Folker Poems | Examples

Scare-City

Scare-City

by

Rick Folker

Here on these mean streets...
The palpable lack of love
Threads through the alleyways
of brutal loss and unanswered prayers;
The anguished cries of despair rise
with the unforgiving heat.

Here among the forlorn refugees,
the frightened and the poor,
Can be found the ones who
forgage for a phantom friend 
and beg for an absent god to speak;

where Hunger Games
are played for keeps.

Here are those we pray for
Yet, never pay for...
The addicted, the afflicted
Those we would rather not see
And those we wish might have
never been.

Here, a thousand miles and a thousand tears
from the suburbs of the cynical elite
One may, if one tries
Travel to this city of the meek.

It's Not My Job

It's Not My Job
by
Rick Folker

It's not my job to teach you of 
love;
to pull you, pry you from your
place of hate.

It's not my job to lift you
from willful ignorance
when you elect a president
the despot whom 
you elevate. 

It's not my job to offer you
truth and beauty
in place of your racist, supremacist
warped world-view;
your wicked weltschmerz
you fearfully embrace.

It's not my job to point you
towards the weeping women
whom mourn their lost children,
taken too tragically, too violently
by the guns you make.

No more, no more can I convince you
that this country is in love with death,

No more, no more can you ignore
The glaring cynical game you
continue to play,

The absurd theatre 
the thirst for more victims
will not abate.

The truth lies bare
for those of us willing to 
educate.

Phantom Lovers

Phantom Lovers
Rick Folker

Seek the meek
In bars discreet
Where men hold men
longing
to be 
complete

the disco days
the haze, the craze
before we ever dreamed
there could be a party crasher
like AIDS

dance, dance, dance
abandoned, unbound
that heady freedom
offering a chance

Your soul is weightless
Your beauty enhanced

You are light
When all lights dim
For this you were meant
Free for the one 
destined to be 'him'

Then that ethereal light recedes
Drowned by the dying din
Searching the lurid shadows
your broken heart
pumping within

Briefly you held his gaze
And were certain, 'it's him'

The lights come up 
The scene now seems so grim
Swallow the bitter dregs
Of the acrid gin
Oh where did he go
Where is the he 
that was meant to be 'him'?

Maybe, just maybe
you just might see 'him'
again

Maybe next week
in bars discreet
where men hold men
longing 
to be
complete

Sit Transit Gloria Mundi

Sit Transit Gloria Mundi
Rick Folker

Our current consumptive culture
Salivates over
"Tech" and "Cell" and "Screen"
That transmits the lurid, pornographic
Apocalyptic scenes.

We long for the end
Of the endless 24/7 hollow info
Hoping, even praying that 
The Moral Arc would start to bend.

The dreadful, the destitute in their death throes
Are caught by our ever-present lens;
The Schadenfreude tourist 
Documenting the world's worsening
woes.

We check off the trauma 
As part of our Holy Bucket List
And tune in and tune out of another
Kardashian/Jerry Springer blitz.

All along we lurch from crisis to crisis
Bankers scot free, Blacks burned in worship
While blaming the ever-elusive Isis

White supremacy in the land of the free?
The clown in the White house doesn't get it ....

Or does he

That Which Is

That Which IS
(for Julian of Norwich)
by
Rick Folker

I came across it 
in a bookstore
As if you were standing 
right there and smiling,
"Now do you understand?  
It IS enough."

You, in your cloistered cell
assured us of the death of fear
and the inifinite Reality,
"All will be well, all manner of things
will be infinitely well."

Now, neither the approbation of humankind
nor the critic's nod to what is sacred; what is profane
Can dispel or impede my very self from ever-seeking
the Divine: in you, in me, in others

And now and then I catch a short mystical breeze
when multiplicity disappears into unity
And I gain some understanding of words like: 
Ground of Being, Ineffable knowing, Dark night, Eterna Luce,
the Eternal Now

And such knowing is more than enough to sustain me
to carry this struggling soul
From exile; from wandering
To a place where you pointed
That strange country now seems familiar
And I realize that I am Home

The Ethical Self

The Ethical Self
by
Rick Folker

If there is evil here, it is complacency, and it is collective.
- Courtney Martin/columnist for On Being

The Moral Arc is bent
but not broken
It can be retrieved and repaired
like a shattered heart
withering in the penumbra
of great grief

If only we take back the responsibility
we have so casually ceded to the loudest, harshest,
and most unforgiving voices

Then we can become caretakers and caregivers
when the moral arc seems to lose the path of justice
and lies discarded and dismissed as so many hopes and dreams
are driven to despair


It is then that we must all the more forcefully stand up and stand by
our ethics, our morals, and refuse to blame 'evil' of some other
'uncontrollable force' when we are ultimately to 
be held accountable for the killings, the cruelty, the craven fear
that paralyzes our better selves
and cynically opt for helplessness when these atrocities
could have been prevented.

Ultimately, we will be held accountable for the future we
and only we can make.

The moral arc in long and it does bend
but we need make sure that we bend
with it.

Lost Lamentations

Lost Lamentations
by 
Rick Folker
(remembering Charlotesville)

"Miserere mei, Deus"

Lost among the shrill voices
of blame, of rage, of insatiable violence
The low, plaintive lamentations
the sackcloth, the ashes
the Cry to Heaven for mercy
smothered by media spin,
justifications and sin!

Forgive us Heather
Forgive us for forgetting
Forgive us for a lack of humility and reverence
For allowing it to happen again
So helpless in our "Never Agains"

In silence and shame
May our grief begin

59

59
by
rick folker

What happened in Vegas
Should not stay in Vegas.

