Long Estimate Poems
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At conception, the point of his earthly beginning inside his mother's womb, there was a light, the likes of which he had not seen until now at the point of his death. He shared with me that he had lived 85 years on earth until his demise two months ago. As he thought upon the light, he remembered that the light was not as bright as the light at his conception. That is to say, he believes when he really dies, there will be an identical light like the one he saw when he was being conceived.
I was privileged to listen and record his most remarkable story of how he died, went to heaven, and returned to tell his story. His sojourn there was a total of some 60 seconds. But if a thousand years is one day*, we are talking a heavenly timeframe of far more than 60 seconds. A brief estimate and some calculations explain why he tells me that he was in heaven long enough to visit a number of deceased loved ones, friends, and Biblical characters. For example, he met the young boy who provided the bread and fish Jesus used to feed 5,000 people. He had always been overwhelmed with the unselfishness displayed by the young lad and his willingness to be a tool for Christ in the performance of one of the world's greatest miracles. The lad never sought recognition.
He told me about a grandfather from four generations back whose name his family was never able to produce. He had suspected it to be a Bible name because his great grandfather's name was Daniel. He was right because he met him in heaven, and his name was Jeremiah. He was so happy as he told me about the family members he met. There were so many people to meet and so much beauty surrounding the entire scenery. He wanted to stay, but the angel informed him that God simply wanted to give him a taste of his future. For now, it was not his time, because his earthly mission and purpose were not completed.
So now, at 85, he's anticipating that exit light which will be there in all its splendor at his demise, he is content to live until his mission is completed.
100118PoSoupContest, Fiction Write, Broken Wings *2 Peter 3:8; Calculations are not meant to be accurate
Whats in the news today
and how much snow is on the ground
they say in the paper there is 2 600 homeless people
in my home city
but word of mouth and the people who work in the centers
estimate its more like 5000
so I ask
is this a protest of a country who has been lied to
who was led to a war that did not concern them?
who demands to have their own backyard of chemical warfares cleaned up?
Is this a protest against war of I'll never pay taxes
but I'll humble my own country
turning innocent men into serial killers
who join the smuftee killing patriots levelling a country flat
firing machine guns at innocent men listening to dance music
not to mention the reports of raped thirteen year olds and arson
and parents being forced to witness the whole thing before being executed
So I ask
wanna know about terrorism
as winter approaches
and you know soon
you're gonna be walking amongst streets
of frozen corpses
because there is nowhere left for them to go
and the soldiers join forces with some other country who feeds you
lies through the television
and then your own backyard says were going in to peace keep and the truth
surfaces that yes it is an all out war and we've been lieing all along
5000 homeless
a protest?
a government abnormality of one city?
terrorism of chemical warfare
and we're told some government across the ocean
can't handle their own nightmare of terror and assassins
so we have to go in to attack them
even though 9-11 under rug swept from years ago through our books of lies
was an event they catapulted unto somebody else!!!
5000 homeless
are we under attack?
Is that why no ones worried about the seial killings
of hookers turning up in fields anymore that farmers keep reporting?
Is taht why every neighborhood is swarmed with druglords and junkies?
and the prison that houses 300 has more than 700 people in it?
and all i see in my head are frozen corpses
and now i'm wondering
do the professionals im amongst
helping me through this rough patch
are they on medication too?
did we point the finger in the wrong way?
Is it US or them
and what does that have to do with the price of tea in china ask the British?
but what does my underground know of saints
divine intervention and methods to madness?
As a writer, people are my vocation.
As for humanity, men, women
And other abstractions,
Their interests constitute little more
Than my hobby; I can only deal in people.
As soon as I start dealing in sects
And sections, I am either an insider
Or an outsider, and I feel lost as either
And as soon as I feel lost,
I make no attempt to find myself,
But simply retrace my steps
And return to the people.
You can call me detached if you like,
But you see, the only way
I can remain sane as a person
With such an all-consuming instinct
For attachment, is to be detached.
The world of subjectivity
Holds no sway over me,
Because it is paradoxically impersonal,
Being affiliated to partisanship,
Sentimental causes and other such abstractions.
I couldn't possibly belong
To a school of orthodox thought
That accepted me as a member.
I don't believe in myself
Other than as a crystal clear container
For the freshest cream of human individualism.
When I was younger,
I ached to be famous for the sake of it,
But now it occurs to me
That anyone can be famous
Provided they are sufficiently audacious
And thick-skinned, and I desire fame
Not so much for the vain satisfaction
Of being seen and known and heard,
But in order to guide others
Towards a happier way of being,
The only precept for celebrity,
Indeed for being in general, as far as I can see.
