OLD MAN and the SYLLABLES: Poetry

Thank You For the Trip

2011-12-03T22:33:00.001-05:00

We come down paths; we walk up trails.

We meet on the way fellow travelers

To our special places.

But all roads end somewhere. Do we

Have quite enough words for goodbye?

We do, just not the spaces.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gave a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. It has come to the end of that journey and this is my thank you to him for the trip.

SANGUINITY OF MELANCHOLY by Larry Eugene Meredith

2011-11-23T06:38:00.001-05:00

Poems of Age

2011

Migraine

2011-11-23T06:32:00.001-05:00

She lay like old laundry in a dark room.

Tossed and unfolded upon the nearest rest,

Soaked with the pain and depths of gloom,

Throbbing colors and flashing lights.

Her head bloody split from fore to aft.

Her life all drained and seeped away.

“Don’t bother with the empty skin,

Just let me die, just let me lie.”

They roll on waves without warning,

Tsunamis, crushing currents, these migraines,

Which are assassins of the lowest form

Whose knives tear and stab and maim.

All her willingness to exist at all

Has left her useless, limp and drained.

“I cannot reach you with my love,

I’ve tried, I'm tired and I’ve strained.”

Photo by the author.

My Lot

2011-11-23T06:28:00.001-05:00

I played in this lot when it was still wild

Next to our cornfield where all the autos stop,

Lined in even rows, a growing bumper crop,

High as my head, you couldn’t see over top.

We got lost in the maze crossing over time

With the herds in the Loft and Pottery Barn,

Behind the back forty and now the front nine

Where we planted in spring and harvested the fall.

We drove our tractors here before the backhoes

Tore through the fences and built another mall

And paved in this lot where I was a child.

Photo by the author

Beginning of Summer

2011-11-23T06:23:00.001-05:00

The onslaught of summer brings winter fore.

Do I think self follows some calendar?

My roses bloom in May and my hair grays

In October with the changing of leaf?

A birthday falls as my beginning year

When the summer solstice is on its turn.

When I feel the heat of sun upon skin

I also feel age give my bones new grief.

My June does not mark a new season start,

But checks off another year from my heart.

And by my count my summer’s long been done

And the winter of my life just begun.

When we see temperatures rise to hot

And talk of lazy, laid-back days of summer;

I shiver in the chill of my winter

Counting off the Junes before I slumber.

Photo: Self-portrait – Alapocas Run State Park, 2011

STATE SECRETS

2011-11-13T06:11:00.001-05:00

What an ugly thing.

This? It is but a little string.

It can’t harm you.

Yet

Avert your eyes

And before you realize

The little strings become the net

You cannot escape.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun!

Cycles

2011-11-12T16:34:00.001-05:00

CYCLES

Grrroom, grrrooom goes some Harley down the street.

Never had a motor; had a playing card in the spokes,

And that sounded neat, like a put-put-put,

And had a siren, oh it was loud and illegal

Probably

But my grandfather found it, bought it, got it

Somewhere

And it was a police bike siren from the 1800s.

Recycled on a Schwinn and it really did squeal.

But that was long ago, back in my childhood.

How the years cycle by like flip cards

In a peepshow nickelodeon.

I can see us as scrawny little urchins

Plopping coins saved from gathering pop bottles

Off the street to recycle at the grocers,

Buying us some creamsicles and fudge pops

Out of a cooler inside an Atlantic gas station.

Or was it Esso then?

A lot of things are gone that’ll never cycle back.

Sinatra sang of cycles

But ol’ Blue Eyes is a long time dead.

The seasons come and seasons go

And we watch the bloom and blossom

And the frosting on the pumpkin

And the falling leaf and snow,

The ever churning changes of the

Same old same old cycles.

Life is like a washer, so much on automatic.

We’re awash in wishes

As we spin our way through time,

Then a rattle and a clatter,

Our cycle out of balance,

Reminds us that our dreams

Have changed from grandiose

To mundane

And now we only recycle memories.

Posting her for The Gooseberry Poetry Picnic Week 13, Childhood Dreams.

Mirror Image

2011-11-12T16:31:00.001-05:00

MIRROR IMAGE

A woman passed some mirrored glass

And paused to see her image there,

The face was fair

That stared back at her.

And her hair,

Her hair was dark and luxurious.

She patted it and smiled a bit.

A woman stood ‘fore mirrored glass,

And saw an image standing there.

It was not fat,

But slim waist and sleek

Her body,

Her figure was full and curvaceous.

She turned to have a look at it.

A woman gazed in mirrored glass,

Much taken with the image there

That must be her.

Whom else would she see?

Her legs

Her limbs, oh how long and muscular

She flexed a calf and felt so fit.

But the clouds shifted in the sky

And the sun shined upon the glass

And it was only

Windowpane she saw,

No more.

