Long Scaffolds Poems

Mount Rushmore: Carved in Stone

From deep within the Earth’s crust,
An orogeny pushes
The batholith upwards
To become “The Shrine of Democracy,”
Of weathered presidential faces
Chiseled in rock in South Dakota,
Representing 150 years of history
(From the birth of a...

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Wonder's Mother, Misery

      Digging up the philosophical topic:
      Disputing bliss as the ultimate state. 
      Argues that striving for worthy...

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In my reveries, I am a monk in the temple of love from the books written with shadows,
Sailing through the endless pages, I let myself be carried by the breath of destiny of fragile heroes.
They...

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It's too beautiful within your soul, like a garden blooming under clear and endless skies,
It's too late within my thoughts, where the shadows of memories lie like a veil of silk,
We share the same secret,...

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I thought these white words like seering light
That jived my brain with alien meanings
To my pain were scandalously gone
I thought I would have to find a way to speak
Using silence as my native tongue
While I...

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One must imagine Sisyphus’s 
boulder, marble-sized these days
And Ozymandias’ plaque,
spinning despair into praise
Look on, ye hypocrites, 
and sneer at my undoing
Your universe is a giant sandpit, 
entropy accruing

Their legacies long crumbled, 
eroded by rust
Gods built...

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Between the black gutters and the painted ceilings,
Dogs teach dolls how to die.
	 Study the rot in my bicuspids, file down the calluses and watch the heartbeat
	Shake the skin like strychnine shivers. 
Whispers fill the...

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For all the Sphynx and Pyramids of their days
These that towered beyond Babel before me
Straightening the old gordian knot of our maze
Have too been swallowed by the unseen eternity
      ...

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There's an old family shop that sells ciggies and pop,
plus Mars Bars and aspirins and tinned Winnalot.
Then just past the shop there's a small patch of green,
where kids playing football can sometimes be seen,
on its...

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What Dad Did

Friends from the nearby projects bike over e'er since we had hit-it-off
and dad atop his makeshift throne, food aplenty, points to the nearby ladder.

Time is October 1973, it was on a Sunday and...

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Sooth this irrational rage resplendent in its affliction
See through the foolish drawls that make up my surrounding core
Understand I see each flaw of mine in light of your brilliance
Not to compare yours to my worth...

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Mentors like priests preparing me for holy rite
Institutional slaves to a false trinity
Subduing adventure, exploration and discovery to classroom rigor
Eternal stairway ... moonbeams to the golden dream
Dismatling who I am so I become who you...

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Walk the streets, Passed the subway trains 
Echos of piss and debris, Filled streets 
Rushed paces, Sky scrapers withhold glory 
Look onto and pass, The city that never sleeps
An overwhelming sight of rodents, Amongst the...

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Bones and their ash remain,
retain and nourish
the under-croft, the terrain.
The meadow green.
Bones replant.

The dead feed the living,
and the living cut down the living
to feed themselves.
The world must eat itself.
This is called husbandry and farming.
It is...

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“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

~William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act V, Scene I

I weep by a stardust shore where the seraphs sing
Tangerine...

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Quietly Sleeping Embers

the materials of timeless elements
that once laid deep within the earth,
as sleeping embers in a quiet fire,
or the thumping of rocks, their throaty shouts,

attracted to the source, protean, 
the standard of all things...

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Written: November 06, 2023
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A swarm of herring gulls amassed
Nexus Nautilus nabbed by zealous winds,
whitening the black soil
we hold spears in our hands.
blood-stained thorns...

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The cities buildings get taller and taller
City apartments get smaller and smaller

Steel legs and arms make monsters named scaffolds
Destroying the dated to build up new rentals

What once was five floors has now become ten
How long...

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Mind the Paint


Oh, to paint the inside of the egg
restyle the matted gray of sunless gloom
splash color on the curtains that belie
soft filtered light through windows of the soul.
Scaffolds to paint the Sistine of the...

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Orange bulb lit firefly, 
Silhouetted scaffolds delude my reticent pace
Speckling lights flutter to my grazing eye, 
Across a barren waste. 
Lonesome night breeze crispends forward gaze,
Tomorrow’s evening builds on and on to a swell. 
Hopeless...

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Purple bats and evil cats and strangled ghosts that laugh 
jet black cloaks, snickering blokes and witches that gaff 

Pumpkin grins, talking garbage bins and all that moves 
Halloween rhymes and pentacle signs with evil...

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How can I try for the stars,
When I can't even afford to keep it bright?
How can I chase the moon through iron bars,
When dawn denies me even candlelight?

I dream of rings, of veils, of vows...

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For years I’ve seen a pair of ducks
In front of a fountain close by.
They swim or sit and those who notice
Likely wonder why.

The fount’s in the front of a building;
Pedestrians pass night and day
And the...

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She used to walk alone
down dirt roads 
in absence of pavement and streetlights

She used to wander
through summer evenings, cicada symphonies
nocturnal sounds of animal happenings

She used to lie alone
on her back, in the grass
silent among the...

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My roots are strong stemming from bridges and scaffolds that embody the strength of a spirit Gracefully swaying in the wind
Dancing to a tune
Adjusted tempo to a rise and fall 
I move to the beat...

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