Such a mind-numbing tragedy
cannot be contained, nor constrained
or explained
by a simple 'summing up'.

No, never 'what happened in Vegas'
Should be termed, the new normal
Or the the new acceptance
Of a virulent form of violence
Or a fatalistic excuse for
Humanity's propensity to cage
Such stark, naked evil in words
that defy words.

No, never should the 'banality of evil' stay in Vegas or Newtown or Orlando
It should affect and effect each and every person with a soul,
with a will, with a modicum of compassion and turn each of us away from Vegas and toward 
our national and individual wounds

What happened in Vegas should transcend mountains and oceans
Transverse the healing cosmos and return to us 
With a simplistic and fundamental message ...

We shall NOT be monsters
We  shall NOT be harmful or heartless
We shall NOT remain in Vegas

On Reading Akhmatova

On Reading Akhmatova
by
Rick Folker
Kansas City, MO

...delighted in deliriums,
In singing about tombs.
I distributed misfortunes…

… But I am not allowed to forget
The taste of the tears of yesterday.

- Anna Akhmatova
“The Last One”

Awake in my darkened room
Another nightmare of doom

Entombed in this nothingness
Life has become a series of shades
Passing by my window on a heavy
August night - Friends long dead
Whisper,

“Hey man, you should have bowed 
Out gracefully … we did”.

Survivor's guilt covers me
like a shroud
Their deaths leave me hollowed;
Dessicated like late autumn leaves
...

The stifling heat is burying me beneath
My last gasps of relevance, remembrance,
And sanity,

I live; they sleep.
I in this lonely room, 
they in the distance
Of their deep

Now the pathos of age and dead end paths
Beckon me; those former friends
Those shades I flee
Against my earnest, ardent screams
Escape my desperate silent plea 
for dignity, forgetfulness, and 
longevity

I shall not dream again tonight
I hope; I pray
Of those I loved;
Of those I lost to AIDS

Kindred Kind

KINDRED KIND
by
Rick Folker

We need prophets and poets
Poor people, lost people
Raising their voices
In Rage

We need Feminists
Fearless Gays, Forces of Freedom
Ready to
Engage

We need Blacks
We need Browns
Burning with your 
Fundamental 
Faith

We need the Unsung Young
And the Yellow-Red tongue
Yelling down
The rising tide of
Hate

We need Torturous Truth
And Towering Hope
Talking back to power
Slinking from the 
White privilege
Haze

We need you, we need me
To seize the scepter
Of shouting supremacy

Something
That just might sound; 

Soulfull
Selfless and just simply

Sane

A Frisson of Fear

A Frisson of Fear
by Rick Folker

I will not bow to
your idols of
hate

I will not offer prayers to
your false gods you
create

I will not kneel to 
your toxic media of
lies, half-truths you
replicate

BUT ...

I will warm you
in the coldness of
a naked, lonely night

I will weep with you
when the weight of weeping
takes all our might

I will wake with you to
some distant future
and reconsecrate

Our shattered souls 
In the balm of 
day's first wake

Abraham's Dream

Ibrahim’s Broken Dream
by 
Rick Folker

His withered hand sifts through the sand,

“My descendants, Isaac-Ishmael are like
stars that have fallen, sand scattering into a
nameless lake ...
Something causes him to wake
some voices whispering,
"Remember Isaac, Remember the Knife.

Lillith-like women laughing
they torment him,
he sobs 
the desert quakes.
Yours is a land
In future will break!

Looking up, he thinks he sees Hagar
“Two beloved wives, now none….
In the hot Arab sun Isaac and Ishmael 
Phantoms who vanish
reaching, fighting, arguing for their star.
The veil rent from afar

“Why have you left us bereft of 
your dream, your wish
of shalom
sinking, stinking
in your wars?"

God is weeping in his musings, thanksgivings, desperate pleadings,

“I would have them together….
He presses his ear to the earth
For an answer
The nightmare, the dream resumes...

My descendants are like a broken family
Without their mother,
Scattered like the sand,
Similar beneath the sun.

“Oh”, his last cry,
“That they might be one…”

Mother Tongue

Mother Tongue
by 
Rick Folker
March 15, 2017

Words...
Words bereft of beauty
bitter words
barely concealing the 
viscious intent of 
opaque surfaces
concealing truth with 
the fake, urging us to destroy - not to make
swallowing the ashes; leaving rage in their wake

Separating the hater from the hate

But I too, have words
Words that patiently ripen
beneath that opaque substrate
they wait, they wait

Roiling like lava my words.
They strain to remember - 
Ashen shades of history's mistakes
The faulty rememberings 
We continue to remake

Of sharp words, hate words
I have no need to take.
Is it possible that now;
After so much time, after so much pain
We still ache and break?

Are we unable to create, celebrate, or 
possibly embrace?

Can we find the courage re-speak, re-learn
The I in me, the thou in you
and find! fail! but at least try
to imagine better words, healing words

Or are we to gather the ashes of bitterness again?

A Remnant Remains

What Remains
by
Rick Folker
June, 2017
Kansas City, MO

When the crowd clamors
And the tocsin clangs

When the mighty and powerful
Crush the weak, the vulnerable,
The poverty that chains and shames

When fear fights fiercely
With the menacing gang
Silencing the prophets
With their poisonous slang

When the refugee seeks safety
Those sojourners are met with a
Door slamming
And a deafening bang!

When these omens and portents are
The normal sturm und drang
Of a soul-less people clinging to
Myths of endless positive change

When all of these mindless, pointless, 
Endless
Strife-filled days
Divide and dwindle down

To the ashes of the last 
Death pangs

A Remnant Remains
A Remnant Remains

And life and love are reborn and return
Again! and Again! and Again!

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