The image of the woman not there

If there’d ever been one at all.

As It Is Today

2011-11-12T16:30:00.001-05:00

AS IT IS TODAY

I could speak of the cosmos,

The destinations of God.

But that thing is broken

And that one not running well.

The wallet on my dresser

Is like a brown and fat Thanksgiving bird,

Stuffed full with crumbs of plastic

And varied business cards,

With very little nourishment

For the bellies of our lives.

What we can call empty calories

In the parlance of the times.

Its appearance may look heavy,

But in subsistence it is lean.

I cannot fix the broken thing,

What if the other fails?

There is a foundation

Long poured and set in stone.

We cannot change the footings,

We can only trim the home.

I leave what went before

To the history it is made of

And hope the present situation

Doesn’t shake my destinies with God.

I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE HALLOWE’EN – WAIT A MINUTE!

2011-10-30T06:31:00.001-04:00

I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE HALLOWE’EN – WAIT A MINUTE!

On Our Snow Storm Of October 29, 2011

Howling wind, falling leaf,

Chilling draft as motif;

Ghostly sheets the only white

To haunt day and night.

Not sleet and snow that fell,

Like a Winter Witch’s spell.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun!

Friendship

2011-10-09T20:28:00.001-04:00

Friendship, Akin-ship,

There’s been a lot of been-ship.

A lot of shipmates sailing together

Until the waves broke vessels down

And carried us through different sounds.

How many wrecks upon the shoals

Of opportunity and goals?

Once anchor-bound by a tether

Until this wave crashed, that one rose.

Ah, the different seas we chose.

Ahoy there, mate, crossing the bar,

We parted in the ports flung far;

At many harbors and much bad weather,

Washed ashore by ambition or pride,

It’s on such rocks old friendships died.

Now this old sailor home from the sea

Is grounded by age and apathy

Without a gull of matching feather.

We were too focused on our fishing trips

And missed the lighthouse to true friendships

Photo: “Crossing the Bar” by the author, 1969

For Gooseberry's Poetry Picnic October 9, 2011

Late that morning...

2011-10-03T06:19:00.000-04:00

…she picked up the tray and carried it

(Breakfast time now well gone)

To the kitchen from the bed.

She scraped the plate with the clean fork

And left all in the sink

While she made a brief, brief call.

Walking down her lovely garden path,

She sat in the dirt in dressing gown,

To snip some flowers growing there.

In the distance the phone had rung,

But this task was enough for now.

They would too soon be here.

She heard them come, she heard them go,

She didn’t know just where she stood,

Dizzy in the whirl of the last day.

Holding Gladiolas in her hand,

Thinking she should make lunch perhaps;

But at the stroke of one the tears broke.

Something of a History of English Poetry from the Dark Ages to Today

2011-10-03T06:13:00.003-04:00

We think of poetry as rhyme,

Similarity ending every line,

As if this was the will of God.

Yes, it’s true I see you nod.

But no it is not in the history of our talk.

Early erudite scribers did not end English

Verse with varied vocabulary

Of sounds of similarity

It probably was not from purity.

Spelling Old English was enough a task.

At some point some poet arrived

Who took a stab and rhyming tried,

But like here resulted in feeble rime

And left it ‘til Chaucer shuffled by.

Yes, similar syllables he did not eschew

Ah, Chaucer knew his way around a rime or two,

Perhaps his forms were his own and new,

As he spread his rhymes through and through

In complex patterns that ring true

To ears raised on the Romantic lines

From Byron, Keats and Shelley’s times.

Though I came to poetry through the proclivities of Poe,

Embracing the spacing of rhythm and rhyme

I’ve watched the full circle back to non-ringing ends,

Probably owing some knowing of Walt Whitman

And the blue-collar

Bellow and blast of Sandburg,

the dropping of propriety proper by cummings

Or the Howls of the Beats, Bukowski and such,

And a love of it all. In my life I have gathered,

If it communicated, rhyme or not hasn’t mattered.

World is Disconnected

2011-10-03T06:10:00.001-04:00

Shakespeare said it first, but what the heck,

‘Tis commonly remembered from Steinbeck.

Still our very own winter of discontent

Has fell cold on our world of disconnect.

Yet under the ice this lava seethes,

Across the fields, across the heaths,

And I fear this hidden broiling froth

Will surely burst forth like boiling broth

And when it does we’ll all be burned.

For one thing certain man has never learned

To temper his greed or undeserved pride,

And on that fact many truths have died.

Days Just After Ten Years Past

2011-09-11T07:23:00.001-04:00

DAYS JUST AFTER TEN YEARS PAST

written 9/11/2011

Strange was the air then that fall.

You’d hear an airplane drone,

Breaking the morning silent.

You’d look up and quiver some

Then bow your head in

Silent mourning.

Illustration: "Children - American" by the author.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun!

