Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
First Violet Series
No. 1 - 64
No. 1 In Deep Born Earth
Carried in minds that harbored hope and imaged gleanings
To caverned, hollowed voids that yielded touch of fingered musings.
Deep within
The womb of Earth received our thoughts, on stone page wrought
Welcomed Child, home again.
They spoke in coloured images that voiced their souls first pleadings.
To Mother Earth they carried faces bowed and dumb.
In awe their minds made ritualed journeys into the place beyond the sun.
In cold locked stone they wrote the first unspoken words that granted thought
In time locked heedings.
In sacred red, and brown and black and dun.
Their inner course of life borne needings
In silence spoke with majesty of stark writ keenings
Beyond the cradled edge of seasoned day they paid homage to a future unseen 
but full of meanings.
Gravid with the promise, locked in mind
They stroked the stone cold skin of Earth
and wrought a world that spoke their
hungry search for thought divine. Evoking magic presences that summoned worlds beyond their minds.
A reach into the unseen places deep within
They painted stone with awe owned hopes
Spoke of death and birth and bellied hungers quenched as life continued and consumed
The slimmest margined edge of well fed days
Stored against the emptied stomachs that compelled the learning of new ways.
So grace was first evoked.
And human travels launched through time
To touch us here and lead us back through eons winnowed, filled, and thus sublime.
No. 2 Untrue Reflections
In time stroked Tides of restless days
Eyes see structures of the mind
Their unexistance, unknown, defrays
The anguish that lurks in God's design
Unmade memories that lie
Unfounded truths that suck us dry
Uncherished children born to die
Unlived days that Time denies.
A vanished dream that never was
A rush to find the edge of mind
Consumes the fall of sideways trust
Ashes made from ancient dust.
Nihilistic pleadings drain
The cherished source of human pain.
Aching anguish proves we live
Even when we've naught to give
Our pain is pleasure in the void
When mind- made spirit is undeployed.
So grace was first evoked.
And human travels launched through time
To touch us here and lead us back through eons winnowed, filled, and thus sublime.
No. 3 Cusp
Imagined place of reredemption
You beckon me with echoed promises of what is lost
Beyond the pall of hope and dust
This place of pause owned cusp
A breath long pausing in a journey, womb to tomb
Fulcrum of the future, be it paradise or doom. A place of summing, crystallized and clear
Where silence touches home and removes the source of fear.
No. 4 Pardon
Pardon given to amend injustices of fact and law
Discretion given, trust imbued
Into an office and a manNuance (March 19, 2001)
Within a pause of nuance where the lights are low and dim
I speak the words of inference that glow with thoughts most grim.
The cherished hopes of honor removed by what eyes see
Remake the shape of covenants, unconsidered by those unfree.
I managed to remember the source of undone dreams
And banished all the feckless acts that bore one destiny
Managed magic, cognite facts,
Remakes the future through rethought acts
Unseen the source of what is real
But true are thoughts to time honed steel.
Thus nuanced changes come through time
To banish cultures lost as crimes.
Oblivion remaindered into time.
Incised oblivion.
Reminded tiny cuts that sutured pain
redressing all the forces that rely on unmade gains.
Remandered applications that survive the edges: never sane.
The memory of love
Incredible, removed, disturbed, enforced by hands that found communion in the place of tempered sanction, replaced and then removed.
Love. Proof against the calumny of thought without reproof.
Still aloof.
But harboring the savaged need; a barricade of edged proof.
No. 5 A Fine and Cherished grieving
When time is spun, through threads both fine and lightly trimmed
I blend the thoughts that cling to mindNowhere sought but owned through course of destiny
Removed by shadowed ages; borne in time. In sanctuaried places and in neuologic condimented increments
Nuanced sureties release the echoing of thoughtDistilled and tasted with the rites of passage dearly bought
In currencies of tears and languishing of years. A baby stilled against a breast; milk filled throbbing that loving will attest
To still all hope; reminding emptiness is waged in place of scopeSurcease of love. Releasing death to wage its war.
The marks of Cain cuts cords of all reward. Speak removes of heart and mind
All one; all lost; all one kind.
No. 6 The Tannin Taste of undone Trust
Trust ungiven lances pulsing boils ripe with angered grieving
The ties are cut.To leave the opened wounds that knot my gut.
I need to cut off trust
Need to leave the monument of hopeful thoughts to gather dustRefine the first and last of human’s first design.
For trust to early given is a thing that steals and binds.When and where did anguish breed?
How did hope commit its follyWhen did nature disagree
To touch the ragged edges seared by something less that truth? In place of unkind making that inclines my mind to rue
All human touch.
No. 7 What You Cannot See
Unseen truths; sightless acts
Refine and still the thrust of facts
For unseen reverberations make
Our futured realm without mistake.
You cannot hide the truth forever
The Truth is Justice’s one sure lever.
Lies distort, give life to greeds
And implement our passions needs
Lies will try to remake the world
Turning sows ears into pearls.
But soon or later lies wear out
Leaving Truth untouched by doubt
So eyes see through the falsity
And justice wins its amnesty.
For lusts and fraud and violent acts
Abuses borne in shadowed homes
Stole the right to even mourn.
So Ugliness has short reprieve
The ugliness is there to see
The twisted lusts, the vanity.
The coarse and raddled grasping hands
That set in motion Demoned plans
Will be revealed for all to see
Thus making victims whole and free.
No. 8 The Unseen Course of Fate
The scarcely ventured, just begun
The unremitted and unsung.
(Written for Brent in the Morning)
Rampant ribbons tear the breeze
invisible skin of wind that bleeds
Out sounds dismayed, oncoming tides
of years and seasons newly died. Autumnal fragrances, days grown cold
Promise life continues, holdsThe winter's end long vise in Spring
Symbolled life rethought to bring.Redeemed, unburdened, grace-borne dreams
That speak becomings to all things.In winter-mottled leaves gone grey
Thoughts continue, fears allay.In Time our thoughts remove all grief
Giving each its perfect peace.
