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Michael Lerman Poem
At dusk the amber eye begins to close
Our dusty anthills fading from its sight
The midnight moonfright black-lit aura grows
Entrenching us in hollow, fiend-filled night
We lose ourselves and lose all sense of sense
We lose the light and then lose sight of sight
The baying wolves with daytime’s sun dispense
Their basest instincts echo through the sky
The praying men seek divine vigilance
And nighttime’s hooded chaos leads to sin
And hide the compass from humanity
And so the fearful seek the light within
Yet know they need the sun at reveille
The light and dark in order intertwine
Just like a rosary, a rosary
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2009
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Michael Lerman Poem
I felt the chaos like a capsule, small
It tumbled down my throat, dispersed throughout
To numb alert my body, I’d no doubt
Newborn idle entropy at sunfall
Senses are but half-blind court reporters
And memory’s known to give in to its whims
So man may doubt the gospels and the hymns
All the “truths” he’ll know will have no borders
For “meaning” needs more than a just-because
A cosmolog’cal constant, man requires
But now the tree of knowledge rots ‘mid fires
That char the good and all their obeyed laws
I felt like chaos in a bottle, capped
A message in a bottle’s still left wrapped
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2009
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Michael Lerman Poem
Treeline, stretch to dusk!
Stones sleep ‘neath your canopy
In the sun’s brief smile
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2009
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Michael Lerman Poem
Atheism wakes
The world floods all his senses
Drenched gray newspaper
Earth closes its doors
Positivist hypercube
He calls it no God
Belief awakens
The world floods all his senses
Drenched gray newspaper
Earth closes its doors
Positivist hypercube
He sees light through cloud
And hope in the blood
Temptation a winding brook
In which we all bathe
Mosquito must prey
Or die, and die anyway
No simple answers
But how much wiser
Must we be than mosquito!
We can opt for faith!
Blood-red newspapers
A dove’s song stirs baby hymns
I choose to believe
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2008
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Michael Lerman Poem
Last year’s alarm clock by my beside silently, vigilantly ticked away until 4:02 AM
In the hour of Platonic picture-perfect darkness kept company solely by the bloodshot red
Of the alarm clock reading 4:02 AM
And a suspicious newcomer, causing panic like a foreigner in a shtetl, arrived
In my abdomen, pain, as from machete clutched by any modern horror-flick fiend
Or ancient Mayan warrior bronzed by the timeless sun, who had seen it all by then
Pain induced, and the panic of ignorant xenophobia at this alien agony, nameless
Causeless, baseless
And I, car-less, helpless to the whims of any pluricellular stowaway aboard the meals I ate
Or long-waiting malcontent festering quietly at my expense, awaiting my moment of weakness,
Before crashing the drums of revolution,
Or even maverick cell born of my own body, swearing me the true enemy
And the alarms are sounded too late, or rather too early, before any outside force can be
called
So I collapse into the indifferent suede of the sofa,
With mutable chestnut Rorschach blots on the cushion shadowing our past encounters,
And I conduct the grand electronic symphony that permits the tinny notes of
Arlo Guthrie’s guitar, which shoot like bullets, speed like beams of light
Across the years from 1967 to today, from Stockbridge to my apartment
To me, son of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, and of a thousand other fathers
My world defined by pasts, by traditions, by the presents of others.
The pain subsides like the tide, backing away foot by foot as it glares me in the eye
Grudging me victory, in the battle, anyway, though the war may be yet begun,
So I nestle in my quasi-significant nook in time, as in the hug of an oversized sofa,
Between the aftershock of near-death and the afterglow of “Alice’s Restaurant”
And I hope my present may too hurdle across impossible chasms
Like Wells’ Argonauts, my presently unknown gifts,
May suffice as to be a past for the present of another
To voyage to the future to comfort their solace, though my hand may be eternal still,
Like the acoustic guitar that had its day in 1967
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2008
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Michael Lerman Poem
Is't sweeter to find an expected dagger
Than an unexpected daffodil?
To be right and find your apple pie stolen
Than find one left for you upon the sill?
If knowledge grants a sovereign power
Its symbol must be yin and yang
For on a peg of hopeless hopes
Is not where our happiness should hang
The farmer who plants a rotten seed
Must reap a venom crop
Some men who live on lesser grains and envy greens
Can find it difficult to stop
Is one's one-day rest too restive
Or one's six-day sweat too sweat
That a surprise sun-kissed baptismal rain
Should not inspire a gladder beat?
Look to the inkdrop atomic ant
No insurance against acts of man
But he lives, loves, and toils in every step
Do you not think we can?
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2008
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Michael Lerman Poem
Let here’s longest night
In the sun’s windchilled shadow
Be there’s brightest day
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2008
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Michael Lerman Poem
In times that both try and excite
To what do we apply our might?
To electronics, toys, and fad
To make each man an island glad
To relieve conversation, dull
To color in each little lull
To get one from point A to B
With no adventure in between
True plagues of mind and joylessness
Seem scarcely ever are addressed
But who will offer sympathy
At the cost of efficiency?
For hours no modern man can spend
We'll build a wondrous robot friend
To lend an ear no man can share
When relatives nor colleagues care
Its cold steel arms will warm embrace
Us in our inhuman rat race
A hunk of hulking cords and wires
Its lifeblood of internal fires
Telescopic lens for eyes
A sound card, too, to mimic sighs
A monstrous voice of monotone
Reminds us we are not alone
Compressing our hand through the dark night
Whispering "It will be all right"
We won't be sad but overjoyed
O, praise the tenderheart android!
And praise to us, to build this 'bot
To learn the love that we forgot
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2008
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Michael Lerman Poem
If you have nothing good to say
Speak naught at all, so saith they
And so my poem must end here
I've nothing good to say, I fear
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2008
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Michael Lerman Poem
A vertical sliver pries into the doorway, a beam from the watchful eye in the hall
While amber stars in cages, captives in lampposts, shout prophecies beneath the moon
Obscured by trees
Their cries filter into the window
And uniform basketball players with fake simulated faces run improbably about my TV
Defying the nighttime but not their fate, programmed by someone not so different from me
Ones and zeroes
Light and darkness
Somewhere sleeps the faithful Christian homeless man with fatigues and a fatigued face
Obscured by shelter
If I do not see him, I pray someone else will
If I cannot give to him, I pray someone else can
His chipped Styrofoam cup no longer empty of dollar bills
Ones and zeroes
Light in the darkness
Copyright © Michael Lerman | Year Posted 2008
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