As every cassock is enough to tell
You are a minister
Either a chorister or a pastor
To grace well and impel
Is seeing you become only God's toastmaker
Every sunset gives us one day less to live
Count your seeds of the spirit
Spread through undaunted love
And not the course of service's bigot
But testimonies of brethren who enjoy your patency
But every sunrise give us one day more to hope
Most time making all observations dumbstruck
Replying each and every with a thunderstruck
It is no near to count a botch
If its effects work like a troche
Hope for the best for we are all human
Flaws are inevitable but can be abandon
No one has ever achieve chancery with God
That has ever live on earth a slipshod being
But clinching His dictates can make you ratherish well-bred
Good Luck
Get strong
Beefing do suck
Flee off wrong
It gets growth abating
Be the David's type Shepherd
Familiar with the said story
Not needed to be re-established
Failure needs no sorry
Be up and doing...
Written: August 07, 2025, for contest Sponsored by: Mark Toney
***********
Corset of steel tightens—ratified pain,
Vestigial breath trapped in ischemia thrall.
The ductile hope failed to placate
This Pyrrhic ache, this woebegone gall.
A sojourn in the squalor of soul,
Where sylphlike dreams maunder, downcast.
Ogle the embers of the miraculous nexus—
A seraphic visage lost, quickly.
Vivacious once, now virile with woe,
Panacea tastes of pabulum, slipshod, and cold.
Tinkling memories coruscate as zeugma—
Bright, yet untoward, they never hold.
Quixotic penchant for connection,
Grasping too late the nebula beneath.
What puissance is this—this throe, this tumult—
When tulle-wrapped love meets a gyre of grief?
Ululation beneath pavonine skies,
Adumbrate every glance, every sigh.
Crimson weave keeps a skirt in place,
Valuable, stained, adorned, and slain.
These thoughts we frame and title
hang now from long defunct dendrites,
made branchless by the passé and pointless
now all strung-up upon threadbare strings.
Ones or twice the hanged are molested
by magpies seeking baubles for their nests,
yet most go unrobbed and remain as still as death,
or they twist in chill uncaring winds.
These thoughts shaped to mind-images,
collected together in empty galleries,
these works nibbled at; edited by blind mice
who then hurriedly hide from sight
the slipshod carpentry of our words.
These portraits of spent passions
may still be gazed upon
by the idle few, who beyond all reason
choose to elect a passing cloud
to admire or decry,
plucking out that feathery fragment,
as if it were the real feature
of the faceless and yet untold.
Written: December 06, 2024
___________________________
We were born into tribes
cinctured by bonds and praxis
welded by ambits and dictums
an eyeless chasm.
But scope a sounder view
just under the shimmering surface
and the outcome will be luculent
our parallels often outshine our oddities.
Our blood is crimson
all of us slipshod weeps
all of us longing for love
all of us fail to face our fears.
Our zeal fashion fetching flow
our souls seek seraphic symbiosis
we all itch for a warm welcome
and achieve startling accolades.
But, we build walls,
and draw lines in the sand,
we judge hinged on appearance,
and ignore the outstretched hand.
But if we may just foresee,
beyond the color of our skin,
and the language we spree,
we may find kin.
Because in the recesses of our souls
within our deep cores
all of us are noxious
rhapsodic around finding fulfillment.
So let's slip away,
from the chains of tribalism,
and gasp our kinships,
with love and hope.
For only then,
can we for real unite,
and transcend our differences,
Into a world of light.
His sloppy slipshod attitude
Was picked up by both daughters
His son took after his wife
A minimalist who never abided a mess
The son never let the hoarders into his house
Losing touch with his father and his sisters
Choosing neatness and cleanliness over people
Just as his mother had done.
the writer’s words were shoddy
slipshod, shabby, sloppy, sleazy
but many readers liked his style
his work was elevated by his followers
who bought everything that he wrote
enjoying it, because they understood it
not connoisseurs of literature,
but appreciators of familiar, ordinary, common text
with uncomplicated characters and familiar plots
It's very, very cold and very, very dark.
Slow breaths of Pluto's bark are coming in,
Barking to alert Earthlings of imminent change,
Signs of a paradigm shift now,
Things are beginning to feel strange.
It's happening now, right now, believe it or not.
One should be prudent to make sure their work is not slipshod.
So buckle your seat belt and get ready.
It's moving slowly, but it's coming in steadily.