No. 9 Return from Anguish
Voids of silence,
deep unbottomed vastness that denies
the breadth and depth of grief.
Echoed, airless phantasm where my soul could find no peace.
This, the place of evilled keep
That binds out hope, and life most sweet.
A place where I lingered in a state more drug than sleep.
Now a memory of futile longings, replaced by lightened vows.
Juncture found; that then, this now.
Now,
Beginnings wrung from whispered threads of chambered thoughts,
I grasped for them when sanity pulsed low and oh so thin.
I fed my hope on memories.
Rescued degrees of longed for intimacies.
Soul-fed touches; glimpsed insight; each of these had bred delight
Reminding me that narrowed paths through unfurrowed time
Hold potentials most sublime.
Deep in challenge; Breeding up my couraged will
To walk the path that's never still.
No. 10 Motion, Mind, and Muse
Incoming tides of ancient thought
revealed from motion, mind and muse
Create an opulence uncontrived
in steel toned truth from us concealed.
In us the future gestated; borne
consuming hours, days and sums
Contrives events that onward come
to fracture what our fears denied.
Majestic coming into sight
the turgid expectations still
Phoenix of the flames reborn
unmutes the tongues of couraged drives.
The median; forgotten shell
Astonished bridge that glows with light
Spins out dreams of finest gold
Illuminating edges of delight.
Finite Man with finite dreams
Conquers what's never really seen.
No. 11 Clash of Touch
Unbridled touches that exhume
delights consumed by dust and grief
Skin resumes its vibrant coils
Canceling pain; surceased beliefs.
Unwinding time that pulses, runs
inside the spirit, matrixed minds
Laughter ripples, lifts all eyes
to sights unseen by light of Sun.
Unrelenting, journeyed path
that teaches each the cut of rules
while bowed head signals not defeat
but promise of unbound renewal.
Challenged coming into Sight
The inkling of what Mind ignites.
No. 12 The Touch of Thought
Mind’s touch.
Encompassing a hundred thoughts of cognite lust.
Reminded needs
Inside the dendrilled compass that subsumes all human greeds
I touched your memory
Sighed in vanished musing and resided in the cusp of choosings.
Singular vanity
I forgot to misremember a more immediate edge of sanity.
Miracles
A different view admits the light
that culls out structures that can blight
The true dimensions of human sight
Keeping us from real delight.
Miracle
Reseen, revisited and thus known
The source of anguish, life and tones
That chord and blend the notes and joys
That internal truths can redeploy.
Miracles.
Light molded dances, owned and touched
Nuances of what was not.
Soul to soul they are the tongues
That give flight to things begun
Miracles.
Sighting of a world unseen
That Illuminates all that we can mean.
No. 13 Formulas for Rage
Explosions of discomfort that illuminate the dark
Release the mind to chaos with reproaches, crude and stark.
I gasp at the dimensions of a world I failed to see
And shudder at the images that bind that place to me.
Electric all the poses that redefine and speak
The untold cords of causing that commit me to belief.
The threads of other making realign what is not real.
Impacting understanding and the ground I did not feel.
So feet will refind landing and my mind with let in thought.
As the last of will commanding reboots and then restarts.
No. 14 Graphic Voice
With the trembled tones of dying that cancel out remorse
The pause of tongues done lying chokes the path of wrong discourse.
Evoking thoughts unmentioned to the touch of living day
The tip of their intention stills the hopes that mask dismay.
Cerebral their invoking of a future lost and gone
The pain of losses summing will spill out inside a song.
Ripped from places unconsidered lit inside the heart of wrong
The melody and timbre will still echo light and strong.
Reminding every listener of worlds now passed away
The long cold void breeds clarity as living goes astray.
Look inward to the surety; the gift that can’t be lost.
Live true inside your conscience and never count the cost.
No. 15 Honor and Old Friends (dedicated to Jack Dean and others unnamed.)
In the boiled shades of evening then the light is turned down low
I revisit with new knowledge all the things I thought were so.
The view of human honor is different in that light
It reveals the truth worn hollows, picking out what was not right.
Sharp pangs and integration using facts dear bought with time
Emerged exasperation with deceptions most unkind.
In that choice comtemplate of honor I recuse the might have beens.
And sometimes in that clarity I view dishonored friends.
I forgive the saddest tragic that I see in close wrought lives.
While I reject the wrong and ugly of the actions I despise.
Do right when all is hopeless, do right when life is fine
Do right to high and low degree; for honor must be kind.
When the takings and the makings distort, enmesh and bend
Other lives with machinations that sheer, abort and rend
Reparations are the actions we must take to made amends.
Admission of the failings is the first step on a path
For truth, the light of honor brings justice, first and last.
This, forgotten template that I hope you soon will grasp.
No. 16 The Logic of Empire (With thanks to Robert Heinlein)
There is logic in the takings that enable them to steal.
They use the forms respected to excise the things most real.Through the magic transformation that turns gold to leaden dross
Through percentaged incrementals are our hopes thus gone and lost. The promises are never meant to do more than generate some cash
The fool’s gold of freedom that though lovely cannot last. Campaigns start with trumpets and whimper out too soon
You give your donors nothing after promising the moon. Opining of the needings and the pleadings and our rights.
The fierce machine of takings continues every day its trystWith special projects paying up and down and right and left
To stop and intervene, debase, where truth once did its best. To the tiny lives of workers, to the highest and the just.
The rending and condemning continues on with scouraging lust.Accepting in the forms that their opinions give them weight
The holders of the power ‘know best’ beyond debate. The mailings keep on coming with their bullets bright and sharp
A rhetoric of dunning to ensure the checks will startA rhetoric assembled to resemble what is true.
And to part us from our money and from what we thought we knew.
Oh, the logic of the government writ small, rapacious feeds
And in this Ponzied con game will Freedom stop and bleed? Will the unscrupulous and the agile with word and wit win through?
Or will we wise up and stop them, the ones we thought we knew? The questions still unanswered hang in breath of time
And the slow dripping of those answers paint truths that are unkind.The heroes were all human and we need to learn the rule.
