Long Notions Poems

"The Sleeper and The Supernaturalist"


The Sleeper
shone as she walked 
through the Woods

shining alive 
like nothing
natural could

caught 
in the moonlight 
unaware

the innocent
red-caped roses stared
the trees whispered,

"beware, beware"

barefoot softly 
the Supernaturalist 
transfigures instead

from under shine 
she bares...

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In 1968,
a time of great concern for healthy human civil rights
for and of women as well as LeftBrain culturally dominant men,
Gregory Bateson invited a Symposium
not quite a finished Symphony
proposing Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human...

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Highlight of Goofus and Gallant 
bred within the survival instinct 
of hungry hordes of prey, 
when Earth in the balance 
against an uncomfortable truth 
smug smurf like scavengers. 

     Punishment meted...

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Good boy gone bad enters the stage with a spotlight overhead, despite being misunderstood in my ghetto neighborhood

The lonely applause celebrates in my cracked, corrupted, and crazed cranium
I exaggerate too much and so too much,...

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 After graduating from UF, in the early '80s I wrote the book, lyrics and score for a musical adaptation of Moliere's farce Le Malade Imaginaire ("The Imaginary Invalid") and have decided to post five...

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Thus it begins—
A free-verse epic
Into the mind of
A writer and an idiot—
A romantic and, 
Often a pessimist
Conjoined in arbitrary glory
Are the thoughts and words 
Of one overly-worked mind—
Charismatic and, of course,
On the pushover, pitiful
And usually...

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“Oh please don’t worry.
I haven’t a heightened sixth sense… about the mint infused lilt here.”
There must be a compass without a point surrounding me
“Looking for directions.
The town you’re seeking is a few winding roads and...

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Differences – you say !

I – me Lass – brave Helios, rides his golden chariot, 
drawn by fiery Steeds, into the vastness of this universe.

These mighty Titans, dispatched – brilliant, glowing -
ruled, controlled the blueness...

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Give me a pleasant, 
Elevating and 
Elegant embrace
Times like these are Grim 

Believe in Him
Don’t give up on them –
The people you hang out with
So much fun, I can clearly see actually, 
Time and time...

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My teacher died.
   
   His lungs failed him.

He taught me that the lungs
harbor grief.

   His lungs are gone.
My grief has only just arrived.


   He used his lungs...

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“I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” (Sonnet XLI)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair,...

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Au revoir oh perilous freedom...

Since pledging my troth
to the missus July 25th, 1996
after the comma error
punctuated mein kampf with disequilibrium.

Ever since the notions
of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness
coalesced within the mindscape
attributed to one
or more...

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A prawn masquerading as a peanut can be quite disturbing. So many times a peel is a garment used to shroud. A tentacle hidden. Here and there. Then to reappear with an often violent burst...

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Brownian motion writ large...
within small medium 
as light brainstorm doth 
hail forth the following poem.

Across the realm of gray matter
slowly percolating within tissue
composed of neuronal, glial 
and endothelial cells, and although 
there must be biological...

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Move on over ole Joe...

and let the youngbloods take the reins
infusing our promised land with hope.

You done good for America,
serving as laudatory President
from 2020 to the present
Vice President from 2009 to 2017,
and in the United...

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Freed from my mind
I escape it
I end time
I think it
I think nothing of it
I believe in you
I believe in the American Dream
I think of it
I think nothing
I know you are something
How is it found 
Where...

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I have heard some things in class today
I pray I make more progress and struggle less
Praying for peace and quiet someday
I want a clear mind from regret and distress

Cold-hearted lies 
Won’t open its eyes to...

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Despite the day-to-day signs of man’s bitter degradation, there were many in the South who somehow still failed to see the endless pain of segregation. From the viewpoint of those who never lived there as...

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The Edges of Rhyme 

I wrote the playbook, watching what they took 
While the earth shook I could not look 
In the direction of the Big Book 
Like a fish caught on a nasty hook...

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***Part 1 of the series, Not Focused (written entirely by J.W. Earnings)***

Resurrect my hushed, pleading voice from the dead
Give me Your water and nourish me with serenity 
Renew my rejoicing spirits, wholesome like bread 
Wandering...

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Niithaar Perumai, the Fundamental Role of Ascetics, Canto 26 of the Thirukkural, the Tamil Classical Treatise on Ethics, Translation and Commentary by T. Wignesan 


[Given the scarcity of information (mostly conflicting even then) on the...

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                           Expectations high did not pan out  ...

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Age defiant was this spruce and spirited citizen slinking blithely past the burgundy red doors of her enigmatic country dwelling.
As her olive skin neatly curved fingers 
slid over an intermittently scratched carbon black handrail she...

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My continuing impatience problem
with smug fundamentalists
self-asserting holier than thou moral positions,
is that Christ's main point is not
Holier Than Others, like Chosen People
but Holier With Thou,
as one interdependent EarthBound BodyMind.

British King James monotheistic readers
digest at AntiLiteraturist...

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...inspired by 'Portrait Of A Lady' by T.S. Eliot


On winter days the view outside is nebulous at best,
within, the furniture is as it always was, and I am waiting,
waiting for a glimpse of you to...

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