Adversity seems to be my fate,
As well as fortune.
The meek ones gravitate to me.
I'm the prince of the hurt ones,
The damaged ones.
I resent all success and authority.
I'm so affectionate one moment,
So icy and evasive the next.
I'm in love with many people at present.
I over-accentuate my individuality,
Because sometimes I look at myself
In the mirror and I say:
"Who's that pathetic wreck?"
The more complex you are,
The less you like yourself,
Because you frighten yourself.
The more I find myself liking someone,
The more I doubt us both.
Liking someone negates them for me.
("An Aphoristic Self-Portrait" was based on a series of teeming informal diary entries made in various receptacles in the late 1980s. "The Compensatory Man Par Excellence" originally formed part of a novel written - at an estimate - around 1987. Its fate remains a mystery. "Self-Portrait" may also once have been part of it.)
My heart waits for you so that our dreams can come true .
My heart aches for you, so remove the guard so that I can be with you
Days have passed and I kept working like a horse, cleaning the barn
Emptying garbage bins and meddling in the dirt oh what a terrible sin
I did not go to school to become a Janitor, but I became one over night
I also spend hours working my brain working with my intuitive mind and the spiritual oracle that originates from the divine.
My heart aches for you when no one is there to watch my back, my heart aches for you when no one is there to buy me a new frock.
Sometimes the days turn cold and I can feel you wrapped up into my soul with just a tiny touch of heat to warm your cold feet. It’s the kind of courage that we share that kept us floating in the air and when the weather is fine, I usually get what is mine.
The road is extremely long and the curves and turns are singing a wonderful song, the guitars strings are strumming and the people are marching on. The work is not yet done so I have to continue this journey until the battle is won.
I have to change directions, angle, and dimension and make the circumference bold and the dividing line whole; you must multiply the radius by two to get the diameter that is true, and then multiply the result by three point one four for a good estimate before you walk through the door.
I have to work with some new people and a new set to obtain some physical and spiritual depth. The location is metastasized with anger, hate and greed and the bald eagle is strangling the sisters and they cannot breathe .
I have to change location to get variety and a better proportion; I have to close in on the inner world with a linear distance and the radius pulling from the center or the sphere intersecting on something that is dear to complete the formula.
My heart is waiting for you to share the story of an unseen glory and ride with the wind in the south and break the wings of the North without a doubt.
My heart waits for you to complete this battle, and when it is done we will publish it and stand on the mountain top and shout with all that we have got
The birds will come raining in the sky for every direction and my heart will be pleased. I will hold your hands and embrace with thee. My heart aches for you.
An Awful Harvest
I went a hike up to Wawa in Montalban and up the mountain roads. Here I was to go past the peaks of Mt Parawagan, Susong Dalaga and Mt Lagyo plus others. The road had been improved by engineers with trucks and plant equipment. I wanted to hike a big circle right back to the beginning. This was possible a few months ago but not now due to the building of the Pamitinan Dam. It will take four years to do this and flood a complete valley near the peaks. A guard told me no entry by the construction site. I talked to a head engineer and he told me more details. The dam will be eighty metres tall or deep more than the Kaliwa Dam of sixty four metres. These are big structures. Hikers wanted to hike from Wawa to Casili by the newly improved mountain roads but the dam construction stopped this. In time a new road will be built above the dam level replacing the old road. Even if the road is built in a year the dam will still be unfinished so still no entry.
I saw a sign saying beware of UXO Unexploded Ordnance. A local man told me about this, of how the military was looking for it and would defuse any found. His details matched much of what I’ve heard before, like finding shrapnel in the soil. The sign was for the road improvement and dam construction. Sleeping shells waited to knocked awake and kill.
The digger, bulldozer and plant drivers need to be paid danger money. No joke. The area they work on is a small part of a huge World War 2 battlefield. An awful harvest litters the land with unexploded ordnance being buried in the soil having not detonated. Mortars, shells, bombs and other things; these all need locating and safely defusing by the military.
People live in the area and many have found live or exploded shells. The live shells are complete and the spent ones are in varied sized pieces. On my hike up there I was given a piece of one five five millimetre shell from a local. This was in two parts, the biggest weighed many pounds. I estimate between one in four and six fired never exploded. On the stone mountains like Mt Lagyo the shells and bombs will explode on impact if the detonators are triggered. In soil covered peaks the shells can just dig in and don’t go off. The army went up to Mt Lagyo looking for unexploded ordnance. They found nothing.
What a city I murmur to myself looking at its map.
We approached the city known as Dis,
with its vast army and its burdened citizens.
At last we reached the moats
dug deep around the dismal city.