Hold them to their promises or fire all the fools. No. 17 The Predator (dedicated to Michael Emerling Cloud)
The hooded eyes intelligent, assessing and unfed
Taste the likelihood of meat to be found, brought down and dressed.
But the eyes have human contours and the face is human born
Predators walk among us, their identities deeply worn.
Their goals are sex and power; all forms of human wealth.
Their means are fraud and violence and every form of stealth.
They smile, use charisma; they milk cajole and bleed.
Their goals: enjoy and prosper, make sure they’re first to feed.
They choose the weak and needy; they use our trust and minds.
They speak the rhetoric of honor to carry out their crimes.
They insinuate with widows and they take a cripple’s time.
They use the rhetoric of honor to pad their bottom line.
You find them selling cars and you meet them down the block.
They smile and drip charisma as they grimace, share and talk.
But their eye is on the income and their hand is in your purse
They will slander and defame you if it isn’t something worse.
But real humans have the power to remove the jungle’s maw.
The predators of the hour can be reformed through rethought law.
Reform the standards for deception; so the weak can see wrongs called.
Eliminate exceptions that allow abuse, misuse and fraud.
The statute is the enemy of freedom and the truth
The common law is justice that conforms to honor’s roots.
The predators live in darkness; their acts must not being seen
For what they do is ugly and the light defines their being.
I see a world a-borning where truth is not disgrace
Where children know that human is the world behind the face
Oh, the futured world of human promise, where doing right is safe.
A world of commerce and of honor; a place for human grace.
No. 18 Predatory Power (Dedicated to John Fund)
The truth can free your anguish and reform distorted souls
He spoke these righteous wordings, citing them as goals.
But his own life: don’t examine; and his own goals twist and bend
His inconsistencies need detection and his soul must learn to mend.
He walks the halls of power and he uses all the perks
He fondles and employs them; feeding all his quirks.
He insinuates in private and in public he travails.
Emoting standards and conditions that in his own life don’t prevail.
Oh, the truth can free your conscience and the truth will still all lies
But power used instead of truth is the ugliest disguise.
Pretense and the editing of your own life kills your soul.
And maintaining double standards, private; public, takes it toll.
The lives and eyes that trusted; saw a hero and a friend
The power that you wield for self was given you to mend.
Power misused destroys us, there our trust must die.
The truth abused and used for gain is just another lie.
The Truth can set your vision free: the truth makes justice right.
The truth is all and nothing; it is reliance and the Light.
The truth is what you take to God to show how you lived your life.
The truth is sharp and unrelenting in the void of that long night.
So remember in that long quiet, when lies curl in on you.
One Someone knows the sources and remembers what is true.
No. 19 Political Infractions (Ode to the SPT)
“We hold these truths self evident,” is engraved inside our minds
“All Men created equal,” speaks the vision there enshrined.
So we struggle and we anguish and we stumble towards the goal
And you tell me that the SPT will make that future whole?
Like a hamster hunting nuggets that remain just out of reach
We scamper and we tunnel; at our backs there looms defeat.
For the SPT is circular, just like the cage we tread
We'll donate and we'll donate, until our hopes are dead.
Oh, the SPT is verity; its wisdom of a kind.
The kind from all committees; the stupid and the blind.
It’s the sort of introspection that confirms what didn't work.
But the fun of its creation was just one employment perk.
The history of the Party we've glossed over and ignored.
What can you learn from history? The donors would be bored.
More fun to retread wish-lists; better to reprise.
This exciting science fiction in a shiny brand new guise.
The Strategic Planning Taskforce: a stalwart band of minds
Who nodded, wished and discoursed through comments unrefined.
That most sung band of heroes who risked life and limb to write.
A tome of monumental exhort telling others what is right.
Recycling is appropriate and politically correct
It’s also so much easier to fundraise than elect.
For candidates who triumph have expectations and demands
And members and our donors might start to understand.
The SPT is wonderful; its long and printed well
It speaks the tongue evasive and it confines our hopes to hell.
The SPT is callow; and it sings the song intense.
It is everything to no one; so it does make perfect sense.
To a clutch of unelected; to a flock without a clue.
It’s painful and it’s obvious what they thought we never knew.
But politics is verity and savants see the light.
And freedom has its rhetoric; its illogic that we fight.
History has a pattern, and a logic, formed in truth and will
We live within its covenant; redefining those words still.
Thomas Jefferson wrote his wisdom in few words that engage
That Soul of revolution would understand the war we wage.
“…whenever any form of government becomes destructive to those ends,
it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…”
Revolution is the method; the place is set in time.
SPT the pattern? Is this a joke or crime?
Are we really stupid? Do we deserve the rule we've seen?
If so, the futures futile; if not wipe all slates clean.
So come to Indiana in the summer of next year.
And take the problematic and remake our course most dear.
Take the words of Jefferson; apply to local ends.
The vision still is Freedom; let Freedom finally win.
No. 20 - Crimson Blossoms Sheer and Rend
Crimson Roses rent the sky; bringing down the autumn sun.
Fracturing the pillared towers;
Sudden death writ red as flowers.
My mind arrested; could not accept, the changes sudden that deformed
The world I knew was shattered there,
inside an autumn newly born.
The scenes surreal, the tears, the shock; the frantic search for those we love.
Trembled tones and dust choked eyes.
The fall of towers from the sky.
Deforming shock of memories, rescinding trends of history.
From grief surrendered; steel bent scope.
Was reborn an edge for hope.
Our courage spent as offered gift; lives to save mean more than risk.
A shroud of dust had cloaked the sky
A cloak of courage, death denied.
A thousand little moments bled, in mind made journey, our griefs unsaid.
As human actions moved our minds.
Ears heard echoes of the divine.
Erupting roses burned our eyes, remaking worlds we will not see.
Recasting all our best beliefs;
replacing them with soul seared grief.
Transforming death; unbending love; our undeflected will to hope.
These the gifts that roses brought
revealing need for truer scope.
No. 21 The Price of Honor
No insulation numbs the pain erupting in your heart.
