Don't Give Up On Me

I was told by someone close to me that I seemed to be, I think his words were, distant from my art.

Though I don't FEEL distant, I may APPEAR distant.

My art, or my writing, is in me and a part of me as it's always been.  I just have been distracted from its creation.  Please bear with me, as my life is in a state of change.  Improvement.  And it's important.

I still write.  And I will still post here.  In time...

But please don't give up on me.

YOUTH IN ASIA

Old and faded
Young and strong
Sudden tragedy
Illness long
Life or death
For which to strive
If the brain is dead
Is the soul alive?

Loved ones ponder
Feelings frail
For a useless tongue
Can’t tell the tale
If life is agony
Fear and doubt
Freedom is choice
Death the only way out

A doctor says
He has no choice
But to keep you alive
So you have no voice
Motivations of mercy
Legal static
Pertaining to oaths
Hippocratic

What is life?
Where is our essence?
Is it just flesh and bone
That give us our presence?
Life is a gift
One you could choose to refuse
If you felt that by dying
You had less to lose

Is death beginning or ending?
What lies beyond unknown…
Is it just the flesh left clinging
The spirit having flown?
Or does the soul also linger
A flicker of life not stilled
Remaining for some purpose

As yet unfulfilled?

WISDOM

After years of bloody senseless wars
There came to power in the Middle East
A man of vision beyond his years
Who pursued a policy of peace
Against the duty sworn of all Arab born
To never accept a Jewish state
To bomb and kill and terrorize
Using every provision of hate
At first he tried to from his side to
Change times and laws old methods tried, true
The first small step? To tolerate…
This so enraged those “powers that be”
With ballots of bombs they gave their decree
Voting him out of his life
Let alone of his position
So they could carry on their fanatical tradition

Another man took another path
He spoke of pomp and circumstance
And asked of young and old alike
To just give peace a chance
Studied for years by a zealous man
Who couldn’t just see him
But wanted to be him
And so somehow he
Saw murder, rather than imitation to be
The sincerest form of flattery

Another time another place
Another failed challenge to the human race
As we gather together under flags unfurled
That unite our nations but divide our world
There came forth a man seeming born to lead
His policies motivated by compassion not by greed
He said: With what we’ve wasted in treasure and talents
We could have gone to other planets, transgressed the known and farther
Rather than building these horrible weapons of war
And pointing them at each other
It’s been said his election was brought about by corruption
And here from books I quote,
Without Cook County and a V.P. Texan
In ’60 Nixon would have won election
By one electoral vote
So those “powers that be” had helped bring him to power
So certain factions expected his favor
But he tried to resist them with the help of his brother
(Who met his same fate, five years later)
From the annals of La Cosa Nostra Co.
To the fascist old Mens Club where defense dollars go
With bullets the only ballots cast
Another “brief shining moment” passed

Around the same time there came forth another
A beautiful man and a brilliant orator
Who challenged us to prove ourselves
To live up to our ideals
Our “Dedication to the proposition
That all men are created as equals”
Penned a century before by another great man
(Who also fell by an assassin’s hand)
Not just words on paper but a utopian vision
Of human relation without racial division
But to those powers that be, that just wouldn’t’ do
Needing someone to feel superior to
Shot a Baptist preacher by stealth in the face
And took another dreamer that we could not replace

Two Kennedys, a King, Lincoln, Lenin, Sadat
Prophets sharing their vision often costs them a lot
Though each has a marker, all have a spot
To prove to ourselves that we haven’t forgot
Airports and avenues, schools and shrines
Even a fifty-cent piece
They take the man and give to us these
Namesakes in their places
And if ever we see their likes again
Who will step forward to murder them?
They take their lives,
But not their dreams,
Nor their prophesies of peace

