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Odin Roark Poem
Toxic Cake
by Odin Roark
How drippingly fine
The words that coat
Such layered density
Icing thick enough
To entice the fool
Along with seasoned critics
Into toxic waste goodness
Persuasion chefs united
Gourmet salesmanship
Learned minds
Street smart minds
Tribal and nepotistic minds
All hawking hidden contagion
Beneath their ever sweet glazing
One day
A global cake will be rolled out
For all to gorge on
Unaware from the top
Might explode layered poison
Well surpassing avoidance
Our own demise
A recipe created by sentient impotence
The giant bite
The final swallow
The sweet tooth seduction
That never was
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2013
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Odin Roark Poem
Quietude
by Odin Roark
Quietude
Like a tree’s dark shadow
Knows only the absorption of all colors
Rendering the din of senses
A cacophonous silence
How gentle the process
Once resistance abates
The mind’s own deprivation tank
Engendering trust void of fear
Yet
So hesitant are many
To embrace the white light
To wait out nature’s tintinnabulation
The white noise becoming aphonic
To lay oneself down
Afloat atop the water
The grass
The ethereal reality of consciousness
Where leaves of brown
Beneath the awaiting orange of
Red and yellow repeat nature’s cycle
Where jasmine lures the mulch of life
Into purity’s gateway
Patiently biding time’s eternal truth
Preparing one with zero
The hush of peace
The quiet of love
The mutation of hate
Conjoin in harmony’s sublime reward
The circle of quietude
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2013
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Odin Roark Poem
Grease Monkey Rainbows
by Odin Roark
How colorfully the reflective smears ignited the senses.
How sinuous the undulating slick remained forever permanent,
its unintentional abstracts made prescient.
Dank syrup of engines idle,
spilled upon aged concrete
where the mechanic beneath rusted warriors
drained yesterday's tensile stress,
fresh loading tomorrow's fluid to live.
How focused his oily footprints remain,
now aloft riding the escort of Valhalla,
gliding upon colors of other-world palettes,
yet remaining forever heroic,
forever indelible,
in a little boy’s perpetual memory.
Yesteryear’s ever present ether continues embracing,
bestowing a blinding courage for the senses to endure,
even as the buried vestige remains dark.
The smell revered.
The smooth touch esteemed.
The unbridled colors forever a reminder of love.
Diesel rainbows,
still rippling in this man-child’s quiet ebb.
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2015
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Odin Roark Poem
Love's Symphonic Passion
by Odin Roark
Shimmering whispers urge forth,
A beginning seeks release from darkness,
The voicing of struggle proclaims arrival,
Like miniature cymbals of resolute announcement,
The humble cries of emergence
Clash ever so quiet with air and space,
Once portending grace,
Now its melodic genesis.
The matrixes of parent/conductor
Anxiously hum nursery rhymes
Through white enameled side-rails,
Vertical portals to unfettered ears,
Absorbing even when sleeping,
Evolving passion's invitation.
The precious first movements
Grow from those one-finger dissonant phrases,
Sometimes pounded upon the black and white landscape
Where an merging piccolo's infant smile
Finds support by paternal contra bass and maternal cello echoes.
Remembrances of tinkling melodies
Soon enjoin its pure and simple
With conflicted movements of trial and error,
Evolving the inevitable adagio of growing up.
Hence forth
The scherzo's innocence of adolescence
Crescendos into threatening measures,
Where layered tones of choices
present challenge,
chaos,
counterpoint to independence,
or sympatric harmony.
The family of voicing
Develop love's thematic material,
Rhythms,
Keys,
And more complex harmonies,
Creating the free fantasia,
A coalescing of passion's varied workouts.
Its strings worn thin,
Arriving at life's largo movement of peace,
That place of reflective consonance,
The weight of its chambered containment
Rests forth its closing bars,
Housing now but the waning echo of a baby's chorus.
Its shimmering whispers
Float upon one last wave of the baton,
Stirring life's ethereal essence
Into heroic chorus
A higher bonding…
Awaits.
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2014
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Odin Roark Poem
Recycled Wisdom Lost
by Odin Roark
How common to recycle today
bottle,
cardboard,
can,
or bubble wrap.
How rare the regard for pleas from
mind,
heart,
memory,
wishing also to amend anew.
How satisfying,
To arouse the sleeping heart,
thrusting its comfort-beat
upon new rhythms made aware,
ensuing musical notes of clarity
not yet upon the staff of boundaries,
affording dissonance where only
harmony's familiarity once reigned.
To revisit memory
offering bygone experience,
wiser tools of perception,
scrambling dog-eared indexes
cross-referencing fact and fabrication,
allowing waste to fall free,
encouraging truth to persevere.
To sort through mind's many strategies,
discounting some,
discarding others,
dismantling exhausted cogs that
advance little the unknown begging at the door.