Not time, not tears not passaged years erases loss so sharp
The breath comes hard and grevious slow a constant wrenching ache.
. For none can mend where no amend is made for honor’s sake.
For none can mend where no amend is made for honor’s sake. Fragile thing of human thought that speaks the tones of trust
Human acts mint mind and facts to mold a form so just. Honor.
Forged in conscience, writ most clear, a couraged striving honed on pain
Life itself may be the wage charged against its absent stains. For clarity in sight and thought are needed to paint courses straight
Against the ease of greedy needs honor’s fabric warps and breaks. Remember when temptation looms and promises all gifts most dear
The loss of honor rends your soul, leaving empty words and fear. No. 22 Eloquent Desire
The skin speaks truths the mind would hide
Conversant with the deepest tidesThat flow and eddy down inside
The places where our soul resides. Soul deep truths direct our lives
Conforming routes, unspoken guidesTo sequestered hopes that still abide
When reason tells us they have died. A covenant of striving drives
Raptured needing; not quite liesThat push the outer edge of time.
Into places nearer the divine. No. 23. Birthday thanks to Priscilla
Magic moments tantalize
Laughter lingers on our lips
Life, the one sure joy we taste
Friendship, the best life-long gift.
No. 24 Birth Formed Linkings
Wombward on from source of time the flowering of joy bent thought
Remembers linkings back through lifeMothered moments; joy and strife. The will to nurture, hold and love
Incites the fierceness of the dove.Babies change the text and shift desire
Replenishing the inner fires.I peer through shrouded, chance born acts
That drove us on to sparse becomingsCojoining lives through birth hard factsThat make the world this morning’s summoned
Chance born.
Joined through pulsing cords of life.
Unsevered even by the knife.
Milk toned memories revere, the unseen wombs that brought me here.
No. 25 Pulse
The constant unread singing of the life beneath my dreams
Is the metronome of linking summing all still yet to be.I hear its magic strumming as the surety unthought
Never questioning becomings that all lives together wrought. A lullaby remembered from the darkness of the womb
It’s faint and burning embers throb even as death looms.Directing and electing the unthought part of Mind
The pulse, unintellected, remains foundational design. I snug into the blankets and take comfort from its song
With counterpoints selected outside all right and wrong. The castings from the past, elastic compass yet to be
Give weight to choice from unheard voiceAnd form to mystery. Oh, through censoring of silence, a concert inward plays
The conductor and composer balance all that life displaysAnd we all go on unhearing, oblivious that we
Are instruments and musicians in a global symphony. No. 26 Seeds of Hope
The commerce of renewal that contends with voids of dark
An elegant refuel that supplies all forward sparksLife is struggle and its needing and its summing leaves its mark
In autumns fierce abundance is its power writ most stark. The seeds of future living; in gestational increase
The simple and the complex continue on their breedsExplosions that remember that disasters are the rule
Multitudes are winnowed through the classes of Earth’s school. Species die unnumbered; their niches filled and gone
Time, the Teacher’s lesson plan, marks them down as wrongThe cycles within living use both animus and greed
What works is right and proper that species strong will breed.In the face of human congress; in economies of scale.
The fate of one lone person wanes, lost, within the pale.But exceptions reform rules that were forged when Earth was young
Human action; mind wrought sanction; is a chord yet to be sung. The beginnings we see dimly through the haze of unmade time
The course of living speaks to us, misunderstood, divine.The Now a mottled mixture, repeating, arching, waves
Beyond control of Nature because Mind has come to play. Oh, the autumn speaks eternal and the Human has its goals
The spirit is renewal; the seeds of Mind to grow. A harvest prime and sovereign, misunderstood by men.
Balancing and knowing, the essence of Amen. No. 27 Life Recycled
By the millstones now circumferenced in the untold times between
We remember what is sorted through the patterns of our dreams We condense, reform and conscience all the places born in thought
While we rationalize the structures that elsewise would hold doubt. Oh, the mind of Man remembers more than is comfortable to know
And that intersect of knowledge denies what must be so.So we refract the wings of certainty, devise new fields of truth
To comfort what is raw and red, born in acts of youth. The laughter doles and dribbles from a place most sparse within
While fear and drear redolent, draw life out most gaunt and thinTo remind the source of making and the hand of takings truth
So that this, the soul’s first waking might by wisdom be imbued. I have tarried in the trumbull; I have gazed with unseeing eyes
I have whispered in the echoes of a fortune in disguiseBut before the very thought of aching need was truly born
The condiments of knowing were dry from womb well born. So remember in the embers of a place where none may go
Are the fractures of the passions that delight and also ownBecause shadows touch beginnings as they coddle our designs
Through unvarnished endings of the place inside our minds. No. 28 Human Devising
With form and structures magic and from constructs of the mind
Are built the monuments of ages that hold thought and place divine. Human made of mind-told musings they matrix, weave, concourse, and blend
And into place of human action they bring our hope and human ends. Our beginning lost in silence and the future, unseen trust
The source of our devising binds the two as time adjustsFor the echoes of all history is the unremembered source
And the fractures caused by violence is just the easiest recourse. In the forms within the possible, an unfound choice still waits
Rejecting blood and death recusing it remains the truest fate.And as the human mind considers what steps are still untrod
The hope of peaceful commerce is still the unseen face of God. No. 29 For Jimmy
Bright memories that turn back time, elected laughter, twists sublime
Refracted images abound, reliving moments most profound.
As ginger waifed and sunlight tarried, I got to know the prince of Faeries.
A truly honest human child, who saw through artifice and guile.
He spoke in tones of love warmed truth, confiding heart owned magnitudes
He lead a tiny cadred troop of puppet folk who spoke his truths.
He considered deeply in quiet pause, to test the truth of human laws.
He knew the quiet place within, admitted few as Silent friends.
From childhood his world was made, ensuing tides of time displayed
Portraying worlds that could not be, inciting imaged destinies
Lighting truths distilled from life, sure and vivid imaged strife.
The Prince of worlds we’ll never see, the soul of Jimmy; always free.
