Born then drawn on your birth certificate
A full legal name and identity.
Some simple, short or long and intricate
It follows us always and plain to see.
We learn early on how to write our name
In simple letters or cursive styling
Our name travels with us as plain or vain
Through academia, records, filings.
What of streets, buildings or on monuments
Or long-faded through time and forgotten?
In directories high, like parliaments
Or lineage with children begotten?
In the end, but one written name alights
Is it written in the Lamb's Book of Life?
Beyond myself my sea sleeps, strange.
It will howl and will call with palms of wind, almost tender.
Sad, forgotten, blue of child, still bleeding.
The days pass, the hands dry like seashells.
The body yields, alive like a wood that burns with cold.
Life grinds me down, hours fall like iron filings.
And yet I find the sea within me, light that sings.
Its beauty, salt of honey, binds itself to eyelids.
It sings me waves that I have never turned back.
Its silence howls, like a wolf of glass in wet desert.
I am the blind lighthouse, illuminating the shiny darkness from blood.
I grow anchors of air, binding the ribs to the empty sky.
The sea within me is liquid sand, a clock burned by frost.
I anoint my longing with the white rust of remembrance.
As I pass, I become sea: the emptiness embraces me.
Paradox: I am the water that burns and the fire that flows.
The mystery of faith
The mystery of devotion
The mystery of love
The mystery of knowing
What moves us
Within us and without us
What draws a moth to flame
And a flower to Sun
The pull of Life on Life
Like attracting and healing like
Without fear of union
Without hope of resistance
Iron filings gather
Around the magnet to reveal
The pattern of polarity’s flow
So much to perceive
So much to know
And still we barely scratch the surface
(5/3/25)
Unrealities and realities
grind together in mortar’s mouth,
spilling, pulverizing, volatile perfumes—
succumbing scents of citrus, crushed copper,
musks of bruised lightning,
threshing thunderous throbs.
Instability incarnate sings her reveling wails,
fragrances of something
Beyond Name.
I guide existences into black curve,
severing them against sharp, obsidian walls,
letting them rupture—letting them bleed
—syrups and statics—
messy marrows of forgotten equations.
Their shapelessness mutable,
pliant pages to pulp in the plunge
of the merciless pestle.
How many combinations will one
blend and crucify—
to crush, to coax, into coherence?
Rasps of bone bend against sanguine salts,
sheens of opulent oil merge with ember embryo—
iron filings licked into life by tempests reigned.
Anything of matter becomes
moisture—mass—mold—
hunger pooling at my basin’s heart,
seething for impending strike,
for sudden and unforgiving
birth.
Trainer must be a powerful magnet
For inducing dipole moment.
Guiding star for orientation
Orientation leads to self realisation.
Realization leads to field creation
A potential to a give proper direction.
I could see now clinging filings
All now set up to reflect their feelings
MSDEED team at North and South pole
MSFDA has kept its all energy in store.
With their strengths they work as magnetometer
Strongly holding and controlling the filling together.
A cascade will eventually build up
Your efforts will keep us pushing up
Master trainer will definitely evolve
Problems in higher education will resolve.
Unsoiled white pages attract like magnets
Waiting for words like silvery bits of iron filings
Words and phrases seeking recognition,
Hungering for an emotionally satisfying place
Of lasting importance -- meaning, a message
Not to be erased by this age’s mediocrity,
Worthy of being a literary rite of passage
That will more than merely fill a blank space
Not cold or unmoving like a legal deposition
But inspiring as a glorious choir of voices singing
Unsoiled white pages attract with no regrets.
Written July 18, 2022
The zealously guarded
Verdant pasture of
The city club
Attract like filings
To a magnet
A herd of undernourished
Hungry city buffaloes
Just as their slavering lips
Pull at the first mouthfuls
Of succulent green grass
The watchman and his
Trio of pie dogs
Barking in token defiance
Arrive hotfoot on the scene
Disconsolate the buffaloes
Gray shapes in the evening gloom
Wend their way out
Pausing to half heartedly
Pick up strewn paper
Throwing wistful backward
Glances at the sweet grass.