Whether you're ready or not,
It's happening right now for the unlearned and the taught.
Light of Transcendence
From the Light of the Teacher
A peculiar transit
Moving into Aquarius, where it will sit for a while,
Pluto is transforming life on Earth in an innovative, unpredictable style.
The woman has no place to be put,
the man is restless; his feet are slipshod,
The child won't eat greens,
he prefers beetroot slices from a sickly can,
The family may once have been human,
now they have been reduced to cartoons,
caricatures tossed into a cardboard box
and left out on the curb in the rain.
Soon enough, but not right away,
a teenager discovers the disintegrating box,
he puts the woman in a safe warm place,
and waits until the night finds him alone.
The restless man and beetroot boy
float away along the gutter,
until they both fall into a drain.
Paper-thin alligators
chew on wet talk-bubbles.
In the woods behind the school,
soft **** magazines
are buried in shallow graves,
so that the priest will not find them.
Fall leaves tumble to their slipshod decay,
oozing from the crowns of tedious trees.
A mephitic scrunch with their latter sway,
as they are raked into wide whisking seas.
Coral-hued yew berries grace the yard's path,
late hollyhocks, and sunflowers shine bright.
Marigolds adorn door homes with gold lath,
thorn twigs in crimson holes dapple faxed sight.
As the bounty of nature sparks strange start,
saffron periwinkle countless bright shades.
Giving a boost to the Fall grandeur art;
the hues of oak trees fluctuate by glades.
Topaz leaves stuck in a sapphire whisk breeze;
fall reveals deep facts, a sprint ember squeeze.
retired beautician
arms, elbow deep in shampoo
volunteers daily at the local elder care
residents line up
three doorways deep
down the hall
waiting their turn
at free furbish
she donates time and energy
knowing that she may be
the only outsider
they've seen or heard all week
she chooses her words with caution
none flow slipshod off her tongue
she goes home, strangely satisfied
May 3, 2023
Refining Consciousness
Unseeking Seeker
a refining of the attribute of poor self-esteem
on the part of the residents as well as the beautician
Slush coated figures
have been drawn on the sidewalk,
dribble people, their disjoined limbs
twisted into guesses to be pecked over
by hammer driven beaks.
After the hard-packed snow
acrobats were doodled flying slipshod
below a trapezing wind.
If the frigid sky were a wall
its graffiti would spray can itself.
Here on the pavement the 20 questions
party game is in full swing.
Prompted by the ice art, we ask:
“Is it a place?”
“Is It an object?”
“Is it real or fictional?”
The answer to all these questions
is “YES.”
Meanwhile the swirling unfurling of meaning
still has legs
until feral pigeon wings sweep
even those last appendages away.
What is left
once meant a fleeting abstract something
but that was before
the concrete forgot how to read itself,
and the sky grew too puzzled
to play anymore.
God's zombies just formed an hit squad
For poets whose work is slipshod
"If people don't die
Then angels can't fly!"
If "truth" is proof, my thoughts are flawed!
Sometime before I was old enough
to be this vessel of seawater reflections
she began to dissolve.
Husband dead, son revolving
around one woman after another.
I did not notice
the ebb, how her eyes lost care
or interest,
how her housecoat insulated her from
what she once loved in her slipshod way.
When she looked at me it was through a tunnel
she had dug for her mind,
her presence wrapped in muffling blankets
as if it were now
always too cold to surface.
I should have seen the signs,
seen the slow disappearance, the pale waning
but by then I only visited
through the narrow gaps of my life.
I told her to join something,
do what other old people did...
only now do I really know
what old people can do,
they recall and piece together,
reflect through a seawater haze
those moments
when seams began to unravel,
falling quietly apart
before closed eyes.
tenuous connections
porous holes
slipshod precision
damaged souls
furious, the pace
rounding the bend
a devil of a race
face down in the end
the black crow flies
the vulture thrives
countless, the lies
empty, their lives
Sundae bar in the middle of a lazy hazy uneventful Sunday
Jam and butterscotch with sprinkles as we devour, laugh and jamb
Phase three of the week which has done her best to poke me and faze,
Lax and chill, slipshod in ability to confuse shows that sister lacks
Witch qualities I had always attributed to her, ideas of which
Damn near anything can parade as truth while I create my sundae dam
Fourth time she has been back to the bar. Her greed parading forth.
I’d like to know what she thinks of me as she stares at me bright eyed.
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