No. 30 Unhallowed Needings
When repression undermines your thoughts and breeds the unmade age’s course
When action, dissolute unmaker, takes the grief that knows its takerWhen nothing touches skin make speech, and peace is something you can’t reach
When hollowed, emptied ungrieved ages, empties out the minds first wages The past is flat, divining sage, this unmade hope defines life’s wage.
In this scant moment, the unbegun,Remember this, the time unwon. Remember flowers yet to bloom
Remember infants in the womb.Remember all things yet to be.Remember then the thought of me. Touch and taste the untried truth, unsummoned sanction unbegun.
The jasmined scent of love is thereBeyond the increment of filtered air. In that place of unopened eyes, the source of you can still grow wise.
No. 31 Glorious Desire
When wrists brush stroking hairs that tremble gold
And skin alights with thoughts igniting untold needingsI remember you, untasted pleasure, folding into times untold.
Long past thwarted achings, and soft spoke pleadings. I remember.
Heated hankerings that still consume chance ignited embers.
Never lost in time; untouched memories that sustain, remain and still incline.
A part and caused intention that repeats what is not crime.But incites delights retold in languid tempers.
Insulated memories that still and will remember. Consuming heat.
Delights that summoned mind and motion; displayed complete devotionVotive flames that spoke emotionsThat distilled, excised, denied, concealed.The true evoking of my will.
Waiting spoken words unthought but not also unrevealed. And the needings come unending, as the waves of untold pleadings
Course, exhort, remake and tease me, from the place that never pleased me. To remake, retake and seize me.All the moments unforsaken, that display, entice and lace me
To the unremarked but well told ecstasies.That hammer stark contingencies. No love but only needings that still stark must own their cedings.
Please release, consume and please me.Please me,Please me.Please. Me. In simple instance, ease me.
No. 32 Choice and Freedom
When breath seems bound by bands of fear
Then life condenses, hopes congeal.And in the sudden pause of time
You see a choice that clears your mindA choice that eases bands of dread
Giving leave to tears unshedPromises that hope remains
Choice elected makes you sane. Perhaps you doubted, questioned, paused
Considered vacuums in the law.But heard the howled wolves on coming
Giving you scant time for runningThis, the choice, confronted, seized
Someplace between nightmare and dream.Perhaps you wanted health and hope.
Maybe wealth beyond your scope.Maybe you professed your rights
While human agents denied you sightOf choices, futures, born in your mind
Delusions of the freedom kind. Past boundaries of State and law
You might have snuck in mindful aweTo witness what you never knew
Promises of life renewed. In chance found whims that turn on fate
We see the promise; life rebates
We plan and scheme, and hoard our wages
That life might lead to higher stages.
These. The choices freedom lends
When couraged premises amend.
No. 33 The Snow Plant
In scarlet trendiled, coiled growth,
The snow plant, quiet, needs no hope.It thrusts past earth and into sky
To live without the need of ‘why.’It’s beauties curl, surreal small plant
In white and red its needs are scant.It summons life from soil and air
And never knows the least despair.Most rare and unexpected sight
Evoking laughter and delight.
No. 34 Journey
The pads of feet I trod are souls
They touch the surface and move on
The path they follow, no one knows
But walking makes them sure and strong.
Mostly I ignore their thoughts
Discount the prickling, stones and grass
Mostly I hear minded doubts
That focus first on what came last.
Embodied echoes of unseen lives
Each becoming ages long in rifts and strife.
And feet still feel, alive, aware
Unrestless servants, always there.
The souls of feet, the seat of mind
Divisions in the core of kind
Or unities that also bind.
No. 35 Unwelcomed Recognition
Delusions, soft and downy couch
The wishes that reject true doubt. Myopic glaze will find chagrin
When even blindest hope grows thin. This, the frigid blast of sight
That turns complacency to fright.Devolution of life’s plan
Beginning in the truth of Man. Love, hormonal vestal voyage
That sinks from sight as life deploysThe effervescent, waking sights
That render fat and melt in light.Iridescent beauty that time forsakes
Loves a bubble, bound to break
No. 36 Solitude and Solace
When parts don’t fit
When means come plainWhen overflows of love bring pain.
Pain is not the stuff of life
The ordinary emollient, foundWhen eyes and lips become unbound
The smiled absence is joyous sound.
No. 37 Remembered Cup
I heard the voices in the rocks;
water falling from great height
Laughter, chatter, lifted livesThe Waterfall still speaks delight.
Over rounded stones and trees
Fallen from the upstream sidesI could, if still recall the tonesOf children seeing things lost from sight.
I heard my father, not yet ten
Grown fearless in the Cup of PeaceRunning through the meadowed worldThat small forever, his to keepI heard their certainties grown strong
Ventured hopes now lost in yearsRushed with gratitude for their joyAnd grieved for echoes of those years.
I stood there, watching water fall
From heights and places removed and steepAmazed at what our lives can keepThrough memories of hard won peace.
The Cup of Peace that healed their souls
Removed the wounds of life undoneWarmed their spirits with spirit’s sunRestarted songs still yet unsung.
I watched the water falling free
And saw a world still yet to be.
No. 38 Amended destiny
When breath comes harsh and throat constricts
And time removed returns and sticks
Within the craw, impeding time
This echoed place is God’s design.
Remembered days intrude to speak
The untold tellings that hid from light
And touch the unhealed wounds compelling
The soul to seek its former dwelling.
Return forgotten angers, aches
Return the sacrifice of life
Return the death that formulates
The world becoming One divine.
Amended thoughts stretched long and true
Amended memories renewed.
Amended grief for all I knew
Reborn to thought; minds blending new.
Amended destinies breed true.
Tomorrow made from One I knew.
No. 39 Course set
The details tumbled through many minds
That taste, construe the best designsCompared and weighed the image clears
Through solemn murmurs of years and tearsA course of poignant, burnished making
The cost of which forbids forsaking. Caballed yesterdays replayed
in lands that never saw them made
Unrelenting paths in time
That speak of agonies – yours and mine.
