Hungry for ideas -
a fish dish would help,
an unhinged arm's length away,
way over the Yangtze River,
where, far from the nearest eyeball,
drunken cormorants dive
for silverplated carp.
Alas, any old iron skillet
will not fit this oily range,
I will have to cowboy it,
first, beans and baby powder
to talcum my muffins
while I break-in some roughhewn chaps,
then to rodeo this coal-black cooker,
as I lasso a China man,
a wise angler who knows how to catch,
the natural gas of an angry Puffer Fish.
Categories:
roughhewn, poetry,
Form: Free verse
I could have been a thing spoken,
a fine Chinese porcelain vase for instance
with all my nature painted upon it.
Herons in flight, storks stalking,
ibis reciting the ‘I Ching’ to other ibis,
lotus and chrysanthemums
floating upon silky everlasting clouds -
a clear visual thing that can be spoken of.
Not this roughhewn wooden bowl of a being.
I could have been read by scholars,
translated into a hundred languages,
held up to the light
a translucent testament to imagery and
and all pictographic symbolism,
an objective reality
shaped by the light that comes through me,
not this thick hollowed out bowl
full of a bitter brew
only fit to be drunk by drunks
and other roughhewn poets.
Categories:
roughhewn, poetry,
Form: Free verse
Skulled hill
supports
the lifted
standard;
skull bent
and dark;
naked for
all who travel the high–way to see those exposed:
the arrogant, the proud; the humble and forgiven;
the one who forgives the most needs no forgiving.
Red sealed
and stained
with filthy
lacerations;
suspended
with spikes
on toothed
roughhewn
dry kindling
envisioning
the fires of
hades itself
trouncing on
the carnage.
I accept and
make it my
own. The Cross.
Categories:
roughhewn, easter,
Form: Free verse