Lady of the Shore

2011-09-07T16:49:00.001-04:00

When you’ve been out in search of whales

Under the windy billowed sheets,

You dream of home and safe shores

Safe from the waves constant beats.

You go for days, for weeks, for months,

Until the hold is filled and full.

Water turns brackish, salty the meat,

And you live on hardtack and guell.

And at last in on the dim edge of night,

With tired body and fearful soul,

Your eyes search out the lady of light,

Where she stands beyond the shoal.

Up the mast, the call, “Her light”,

To guide you betwixt Hell and Heaven.

To a old salt home from the sea,

Lighthouses are alluring women.

Written September 7, 2011 for Slam Week 9 at bluebellbooks. Com as inspired by the picture shown.

In the Colors

2011-09-07T15:52:00.000-04:00

Move the colors.

But they stop and go,

Not red or green or yellow.

No, no, they flow where colors never go.

Some darker stolen

Painted skies from haunted worlds

And go away and go away

How I wish they’d go away.

But the colors stay

And they have a weight

Because they’re not a shade;

They’re not a ghost, a specter or a sigh

Of wispy hues at all.

Move the colors, make then change,

From dark and deep and deeper gray.

Make the colors

Give me back the sky

Of golden rays and lighter blues,

But be careful there if when they lift

That reality I fear within

Doesn’t fling the shattered palette

And blind me to the outside day.

Photo by the author

Bride

2011-09-05T13:55:00.003-04:00

She comes all winter warmth

Swathed in clinging frost

And diaphanous gloom.

Her smile of frozen teeth

And her eyes of icy ponds

Send shivers through the room.

We think of death as skeletal,

Cowled with cloak of black

Hunched like some old farmer

Over his scythe and sack

To cut and carry us to our doom,

But no, death is not the groom.

Death comes dressed in marriage veil,

In a snow white bridal gown

With a long icicle train.

Our final vows are sealed by one

Who doesn’t steal, but stills our heart

With a lover’s kiss that ends all pain.

BRIDE the reorder reading by the author

It is suggested you scroll down and turn off my music before playing the video.

I am hoping this will work now on "Voices and Friends". Soundcloud burst and rained on my parade trying to use it for that purpose, even with Nancy trying to help me. So decided to go to the video route.

I am not sure why I picked this particular poem. Maybe because the poem was a troublemaker, too. One day I got this one line in my head and couldn't get rid of it: "She comes all winter warmth." I could seem to do anything with it either, except I kind of liked it. Finally, what we have here is what I came up with.

After chatting with nancy, I decided to record this in a graveyard and then realized I never saw any graveyards nearby. Where I grew up all the churches seemed to have a cemetery, but not so in my current neck of the woods. I finally located one and wandered back to these older stones. The folk in the house in the background were having a Labor day BBQ. It smelled good. I wonder what they thought of this strange guy kneeling behind a tombstone reading something? Probably thought I was praying.

Friendly Gatherings

2011-08-18T12:37:00.000-04:00

When it was still early morning,

Came some in curiosity and some with needs.

Ah, I like this.

Me, too.

And they shared in the bounty of the seeds.

Over the season in the sunrise,

There is friendly gatherings a-twitter.

Ah, this is life.

Some flew

When in bound some unfamiliar critter.

But even the beast from the hedgerow

Was soon accepted at the table,

Among the feathers of many color and hue.

I wish I could belong to this congregation,

But as a human I am not able.

I can only watch from a concealed view.

The wrens rush in rapid flights for their ration,

While the grackles gather about the edges.

The mourning doves, in moving pairs,

Come early and earnestly ignore

The in and out swooping sparrows.

Blue Jays and Cardinals add brightness to the gang,

And a squirrel, switching his tail,

Peels a nut to the rhythmic caws of a crow.

In the hours before the sunset,

When the seasons are turning their collars to the cold,

Oh, how I wish

I could

Sprout wings and fly south with that friendly fold.

Beware of the Blob

2011-08-18T12:33:00.000-04:00

In the dark, sticky recesses of our only such repertory.

In the flicker of the screen and the screams

Of some girls who sat not silent beyond

I, in utter fascination, watched the Universal uglies,

The makeup formed fantasies on the faces

Of Bela, Boris and Lon.

But in the lonely, looming dimness

Of my bedroom in the midnight minutes,

I cringed in fear and loathing reliving

Mummy, monster, bat and beast.

Would a vampire wing in through my window?

Would the Mummy unravel my restraints?

Would, oh horror of it all,

Frankenstein’s creature crash my hall,

Smash through my confines

and drown me in the sink

Like the flower and the child?

I had a few defenses against these imagining of mind.

What did they have in common

That could provide me escapes?

Slowness of step and ungainly gaits.

Why the Mummy moved like molasses

And the Monster stumbled in outsized shoes.