Set course in harmonies that play
Within the light writ large and grave
Set course that grinds our lives to dust
Destroying both gratitude and lust.
Set courses that defy just ends
Set courses that distort and bend
Set courses that unmake my lives
Reproving choices long denied.
A course reset through eyes that see
The full cost paid to destiny.
No. 40 The Winter
The Winter turned from night and cold
The pause of change hung in the air
Blending flakes of snow with anchored stone
The bones of Earth ignore despair.
The geologic pace of time
Reproves the anguish in human minds
The Winter seasons, kills, amends
That Spring might breed its next of kin
Allowing Summer to nourish change
And Fall to harvest life’s true wage.
The unrelenting flow of life
Both cancels out and speaks our strife.
The Seasons, times of human telling
The harbor of our human dwelling
The metronome that marks the year
With colors, fragrances and fear
Still touches us in every cell
Alive in ways we cannot see
Strategic comings that let us be
And grant hope to hold our destiny.
No. 41 Calls in the Unbottomed Night
Summoned from uneasy sleep to hear the tones of anguished fear
I wake again to Mother’s worries.
Familiar place, uncounted flurries. Her voice was shaken, and I knew
Her pain held needs my words could easeFrom miles distant love speaks true. Now I wander through the house
Lighting here, a moment spentTo speak my fears for child’s lifeInto cybered place that holds my pain. Motherhood that ranges life
Subsumes the gravid and the grief.Mends all tears with hugs encompassedAll fears rescinded on magic knees. Testing places in our souls
Stretching us to forward reachAmending preconceptions bornFrom thoughts untouched by life’s true griefs. I sit and wait for time to start, the phone to ring and ease my heart
I wait to hear that all is well, I pray into a darkened void
To still the bindings sealed foreverThat nothing ugly can rend or sever. Mothering, the unpaid vocation, allowing for no ungraved cessation.
A voice through space that wakes my prayers
And takes me there to share despair.
No. 42 Rewrite of Jasmine 6 for today, April 19, 2002
To Save Mankind
We cannot change the leaders, they're lost in dreams of power
We cannot change or rearrange our history's sullen hours
We cannot use their self same tools without becoming them
We cannot do
and we cannot
retreat without amend.
The nots are many, often tried, marches, starving, asking why?
Begging that the war should end, refusing service, money, men.
All these means we have employed, to end the tide of unjust wars
Now we need another way, to bind the wounds that rend and slay
We need to take back all the power
Every second, minute, hour.
We to redeploy our inner power, rethink the course of history
Reclaim abandoned destiny.
We are not owned, but sovereign souls
Free to find undreamed of goals.
The vagrant might of those who rule
Must be challenged, changed, untooled.
Each of us has been misused.
Each of us, must now rechoose.
If we say that we cannot
If we give in, relinquish what we sought
If we excuse because we need
Savage others with our greeds
Heed our fears and not our dreams
Dreams will die unknown, unseen.
If we don't live the largest dreams
That misted glimpse of what life means
Do not find the place within
Where dreams all meet and know they're kin.
If we do not, give not, comply
Need we ask the reason why
Our core, our essence, had to die?
A world that shimmers, lives and breathes
A world united in One Dream
One living mind-spun long beginning
That, horizoned point that beckons, grinning.
Tempestuous and untried hearts
That doubt your power, please own and start
Become the living will sublime
And in this way become divine.
No. 43 First Plan
I walk into a past forgotten, see with eyes that understand
The pain is muted, nightmares slumber.Comprehension clears the Mind’s first plan.
I learn to trust the faith unmentioned, learn to hear unspoken words
Study text in life forsakenDispassion wakened, owned and true.
This cusp of ancient making owns me
Drew me on through shrouds of time
Excised and tutored shells to hold me
Taught me lessons most sublime.
Laughter fills me, promise echoes
Gifts forsaken fill with joy.
Love the harbor now retaken.
Love the tool now employed.
No. 44 Fear
I listen to her breath so muted
As she slumbers on the couch.Count up minutes as they vanish
Weight up both promises and doubt.Will time unwind as once was promised?
Will harbors open up to keep?Will Mother-arms confine or save her?
Will Mother Love relieve her grief? I live the fear of Mother waiting
I watch and listen, hope and trustI try to know before it happens
Try to cherish and be just. I listen to your breath intaken.
Wonder at her restless dreams.Worry, watch, my sleep forsaken.
Know that friends aren’t as they seem.A world that eats a child’s heart
Does not deserve to see life start.
(Thoughts on leaving NY and a most fragile child much loved.)
No. 45 Response.
All the boxes artificial, all the premises absurd
The form of human living is inside the cusp of Word.
Laughter winnows anguish and redefines the Path
As onward we all blunder with reason as our Staff.
Eyes see and move on blinded to the fragile mist of Truth.
While perceptions that are dying struggle with the new born eyes of youth.
All the colors come up white and black as absolutes disclose.
That humanity is chaos, a free-form Spirit no one knows.
No. 46 Second response
Yes. I think life into forms sublime,
redefine and retrofit
with curried thought and winnowed wit.
I listen to the unspoken words
that screech and cackle,
trill like birds.
I choose to live the life intense.
To me that makes most perfect sense.
A stupid heart; a too smart head
Can leave the soul most nearly dead.
While one instructs its bodied mate.
To summon rapture and elate.
The other groans and drags its feet.
Life unlived, is sure defeat.
And still I summon and employ
Intensity that can annoy.
Laughter trickles, falls and speaks.
Against the faults that make us weak.
Do I feel lucky?
Yes, I do.
The unasked question is - do you?
No. 47 Survival
Survival
Source of visions that peels back grief, flash of ecstasy all too brief.
Hope unfurled to pristine winds
That calls the soul and knits amends.
In minutes, moments, flashes seen, the truth of living builds our dreams.
Instructs our souls in joy-born musings, that misunderstood can be confusing.
Raptured moments flush out lies; those truth restatings that gods despise.
Surviving showed our misspent hours; anoints the soul with redeemed fires.
Survival is the only test to which any answer made is Yes.
