Long Slackens Poems

Alone, surrounded by seventeen million humans who call New York home
In a rut, depressed, searching in pain and in vain for hope

A crisp fall day, I venture north to play
The Adirondack valley, mountains borne from...

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I had for long been an arborist, enthusiastically caring for the trees,
Like a grasshopper immersed in a green world, is glad for all he sees.

I had always loved nature, having begun gardening when I was...

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I swear there’s no heaven
I’m just twenty seven

Two toddlers, never married
Two fathers, my life far too harried

I bartend and wait tables
My life doesn’t resemble storybook fables

I live stressed out with fatigue
I often wonder if I’m...

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Long green grasses stir in the gentle breeze
	bright summer sun beats down upon them
cool fragrant scent rises up into the air
	carried across the land in the gentle breeze

bright blossoms of yellow shine in the sun
	gently...

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You live in your own inner city, which you bought in a 
silent auction.
You were again unable to cancel your debts.
Under your blackening eyelids you try to feel certain 
things.
Without noticing your withdrawal from self,...

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As I near the stratosphere, I let loose
an untamed, raw rainbow

I pull on the tattered, worn ropes
of my hand-sewn hot-air balloon across
the hidden boreal quarry hill in the north

they rose above the nose
of a furious...

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New boots, pressing on my heels,
still stiff, not yet broken in,
stomping on roots, beds of needles
dropped by towering white pines,
scuffing on gneiss and granite
as they pound down the trail.

Have been walking since early morn,
a long...

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fade the tyrant to black
    to snap a people's slide to hopeless
when the down trodden gasp for frenzied gulps of air
     freedom's fullness lost

authoritarian arms in perversions of...

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Monsoon, the tricky magician has drawn
A spectral  stripe ,high from left to right
The  sly  violet slackens to turn into red,
The weary sun has travelled since dawn
Yet  glows  yond on the...

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I walk with my sister and we are young
And her knees are less broken; they swallow
petrel calls and soon we are
equivalent. I call these my oceans. I
shriek with my sister, we wished the 
evenings would...

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Whistling through the air
Without a care
Flying with the breeze 
Always at ease
Sliding and gliding 
But the wind is subsiding 
Dropping you at a high velocity
Shaken and jolted with unknown ferocity 
Dropping onto the cold hard...

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The stream surges in turbulent torrent
the dry tree felled by the summer storm,
the truncated trunk anchors at the tilted levee, 
in the web of boulders it sticks, stranded. 

The flood slackens the grip of the...

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White rope of sunlight
Tethered through my chest
Shot clean through to my spine.
Gordion knotted to my backbone.
I can feel the knuckles of it
Between my shoulder blades.
Pinching rope with a yawn.
No contortion reaches the lonely
Mark, the treasure...

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When warmth of springtime slackens winter's glare
and earth from bitter bonds is free to breathe
infusions of fresh colors boldly weave
through nature's living canvas, wild affair.
As instinct wakes the hibernating bear
while like a compass, birds fly...

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