Long Heedless Poems
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When we were not old nor young
we tracked and hunted;
it never occurred to us
for what,
and it was good,
that we never caught up
with what we sought.
We the gatherers,
faithfully recording the momentous
as well as the inconsequential,
our straw words burned bright
until their own ash
extinguished the flames.
The racing pulse of our sundry passions
was never taken
and so we took much and yet more,
inventing perfect lovers
from heedless imperfections.
The years turn us around now;
we look back.
Tomorrow stretches away
upon a pathway
fashioned only for empty shoes
and it was good
that we were those reckless creators
of both heaven and hell,
good that we survived ourselves
day by day
and never thought to wonder how
or why.
Through veils of bright red pain
They bring us to this life;
Through tears and laughter
They love their small pink wonders
Through all those gates they must pass
On their way to full humanity.
They are lilac-love and discipline
Navigators of our stormy seas
Heedless of themselves for our sakes
They bring us all the soft sweetnesses of home and hearth
That ever call for our return.
So from every tongue
There falls the sacred one-word prayer
When the wide cold world affrights us
When the hand shakes, palsy like
As the heart beats hard against its cage:
In deep of night
When something unseen stirs
The whispered hope is "Mother".
When the flat grey weight of grief
Lies hard across our shoulders
The word that lifts the stone is "Mother".
For scorch of stove, for frostbite sting
We conjure cool and warm with "Mother".
In the place for giving birth: "Mother".
On the battlefield: "Mother".
Whatever pulls us to our knees
To rudely remind us how small we be
In the Grand Scheme of Things,
The idea of Her pulls us up again
For we are hers entire
In a way unique to Her -
Things will be alright
Because She says it shall be so,
And one may never never Never
Disappoint that Sacred One:
"Mother".
Auto-da-fé at Plaza Major
Sixteen-Eighty was brutal on saints and their hissing cats.
A turgid June, thickened as it was by an immature sanguinary wine
that failed to quench the civil mob.
Above the birthday cake façade, the pink and cerise porticoes,
the heavenly-frocked casements, the stucco -
a tiered sibilance rises where the throng in a sportive sweat,
begets its feverish desires.
The accused stand center-stage, as hairless as Sphinx
garnished with sheen's of fear.
Some contemplate the ornate state of their theatrical ruin.
Some already lash their minds behind unfocused eyes.
That was then; I see all this through a blood spattered prism,
the square still seeps
through a crimson varnish of time.
Evening now flaps a checkered flag.
The plaza is now a pitch for celebrating revelers.
Real Madrid fans have surged out of the barra.
Soccer balls are dribbled over cobbles.
I imagine my hapless head plunging in and out
of the heedless crowd. I am their sport,
a candidate for a mocking inquisition perhaps?
Meanwhile, the cats stare patiently,
squeezed as they are into strips of sunset,
a pink Iberian tongue of light that streaks the floodlit scene.
This place could be a plaza for jubilation, were it not
for the sotto voce hissing of these time-stretched
unforgiving shadows above us.
Faith is a cat, treading softly,
with delicacy, with hesitation,
unlike the dog-like dogma
(so aptly named) which seeks
to hold fast a believer in its
proud, fierce and steel-like jaws.
Yes, faith is beyond reason--
how could it not be when the
mystery is more than any mind
can seize and hold and eat....
And faith is a tease, a hope not
fully formed but heavy, unlike
its correspondent, the soul, so
light no scale can weigh it, no
meter can measure--but faith
sweats and breathes and lives
in fear of its own death like the
fragile body and life it inhabits.
Faith can be mocked so easily
by those resolute like stone
whose hearts are sealed and
walled against wonder, magic--
the magic of the world, of air
and sun and moonlight grace.
The deep, deep magic of two
who meet as strangers, then
meld into friends, then bind in
a power greater than death,
a power cloaked in mystery:
'Why do I love him?' and
'Why do I so long for her?'