No. 48 Unmade Dreams
In unmentioned carverned musings I reflect on unmade dreams
My internal introspection cannot mask the heat made seams
That pull and strain the holdings of the vanished source of lust
I count untasted pleasures now faded shades of rust.
The ticking on of hours that bring on horizons holding death
Grow louder with the metronome that whispers my distress.
And the tones grow loud and raucous and deliver up their lies
Because dreams deliver power and only lies will die.
The human part of hero speaks the fumblings of age
While the spirit all internal sees past the end of days.
So I listen to the monuments constructed by design
And know that all our follies will falter and decline.
The bright hard edge of honor is honed on blades of truth
The light of revelation gives us back the core of youth.
For the disbelief in dying, refuted by our years.
Finds renewal outside of boxes, premised out beyond our fears.
I breathe the ancient callings and I taste forgotten sights.
Welcomed homeland calling for a future masked in light.
No. 49 Volokh Courage? Is that a joke?
In the tortured convolutions of a brain without a dream
Illusions replace honor to deface what courage means.
No edge of fear confronted; no threat to life won through.
The smallness of his spirit is the ego that he grew.
Pathetic his positioning; mean his view of life.
Power is his recourse to smooth his way through strife.
Power is the weapon that he wields with savage glee.
Enjoying all the glitter in a world that grows less free.
He mangles the intentions of the Founders he opines.
While using law as justice he rapes the truth of their designs.
Courage to consume and take?
Courage - threats to end debate?
No courage is expected when power drives the mind.
This, the scripted plot that lies beneath his spoken lines.
Squeamish on confronting because others may attack
He has mastered every nuance and can hastily retract.
No courage in convictions and no sterner stuff employed
He weasels and he waffles when statutes aren’t deployed.
With the opulence of ego nurtured from his earliest of days
He trembles when confronted when the price of truth is paid.
Little cut-outs hid in paper and the pictures that bare all
Refute his sad pretensions with a force that surely galls.
Privacy the concept that shatters on the First
Public figures, public voice, and swelled pretensions burst.
In ape encrusted disguise and in pretense that belies
The smallest little faker that fell for his own lies.
So speak with muted ego, consider what you do.
The amendments you once defended have got the drop on you.
No. 50 Skin and Quiet
In the muted place of quiet where the light is dim and low
My mind inclines to fantasy and hears in tones unowned.In that summoned source of ecstasy, when needs resume their glow
I remember passioned glances that remind me I’m alone. Your smile lingers, lancing, my need to touch amend
Your lies, pierce unsanctioned, the course that marks my endYour hollow truth, abstracting, reminds what living trust can rend.
And in the dance of makings, there is neither love nor friend. But I remember lips that lingered on my own
I warm with fair illusions that tell me you are homeI wish the fantasy of magic that speaks the lies unsown
To fields of love born holdings driving anguish to the bone. Your lips are eloquent with lust
Your eyes are lies that broke my trust.
No. 51 Gold Answered
The touch of thought remembers elegance and dreams
Woven incrementals of the place that pain redeems
The cost of sad compliance with the emptying of time
Draws spirit's own defiance as the count of grains decline.
Yet our lives are written firmly in the book of God's peruse.
Every moment for our usage, every thought our own to choose.
Never near but never absent; never far from thought removed.
The cost of certain gladness contradicts and so reproves.
No. 52 Time Inhales
Let time inhale the sweetness of your smile
Breathing in the nuanced flavors that beguile.
I see your need
Escaping untold takings that responding keep me free
Lips and loneliness discourse and then beguile
Every inkling shadow first explains and then evidences denial.
I feel the touch of fingers as they trace passage on my skin.
I hunger for the blendings that would not divide us then.
I mull on mannered moments when our thoughts touched through our eyes
I transcend the sound of pausings that refuse, excuse and sigh.
I wander through what will not be, rejoicing to be seen
I find the source of waitings, choices making me most free
In the silences of siftings, in the musings never said
Are the echoed hours marking the choices of regrets
Remember this, most truly, in the moments ticking down
Choosings rued most newly were the first your heart once found.
No. 53 World Peace
Shock, surreal and unmade dreams,
Awoke my mind to silence screams.
A shroud of dust removed the light
As towers melted out of sight.
One year ago our nation bled,
and mourned in anguish for the dead.
Today we will remember grief,
But also cherish hopes for peace.
Peace be with us, peace amend
Make strangers family and all our friends.
Let peace for worlds begin at home,
all world peace is local grown.
No. 54 Moonlight
In the moonlight, silvered magic, that reflected sun-made sheen
Are the tones of life honed ecstasy that winnows out our griefs.
Misted orb of ancient portents speaks of silent throbbing needs
That cut past barriers of anger and breed up laughter and relief.
A draining out of hurting and a filling up with joy
A rare and fragile trusting that is easy to enjoy.
In the glow of night time velvet pulse the raptures of the skin
In the sheeted place of meeting do the chasms nearly thin.
In the softest kisses pressing; from the lightest touch of eyes
Come the sentiments elected that teach us to be wise.
From the meetings of our bodies to the meeting of our minds.
A distance uncircumfrenced that considers all that binds.
Remembered and recounted to delight, again, again
The sating of our hunger can leave us unfound friends.
So consider well the circles that hold convictions and define.
For truth, the fiercest warrior, moves through all kinds and lines.
No. 55 Earth Tones
One tone
Wind carries me into the silence
Alone through rushing clouds of mist
Alone through eddied weavings of the air
Alone through hungers and through needing.
I climb the columned wind in search of feeding.
One truth
Gliding, arching, diving, stretch my wings
Keep tempo with the pulsing blood inside
Keep eyes on movement; hunger always driving.
Keep talons sharp; I pleasure in the kill for meat inside me.
All hungers one; the living will incising.
And then:
The flight divined from need lifts from the Earth
Uncounted tones each add the nuance of their worth.
As lines of life revise, devise and blend
The Earth a single symphony with no end.
No. 56 Raptures Capture
When need builds into rapture
suffusing every pore
When elemental capture
forgets what came before.
