A FLOWER BEYOND RARE
Your hair
How it falls
Like water's churning call
Your eyes without care
A windowless wall
Your lips
Soft sincere
A flower beyond rare
To me you are all
And to all
None compare
Dark brooding pall
Mirrored, frost, and fair
Your flesh
Never touched
Such I'd never dare
Drain away the blood
I lay awake and wear
Wane away the pain
I lay blame and bare
They say her hair remembers sunlight,
even when the rooms are windowless,
even when the questions stack like files
no one wants to open.
From Tampa’s salt-stung air she rose,
a practiced smile, a courtroom voice,
a lacquered certainty that learned
how to live inside microphones.
Power is a mirror with bad lighting—
it shows you only what it needs.
Behind her, paper storms keep forming,
names half-redacted, dates that bleed.
She walks through corridors of flags,
through praise that claps like shuttered doors,
while somewhere, whispers learn to swim
in darker, colder drawers.
Is it guilt? Or just the gravity
of standing near the grinding wheel?
Even clean hands smell like iron
when history decides to feel.
The cameras love her confidence,
the way it doesn’t flinch or break—
but truth is a slow, patient thing
that never hurries for our sake.
So she stands—bleached, branded, framed—
between the oath and what it hides,
a silhouette of certainty
with doubt stitched softly in the sides.
And Tampa’s sun keeps shining anyway,
as suns have always done before:
indifferent to who holds the keys,
or what is buried in the floor.
Something caught between the eyes of fellowship and the riddle of thought makes any setting unforeseeable. Yet, within the mannerisms of those declawed by the very societies they themselves conceived armed only with a utility belt of miraculous misconceptions springs forth exponential, autonomous growth, promised by the ancestors of preconceived notions.
Most often, the spirits of ideas formed upon the fragile spine of inadequate frequencies press us all into a reliable destination, one mastered only through performances of unseen archetypes, driving this windowless vehicle we insist on calling time.
My augmented delusions, I admit, disassociate from the fermentation of your reasoning, and so taint our deductive search for the emotions we struggle to preserve. The tropes of an enigma’s fragrance intoxicate the cerebral moments of free thought, undermining even the simplest reproductive solutions for advancing communication.
And so, as I tear this parchment, I summon an opportunity. Yet what a cumbersome opportunity it is.
Abandonment is
Vietnam veterans
greeting card.
A door stepped baby.
Windowless
city structures
after resident's
suburbanized.
And me
a Christmas tree
after you undecorate.
The obscenely convincing,
have arrived in their stealth mobiles.
We are made to unmake-belief,
to regurgitate Saran wrapped words.
Wide-eyed we watch the spreading creep
of windowless thought-factories.
Druids rage for the loss of their tongues.
Magic dragons puff obesely
and cannot now climb their spines.
Combative batmen tussle
with spitting cats.
It all makes no-sense, and yet
we know the fantasy is built
on self-destructing concrete,
we see now how red lipstick
smothers us with a smirk
in the dark.
Too late to run for cover.
Even as we slumber
the mother of all bombs
gives birth to yet more
pre-packaged fictions.
So much passes unnoticed,
fails to attract an eye or an ear,
excite the senses enough
to interrupt the mind's endless
chatter conducted within
the windowless walls of itself.
Too often, a walk is no more
than an exercise in navigation,
vague passage through
a dreamlike world of shapes
floating the outer regions
of what really matters,
your own thoughts.
Time thickens a spun
cocoon. The day in all
its glory remains out there,
sunlight golden on the trees,
the smell of freshly cut grass,
birdsong filtering
through autumn leaves -
more distant now
from the tightening enclave
you slowly weave.
An admirer of nature, I used to be
‘til a storm felled my favorite tree
Ever-optimistic, my always thoughts
‘til in my first real war I fought
Laid-back and leisurely, I once dined
‘til worn down by the workaday grind
Always thrilled to the sight of flowers
‘til I lived in a windowless tower
The world chews us up and spits us out
Heaven’s surely better, I have no doubt
I Write
Less words
in a windowless room
no use for my eyes
Humidity suffocating
what is left of me
I hear the silence of evil
poverty a state of mind
a shiny gold coin
Turns a small man
into a rich thief
Laughter the cause of death
Deceitful seasons breed perfidy
Waves form the fantasy of the starry beam
The heart of crimson is bleeding
Reflection is a calm shade of blue
Blustery winds in the four seasons.
