The church I went to as a teenager
was full of sex.
It seeped through the worn wooden pews
into the pours of our hands.
It sluiced around the stucco walls
and fake stained-glass windows.
The aroma of young girls at prayer
was overpowering.
On the surface older people
seemed oblivious to this sea of sensuality,
yet when I looked closer
peeping over the edge of my hymnal
I saw folks with closed eyes,
backs arching, many
holding onto some unexpected
yet well-known arousal.
A stirring gravity enthralled us
as we orbited a magnetic divinity.
That day I knew intuitively
that the holiness of life was a passion
gifted to us by an even greater passion -
one that loves us.
Categories:
sluiced, poetry,
Form: Free verse
It clouds the vision of its proponents
Causing them to see things that are not.
It mixes their minds into components
To which rational people give no thought.
It dismisses those whose eyes are angled
Or whose skin is anything but white.
It is quick to see the homeless as mangled
And to surmise they cannot be half-right.
It believes its views are singularly correct
And all other positions implacably wrong.
It lumps non-conformists into a sect
And treats them as a misguided throng.
It forecloses on every outreached move
Designed to help it achieve perspective.
It knows what it knows—nothing to prove,
Unaware its thinking is grossly defective.
It owns uniquely the truth of every issue,
Taking care to avoid having facts intervene.
Its arguments are made of gossamer tissue,
And in time they are sluiced from the scene.
Categories:
sluiced, discrimination, prejudice, perspective,
Form: Rhyme
I could not, would not, eat my beans
Will not, will not, eat those spleens.
I will not eat them soaked in sauce.
I will not eat them just because.
Not braised with jam! Not with my tea!
Not sluiced with wine! You let me be!
I do not like things from the bowels.
I do not like it if it growls.
I will not eat it in a bun.
I do not like it rare or done.
I do not like spleen, ditto tongue.
The same, I say goes for lung.
From Green Eggs and Ham
- Dr. Seuss
Categories:
sluiced, food, children,
Form: Rhyme
You: Arrow
Arrow-Cupid misplaced
Pleased, I am
To validate this man
Basically: Pleasingly loved
“Apple of my eyes”
Heart-hanging from doves
My lullaby
I would take that bullet
For you
Sacrifice My all
For this
Make Him wane
For us
Now, am I but dust?
That sea sluiced away.
Shall on no account, again
Cupid’s arrow stay
Categories:
sluiced, lost love
Form: Light Verse
How I wish I’d kept that picture…
That framed doppelganger of you,
Snapshot of a faded age, that can never be recaptured,
Resurrected or relived,
How I wish I had kept it, propped on my
Ignominious dresser,
To be, by turns, caressed and kissed
And spat at, cursed, ridiculed, loved,
As my tidal feelings for you ebbed and flowed
How I wish it still sat there, staring at me with your eyes,
That image of you on a nameless beach,
Cigarette clasped in your youthful fingers,
Your hair a dusky fountain cascading down your back
How I wish I’d clung to it, as a shrine to beauty,
A reminder of you, a keepsake,
To buoy up my spirits in the bleak loneliness of night,
When my sheets are cold and my arms mourn your loss
How I wish I still had that picture,
Even if it meant causing me pain every time I looked at it,
Even if the memories it evoked stabbed me with white-hot
Blades of pain,
Even though tears sluiced my blotchy cheeks…
How I wish I’d kept it…
Instead of throwing out with the trash,
In a single fit of mindless rage,
Never to be kissed or cried or sworn at again.
Categories:
sluiced, dedication, girlfriend-boyfriend, love, nostalgiame,
Form: Free verse
Bathed in your soft starlight warm
Dissolving troubles the tension shorn
Instill my mind with lucid dreams
Elevate my soul on silvered beams
Removing discord from atop my shoulders
In temperate love as night grows colder
On wind burned face your thoughts caress
Removing deep imbued duress
Steeping away the anguishing past
A bonding anew in the fire is cast
A gift living essence before you I raise
This beauty adorning in heavenly praise
Qualms are sluiced on showers illume
Dispirited man in your hands impugn
Transfusion of hope from skyline of night
Cleansed and reborn in your basin of light
Angst of the morrow dissolves in your song
Instilled of your spirit to rise a new dawn.
Categories:
sluiced, devotion, faith, hope, introspection,
Form: Rhyme
I knew when sparks flew
From my brand in her cavern,
The friction-lit dark
Fanned the impotent fires;
The charring of juices
Hot, uric and spicy,
Flowed a lateral tango
And the hairs sluiced with life.
With a breath of exalting
The dream turned to torture,
Collapsed in a gnarling
Of dust from the grind;
When done only dying
With memory and meat-hooks
Simmered down upon skin
And the night embroiled vengeance.
Categories:
sluiced, lost love, love, passion,
Form: Verse