When the laughter and the anger die inside the scope of need
There the helix-honing nature of the species sates its greeds.
When the rapture of the moment lingers on into the mind
Then the stature of the principles might be another kind.
For the sating of the senses is a matter of the seed
While continuance of discourse fulfills our other needs
The elegance of thinking writ out in acts of choice
Defines the higher values giving mind its finest voice.
And the meeting of the organs is anything but new.
For Mind designs the courtship that speaks its tones most true.
No. 57 Discourse in Contemplation of Nature
In the cycles of the living, in the tones and truths of breath
Do all improve dominion enjoined through many deaths
For life renews through dying, and all links forward need
Consumption of the fruit of life so their’s might onwards breed
The same through microbe probing, for place in sylvan soil
Same for cougar and for condor; the same for man who toils.
Intelligence our tool, but meat sustains our life
The vegetable that we boil may still resent the knife.
The hopeful pledge continues past struggle eons long
Our own seed must continue or be written down as wrong.
No. 58 First Word
Smiles fade and blossom;
eyes narrow and evade
Shoulders hunch and caution
follows from the place that mind has made.
But the suckling lips of child spoke a language all must know
The breast then comforted, beguilded in a language all its own.
The skin of magic feeding with its nipple smelling sweet
Was pillow and intention, the place where generations meet.
Eyes dancing in unspoke meaning for the pause in constant toil
Strokes exchanged then brought all meaning to minds rewriting coils
The rapture and reflection wrote the verse most first designed
Lips pursed to suck say Mama and so launch a course divine.
No. 59 Star Made Sojourns
Through pine and cedar framing, through dark and layered air
I watch the stars parading, eternal mask for human cares.
The madness and the mystery meet in tears that wash my face
The inside soul of sanctioned silence tastes the whisper of disgrace.
Disgrace for unright thinking: disgrace for unmade lives
Disgrace for shirking duty and disgrace that’s still denied.
A human world becoming something more from place unseen
A human world resisting all the things that human mean.
I watch the stars abiding in a ceiling without end
I wipe my eyes and breathe the evergreen, aromas sweet that mend.
There is enough to nurture; there is enough for all
There is enough in balanced life to find the spirit’s call.
The unity of Truthing: The raptures of delight
The well-honed place of honor is the human core devout.
That time is coming closer through both loss and grieving days
It touches each impartial to which is lost or which is saved.
The stars walk on in silence, their light a harbored place
And I forgive the former friends whose actions are disgrace.
No. 60 Wolf
The portents were for killing when the pack began its quest
The forest stilled to silence; bellies needed death.
The hot, red blood would slake them and the ebbing life would mend
The need that held would fill them when their teeth began to rend.
In a trot that heard the flicker of the birds perched high in trees.
In the smell and taste of eddies did they follow in their need.
Not for flesh and eating but for hungers in the mind.
The beginning of an eon that consumed the source divine.
The hunting and the coursing that consumed the truth with lies
Remains most ancient of distortion that is yet to be denied.
To elevate the killing; to make war the truth sublime.
Is the source of human folly; original for crime.
The pack of wolves is nature; the pack of Man denies
The form of human culture that reached beyond its lies.
From the takings and the color and the wealth of stolen lives
Is the wolf-born face of savage peering out from human eyes.
No. 61 Autumnal Taste of Time
When worlds apart grow closer and touch inside the Mind
The promise of the winter, while fierce may seem more kind.
The sore sure ache of dying gives way to ancient trust.
When fertile Earth gives birth to life we see life may be just.
In the mild days of autumn, that portent the silver snows
The unseen worlds are pulsing, closer, near and known.
We hover in the anteroom that awaits us all
We taste the untried fruits of death, and feel the coming pall.
And in the moments mentioned when we know that we will die
We also see the echoed truth that all death can deny.
Continuance in rapture and spirit held in thrall
The first best glimpse will capture the soul that hears its call.
In the vivid days of autumn when we gather up our bread.
The other worlds are waiting to harvest us to death.
No. 62 Memory
From the silence undetected comes the memory of days
That release both joy and wretchedness each in its own way
For the cooling days of autumn hold the promise of respite
While the heat of angry calls bid the soul to endless night
From unsummoned place of passing, from the echoes never born
From the rage of hate and hurting are the images retorn.
From the long dead years of living from a soul in forward flight
Come all degrees of knowledge from the inner place of light.
Redemption of the promise and completion of the voyage
The threads of time are tied off on the edge of endless void.
So that all might join the rapture and understand the gift
So that none might miss the capture and be lost inside the mist.
So that seven voices rising might find peace and rest sublime
And that one united people may live in whole divine.
From a place of fractured anger and from a silence ages long
Come images that heal us, all threads inside one song.
No. 63 Source
From the first unfettered tryings to the last age-aching song
Does the hope of unwon power come to mark the metered tones
As the avenues of silence touch the source of pain
Are all the needy whiners told that whimpers have no gain.
In the still, terse sketch of never are the penultimate of greed
And the first come recouraged moment tells us all we know of grief.
For the taste of unshed grieving takes us beyond the grasp of time
And the echoes of unspent measures; small taste of the divine.
You walk with me awakened from a sleep stretched eons long
And the first best sound of gladness tells us all of right and wrong.
In the manner of the ages that stifled all release
Are the unpaid tolls of sages first discovered and then released.
So when your night-thoughts take you to the places never seen
Remember that your visions are the only thing redeemed.
No. 64 To a Hopeful Poet trying to Sell a Book
I take a moment from a day fraught with toiled needs
To read a poem that incants the urge that makes you free
Free to speak in worded tones
Free to live you’re life alone
Free to know pangs unrequited
Free to leave words unrecited.
To write the candenced tones of truth
To ripple laughter born in thought
To fight the battle to be heard
With emotions carried in your words
This, the banner taken up
This the life of wind milled devising
This the least and most of human paths
That echo words that do not last.
Tomes of poems are writ each year
No one reads them, knows or cares
Write for pleasings, not for gold
Books of poems are never sold.