This power, this mystery will
never be contained, either by
time or place or memories--
it will transcend even eternity.
Thus faith is the child of love,
real love, love unbounded,
fierce, heedless, far beyond
its greeting card counterfeit.
Faith is found in the cracks,
when reason is overwhelmed
and hope seems near death--
then faith, never easy, never,
never truly simple-- then faith
will be tossed and turned and
sometimes die, but more often
thrive as it makes the soul one.
She counts her calories,
Reminders that even her hips
Can lie, as they lye quietly against
His leg, hesitant to breathe,
Soft as a kiss, yet longing to exhale,
Winds of respite from the calories,
Counted silently, amid
Vegetables and fruits, some fiber
Proteins in hues of solid colors,
Like a gesture to be weighed
After the sins of swallowing whole,
Devouring meals of fats
Who refuse the fast she lingers in,
Close like the reflection that reveals to her,
Stout limbs in silk wings,
Denim, gasping and blowing,
Reminding her of the reason beneath
Those calories she counts,
So heedless of the pounds she’s lost,
Her bulk, reduced as she continues,
Her journey through a diet that soothes,
Like the rain, kinder than the flesh
Who keeps her doubting herself.
If the mind, more overweight than her limbs,
Nagging at her, the culprit of misgivings,
Binding her figure beneath layers of massive clothes
Intended to hide her weight, and her shame,
Humiliation of curves who tell her,
The bulk of her life is counted in calories,
Instead of the wisdom that reassures her,
It is the love that holds her together, pushing,
Away the monsters, the skeptics
Who tell her it means more to be perfectly,
Shaped than it does to be wholly embraced by a love…
That lives inside, a love that all the calories,
She might swallow, can’t possibly hide,
Because her heart belongs to One who knows her
As a child of the light who glows eternally,
Throughout life, throughout time… despite the fears
That can plague the mind and try to define…
The person she is on the inside!
I will tell you a sorrowful tale of an ancient time
when the turning years carved grooves into vinyl,
a time that changed everything and nothing.
He was a lad, a stripling, knobble kneed and roughly handled.
A youth with a common history told a thousand times
in any slum-clamped town.
A cultural weather mellowed him,
it gave the young a way to be poets, cynics, heedless pundits.
Rainbow children beguiled; they wed their minds
to a street corner weed, past its vows between them.
Then it was that mop haired songsters
again stirred his angry blood; he defied ruler and book,
forsook the hierarchies of the hard boiled,
long hair grew into words that shook as he danced
defying the soft shells of faceless egg men.
The boy drifted, still raw-boned, still trapped
by the rats in his head. Jail house beckoned;
bars griped his knuckles tight.
One night he became a storm in a windowless room.
They held his body down, beat it black and blue.
All he could think of as fists pounded broken ribs,
was if he yet lived, he would write it all out one day
yet still leave out the bad parts.
What dwells in light is blind to darker shades,
Unfixed by boundaries, yet tethered close;
A circle turns without a start or edge,
Electrons hum, the cosmos stirs and wakes.
Though shifting tides govern the starry floor,
All nature rests content in what it is;
Why thence man strains from being to become,
And miss the quiet grace of what he holds?
The world calls forward in march of progress,
Man hungers for the new, yet dreads the shift,
Resisting every turn of time's design.
Instead of marvelling at the passing road,
He counts the miles carved onto the stone,
When true joy moves inward, quiet, uncaused—
A welling spring that needs no earthly rain,
A state of grace that flows without a source.
Instead, man barters peace for tinkered toys
In search of fleeting joys that never last.
The human mind is split by inner stir:
The ego wants to claim the mountain crest,
The heart aches for the valley and the stream
To dip tired feet or walk on cooling grass,
And in this conflict spoils man’s present peace,
Thus losing the pure joy of simply being.
When days are cool he chases summer sun,
When they turn warm, he dreams of winter snow.
A lifetime spent in chasing there from here,
Voyage trapped in dreams of destination.
