POEM 4

Man looks up with a vacant stare

He knows there’s hope, just not where

It came to him one night

In a blinding flash of light

A smile came across his face

There is hope for the human race

Knowledge is the path to what is right

It scrapes away the simmering blight

Leaving the raw beauty without a trace

POEM 5

The sky is blue, a peaceful hue

The finches and chickadees came calling

The seeds from the feeder are falling

The clematis strangles the trellis

The dogs are barking because they are jealous

A peaceful aura radiates from hill to hill

The stroll down the well-worn path is such a thrill

Life can be a walk in the park

A single candle will pierce the dark

POEM 6

It is known music soothes the savage beast

This is as true as the sun rises in the east

Music is a magical thing

A million variations make my heart sing

Music can make you happy

Sometimes is makes you feel sappy

It gives movies character and strength

To do its job, it will go to any length

Music can stir anyone to a crazy dance

Music makes the world a better place,

Just give it a chance

POEM 1

Love yourself as you are, you are a complete person

Failure to do so will make life worsen

Love all humanity, we are in this together

Proclaim it out loud, hold up the bright banner

When all is said and done

There will be plenty left for the heart that is won

POEM 2

As he rode down the winding road

Forgetting his boss, who acted like a toad

The surreal freedom enveloped him like a mantle

Detachment from the troubles that followed like a battle

A feeling too rarely experienced

The calm is like wisdom evidenced

POEM 3

People often come here to weep

The ocean, your secrets it will keep

The wind stirs a fury

From a safe distance, not to worry

The sun is out

It is serene all about

Children play, the kites are away

The beach may be gray,

But it’s a glorious day

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “ask not what he meant when he wrote it, but what you felt when you read it”-me

19 vein scissors season room crest

The vein in his forehead pulsed with an anger few people feel

He felt the anger crest and roll through him, it was real

In a forgiving world, this anger was out of season

With gleaming scissors, he cut the lonely flower without a reason

In the gloomy room, it stifled anger and spread goodwill like a beacon

20 pernicious saddle pen rove fizzle

A flood of complaints at the counter is pernicious

Makes one want to rove the world and not be callous

Time to get back in the saddle and greet a new day

Grab a bucket of zeal, make this your new play

Let not your energy fizzle, pump it up, go your way

Pen your best thoughts, they will comfort you when you go astray

21 yellow tempest lemon spin incredible

Life can be a tempest under a microscope

Without help, it can be hard to cope

Music answers man’s incredible, eternal thirst

Evil will spin a web that is cursed

Smell the yellow rose, reorder priorities first

Life is not a lemon, there is always hope

Ignore the worst

Poetry is the most personal form of literature. We each have our own experience base and world view. What the words mean to me can’t possibly be the same for you. This is not a problem; this is what makes poetry what it is. I know my poetry doesn’t follow established literary rules, but my poetry, my rules.

16 peninsular arse framed cows peripheral

Our planet is framed by a structure encompassing all living things

Nothing is peripheral to our existence, we are what sings

There is no room for the peninsular, we are continuous

Be not an arse, kindness in not arduous

Just as cows give milk, life is what kindness brings

The spectrum of life is the whole of us

17 tend sharp seam transform swing

Darkness collapses to transform the heart empty

The cold strengthens and makes me feel eerie

The seam between the emptiness and the abyss is dread

The sharp call of the raven makes me shake in my bed

Memories of that day tend to haunt that I fled

The dawn has come, I hear the chimes swing in the wind

I grab my clothes and proceed to conquer, I am disciplined

18 dizziness tick octagon rattle culture

The dizziness of a tumultuous world crushed upon me

The foreboding tick of the clock told me I wasn’t free

The rattle of the chains haunts the memory of that day

The culture of unforgiveness casts a shadow over those who would be free

Like the octagon sign stops traffic on the way, a little kindness makes it go away

13 follicle ecstatic drone ostrich sleep

Peaceful sleep, refuge from the melancholy

We have a beautiful mind, use it I plea

Don’t be like an ostrich with our head in the sand

We are not a one-man band

A new view of the world

Through the eyes of a rose prismed drone

None of us should be a clone

Embracing the ecstatic play of a newborn lamb

Will get you out of a jam

Happiness is not a vestige of the past

It’s a follicle of future truth

It should not be passed

14 syncopate leather hair hello Jupiter

As I awaken from my slumber

My feet greet the floor, my hair asunder

The day says hello, life is truly great

Music from my guy style music system is syncopate

Jupiter is syzygy with Mars

The aroma of my leather recliner

Brings visions of a better life in the stars

15 erudite cube limestone France sober

Seventy years since sober, drunk on a constant stream of knowledge

Certainly not yet erudite, not either filled with garbage

The pinnacle of knowledge not yet written in limestone

Knowledge employs age like the fine wine of France

The cube of knowledge is still knowledge, its own clone

Progress worships knowledge like its own

10 secret blind renew serendipity mere

The forest held the secret for so long hidden

The beauty distracted the seekers from their task

It made them blind to the treasure hidden within

The power to renew and again begin

The serendipity of the eternal forest

Was but a mere passing thought to ordinary men

11 forensic hinge milk spiral catholic

The spiral of consciousness is often a blur

We seldom slow to smell the myrrh

Unleash our forensic self to find the clue

The milk of kindness will create a new you

Don’t let your existence hinge on the will of others

Make yours a catholic view, not one of the actors

12 phoenix electric aurora thread desert

The human mind begins in the vast desert of emptiness

Ideas, thoughts, and visions arise like a phoenix from the dust

The electric creative process is the thread of progress

The plethora of ideas is the aurora of a life to trust

 

Just verse today.

