George Francis Train
Introduced the tram to England
I introduced microwaving the sausage and bun together
To a not-very-impressed-American
We talked and talked into the night
About opera
How Norma's role was designed
For Giuditta Pasta
The weather cooled and necessitated
A dressing gown
He got up and strolled through the room
Pondering whether to purchase four-hundred pound Glastonbury tickets
At dawn, we'd moved onto chess
He advised, 'You gotta ram the pieces down their throat.'
When will I be invited to a Beverly Hills mansion dinner?
In a room without walls,
stars lie scattered across a long workbench,
each one dimmed in a different way~
some cracked at the edges,
some holding a faint pulse
like a memory trying to stay lit.
Tools hang from nothing:
a hammer made of cooled starlight,
a spool of night threaded with silence,
a brush that leaves a trail
only the dark can read.
Someone
or something shaped like someone~
leans over a fractured constellation,
turning it slowly in their hands
as though checking where the story failed.
A soft sound rises,
not quite sorrow,
more like the sigh a myth makes
when it realizes it can’t return
to the shape it once held.
Pieces of old legends
glow on the floor,
still warm from the moment
they fell out of belief.
A wing, a vow,
a name that used to matter~
all waiting to be reassembled
into whatever truth remains.
And in the far corner,
a single star brightens,
not repaired,
not restored,
just choosing to shine
despite the fracture
running through its center.
He fled beyond eternities, boundless, aching voids.
The walls of time tallied his sins, nameless.
Yet he chose the Sun, a prison ignited.
Fanatic heat, blistered skin carved to stone.
Far above, her glance burned velvet through storms.
Her gravity called softly, furnace-muted,
where light bent to frame her shadowed figure,
a silhouette of celestial grief. She wept.
Pierced by her sorrow, he circled endless days.
Golden chains cinched his wrists like whispers.
He watched, consumed by her form's fierce quiet.
Eyes hollow with wonder; soul quaked, undone.
Then fire cooled, surrender wore as peace.
Her light softened: molten balm, tender pain.
His tears joined hers, falling like volcanic rain.
Time cracked. Eternity shattered. Still, they burned.
Grief rewritten, etched into ash-drawn orbits.
"Witness me," he thought, sun-borne martyr.
Escape became weight. Freedom became her gaze.
Took trash to the curb for this week's pickup,
And did a few more early morning chores.
In a region I once knew,
Were tasty days not a few.
Those summer rays would heat up the days;
But usually, a delta breeze cooled the nights.
Our present region has no such delight.
But on this early mid- August morning,
A summer breeze said "Good Morning",
Soothing me softly as I watered the flowers.
She blew gently as I also watered the pepper
And tomato plants.
The soothing gentle breeze felt my gratitude.
Sensing my curiosity, and discerning my present
summer crave, she quietly said to me,
"Like an Arch Angel, I broke through the
Torturing heatwave just to give you a taste
Of another form of the heavenly manna".
Beaming and satuated with delight,
I took a seat under our back balcony.
September ends
The first cool mornings
The fresher breath
The blue cold skies
It leaves remains of summer
And what was
The heat and hope
And now it's gone
So onwards to a greyer time
The earth softened and cooled
Rains that dissolve us
Mists that return like old friends
Nature rolls on forwards
Reminds of life and death
Decay that will spring new life
When the time is right
So breathe in the new airs ether
Bathe in gentler light
Walk to frosts and fog now
Embrace retuning feelings
You've known them from before
The pattern began with one piece of cloth~
a mountain shaped from triangles, each one a sliver of prairie dusk.
Indigo settles at the base like cooled shadow,
while a pale circle of moonlight hovers over the mountain
The geometry is simple, but the feeling is not.
Every angle carries Mother’s love of the Kansas prairie,
wheat bending under nightfall, each remembering
the woman who stitched them with moonlight pooling at her elbows.
When the quilt is finished, the mountains multiply~
a procession of slopes climbing across the cloth,
each crowned with its own soft moon.
The moons shine, remembering the hand
that patiently stitched them into place.
Soon, the quilt becomes a landscape of wonder
a picture stitched with cotton and color .