In reaching there—a phantom on the hill—
He misses quiet joy of travelling on.
The endless war of being to become,
When here and now holds the truth of his life.
And yet, how sad, the road to reaching here—
The quiet place of simply being still—
Gets clear only when the traveller tires,
Weary and worn out from the endless road.
The fruits of labour ripen when they please;
Alas, man muddles blindly through the dark,
Trapped in the space becoming and to be,
A conflict born of heedless head and heart.
______________________________
Reflections |18.07.2026 | creation, god, journey, joy, perfection, Blank Verse
With a deafening thunder
and blazing lightning,
Amidst a swirling clouds
of dark ominous smoke,
He appeared suddenly
smack in front of me--
A most hideous being
who appeared neither
human nor a beast.
With the swift sleight of hand,
Before I could even cry out:
Stop it. Oh God, please stop
He plucked my heart out
and held it in his hairy filthy hand.
Oh, why he has to take it out?
My only possession, my only wealth,
The only thing that beat against
my frail, long worn-out chest,
Assuring its constant company
in this lonely journey of my life.
But heedless of my pleadings,
He tossed my heart
into the gutter
with a gut-wrenching laugh!
I asked this foul fiend:
Who art thou?
Why did thou taketh my heart away?
With a guttural voice he spoke thus:
I am the devil! Lord of the Hell,
I am the impetus that steers
the course of affairs in this world;
With me on your side,
You'll get the most out of a strife.
With Adam, the first man,
I came hither and residing since.
An ardent companion of those
who coveteth glory in life
He bent down,
And with his flaming eyes
peered into mine,
Spitting foul breath into my face, he sneered:
But this heart!
Ha, this heart is a hindrance,
A barrier, the core of love and humility,
Where you feel the joys and woes of life.
Nah, there's no need for it.
Not in this world,
Where the mind reigns supreme;
Not in this age,
Where vices prevail unrestrained--
The age of decadence, KALIYUGA!*
He half turned to go,
But then he paused,
Turned back and looked at me.
Never have I seen
such a heavenly sight,
Now transformed into an angel,
He extended gracefully
his milky-white delicate hand
And whispered softly
on the breath of the breeze:
Give me thy soul...
And I will give thee this world!
~Dark Poetry contest by Nayda Ivette Negron
*(KALI-YUGA- Age of vice, is the last of four stages the world goes
through as part of the cycle of yugas (ages) described in the Sanskrit Scriptures -
an era of decay in values and the consequent havoc.)
The gods are angry
and growing angrier.
Poseidon views his beautiful ocean
despoiled with garbage,
poisoned and polluted
by heedless humans.
He rages to Hephaestus
and Vulcan, gods
of creation, but, when angered,
purveyors of
fire and destruction.
He exhorts Jupiter, highest
of the gods, for retribution.
And now
the world is ablaze or
buried in snow and ice.
Boreas, god of the North Wind,
unleashes catastrophic winds
that fan the flames
in one region,
turn snow-laden, below-zero blasts
onto another.
Cities are flooded
or turned to dust in droughts.
Crops fail.
Disbelieve in us, they say,
at your own peril.
My poems are ghost-written.
I scarcely identify the visitants
Mingling with heedless shadows.
Poltergeists outfit my words.
Though we converse,
I hardly know them,
And seldom fathom
Their prophecies.
My poems hemorrhage
In convulsive madness
Like the speaker in tongues,
Unleashing foreboding fragments,
That I might discern some divination.
But my autonomous hands move on
Planchettes over enigmatic spirit boards
For which I act only as outlet.
My poems are ghost-written.
My stanzas are tent revivals arrayed
Down the page with ritual dance.
Faith healers shout and wail,
bending my lines
wending a trail of travail,
They conjure all specters to avail.
My poems are ghost-written.
My words breathe and writhe.
They live as cells squirming for life.
Yet, inflections within them always
Mutter from another,
A propulsion between impression and
Arousal.