7 stone word muddle broken noise

They say she had a heart of stone

They misperceived, it was actually broken

The muddle of the noise set the tone

A kind word healed as it was spoken

 

8 heart apple battery psychiatrist between

In matters of the heart, the psychiatrist is a has been

It merely needs a charge, it is the battery of life

It lies between reason and emotion, not at the seat of chagrin

Like an apple it will one day be ripe

Time is the architect, let life begin

 

9 penultimate lace paradox bastard syllable

When in the penultimate chapter of life

Don’t let the paradox of existence increase your strife

Don’t let the lace of reality allow bastard screams

Let no one know a syllable of your dreams

I don’t have any training in poetry, so I googled poetry to see what it is. This is the definition I found: “literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm”. I’m going to say what I do when I say I’m writing poetry matches this definition. I’ve put together some descriptive phrases for my poetry: some are painful to squeeze out, some write themselves, some take on a life of their own, some are contorted, surprising, masterful, amateur, profound, arcane, weird, but not all at once. That is for the reader to judge. Rather than titles, I’ve decided to just number them. They are short (at least for now) and they are their own title. I found a source of about 500 words. I put them in a spreadsheet and randomly sorted them and put them in groups of 5. Here are a few more. The first two are from someone else’s grouping.

4 avarice ambition envy anger pride

Ambition and pride are precarious bedfellows

Are we yet winning

Avarice is the progeny of envy

Life again becomes a ring

Kindness conquers anger

It makes my heart sing

5 hello betrayal France lily flair

The world greets me and says hello

It has abandoned the old forms of betrayal

It displays a flair like never seen

A single lily is the best in France I have been

6 number frame exit art jockey

The number is just a frame of mind

Life is about the art, not the exit

We are just a jockey riding life to the sunset

The ride is all we have, exalt in it

It’s probably been a year since I read a book called Fierce on the Page by Sage Cohen. Sage is a blogger who writes about writing. The book is a collection of posts that tie together her thoughts on how to be a better writer and budget time for people who think they are too busy to write. It is an excellent book, but that is not what I’m writing about today. Her primary passion is poetry. I subscribed to her blog. One of her posts mentioned an exercise for poets that started with 5 unrelated words to be made into a poem. Several years ago, I thought it would be fun to be a poet, so I purchased a book on writing poetry and by about the third page, my head started to hurt. That was enough of that. Then along comes the challenge of 5 words. I tried it and used three of the words and then the big block hit. I left it in my journal and forgot about it for months. Then the pandemic hit and in a moment of boredom, I started reading some of my old journal entries and came across it. The poem finished itself. Something about the aurora cast by the pandemic. I thought: “well that was easy”. I went online (what else?) and found a site that had some more. I now have three done. I know nothing of the rules of writing poetry. They don’t have titles. That seems harder than writing the content. I have just used the five words for a title. Here they are so far:

Bruise horse milk reason bride

Truth is the bride of reason

What strange bedfellows they make

They ride the horse that is out of season

Leaving a bruise on that which is fake

The milk of kindness is spun

Vein verse bee rhythm thirst

This was to be a simple verse

The air has turned very terse

The rhythm of mother earth

Echoes humanity’s thirst

A vein of pollution streaks the sky

The symbolic bee begins to die

Dandelion rough rain antidote skill

The intrusion of a single dandelion in the spring

Nurtured by the welcomed chaos of rain

The antidote to an overly ordered mind it does bring

It calms the rough structure of a world that doesn’t forgive

With the skill of a masseuse, to help me live

 

The pandemic of 2020 is a horrific thing. We can only hope the trail of deaths doesn’t extend into 2021. There are no guarantees. If we don’t search for knowledge during this time, it will all be for naught. I believe there are many lessons to be learned during these tough times. I am going to expound on just one today. I’m a realist (sort of). This isn’t going to happen, but it should.

One thing the pandemic has shown the world is we are capable of emitting far fewer greenhouse gases and carbon pollution than we have been. Sure, it’s been painful, but we now know we can live through a little pain, especially if we do a little more planning than we have. Most of the models that purport to “solve” global warming show a 20-30 year timeline for full implementation. This is what I think: We should calculate what level of emissions the world can assimilate and set a target of 95% of that. I believe we should claw back some of what we have already lost. We should re-energize and strengthen the Paris Climate Accord. We should set up enforcement for noncompliance. Emission “credits” could be distributed to the various countries of the world based on population. Countries that can come in below their target can sell their credits to other countries. Additional credits can be earned through scientifically proven methods such as planting more trees. Conversely, credits would be reduced for the destruction of forests, etc. that mitigate emissions. The timeline should be reduced to three years. Yes, there will be much scrambling to stay on track. Whoever said saving the planet would be easy.

We could start by placing a worldwide moratorium on new coal-fired plants. Then we could set up a schedule for decommissioning the existing ones. In January I purchased a used hybrid vehicle when I thought I would be driving more. It gets 50 MPG. Does anybody need a one-ton, 4 wheel drive pickup for a solo, 20 mile commute to work? The needs of our planet do not extend to that kind of “entitlement”. This will be hugely disruptive to many industries such as aviation, autos, etc. These are just a couple of examples of where progress can be made. Humans are very resilient and resourceful. If we start with the necessary goal and work backward to provide ourselves with the best lives possible, we will succeed, and we will have a much better place to live. We could use tax credits and subsidies to spread the pain. There are alternative energy sources available and new ones can be developed.

This analysis is very incomplete, I just want to start some thought. I know we may never have the political will to make this happen, but a guy can dream.