What destroys the poetry of a city?
Automobiles destroy it,
and they destroy more than the poetry.
Dante and Virgil chased by 7 or 8 dangerous devils
Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey . . .
Our heroes reduced from metaphysical philosophers
interested in god and what man has done to man
to improvising primitive tools for survival.
Hope abandoned, we rate our chances of expiring
in the nuclear fire – excellent –
during the decline of western civilization.
On the other hand, I hope
our current problems are only temporary
and it’s just a matter of time before
the public ignores the 24-hour news cycle.
Bad news sells but the good life’s all around us.
One feels love and devotion
even for the 60 million who voted for our opponent.
Vaclav Havel said with a wisdom well beyond brilliance:
“Either we have hope within us or we don’t.
It is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not dependent
on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart
that transcends the world as it’s immediately experienced.
It is not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense
no matter how it turns out.”
It resembles grief. But it's not quite grief. I'll give you grief.
Certain days planned to be eventful I look forward to for weeks.
Let the peaceful transfer of power proceed. The sorrow and the pity.
Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth.
When the laws are kept, how proudly the city stands!
When the laws are broken, what of the city then?
We are moving through some allegory between a City of Hope,
where history has been abolished, and a City of History,
where hope can be slipped in only as contraband.
Failing to achieve understanding, we're searching
outer space for an entity to unite us as humanity.
That person, or city, is consciousness.
Two ancient female poets are a revelation,
the clarity of their complaints: lost lover, lost city.
Our enemy eventually becomes our brother,
his misery lifted by coming to her city.
1
I say I'm a designer of systems, plans
Man's
Parts that stand together, set in place to serve
Trees and planets, too, which are unplanned by us
The observant, wise man
Tries to understand
Name the parts, pistil and stamen
Rocks, eskars
Elements.
Winter is shuddering to an end, mud roads
Cardinal pairs
Robin flocks return that will soon pair off
Buds
Soils swell
Will I live to smell it again, learn the lobelias
Understand and name the parts
It ought to be a great comfort to be so insignificant
Go among weeds, a wind
Thinking to myself
One's never alone
A dichotomous key is needed, a book of twigs and fruits
Accumulated over time and generations
Without it mine would be a blank mind
To be blank but knowledgeable
Without any machinery
In a perfect silence
That is the definition of death for which we have only to wait
But in my panic last night I thought death's inert
Grace requires consciousness
Hold on long to the senses
At least a century, maybe more
A boy hanging upside down from a fence at sunset, counting clouds
2
Now we go to our daily practice
And chosen disciplines
Sustained by the satisfactions of being good men among our fellow men
Women
Choosing to do this and not that
With the finite days allotted us that at first seemed like a lot
They're now few
But the chickadee's life to the chick and the cankerworm moth's to the
worm
Seem as long to them as ours to us
What question am I asking today
By now, past half a century, I should have chosen a discipline
And been satisfied
To be a war president one must have war
May you live in interesting times?wish or curse?
Squirrels, high in oaks,
Fiber, fat and protein in acorns
Strong runners, leapers, climbers
Should stay off the roads which some cannot avoid being where they're
born
Natural selection is occurring
Those that look for machinery in motion
Hesitate or don't as needed before crossing
Live in larger numbers than those whose modus operandi's
Guessing
The ravens eat the fur and guts of bad guesses off the roads
I impose my own small order
Having chosen mountains over plains or shore
Go to my daily discipline
And estimate the motions of the seas and stars
Measuring my satisfactions by my children's satisfactions
No ... there would be no happy end to this story ...
No shining horizon or shimmering visions of tomorrow,
No joyous rhapsody of angels to greet us at the end of THIS tunnel.
The Big Apple was behind us now, fallen to the horrors of the epidemic ...
A gestation period of merely thirty seconds,
Which meant half the globe - half of humanity -
Could be firmly in its grip within 48 hours ...
Just two days! (And that was an optimistic estimate).
I worked for the CDC, but was on vacation with my family ...
My wife, two daughters, one son,
In Manhattan to see "Hamilton" on Broadway.
We were headed back to The Plaza when it happened -
When the first infected folks started to turn.
Whatever it was, it increased metabolism in the host,
As though giving people super powers,
Making them faster, stronger, more erratic, more deadly ...
One bite to the skin, and within half a minute, the person would change ...
Transform, into these ... monsters, crazy eyes and gnashing teeth,
With only one drive and purpose - to bite flesh and spread contagion,
(And the possibilities of mutations were nearly fathomless).
Nature always protects itself ... always finds a way,
And diseases and microorganisms are PART of nature.