When the quilt is spread across a bed,
the mountains rise, the moons hover,
and Mother's presence fills the room,
held in the quiet geometry
of cloth that knows the shape of love.
In the dark of night, upon a haunted gorge they rise.
Magpies serenade deep echo’s in aeolian shrieking shrills.
Under the great oak tree, a figure stands in the shadows,
a black cloak, boldly humming sonnets to the lost or lonely,
Her breath cooled by crispy mists.
Pouting misty tendrils dance; clouds blow long feted kisses;
Coyotes chant to a full moon their calls cut like the blade.
Vibrations shifting all about, nearby Kitty Jay’s old grave
shunned by the man she loved the server girl took her own
life in the muddy cañon hollows.
Sun chases wandering spirits; disappearing in the light of day.
Serenade songs of virtue, in swale dance the dew faeries.
And magpies shall soon return with a shrill just after
twilight to roost in the great tree above
the hidden grave of Kitty Jay.
Fresh flowers appear there nightly rest-not the outcast dead
of Dartmoor National Park.
sparrow sits in tree
cooled off by the fanning leaves
as summer heat hits
Calmness, and its slow drift
Of peaceful hours.
Lakelet borne, boated herein.
Far which sky lours.
Day, oar-dropped, but guided of
Hand, passional
Willow-cooled, waves us onward.
Fate's consentual.
So intensely I loved you,
And in the heat of passion I was burned,
Like a tree caught by surprise,
By the traps of fire that devours all nature in its turn.
Slowly I won you over,
As the sun courts the day with care,
As the moon dims the warmth away,
And the sky, defeated, empties into air.
So your coldness cooled me down,
The passion faded, the light grew pale,
Leaving bruises born of emptiness,
Of uncertainty and a love that fell silent without a tale.
Every memory, a faithful witness
Of a feeling never truly lived or fed,
Hope departed, and with it Cupid fled,
Leaving only the echo… of cold silence, lost and dead.
There are pearly white flowers
that delicately sway
mimicking tiny dancing butterflies
within the lacy shrubs sector
breeze blown away
blooms of heaven-sent nectar
an attraction, an invitation
A meadow brown butterfly swarms to
its empowering rich white petals
resting, buckled, uncoiled tongue, sucking
scaled wings clasped, it settles
stupefied by scents, it feeds
bewildered by sugary sucrose
ideal prey for a spider’s capture
in its ampullate silk orb web
sticky droplets woven to ensnare
Asclepias incarnata, magnets for pollinators
Ice-ballet swamp milkweeds
amongst igneous rocks banding from foliation
rocks formed from cooled magma
gravy tones, an obsidian correlation
where white flowers string
In a momentums gain,
a brown butterfly takes wing
Asleep, do all looks soften
For severity.
Even those of fierce cruelty.
The moon has risen.
A cub, in its innocence.
Cooled, whose tiger face.
Even you, Earth; through our race.
Moon, your effulgence!
Having cooled down, these life-passions
With them, that bond with Summer
Foot to flame, done in.
Best of whose associations
Childhood's raced, running.
Trudge now. Til with that more harried
Countenance, onto Autumn's
Breast-like leaf-mound slump.
Its winds to my words replied:
"We're of one mind, grump!"
The night rain cooled the following day, making it feel like winter. Climate change continues to wreck the weather, and spring days bloom in winter. Earthworm carcasses rot in drying puddles. Freshly cut grass soaks the air and drowns the lungs. A murder of crows pecks at the bloated insect bodies floating atop the grass. Their joyous caws echo across the overcast sky. The feathers on their swollen bellies gleam from my car's headlights.
"I'll have the 3-piece chicken strip combo with hot sauce, and a medium Cherry Coke." A crow waits below the drive-thru window.
"Here's your order." Medium Cherry Coke crosses the facing windows. "Than—" The crow strikes the brown bag and spills the order on the floor.
"Please pull around to the front, and I'll redo your order." The crow's laughter reaches the front of the building and follows the fast-food server back inside.
Their joint slept espoused peace; of all
A safe-sealed lie
What as sweet did with vie
No trees down-threw!
Besides what needful was, of us
Cooled, quelled thereround
With sun had bursts of sound
Yet filtered through.
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