I’m watching the Australian Open;
The players are battling heat.
With temps running high,
No one needs to ask why
Many athletes just wilt in defeat.
Yet outside my well-heated apartment,
It’s way below freezing this week.
To venture out there
Every item I wear
Has been chosen for weather this bleak.
I’d rather be colder than warmer,
Though I don’t like either extreme;
But in Melbourne, I’d bet,
While competitors sweat,
They must also be losing some steam.
I live inside the space between extremes
Stories bursting at the seams
Everything comes to me in dreams
Consciousness flowing like streams
Writing lives within extremes
Voices clawing through their screams
Like walking narrow balance beams
Hoping someone catches the themes
Stay focused Australia..Do not follow extremists.' Hold your nerve.'
And the centre ground.'
Mile high eyes Miss Imagination,
beguile us with a new fairy tale.
Style the hair of an unruly wish
while writing a journey at grande scale.
No way let your eyes start to open,
throw out reality for daydreams.
Below your lids let your mind wander,
go past what is known aim for extremes.
In the nighttime hours
As the world deftly creeps by
I summon my powers
Spread my wings and fly
Past cotton clouds,
Snow-capped mountains, white
I am lost and I am found
I am beauty and blight
Past the midnight chimes
A soul searching for home
Tangling myself in rhymes
So as to not feel alone
Catch the updraft of hope
Friendship sun on my face
My place in this world in scope
Loathing, with love replace
I operate in abundance of extremes,
Flirtish to skittish; kind-hearted to mean
I am a tolerant bigot or a emotional stoic
Yet everyone around me don’t even know it
The tug-o-war of conflicting interests
Both teams in an endless contest
To control my fast twitch reflex
Of my best defence; verbal offence.
Shutting people down from entering my mind
When I see the pity form their beady eyes
I don’t know if it’s pride or loathing
When my tongue cuts words foreboding
the demise and destruction of myself and others
But I move forward for my mother and brothers
And with the numbers of loved ones that every day grows
I need not fret of ever being left alone.
The carpet has two sides
The upper surface with patterns
The underside plain
It describes two worlds
The rich and the poor
The dignity and the informality
The solemn and the ordinary
The authority and the civilian
The high reputation and the low reputation
The publicity and no visibility
The difference makes the two extremes
Unroll the carpet red and shining
You're the king or queen of that moment
Rolled up the carpet dull and dusty
You're yourself or a step lower
Why not
Always be a figure that live
In the hearts of people
With or without the carpet
Like God who is the almighty
Of all mankind
Irrelevant of man's origin
Approval's a craving, seeks even a smidge
Conformity dictates no room to forgive
Wealth is elusive, just over that ridge
Fame's a hot flame that's intense but short-lived
Faith's the assurance of things still unseen
Hope, steadfast, certain for times in between
Joy's not a feeling that scared, flees the scene
And love is a person whose death washed us clean
The first set, to die for, to not contravene
The second brings peace and a life that's serene
At opposite ends, at the utmost extremes,
To chase or to live for, you see what I mean?
Her love-life ruled by idyllic extremes
romantic, passionate kisses on screens
fairy-tale princes on stallions pale-cream
Promises whispered on moonlit nights
shoreline strolls under stars twinkling lights
two lovers' eyes filled with amorous gleams
Little wonder no beaux could live up to her billing
any glimmer of hope she ended up killing ~ 'til
she retired to pillow-fed, wistful dreams
To be beaten by rain Too greedy for gains To love until it pains
To hate anyone is insane Too speechless to say your name To hold on when nothing remains
070621PSCtest, Bite Size Poem No 11, Line Gauthier
Water may be hard as ice
Soft as steam
Iron may be hard as mineral
Soft as pills
People can be good as saints
Bad as ghosts
Two extremes they may go
Emotionally controlled or uncontrolled
She asks me to rate my pain on a,
He asks how much I love him on a,
Now please rate your professor on a,
What would you say your mood is on a
One to ten scale, one being the worst.
Everything, at it's best, gets a nine.
I want to believe there will always
be something better in my future.
I'm saving my ten for forever.
Written: May 17, 2021
Ah middle octave's musical note C,
Balancing left-right hands, a resting point,
And marked white all over the central key-
Piano players do as it appoint.
And beginners' first lesson, middling joint ,
Watering hole for fingers to return,
To, a lesson of a lifetime to learn,
That life's opposites tend to dwell extreme,
A rudder that wont let life wide off turn,
Buddha's midpoint of poise rising like cream!
10.13.2020
Craziest time in virulent living
when protest is black and white to erase
invisibility
when fueled rage overtakes urban pockets of beauty
when the ash from smoking crater anger sears
public spaces
or an insurrection unachors reason
Shifting focus from a virus, hot iron of deep confusion
Pandemic cruelty to the unprotected masses
Indelible marks of worry
Frayed threads of crazy in trenches of stand off
A nightly-news world reduced to sound bites
Are we on the right side of change?
A turnstile that thuds constraints and fury
Hard scrabble life, a gnarly tale
No sleeping bag comfort
in living, oxygen thin
with nothing left to conceal
Hope sustained in the roulette wheel of history
that breakdown is temporal
that an impasse will give voice to the suffering
that things strained heal
Even the iron-cold ground boasts transformation.
Poem revised: October 9, 2021
Explosion / Implosion,
caught in the din
Forces once pushing,
now pull from within
The physicist cries,
as the mockingbird calls
To see past tomorrow,
today in freefall
A binary motion
of polar extremes
All consciousness split
—dark hole of my dreams
(Villanova Pennsylvania: September, 2019)
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