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Heather Chernen Poem
Although fertile were the fields, I plowed
That self-same earth lies barren now;
Barren evermore.
Still I shall not fear the wrath of God or Anyman
For my seeds were sown in the wild and unsullied season
Albeit the earth which absorbed the substance of my labors
Yields neither fruit nor flower.
Still what remains behind us after we have passed u nto nothing
Is it the perception of ourselves by others
Or the small and humble things that are the substance of my struggle?
Although tertile were the fields I plowed
That self-same earth lies batrren now;
Barren evermore.
Still I shall not fear the wrath of God or Anyman
For my seedswere sown in the wild and unsullied season
Albeit the earth which absorbed the substance of my loabors
Yields neither fruit nor flower.
Copyright © Heather Chernen | Year Posted 2007
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Heather Chernen Poem
Stalking him,
Always now,
In the daylight, or down city street, no matter.
Sleek- a panther, its coat cast obsidian under a moon in anarchy.
Behind him, or in front,
Clutching deeply until each appendage of self falls victim;
The brain, the belly
And the heart unwittingly surrenders.
And the heart.
For although it assuages his fear
It absorbs the essence of the spirit.
It has given inexplicable sorrow a name.
And although the symptoms are in juxtaposition
Nonetheless it defines the nature of his disease;
In this he has found the substance for his epitaph.
And you, who are behooved by deadly youth's penchant for morbidity,
Seize now, his eyes, glance for glance,
And answer this question which binds his life to a name.
Who can be so blind as to assume
That one is amongst the living because you see him walking?
B ecause his lungs expand and so much toxic air is absobed
And expelled?
Copyright © Heather Chernen | Year Posted 2007
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Heather Chernen Poem
And this flag I have damned so longly,
This rag, and nothing more,
While death-mock-racy raved and raved and avenged its bloodthirst
Over and over,
Since the inception of a country, with George and Martha and Mary
With nothing save civility, in drawingrooms and battlefields
Is justified by that gentle face, somehow justified as being no longer a damnation
But the stuff of a citizenry, with that face, and the mulatoo's face, sad, overgrown Abe
and all of his honesty,
How proud I am of the flag I never had,
Of the society I spent decades criminalizing, cursing
And of all the possibilities inherent in Innocence:
That is the face of my President
And this is my tattered flag!
Copyright © Heather Chernen | Year Posted 2009
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Heather Chernen Poem
Her existence was reduced to a composite
Of scenes:
As consistent as the seasons,
As emperical as the earth she trod on;
As irremediable as memory,
And the obliviation of memory,
Slowly, in the mind.
As to the pattern of droll days and night dreams-
There was no help for it,
No terminus-
Although oftimes she would beseech God and God, and God
And oh my God, but nothing changed
Just winter to spring and fertility and rampant dryness in the clime
Where nothing seemed to live any better than she did.
She would find herself smirking the dichotomy between her beliefs
And the reality that confronted her,
For, in truth, her beliefs availed nothing and nothing
And nothing was propogated by Lifelessness in dead air,
And she was incredulous that this were so.
Was the universe then but a brute and senseless phantasm?
An ambience seduced and won by Caliban
Leaving all men adrift,
Linked incongrously to their glistening sphere
Such that mortal existence was, but a composite of scenes,
Cyclical, senseless, horrific;
As consistent as the seasons;
As emperical as the earth men trod on,
As irremediable as memory;
And the obliviation of memory,
Slowly, slowly, slowly in the mind.
Copyright © Heather Chernen | Year Posted 2007
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Heather Chernen Poem
He had not meant to drift
Yet he could not avert the dreaded nature of his anarchic days;
The craven, inebriated nights wherein all manifestations of Time
Slipped away from him.
Yet memory remained entrenched in the sensibility he sought to dull
As did the cruel actuality of his youth, a negation.
He was not as gauche, nor as ugly as he feared,
And even, in his better days,
Not as handsome as he wished.
He was a hybrid entity, splintered at the nucleus,
An estranged dark, stoic thing,
And the intervention of others upon the isolate continuum of a self embellished
In an unameable lattitude
Solidified his existence to a fate that was never his.
For Narcissism had been his fatality, and he knew it,
And he had never meant to be an affront to God.
Still some amorphous presentiment, which emerged, then retreated,
Impelled him to nourish whatever innocence remained in him,
As if that cruel malady could be ingested, assimilated, dart through
The air into his trembling hands
If only he could coerce his muscles into consummating the task.
A response to a certain common loss
Compelled him to frequent one particular deviant tavern;
A "brother" is what he said he needed so desperately to find;
How essentially insipid he must have been to believe that " a brother"
Could be found in that dank, windowless chasm.
Rendered ill, towards closing time,
He wondered which had succumbed easier to the whims
Of the foul wind that encircled him-
Was it soul, or physignomy,
Or was his Nemesis the streets, which he hit like clock-work
Moments before this days death, and dawn.
There was no plan to his existence;
He simply went with the tide, however frenetic, the moon
That made it dance,
Such was his Life,
An atrophied thing,
Remotely adherent to his quest before his corruption:
To acknowledge, even in the most solemn silence,
His inalienable right to be as he was.
Copyright © Heather Chernen | Year Posted 2007
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Heather Chernen Poem
Still it is possible to have a conscience
Amidst the conscienceless,
Then you're on your own
Good-luck-buddy.
Avaricious protoplasm spins madly out of control
Under an aching sky,
Vapor and dusk.
But that which is rooted in things dead
Drains the living of its intrinsic essence
Devoid of remorse, loathe for sorrow,
There are ties rooted in memory,
Thicker than water, just as ephemeral.
Ties that strangle when no facet of comprehension
Encapsulate tthe ties that bind.
But I am not rooted in things dead
Nor do I wish to die in consideration of the retrospective flight
From sorrow,
As if the mob's approbation or wrath
Ever impelled the wonderment rooted in things beautiful
Engorged in my eyes.
Copyright © Heather Chernen | Year Posted 2007
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