Long Atonal Poems

Why do I love poetry? Well, it's none of the usual: beautiful words, lofty thoughts, noble sentiments. I can get all that from Tolstoy or the Bible. No, I love poetry, good poetry, because it...

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New Year's Resolutions 

This new year marches into view
Brooding and still with empty calendar pages
For this pilgrim on a pilgrimage past new mile markers
Engraved with resolution quoting harmony
Among the spheres.

“Make a difference with what you...

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The Gift of Christmas

Some people say Christmas in this present time
Wanders lost
Through flashing ads and tinsel carelessly strung
On an artificial bough.

Some people say the Spirit of Christmas
Lives no more -
The simple Christ Child’s birth
Coldly mocked...

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The Gift

Some people say Christmas in this present day
Wanders lost
In ads and tinsel carelessly strung
Upon an artificial bough;
Some people say the Christmas spirit
Lives no more -
The simple Christ Child’s birth
Coldly mocked by glittering ads
For diamond...

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Tight Spaces 

I wriggle through the tight spaces, 
moving between these fussy wise cracks,
all in forward motion, my forward goal,
moving towards a light beyond, way up ahead.
A dimming glow, like a watery eye,
lubricating and easing...

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Angel’s songbirds awoke and flung the deal
Anisette chirps, sounds of reels
On that day my soul grew lyric
My heart couldn’t see it
Angels songbirds sing with me

And the harmonies never waiting
The sound singer souls singing
The song craft...

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In walked the Redeyed Stranger


Bragging: he used an excessive amount of
bagging gestures and words. He was told by
his handler to tune down the rhetoric, as one
person found him rude and overbearing. We
were worried someone would...

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Thank You for the Music - Coda

Companion on my journey
Abided with me 
In the anthems of delicate dawn -
Mornings of mauve and lilac light,
Octaves of afternoons in amber reflection,
Serenades of slumber’s silver reveries -
The melody...

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I hear the words. In autumn's silent verse
lie anapestic wafts of falling leaves
with golden syllables both bright and terse,
the crimson pluck of summer as it grieves

its loss of verdant shimmer.  In the wake
of crisp...

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Proud parents gathered for the fifth grade band presentation.
The kids labored long and hard to enhance their musical education.
'Twas the band's first concert since its recent organization.
The harried teacher approached it with a sense of...

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Hee Haw, I Cried 
By Sy Roth

With a mulish hee haw, 
I wrap myself in my own divine comedy.
Commedia dell’arte path 
For a blind mercenary of his own fate.

An ormolu wonder stood before me--
Trees clad...

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I needn't don a tuxedo nor pay a dime to enjoy a pleasing symphony!
In my own back yard or lying abed at night I hear nature's harmony!
The rolling bass of thunder, the strobe-bright lightning on...

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With no specific tone or direction.
And , than suddenly: Whoomp! the tone began to change
it devloped into a"whoomping groove" 
it's beleived to dereive from Pickett
the lyrics said
early one morning I ran out and hollered
my voice...

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Thank You for the Music

Companions on my journey
Surround me in anthems -
When the dawn rises up,
In afternoons of reflection,
In slumber’s reveries -
Melodies
Always embracing me
Asking only breath
In canticles and choruses –
 Paeans and in psalms –
...

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They form their own collective society in the sky.
In the distance between one tooth and another
brushing past the dentally doctored,
or subtly manipulated by our own sugar desires.
Succeeded by the lowest common denominator,
in bitterest weather seeking...

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Heart Song Separation

“We got separated from us last week and I haven’t found you since.”   Poet’s Quote

Too long my heart we beat in arrhythmic clashes
 Languishing in sudden cardiac heart arrest
Out of sync...

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And, now I lay me down to sleep,
For another wretched night of counting sheep!
Lord, should I expire before I awake,
Please allow me some zzzzzzzzs for heavens sake!

The cat has leaped upon the bed,
And snuggles closely...

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Music 

Mystical labyrinth of twisting harmonic warnings
Gazing into infinity’s composing handiwork –
 Moonbeams in silver sung sonatas –
  Ivory hued cantatas resolved from heart pacing crescendos
Spring’s soothing birdcalls after tympanic thunder.

Measured tempos of rhythms...

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Who's voice meatus
with a sweet tenors
tone
which words are sung
so lovely
so smooth and sweet
Nonet Musette?
Atonal Baroque?
Vivace Trill Trombone?
uh, you don't know
Rubato Tutti?
Meatus Tablature ?
sweet, sweet tone
do you have interest
in the clefts notes, huh?
does the whiskey from...

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Wall in the Woods

A solitary pensive woodland canticle
Wanders through summer’s souvenirs,
A gypsy quilt of green transformed to crimson flame,
And prophesies of empty paeans swiftly riding
Through a meandering row of barren arms
Keeping silent watch at last...

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The dank petrichor of grainy night,
meters stand like gravestones, 
the obsidian avenue slick as a sapphire,
windowed granite rising in sharp cut shadows,
wind gusting, tumbleweed clouds somersaulting 
in a moonless ghost town.
I jingle keys with atonal...

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MUSIC IN THE LISTENING LAB
 
Notes!  Notes of music
Bouncing 	
Off of walls – off of chairs
Off of ceilings and off the floors
Running down the hall in half steps
	Flooding every inch of space
	In atonal tangos...

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Your synaesthesia danced the air, my feet the floor
And bounced again and with a scream and more
I fell down to my knees and screeched my dance
Against walls and unseen windows without a glance
Beyond the yearning...

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Lost in a wistful arbor, where malaise blooms,
Mists flower in hypnotic bleak violet dusks
Shades of brooding melancholy  
Bruise my treasured bouquets of dreams
And plod through ponderous mists 
In metamorphic doldrums

Cold inertia spirals into lamentations,
Midnights...

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Beauty, like most things, is subjective
Some people prefer a statue, marble, 
Crafted at the enervation of the sculptor.
Others prefer smoke, thin and intangible, 
Dancing in plumes to an atonal rhythm.
Call me crazy, but I prefer...

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