The Calendar Dealer
David J Walker
Pick your own date
Early or late in life
Pick the husband or wife you
Wanted to be
And I will see
What I can do for you
Finding the filings in
Bindings of memories of
Calendars past
And at last, though late
And determined by a set fate
I can expose you
Although you will only see
What you wanted to be
And not what you were in the
Lost days blurred vision in
The grasp of a dealer
In calendars past
Losing Someone
Written: by Tom Wright
2/23/2016
At times we catch ourselves questioning why
That in droves grievous things, appear to come
We spend time in prayer then say goodbye
While the one we’ve just lost has left us numb
We retrace those steps from former days
For footprints have remained in each path
Shortly, those faded prints at which we gaze
Face disappearance in deaths aftermath
The footprints we leave at death
Reveal not only the size of shoe
But filings of our life;
When lyrics that you haven't heard
For maybe forty years
Come pouring out from deep inside
There might just be some tears.
For hearing Graham Nash last night,
Nostalgia reigned supreme
And I was back in college
(Like we all were, it did seem).
I mouthed the words to "Bus Stop,"
But when "Our House" came around,
I sang along, as asked to,
With a joy that did abound.
Like filings, we, the audience,
Were drawn into the pull
Of Nash, the band and venue,*
Where the sound was rich and full.
There's magic to be made, for sure,
When past and present meld
And release some secrets we forgot
That we had tightly held.
*Chautauqua Auditorium - Boulder, Colorado
agape gave grave to age
bent not to burdens born
cleave verily the leaves of life
distilled stilled styled reviled
entry net try and try
filigree reeds figure loosely
grave gave the age to rage
humble bled humid muddle
insomnia sonogram moss grass
jubilant talent bilious slant
koan known now shown
lilting quilting tinged with gilding
mellifluous flows of metal filings
nervously reverse obtuse nouns
opulent lute plants ting
preening terns plead for flight
quatrains track rain tacks
remote restless rustlers rust
still lilting laughter silenced
until nettle salve unwinds
valves self-seal veil sails
wishes she eschews clothes
xoxoxox the ox loves my ex
yew we way away my yes
z in me sees z in you
Losing Someone
Written: by Tom Wright
2/23/2016
At times we catch ourselves questioning why
That in droves grievous things, appear to come
We spend time in prayer then say goodbye
While the one we’ve just lost has left us numb
We retrace those steps from former days
For footprints have remained in each path
Shortly, those faded prints at which we gaze
Face disappearance in deaths aftermath
The footprints we leave at death
Reveal not only the size of shoe
But filings of our life;
I shall begin this tale with a storyteller's flair
take out my flute to play a soft seductive tune
between pauses, as I recall my journey.
Facing the unknown does not frighten me
unchartered waters are a challenge not to ignore
lure me like a siren, or filings to a magnet.
I am not an old god, doomed to search the world
on a quest for an elusive Seven Cities of Gold
excitement runs red in my blood, vivid as a wound.
I chase mountains as they loom enticing ahead
sometimes they fade like mirages in summer sun
so I drop anchors unfazed in strange lands.
After the rains, thick stars scud the summer sky
I could gaze at them forever in the moist darkness
leave the world, getting off it with not a look behind.
Can this be love - an insanity which is willing
to risk everything for what turns out to be
a colossal mental illusion - be shipwrecked at sea.
@jjote 02/11/2017
Losing Someone
Written: by Tom Wright
2/23/2016
At times we catch ourselves questioning why
That in droves grievous things, appear to come
We spend time in prayer then say goodbye
While the one we’ve just lost has left us numb
We retrace those steps from former days
For footprints have remained in each path
Shortly, those faded prints at which we gaze
Face disappearance in deaths aftermath
The footprints we leave at death
Reveal not only the size of shoe
But filings of our life;
A Cynosure of Sadness
As gun has that sense of humour in the trigger,
It triggered my mind that I clouded darkness in your happiness with sadness,
Sadness that is brewed from failure to curb the vase of your love,
Sad that is being punctuated by disappointment that can't bend to your calls,
A gait of loneliness that widens by the open gate of my embarrassment
It is a cynosure of solace.
As magnate files out iron filings from chunks of dust,
Sadness attracts malice intent as it kills happiness,
Sadness embeds itself with deception lie and cheats,
Sadness that fathers hatred a bona fide it savour most,
It sads how love is neutralized in the bog of sadness,
It is a cynosure of sorrow.
A fail in raising the need for house graze fight,
Fight that has an eternal engagement with sadness,
A salt of sadness that blends well in perfect love and kills its soberness,
Halts not and give birth to somber of drunken sadness
It cyclone a clone of peace that can't digest, as it allows to be poisoned,
It is a cynosure of sadness.
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