VOICES

I hear the roar of a voice, unseen
Two worlds I’m torn between
One of metal and gasoline
The other likened to a waking dream
The first has a tangible culpable calling
It echoes with answers more questions bring
One foot in the “real” world of laws and kings
Worth, value gauged by acquisition of things
Well another world rages, I have found
It turns and it toils
Burns and it boils
But that loud voice don’t make no sound
To the senses rendered just beyond
A dedication “tu les monde”
To the whole wide world of Babylon
And just who are the sages?
It’s for you that it rages
These two world’s wages
Sin is death
These two worlds, in between
Two hands motion, beckoning
Do right. Do wrong. Do anything
There must be, there will be
A reckoning
Be ye not tepid, make your choice
Heed the call of your destiny’s voice
For wither thou goeth, heart and soul follow
Whether you tend to the noble or hollow
The voice that carries on a silent shout
Beckons you notice the hand of God all about
There are none so truly blinded
As those who just refuse to see
None so dull and vapid
As those that dream but never be
Seeing naught they listen not
Keenly honed senses still miss (a lot)
Doing nothing to explore those dreams
Which by morning are forgotten
By those ordinary means

UNTITLED #2

Look where I look,
See what we saw
Inspired by things
Brutal and raw
We sell no illusions
To confound your confusions
I’ll tell you the truth
Draw your own conclusions…
Truth is a word
Hard to relate
Injured by doubt
Clouded by hate
But mostly buried in haste
With indifferent greed
Just look at the hungry
We refuse to feed
From Vietnam veterans
To urban black children
The debate no longer “if”
We should have had them
They’re here and they’re hungry
But we don’t help them…

Try and discuss these
Things sincere and sober and
Watch the eyes of most people
Begin to glass over.

With such cynical ease
The hypocrite prays…
True are his methods
Tried are his ways
And he’s fine with the world
Just as it is
As long as he’s able
To keep what is his
As long as the police
Come when he calls
If some uninvited
Transgresses his walls
And if that trespasser
Had the look
Of “that man” described
In that “Holy Book”?
Why, he’d simper and cry
With a 9-1-1 wail
And cuff him
And stuff him
And “book” him
In jail

Try and discuss these
Things sincere and sober and
Watch the eyes of most people
Begin to glass over.

So here is the message
And the message is clear
(Though perhaps not the one
That you wanted to hear)
God is alive
He answers all calls
In a fair fight with love
Evil falls
Reach out and uplift
Your fellow man
If he won’t himself lift
Pull him up by the hand
And count up amongst
Your time-honored quotes
Your pearls and proverbs and anecdotes
A rising tide raises all boats

Try and discuss these
Things sincere and sober and
Watch the eyes of most people
Begin to glass over.

UNTITLED #1

A wanton shot across my bow
Circles like silence, then as now
Hear my blindness? Smell my fear?
Desire’s aim? Away from here.

Beholden to gods our fathers knew not…
To each their own wanton shot
We bind ourselves of our own free will
Then lament our fate, even still…

A favored craze of the willing victim
Stays the course on the suicide slalom
Free me, save me, take me home…
Break my bondage, redeem my shame.

You long to escape, but all roads
---------------lead back to
a mad cry to Heaven. Born
---------------of a furious lack, you
close yourself off to a world gone
---------------bitter and numb…

TREASURE

Is looking up just looking down?
Does a miserable life mean you’re heaven-bound?
Does taking your God to this forsaken town
Make the down side the upside of upside down?
Does simple inversion make a smile a frown?
The feeling behind it no longer around
Like a face you can’t place
Or an answer not found
Or a song, long forgotten, remembered
Will hauntingly sound?

Does your mind favor time
When sadness and pain
Were lost in true love
Like tears in the rain
When to make yourself “right”
Means you’re selfish and vain
And if wrong you’re all right
But you’re also insane
When your innermost impulses
Wax and wane
Between raw desire and pure disdain
The groove of the world goes against your grain
And smothers your soul as it clefts you in twain
If you whittle the words will the meaning remain
And is the question well answered, the same
When you ask it again? And again? And again?

And I, never sure
If truth or no
Pure or stain – friend or foe
Though it must go on it ends the show
Growth brings death and stay means go
It is of nothing apropos
That fleet meets defeat beat by steady and slow

If a world of contrast
Is really God’s pleasure
Then I’m in the grips of synaptic seizure
But if I’m insane then
By that same measure
I’m pissing wine
And crapping treasure