Such is…
To complete one's desire to remain conscious,
allowing distinction for that worth rebirthing
from chaff heretofore but a friction urging resolve.
How obvious to some:
the take-to-the-curb days of consciousness.
How misunderstood by others:
the smothering effect of effort
to treat excess destined as garbage.
How aware
those who
like the winged flights on high
weave today's nest
from yesterday's exhausted remnants,
knowing well the destiny of permanence
is but to replant where burnt forests once thrived.
And yet…
We often think recycling is confined to aluminum,
plastics, glass and other fabrications of man’s intellect,
but what of...
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2014
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Odin Roark Poem
Energy’s Suffocating Gallop
by Odin Roark
Ancient blood soaked sand
Plumes its sticky residue
Beneath rapacious hooves
Dust storms of evil stampeding beside pipelines
Goad flow to tankers
Where ubiquitous black gold addiction
Steers toward pervasive profit-docks
Behind sweat lathered greed
Winds of historic baggage
Tether their historic words and song
Blessings and curses
Exciting swirling vortexes
Windmills of molten fire
Entitlement’s rape and pillage of breath
Of pores once absorbing purity
Evil’s global bubble
Appearing as mankind'
Robed in white zealotry
The blinded hawk-minds
Embrace the Middle East predatory contaminant
Wallowing in solipsistic riches forgotten
Awake only to pick tomorrow’s gluttonous prey
The world turns on turbine propulsion
With oceans bowing to its slavery
Delivering liquid smokestack suffocation
Silent killers preparing ghosts
Of time’s new-century-plague
Ignored
As oil gorged tankers find port
Release their pandemic sleight of hand
A destruction as innocent as rabbits from a hat
Charms the ignorant
Beguiles the wannabes
Wheeled transport
Delivers the demise of children’s hearts
Left to take a number
Unaware there is no lottery
Only loser-consciousness
Adult indulgence clinging desperately
To evil’s mane and tail
As it whips gullible eyes
Into cataract submission
Alien life hovers above
Grieving the minions destined
To find black energy’s ashen dust
Sprinkling its fool’s gold
Upon a barren planet
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2013
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Odin Roark Poem
Micro-Feasting
by Odin Roark
To propagate the dung heap of ignorance,
Is to place on low simmer
A main course of illiteracy.
How festive the chefs of mental starvation
Make the tables of 140-character-feasting,
Luring the gullible
Along with the lazy,
The doltish
And the lost,
To gorge, then purge,
Then ignore the noxious vapor
Of sentience becoming residue waste.
So stirs this caldron of abbreviated ingredients,
Stifling taste buds for savoring delectable elocution,
Reducing vocabulary to bulimic shorthand
And expecting all to join this achromatic work-around.
Hopefully, the language of full syllabic enunciation
Will return with a vengeance,
Sending expression’s drive-by expediency
Into its all too deserving exile.
Consideration pauses in the distance.
One can hear the echoes of dismay,
“Does this mean we’re expected to read…
AGAIN?
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2015
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Odin Roark Poem
Deepening Dusk
by Odin Roark
How might this relentless approach of final darkness
present its final moments before curtain?
The acts have been rewarding,
even as the protagonist and antagonist
missed some cues,
made a few false entrances,
and at times confused the audience
of only me.
Thankfully…
My catwalk view
where having long ago embraced
Gordon Craig’s Uber-Marionette concept,
his self-aware-life-enactment
being simultaneously puppet and puppeteer,
prepared me well for the Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations:
“All of us are creatures of a day;
the rememberer and the remembered alike.
The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything,
And the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you.”
Such is the synchronous epiphany
with a drama’s final curtain
allowing a moment’s pause
before one’s inner-house lights
illumine yet another transition,
from “what if” to “what is” to “what might be”.
Hopefully the staging of one’s mirrored life
becomes companionable for the journey back home,
that place in one’s mind
where comforts remain tenuous
by often reluctant acceptance,
when overcoming challenges
is beyond one’s ability.
Yet…
To prepare for the final unpredictable,
when one’s deepening dusk
no longer finds the stage lit,
when illusion and delusion applaud together
the finished performance of one’s choices,
one’s experiences delineated into one’s
inner-monologue of truth.
“Pass, then, through this little space of time
in harmony with nature and end thy journey in contentment,
just as an olive falls off when it is ripe,
blessing nature who produced it,
and thanking the tree on which it grew.”
Marcus Aurelius
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2015
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Odin Roark Poem
X Continues Marking Many Spots
by Odin Roark
Anonymous living suits many,
gypsy fever of the brain.
Seldom hiding in the shadows,
the glare of klieg-light attention
forever glares upon responsibility,
a disease to many,
a growing malady for most,
a welcome invitation to others.