Your lights feature an ominous vibe
the shine of crimson, as pools of blood
It is fully murky throughout the street
I shiver as rain pours into the rills on my body
Your farewell echoes in the darkness
Daggering through the heart
Without you, who would I be?
Heaven's purple shade
shows a glint of silver moonlight
dazzles a modest dwelling
And I will join you in gazing at the sky
The moon attempted to convey this
skyward-looking but windowless
as blind as they wanted to peer into my chest
barrenness and broken fantasy.
Written: November 18, 2022
I will tell you a sorrowful tale of an ancient time
when the turning years carved grooves into vinyl,
a time that changed everything and nothing.
He was a lad, a stripling, knobble kneed and roughly handled.
A youth with a common history told a thousand times
in any slum-clamped town.
A cultural weather mellowed him,
it gave the young a way to be poets, cynics, heedless pundits.
Rainbow children beguiled; they wed their minds
to a street corner weed, past its vows between them.
Then it was that mop haired songsters
again stirred his angry blood; he defied ruler and book,
forsook the hierarchies of the hard boiled,
long hair grew into words that shook as he danced
defying the soft shells of faceless egg men.
The boy drifted, still raw-boned, still trapped
by the rats in his head. Jail house beckoned;
bars griped his knuckles tight.
One night he became a storm in a windowless room.
They held his body down, beat it black and blue.
All he could think of as fists pounded broken ribs,
was if he yet lived, he would write it all out one day
yet still leave out the bad parts.
the story goes
that convicted criminals crossing from court to prison
to be executed
or locked away in dank windowless cells
received one last look at the world--
from the bridge's portals facing the sea
where against Agian skies
sails slipped silently past
San Giorgio's doms and its tall tower
a million breaths
wisped away on the wind
fluttered softly to the water--
such a beautiful place
again to never see
forever more to leave
not one sigh stifled--
now, I upon that bridge
drink all that I can see
for whatever I've left
twenty--thirty
before eternity
I sigh
every day
every picture
every poem
Living out loud, is being awesomely fearless,
Of judgements made by the internet crowd!
“Be you”, is a constant, pounding refrain!
And then, when you are, they think you are vain?
What a conundrum, for quite a few.
Kneeling to others’ social points of view.
A windowless prison on this lovely earth.
To sacrifice unique you…to please a few!
8/9/2022
~1~
Far away by the oceanside I sit and watch the seagulls fly
inside a pale orange sun that has yet to warm a reposing sand
Over by the boardwalk the air still hums of yesterday's feet
two youngsters feeding pelicans perched on feathered height
The smell of fried shrimp coming out of a windowless kitchen
tall glass pina colada bottles with little umbrellas inserted in
down by the ocean the burgundy traces of a latent sun arrives
as we sip slowly, and eat quietly, atop the hotel peer
Its as if it happened yesterday but I can still smell the French fries
wrapped in plaid red and white paper drenched in crisping oils
Pungent odors of chlorinated water from the pool now all gone
replaced by freshly shampooed hair, and lingering sun tan lotion
Wearing a linen white dress and my recently purchased mala beads
I feel more Zen in my pinky today then I felt in a lifetime my friend
far away by that ocean it was the perfect vacation without any fear
when I stop to think of it I hope to return there some time next year.
walled isolation
when a relationship hits hurdles
gripped by the unfamiliar
a stillness that caves in on us
our small spoonfuls of conversation lack direction
closed pod, defensive
my near muted pleas to break free of holding back
for nothing good brews in brooding
sucker punch of speculation
health shifting
the enemy, a diagnosis
to map variables, unknowable
our dreams having no scale
de-stabilized by no surety of self
we hide behind silence like a well placed curtain
balancing on slippery rock sickness
life altering
words perishable
numbing
a fall-to-pieces stillness
like a windowless white room that traps the urge
to breath
Poem composed: October 31, 2021
Train ride, in a windowless freight wagon,
rocked back and forth, with the clatter
and vibration as it snaked on the rail score.
Packed shoulder to shoulder,
overpowered by their own stench.
Separated from their families,
unfed, with only snow to eat,
cold, with only the bodies
next to them for warmth,
as the train traveled for days.
Resettlement to the East
It was not fully understood, why?
4/22/2021
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