Long Novitiate Poems

"Salvage"


Salvage the fixating salvation 
unfurling from the wreckage
of a numb world twisted inside
treasure climbs swimming 
the ladder from the deep of all things 
reaching upwards travelling in a new time
of melting morpheme moments overlapping 
dissolved...

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"The Crow Bar"

she said,
here I bury my dead,
you can hear them sleeping
somnulent forget-me-nots,
snoring blithely unaware,
in neat rows between 
the thick,
ink injected lines,
their soiled lives
ploughed and 
turned over 
replanted
sunnyside down
expunged and 
wrung out

eventually,
not totally oblivious, 
they...

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Present wedded bliss haint no touchstone...

Circa ~ late spring/ early summer 1978
twas at behest of Harriet Harris,
thus due credit mother dearest
(she long since passed away)
who tried, to bribe, coax, exhort...
(protracted effort not all in vain),
cuz...

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"Cherish Armour"


She 
wears 
Her armour,

LOVE -

draped like chain mail
shields You 
with Her heart

When She is drowning
She will throw You to the sure
safe for Your future

And She will cry of lost children 
morbid oblivion, 
damnation and...

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"Penny Dreadful"





Penny Dreadful
Penny Dreadful

Do you remember when?
That time long before Formaldehyde kicked in?
When the Transformer grew your freedom wings, blew your neurons in?
That time when your story kissed her Blue Violet bleeding grin?
A wet ripe...

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"SYNAESTHESIA"



The Rose was burning 
long before she was Green
The Synaesthete placed his brush stroke
On his future dreams


Long before she was Green
The Synaesthete dreamed of him
Walking barefoot through the buried Rust 
and rustling burnished Ochre leaves...

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Ruminating vagaries of life May 2nd, 2021

(conceived while in utero
which loosely summarization in toto
of this ordinary Joe Schmoe,
who did wade nine months for a roe
at mercy of obstetricians status quo,

giving me a jump start to...

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"Sitting with Koans" 

Zazen sits zafu'd in the zendo
with the poetic monkey minds
echoing the sound of two hands clapping
producing sound bites bitten like Botticelli reprising
polishing red apples for eating the shining

listen to the sound of...

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"The Emperor’s New Clothes"

We write about beliefs
our prayer flags flying 
like chrysallis books on a branch 
of those higher deities we trust, 
submerged, we are always listening 

in our quiet hours of sleep
mostly when 3.33...

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"Wolves"



Pulchritude is not a beautiful word.

Dark can be beautiful
when walking with wolves
hearing their stories
sad songs of love lost 
soft they begin 
and then hungry
for the essential missing elemental,
they can be heard harshly calling, 
after a...

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"The Epiphany Rose"

All well and good,
the story unfolds;
the isolating madness 
drew out the poets 
in all the shunned
playing up and out 
their origami
word games

something like 
an epiphany rose
in them, the mad,
recalcitrant ones,
like nuns leaving 
the...

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no emotionally ecstatic experience compares 
   to the seminal instance 
   whence spermatozoa 
   (from profuse ejaculation) beget

the miraculous propensity 
   to procreate despite the steep odds...

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"Novitiate"

Wading through
turgid mainstream
Novitiate makes her 
way to the bottom rungs
of the Clean Team

Where dreams are 
captured a.m. p.m. .
on the run with 
weeping neutered minds
zero sublime 
same old, same old

Asks herself,
“Where’s the substance?
Am I gormless...

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I sleep 
to visit You 
in Your dreams,

oh my Esteemed -

a gauche novitiate,
there like a Laureate
You receive me

to learn Your secrets,
there wisdom is served
like as one planted, 

seeded at a last feast,
where all can plainly...

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Habits are scattered in every cubicle
the veils are seen hanging on walls
the rosaries are  play things for rats
there is no sign of life in living room

What comes to mind is a place for Nuns
long...

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SHE WANTED TO BE A NUN


After graduating from eighth grade,
She wanted to be part of the novitiate,
of the Holy Sisters of Nazareth.
Dad put his foot down loud and hard.

How she went from that, to nurse,to...

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