Haunted
By a portrait on the wall
By eyes that will not let me be
The man who went instead of me
and took the fall.
Haunted
By the ship I set in motion
Watching with disbelief
when it hit the reef
And sank into the violent ocean.
Haunted
By the child's life ended too soon
a life of brilliant colors, summers lost
no way to put a value on the cost.
A bird in flight, eclipsed at noon.
Haunted
By the vultures on the heath
Under the obscuring mist
I had no plan for this
Couldn't face what lay beneath.
Haunted
By the mess I made
They tell me that duties remain
They say don't wallow in the pain
Let the memories fade
Pointless
But I don't think it right
to kill the ghosts that haunt the night.
Categories:
counterfactual, allegory, analogy, bereavement, death,
Form: Lyric
Robots reason
people think
in counterfactual oxymorons
The equal sign
ironic still
in anti-literal contradiction
A=B
B=C
but D won’t link without reflection
Zero-Sum
with nothing totaled
nondescript—the grand ligation
(Rosemont Pennsylvania: May, 2022)
Categories:
counterfactual, poetry,
Form: Rhyme
If I did not believe it to be true
You have enjoyed observing
Your actions have been prejudice to me
Skeletons of our history
Not once did you confess
That you missed me
Such a squandering instant
Your love for me
Was only an illusion of my imagination
And what thoughts of you
Was truly misplaced and mistaken
A decade of...
Disintegrated, dismembered, and fragmentary assurance
All the while you only seeked
After my ruin.....
Categories:
counterfactual, betrayal, break up, heartbroken,
Form: Free verse
Spiderweb phantoms of the energy lattice,
tension spires where emotion opaquers
draw from the void.
She'd get up early
and rent a hotel room
where the staff would remove
any paintings or pictures from the walls.
She brought the Bible and a deck of cards,
plus a thesaurus and a bottle of sherry -
ha! you know this sounds good -
she'd play solitaire if she needed to get in the mood,
she'd write on yellow sheets of paper with lines on them.
That's the way Maya Angelou did it.
If there's an intersection between physics, philosophy and religion,
then I'm going to be very pleased, incorporated,
maybe even superluminal.
The layered ziggurat that you climb,
the humming iridescence coming from within,
the high priestess is at work.
Counterfactual definitions,
waveform collapses,
conservation of information.
Can random data be generated?
Derived forms,
ancient watercourses,
rapturous from trying too hard.
So, let's kill the essence,
leave ourselves hollow silhouettes,
fast-moving blanks,
or the ultimate satisfaction
that goes so slow we won't live long enough to touch it.
December 13, 2016
For Lewis Raynes' contest - 'In your head'
Categories:
counterfactual, mythology, nonsense, words,
Form: Free verse
The Aberdeen bus arrives, deposits and boards
the same people daily. One is the dark-haired
chambermaid at the tourist lodge, awkward
in her print dress and wearing a frown. Her
big breasts inspire and her long legs are
quintessence. The sun dispels moisture,
with fire-blackened face I lick a popsicle
after work and achieve a counterfactual
childhood. This is what the chambermaid’s scowl
is about, the frozen treat and smile of a grown
man. On a summer night what passions
would I find in her? We take our place in the pattern
of daily activity, pick-up trucks with crews
arriving and leaving, uniformed rangers narrow
in their imaginations. Two ravens fly low
over the clearcut like weather, in weather, there will
be weather. Felling trees in the forest, I look uphill.
The ravens float like hawks, nearly immobile.
Categories:
counterfactual, blue, child, imagination, memory,
Form: Free verse