Long Poles Poems

Dad hit me only once, an upper cut to the solar plexus. It nearly lifted me off my feet. I was 17 then and already fairly tall, 6’1.” He was 48 and of medium height,...

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It may have been the devil himself who prompted the kids in my schoolyard back in 1947 to chant "Patsy Foley's roly-poly from eating too much ravioli."

At first, no one could remember who started the...

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I Know The Truth
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I know the truth?abandon lesser truths!
There's no need for anyone living to struggle!
See? Evening falls, night quickly descends!
So why the useless disputes?generals, poets, lovers?

The wind...

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Do you share my concern 
that your happiness and healthy life 
are too ephemeral,
short-lived?

No! Why? Do you know something I should know?

Not likely.
Just wondering,
awed by your capacity,
your relentlessly positive 
EarthAgapic energy for healthy life,
despite the...

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History’s Greatest Miracle Play

Let me tell you a story - Prologue

Actors gather to play their parts
To set the stage – backdrops and props –
In history’s greatest miracle play
Called to speak their lines
On redemption’s stage
In a...

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We are each a new way of bilateral becoming and thinking
about what a mind with body is,
where these are headed,
individually,
and as a part.

Thinking about what embodied consciousness is
and where,
in what stable climates of opportunity,
and which...

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FIRE! UPDATED 1998 IN 2021 BY COVERUPS PAYOFFS
GARGANO FAKED HIS OWN DEATH MEMORIAL DAY 1999
THE CAR BOMB THAT ENDED MY LIFE AT LEAST AS I'VE KNOWN IT ON THIS DAY THE SKY WAS SO BLUE...

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Paradise
like Rome
is not built
and not rebuilt
and rebuilt
and redeveloped
and healed
and redeemed
in one 24-hour
cycle
and recycle
and revolving
round day v night,

And/or 
appreciatively regarding both day
and dualdark
rich and fertile 
souled and soiled
recycling night.

So too
my personal
and political
and economic
and ecological
and theologically reformed...

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Was this a bold  endeavour or worst-case high risk plot?
 In one sense I was caught between two poles apart  concerns.
One must never underestimate indeed trivialise a devilish 
difficult decision.
A decision that may...

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God Bless Each Day's Magnetic Field On Earth!

God Bless Each Day's Magnetic Field On Earth!

God bless each day's magnetic field on Earth (1) that shields the human race
from cosmic rays bombarding Earth and us (from...

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I ran out of breath on the road to Mumbai ...

    Not for sake of dust or smog or even health. I had rounded a curve on
    my motorcycle,...

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Shortly after the naming they made arrangements to visit Jessica's home in Nordgrend.  Her father, Raðulfr, sadly, had also succumbed to the last ringing of life's chimes as time's pendulum could no longer be...

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What if…

If fear did not guard and watch over me?
My seeds of shame and doubt
Would timidly venture out
And finally sprout,
But as they reached the light,
Like a vampire, would wither and die
Without the protection of night.
Or:...

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Written: 21 July 2023 
Submitted to No. 1231 New Poem Only Poetry Contest 
Sponsored by Brian Strand 

Bridging the Unbridgeable Chasm*

As rises the wealth of nations,
As grows the limb of a township
So declines the flowers...

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There remains,
among cherished riff-raff,
old trope
tropical wet and warm
reproducing images,

Sadly resilient
and madly resonant,

About organic holes
and tumescent poles,
full-flowering 
young
green feminists
of feckless zero-empty wombs,
glacier valley lows
merely reflecting
volcanic mountain peaks

1's and 0's
blushing co-binaries 
of upright monotheistic YangPower
never
ever yielding to...

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A Journeyman

Prologue and Epitaph:

I am the fool, the jester, clown, a harlequin, charade, façade of many
shades and colours, mascara over broken fragments, dead and gone

1)	Megalomaniac charlatan, lost in destruction, finding the path, the touch,
the miracle...

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What could I do? 

What to do
when your biological,
and even formerly sober ecological,
relationships suddenly veer insanely romantic?

Or worse,
mistrustful
and yet
not always distrustful,
or not,
maybe deeper sadness
and occasional manic gladness
emerging inclusively wider questions
of approach and/or avoid

Both romantic
and yet...

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As time passed on by, they settled and married
producing a fine brood of children
yet growing more and more unsettled
until one day they headed off again
this time going to the far north
where the lands were bound...

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Fishing Boats On The Beach at Les Saintes - Marie’s-de-la-Mer

                  Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1888), Arles, June...

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My fundraising problem with positive psychology,
said the good health doctor,
it is too social science squishy,
not leftbrain dominant enough,

Suspiciously ecofeminist
for natural science pathologists
Straight-White privileged proctologists
urologists
bicamerally challenged cardiologists.

I must concede
not ecopolitically erect enough
correct indeed
said the nervous 
trauma...

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So I was feeling badly,
sad,
because I share our mutually complicit status
for my compatriot's difficult terrorizing
chronic stress disordering
time.
I too have been there,
lost there,
to a more moderate extent.
I just walked away.

I wish I had done more at...

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*LETTER TO MY FATHER*

 
Dearest Father
With heart ripped into rags and shreds I write ? to you tonight
Trembling hands and ink made of tears and blood
Teary ?? eyes and bloody heels like a defeated soldier
Lost...

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All that does encompass bespeaks wonder in everything
bubbling brooks and waterfalls does your glory ring
terrestrial and celestial ever fill our eyes with seeing
how can not it's splendor not fill our very being
 
raindrops in waters...

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I.

In the beginning was the Single Stroke Roll—
left-right, left-right, the primordial heartbeat
of existence itself, each alternation a binary choice
between being and non-being, the eternal paradiddle
of consciousness striking against the drumhead of reality.

Listen: the Buzz Roll...

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Reversals of Fortune
I. Most think luck’s just what happens, though love groks luck’s seized
by each seed that sticks (somehow) in less stone-filled ground
(which its siblings blow off or press past). That’s less luck
to my brain...

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