When we hear words like “hit” and “kill” I cover SheGirl’s ears.
My husband asks what I am doing, for he has no fears.
This emotionally delicate cat with a heart of gold understands this talk.
I know she does; she is a reincarnate of my aunt, and does her walk.
When we are alone I call her Marjorie, my aunt’s preferred name.
We play Monopoly, my reincarnated auntie’s favorite board game.
I don’t bother to share this information or her nickname with him.
He is on his own couch lying next to his hound dog, named Jim.
Jim reminds me of his father, but I keep my mouth wisely shut.
I do not want him to think I am ready for a crazy loony bin hut.
Just before we go to bed I hear him say “Jim, I am glad….
That you are here beside me, for you smell like my dad.”
I tap dance through the clouds of doubt
Shaking my body
Throwing my feathered boa in the air
The air laughs
Catching it and running with it
Dropping it in the top of a large oak
That’s that! I say,
So I find my skates.
Skating my truth onto the ice.
The ice cracks.
So I jump off,
Into the arms of my giant cat monster.
Shall we nap? She asks,
Tamping me down with her giant claws.
Who could stop us? I ask.
A joke.
I am flying now.
High above the pond. Being my most favorite me.
She has belief
without comprehension
and in her crutchwork shack
she is
much like us . . .
tamping the bread
into edible forms,
regarding her children
at play
with something akin to relief . . .
ignoring the towers ablaze
in the distance
because they are not revelations
but things of glass,
easily shattered . . .
and if you were to ask her,
she might say—
sometimes God visits his wrath
upon an impious nation
for its leaders’ sins,
and we might agree:
seeing her mutilations.
Shadow Self lurks in the back of my mind
Hiding from our other selves,
ashamed of herself, but not knowing why
Maybe thinking she is less than.
I am not urging her forward;
I do not have the luxury of feeling sorry for her
For when she does promenade to the front
she takes over all of our senses
We get depressed, down, sad.
Cry for reasons unknown to the rest of us.
She is a powerful force, an evil being.
She is the sinner’s most sin-loving side of us.
Her down is more down than other’s downs.
So we keep her at bay, not allowing charitable feelings
Tamping our empathy,
As Shadow Self cowers, feeling ashamed and less than.