Long Encaustic Poems
Long Encaustic Poems. Below are the most popular long Encaustic by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Encaustic poems by poem length and keyword.
("Corpus Callosum", 2018, original encaustic)
Left Brain Right Brain
The two halves of our brain
exist like opposites in our world
but as wholes within our heads.
Sometimes it seems the left -
the side of words and logic and manageable things -
disregards that there is even an other,
a side that is in fact the master
that all perceptions filter through,
a gate keeper ever watching without judgment,
a side that knows
but doesn’t say
speaking instead in gesture, music and image,
that only hint at the truth,
that takes us down
the rabbit hole
to realms unknown
yet all our own
where sequences build
and break and form
kaleidoscopic worlds are born
where wind can talk
and Sun does sing
and logic becomes a playful thing
that turns to noodles
we sell at roadside stands
eat with chopsticks
that dance to marching bands
and feed to snakes
as they hum the rhyme
of ancient mariners
now lost in time…
(first published in my second book, LITTLE PINE, 2016)
("Rainbow Body" - detail, 2018, original encaustic)
Like Honey in the Sun
The other night I dreamt
of a fork in my spiritual path.
At a place where many gathered
to engage in spiritual retreat,
one group went off to sit
with silent inward focus,
while I joined another for a month
in the playful practice of simply making music.
And as we started in a loose kind of jam
I noticed there in the space before me
a stream of honeybees flying back and forth
working an invisible line
building something in midair, glowing
transparent like honey in the sun…
Showing me the essence
Radiant with inner light
An inhuman presence
Softly warm and liquid bright
(1/26/24)
(“Corpus Callosum", 2018, original encaustic)
Right Brain, Left Brain
Two halves of a whole
Complimentary opposites
Passive/active, imaginal/verbal
Figurative/literal, depressive/manic
Outside and within time
A master and his emissary
Inside us all.
Yet each of us have our own balance
Our own comfort zones
And range of tolerance.
Like a finger print
Within our brain
Leaving its subtle mark
On everything we think, say and do.
Viva the difference!
I say
While my right brain
Just watches, impassively
As thought bubbles form, drift and fade away
To an ambient soundtrack
Of invisible spheres…
(3/7/25)
("Eye of Storm", original encaustic, 2017)
Epiphany
I’ve had two major epiphanies in my life,
And I figure three is all we really get.
So far they are following a pattern
Of thesis/antithesis
So I assume the third will be some kind of synthesis.
The first involved pain.
When I broke my femur in a climbing accident
I had some time to consider pain
And I concluded that it can always be worse
As in, it’s never a full 10 on the scale.
The second was a couple of years later
With my second climbing accident
When I did a 40 foot backwards swan dive
Landing on rock, cracking my helmet
Instead of my skull.
What I learned when I woke up several hours later
In a hospital far from home
Was that no matter how much pain we experience
When we die it ends
As if it never had been…
I think the third when it comes at last
Will be something along the lines;
I really don’t know sh*t
And never have
Despite a lifetime thinking otherwise.
I think it’s an epiphany
To enter an open door with
Regardless of what’s come before
Somehow knowing it’ll all be familiar
The way dreams are, just before we awake.
(5/27/24)
("A Moment of Grace aka The Empty Mirror", 2024, original encaustic)
Running on Empty
Within the empty mirror mind
I see an empty smile
Is no one left to judge me then
And my heart of guile?
For who am I to blame at all
It’s just what I’ve become
A life consuming this bullsh*t
A life of playing dumb.
We’re what we eat and what we wear
To live and just fit in
Yet that is no excuse at all
For lives consumed by sin.
To sin is in our bones you know
To simply miss the mark
All careless players in the game
We stumble in the dark.
Until at the darkest hour
Dawn comes with growing light
To see at last right where we are
And how we lost our sight.
And with that clarity we take
Our aim and hit it straight
With head held high and heart aligned
We bravely meet our fate.
Yet all the while the mirror’s there
With nothing more to be
We play the game and follow rules
Pretending we are free.
We reach for stars and mimic fools
And think we have arrived
But in our hearts we know the score
A life that’s built on lies.
And that’s our lot, both yours and mine
To struggle through these times
An empty mirror, empty smile
In essence so sublime.
So run away and run around
And run back home at last
It’s not a race, it’s all just play
Until our final gasp.