Like good bacteria, viruses seek out highly beneficial environments,
And this one had selected the most deadly and formidable of hosts - humans.
On the other end of this long tunnel under the Hudson, was New Jersey ...
We were headed south to Atlanta and CDC headquarters,
But that was an eternity from where we were,
With untold dangers and obstacles ahead,
And in the midst of this horrifying and virulent plague.
The tunnel was empty, thankfully, and dark,
But with a tension-filled quietus that seemed ready to explode.
Our one blessing? It was very early Sunday morning,
And there was little traffic on the highway.
Still, there would be surprises coming, we knew not what ...
Surprises and trials, at the end of this long underpass AND beyond.
We could see the light of the entrance as it drew closer,
We could envision the stress and danger, and feel the cold breath ...
Of doom approaching.
~ 4th Place ~ in the "Tunnel Vision" Poetry Contest, Kai Michael Neumann, Sponsor.
Carefree in leisure time, one blasé tourist,
almost happy, I once had collected a complicated stone;
after the sunny hours had ended and last opportunity
for keepsakes began.
In my hand the stone had kept all of its mouths sewn shut,
holding its amalgamated story, and likewise in the car,
on the plane, through US Customs where it was not
in the least suspected.
A thumbnail identity I now should guess at, marking an old date,
and fixing it to, with reasonable estimate, a map location:
Plot No. 243, East end of the island, slave sugar plantation,
the stone from the corner of a ruined windmill stair—
broken free by my criminal hand, having liberated a vine.
The stone looked like a bleached out mini-monolith, square-rectangular,
able to be stood on end, leaning back and swollen at its center
like a pulled cork.
What could have moved this sequestered world to opening?
That was not for me to discover, except what came on Christmas Day,
two days after my returning.
Slave watercourses, the sight of innumerable Dutch ships,
ballasted with human flesh and hewn rock for sugar works buildings.
The drop at arms swish of the Driver’s bullwhip.
Flecks of spirit splayed on vegetation.
A mongrel dog barked beyond the windless wall of sugarcane
in centipede and mosquito heat.
Seaside, beautiful seaside impressions;
distant coral light shadows, etched deep azure;
snowy colored breakers that pencil-marked the sea.
The staid, vibrant, mocking power
of visual symphony backdrop.
So little of aid for the slaves, but for those dangerous secrets,
unhoused in the fallen coolness of the night:
demonstratively crystalline heaven of stars;
a ragged moon, clouds scudding eastward toward Africa
before freshwater rainsqualls came. And there
Orion’s Belt, mid-sky, illustrious bright, with its three
centering star points in rational line, as if
Hope could have flung such a rope anchor onto Life
engendering sanctified resistance.
Christmas morning, 5 a.m.
I had awakened from a stuck place, shapeless and dark,
half in dreaming and half in knowing I was in no dream.
I was sobbing, yet strangely, because there were no tears.
I had only put the stone inside my pajama top onto my heart.
“When I grow up I want to be rich!” The young boy announced.
His father didn’t bat an eye.
“And what makes you think you're not already rich?” Came his quick and simple reply.
The son gave his father a look…somewhere between exasperated and bored.
“Because,” he said, “there’s so many things I want I know we can’t afford.”
The father listened…for he always listened…then knowingly nodded his head…and after a moment to think it through…”Here’s what I want you to do.” he said,
“I want you to get a sheet of paper and on it list everything which…when you are older, just like me, you think will make you rich.”
“List anything you can think of that will bring you celebrity, fortune or fame…and while you’re making your list…I will do the same.”
The son returned in no time…on his list was money, a big house, a new car and a boat…“This will make me rich.” He said. “Now show me what you wrote.”
“My list is very old.” His father smiled. “It’s a list that, hopefully, never ends.”
“The first item on my list is time spent with family and friends.”
“In fact you’ll find family and friends on my list quite often…they are very important to me…for I never would be rich without my friends and family.”
”You’ll find humor, gratitude and happiness on my list…to me…more important than prosperity or wealth…wisdom is also listed… as well as generosity…and good health.”
“Holding hands…hugs and kisses…help to make me richer every day
as well as eyes that see into others hearts and ears that listen to what others say.”
Sharing the sun as it rises in the morning…or in the evening as it sets…
I’ve listed the aroma of Nana’s cookies…as well as eating them…with no regrets.
My father handed me this list years ago…I’ve added a few of my own as you can see…
and now I give my list to you…with the same message my father gave to me:
He said, “If there is one piece of knowledge upon you I wish to impart…
It’s that you can’t estimate the true value of anything that is measured by the heart.
If you use your heart to add items to this list…quickly you will see…
how rich you’ve always been…and how rich you’ll always be.