Even back then,
at twenty,
the waking age,
at least for this X,
a Midwest-ignoramus,
a miscreant not even aware,
experience was about
to render raw and tender the face.
The vengeance proffered
gloriously fait accompli,
needing not the klieg light focus,
better mere awakening
by simpler means
like...
like,
a few beers,
so liberating,
so embarrassing.
This '56 student of students,
bathed in the drenching of
Kerouac,
Baldwin,
Miller,
Bergman,
Fellini,
Truffaut,
Godard,
Kieslowski,
Antonioni,
damned near drowning
in flailing need to see
and survive.
After all…
This was education,
totally missing
from cult religious dogma,
not offered in Aristotelian mode.
So…
Here X was,
always at the Plaza screens,
or the Waverly,
Saturday nights,
lasting forever.
X along with some buddy Y's and Z's
exited the art houses and made their way,
oh yeah,
to the Russian Tea Room.
Saved up rations of money…
Black Russians,
minimal water,
more Black Russians,
the world as we discovered it,
not the world as professed
All around us.
There
in Italy,
France,
Poland,
life seemed somehow more real
not caked over with candied syrup
like American’s urban seduction.
Oh how we longed
to be part of it…
make films.
But more important,
discover what it was all about,
this life
that for many
Was but professed by a God.
Those were times,
magical times
where peeling away the facade
was so delicious,
while we got wasted.
Along about 2 AM
Columbus Circle Books.
Sit on the floor,
thumb through 25 cent paperbacks,
always a Nietzsche,
a dog-eared Menninger,
a used Baldwin,
treasures we could afford.
‘Course…
We had to careful to save enough
for the subway.
We…
The X Y's and Z's hugged,
kissed with manly disregard,
Hell,
we didn’t care who was watching.
We were happy.
We were learning.
We were happening.
X dragged his weary ass up
the 4 flights
screwed back in the light bulb
old man in 4f always unscrewed,
figuring no one's gonna rob
a dark floor.
Simple shit.
But…
love him
to this day.
He was wise.
My first introduction to street cred
in spite of his oldness.
Next morning…
Ah,
Sunday New York Times,
Espresso,
Aspirin,
Growing up.
Learning the hard way.
Sublime,
One’s x’s.
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2014
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Odin Roark Poem
Endangered Trailblazing
by Odin Roark
Astride his father’s shoulders,
Like a double decker bus,
There was always what his father saw,
And the child’s gaze beyond.
They learned together
What their senses taught them of reality.
There were so many hills his father climbed,
The boy seeing what was ahead on horizons,
The father focused on firm footholds,
Following trusted forest imprints,
Relying on tradition’s habitude.
This father is long gone now.
This boy of shoulder wonderment
Has grown wise of rugged tracks
Leading to this day.
The day…
A stormy December afternoon
Staring through a digital lens
Atop a mid-town observation deck,
The boy now a man
Stares outs across a skyscraper landscape,
A winterous tundra his father never had to pioneer.
Realizing the Now of navigating
Relies little on the primitive tracks,
When plant,
Animal,
Rock,
Weather,
Parts of the undeniable whole
Determined shelter and food,
Life and death.
Wisdom,
The oft missing essence of success,
Impacts little of today’s aspiration,
Whose awareness respects not learned footprints,
Nor hardened determination
To stay true to a right direction,
Instead…
All too often
Success honors but bushwhacked obstacles,
The opportunity to conquer any and all,
The razed aside,
Inert and live,
Banished and dead,
Leaving many to query
What lens can sharpen that which isn’t there?
Today’s existence is but yesterday’s ethereal presence,
Once preceded by integritous footholds/handholds,
The resplendent oneness of nature’s vast inner-connection,
Now all but buried beneath
A stumbling culture’s duplicitous stepping stones.
Tracks lead precariously to penthouse suites
Where an eagles nest is but a Britannica reference,
A redolent library book of often ignored history
Reminding a father’s boy
Staring through glass-layered revelation
That decisions need pondering past momentary reward,
That Nature’s swirling white layering the once wilderness of discovery
May be foreshadowing avalanche forces
Unrestrained in their ability to bury man.
Pulling his eye away from the telescope,
He considers a wind gust
Lifting snow daring not to confront the ground,
Choosing instead to swirl,
To levitate with perhaps man’s exhausted currents from below,
Struggling to rise through waning memory,
Trajectories of so many devoted fathers
Trusting honest trailblazing would never disappear.
Fortunately…
Like the cyclic snows from on high,
Rising temperatures initiate their own revolution.
Endings return to beginnings
Nullifying load and weight.
Time’s undaunted sagacity knows
Once civilization’s latest aspiration expends,
Creation knows no better
Than to invent new trails,
New boys on father’s shoulders,
Tomorrow’s then and now…
Again.
Copyright © Odin Roark | Year Posted 2014
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