(8/23/24)
(“Dreaming Gaia”, 2020, original encaustic)
I dream at night like everyone,
But there’s no escaping it,
I dream by day as well.
My night dreams are the more interesting
But my day one’s the more binding.
I have an address book of my daydream friends
After all
But that’s not something I’ve ever needed
On the other side of sleep.
In fact, it’s amazing how rarely I do some things
In my nightdream world;
Like make phone calls, write letters, surf the net
Or grocery shop.
I may drive a car, but don’t ever buy the gas.
I may be with my dogs,
But never need to feed them.
That’s what I do and what defines my day dream world.
At night the dogs come and do things unexpected
Yet perfectly understandable
Like dance on their hind legs to inaudible music
In foot deep fresh snow.
So being a human I know so much
But there are some things that I may never know.
Like, in my dreams where do I go?
Do I stay in my brain
Or do I go to some space
Where others may join me
And time is erased
Where roles are exchanged
And minds can embrace
And maybe just maybe
We’re reborn with grace.
(11/19/25)
(“The Particle In The Wave”, 2018, original encaustic)
Down to Zero
In the great equation of Life
Everything eventually cancels out
As it naturally balances
And leaves us down to zero.
From the perspective of static
The dynamic is the illusion
From the perspective of dynamic
The static is the illusion.
Buddhism with its notion of a final Nirvana
Takes the former
Taoism with its effortlessly flowing Wu-Wei
Takes the latter.
That is the East, while in the West
This paradoxical duality is expressed
Succinctly by quantum physics
As the wave and particle nature of light.
The reality is always, of course, different
Than what we think, when we’re at zero
And left with what it means to be alive;
In work or play, depending on our view.
(7/21/25)
("Winter's Edge", 2018, original encaustic)
In The Shadow of the Sacred
This game
Of life
Played
With full abandon
With all our doubts
And confusions
Hopes and fears
As we soldier on
Suffer and grow
Gradually or suddenly
Expanding the crack
In the cosmic egg
The tear in the womb
Of all our births
The crack of the broken heart
Life inevitable bestows
The tear we bleed from...
The crack by which the light
Gets in, and out.
And so it goes, this cycle
Of birth and death
And everything in between
Giving and taking
As best we can
Learning what it is
We have only forgotten
Learning who we really are
Beyond the veils of this life
The conditioned habits
Within the story
Of all our relations.
Coming home
Always going home
Whether we know it or not
Whether we even care or not
Everyone, brothers and sisters
On this same journey
Each in our own way
Coming home
Stumbling on our knees
Running at full speed
Soaring with open wings
To a place
The sacred space
We have never really left.
(11/16/23)
(“Shadow Puppet”, 2023, original encaustic)
What Is It About the Jews?
We live in a time of irrational fear and phobias
From fear and loathing towards one’s own body
And parents (about as basic to hating life as it gets),
To the rapid rise of anti-semitism
After the Oct. 7th massacre.
Now, as it was in Europe in the last century,
Jew hate is all the rage
From college campuses to the halls of Congress
And still it’s the same old same ole.
The problem is the Jews are the hyper rational ones,
The ones with a whole standard deviation higher IQ.
And this may not seem like much to those who cant understand
But it becomes oppressive to have them always overachieving!
And this oppression in academics
Business, entertainment and science
Makes the self-oppressed feel the victim
And so they, as they have always done,
Project their fear (in the form of hate)
Onto the Other.
Do the Jews sometimes play their own victimhood up
And so manipulate the less intelligent all the more?
Of course.
But that is the way of the world
Those who can, do
And those who cant, teach
And those who cant teach, just complain.
Even if the Jews didn’t exist
We’d have to make them up
To have something to complain about.
Maybe that is exactly what we do.
(9/8/25)
("The Mothership", 2024, original encaustic photo collage)
The Programmed Mind
Riding our brain waves
What we do and say and think
Finds a lasting home
At whatever level
Those vibrations take us.
Do we remember our dreams
What we did, said and thought
As the relaxed state of REM sleep
Molds us, solidifying or disrupting,
Our daytime persona?
Do we consciously seek out
Our own reprogramming
In deep prayer and meditation
Establishing familiarity
With primordial zero-point awareness?
Or do we simply
Follow our impulses like a dog
Basking in the pleasure
Of comfortable routine
And operant conditioning?
It is our mind after all
To have and to hold
Or rather as the case may be,
To reclaim and rewire,
Program and heal for ourselves.
(4/16/25)