I could outrun both as if they walked in glue.

Oh yes, the Wolfman was quick,

But restrained by the moon.

And you get enough garlic and the ghastly Dracula

Will fall into a swoon.

Besides, I reasoned, in my bed and my room,

I dwelt safely in the center of the streets

Of our tiny, tidy town.

By the time these hobbling horrors hop from the gloom,

They would have satiated appetites and want no more of eats.

So safe in bed I’m found.

Until…

The Blob “glides across the floor,

Right through the door

And all around the wall…”

Not only would nothing stop it,

As it slid in through some crack,

It was never satisfied,

Eating its never-ending snack,

As it creeps,

As it leaps,

To a tune by Bacharach.

NOTE: “The Blob” starring Steve McQueen came out in 1958. It was made by Valley Forge Films, which normally made religious films. I saw The Blob on its first run at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, a somewhat bizarre situation watching a monster in a film eat the theater you are watching the film in. Those who fled the theater and then ran into the diner must have been quite athletic. The theater is in Phoenixville and the Diner is in Downingtown, around 16 miles apart. I have also eaten in that diner.

It the scene from the film that I have inserted at the end of this poem also has meaning for me. The fireman dressed in white is Tom Ogden. More correctly, Reverend Thomas Ogden, who was my minister when I attended the Downingtown Methodist Church as a boy. He played the fire chief in the film.

Jobs

2011-08-18T12:26:00.000-04:00

JOBS

Let me sing, like poets before, of the land and working poor,

Of crops sown, the new mown, the buildings built on vacant lots,

Of the shirts of blue and shirts of white, the every day commuter flight,

The backs bend forth over field or desk, the drip of brow and the drops

Of sweat; the sighs, the ruined eyes, the muscles strained, those who die

Creating the economy that taxes our credulity as well as our wallet and soul.

Ah, the jobs I’ve held, or should I say, the jobs that held me.

Bound to the clock on another’s sleeve so have I spend my time,

Being there at beck and call, doing little or doing it all.

It mattered not in the scheme of things, not to the rhythm or rhyme

Of what was in my mind. No, the necessary daily grind was a wall

You beat upon or clawed with nails, banged your head, tried to climb.

Honest work I do not disparage. I’ve fulfilled my own with honest pride

In achievement and accomplishment. But all in all I would have rather been

The underfed artist burnishing the blazing pen of truth dramatized,

Than those deceived by the glittering façade of success and wealth.

Now the wasted youth, those stolen hours, what have they gained of worth?

A crumbling society of grasping greed, cheap thrills and broken health.

Here I stand behind a lifetime of labor and where is the monument?

It was just make work after all, a putting in of the time, a clog.

Most places that paid me my wage to make their gears turn

Are footnotes in the history of industry, a jotting in a log.

That I was soon not missed each time I left is probably quite true.

I’ve broke your clock and falled your wall and miss you not at all.

Photos from some places I worked: Atlantic Refining Company (later ARCo), Philadelphia Gum, Welded Tube Co. of America, Wilmington Trust Co. (2 Photos), Mercantile Press and Chicos.

This poem could almost be a companion piece to the essay I recently did on my "Drinking of Old Men" Blog entitled, "A History of Work".

Change of Hope

2011-08-14T10:04:00.000-04:00

Once were nights that seemed less stark

You saw stars shining, each hopeful spark

Showing there still was light.

Now all I see is starless night

And dark upon dark.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun!

Photo by the author, Talley Day Park, Delaware, 2007.

Summertime and the Breathing's Not Easy

2011-07-24T07:05:00.000-04:00

I step with splashes, but there’s no saving rain.

Only sun much more hot than heat.

A steaming stalled sizzle of summer steam.

It is my sweat dripping on the street

And forming puddles at my feet.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun!

Photo by the author, Desert of Maine, 2006.

End of School

2011-06-25T14:28:00.001-04:00

Back on the street

Where the boy played

Was the teacher of the man.

From a hard hand

And sharp tongue

Blood and fear was all he learned.

He had not asked

To be born here

Nor die in these alleyways.

Do not join the gangs, mama said.

Be a good pupil, mama said.

Learn you’re studies well, mama said.

If you don’t join us, you’ll be dead.

Back on the street

Where the body laid

Was the creature of the man

Growing with hate

And bitterness

In the gutters of his youth.

He died today,

Years later, still young,

End of school, all lessons done.

For the One Stop Poetry Saturday prompt, Bob Dylan.

Photo by the author, 1969

A Stinging Attack

2011-06-18T12:48:00.000-04:00

A STINGING ATTACK

Once poet T. S. Eliot said April is the cruelest month.

You know I think it is a fact.

Along comes a nasty spider, a real blighter

Called the Federal Income tax.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun!

Cartoon by the Old Goat when he was the Young Kid.