Monthly Archives: March 2017

Blank Canvas: kyrielle

Believe it: in a moment’s time,
what plans you’ve made can all unwind
and with a splash of turpentine
your canvas is again a blank.

No matter the expense and time
in pigment, brushes, sweat and wine,
no other act is as sublime:
your canvas is again a blank.

Perhaps it’s opportunity:
to start again, to disagree
with first intent, to be set free.
Your canvas is again a blank.

Or maybe just a timely prick;
ego’s balloon deflates so quick.
True art employs such dastard tricks:
your canvas is again a blank.

The simple blinking of an eye,
and one’s whole lifetime flashes by
before an ounce of paint is dry,
your canvas is again a blank.

The painting is your legacy,
but won’t reflect the means, you see,
only the end is guaranteed:
your canvas is again a blank.

31 MAR 2017

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Time Travel: katauta

What is this thing life?
Even stuck still in amber
the passage of time remains.

What use is living?
Even the largest river
remembers the breeze touching.

What is this thing life?
Keeping track of each minute
wastes yet another minute.

30 MAR 2017

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Let Loose: hir a thoddaid

Let loose the chains that bind you to the past;
though they restrict, they cannot hold you fast.
The future is not set; no die is cast.
Whatever plans and schemes you make, don’t last;
tomorrow’s rain and sun mind no forecast.
What is to come, will come, no matter what;
a shut door cannot slow storms so vast.

29 MAR 2017

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Not So Simple: heroic sonnet

How simple it seems to be born again:
to never reach the stage of an adult,
but each time that you feel a growing pain,
to plead no contest and avoid the fault,
accepting being only just a child
with no responsibility to age,
nor consequence for acting dumb and wild
besides the reprimand of childhood’s cage.

How easy it must be to start anew
each time you slip in error, to reset
the game, and once again replay it through
retaining what in life you would forget,
thus seeming at advantage to proceed
as if your past mistakes had little cost,
so you advance while others stop to bleed
and you gain opportunities they lost.

Too bad that’s really not the way it goes;
just your belief won’t always make it so.

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This is the Morning: gwawdodyn

This is the morning of the first day;
nothing much remains of yesterday
except some dust in the clay on the wheel,
a flew flecks of shadow in the gray.

This is the morning of moving on;
what happens now is already gone,
chaff on today’s mown lawn blown by a breeze
that has no memory of the dawn.

This is the morning of here and now;
in past soil turned under by the plow
its seeds take hold, somehow, and make their way.
No pause for reminisce is allowed.

This is the morning of the new day;
what can remain of yesterday,
except the faint scent of decay that hangs
above fragrant, new blooms as they sway?

This is the morning of what will be;
let all yesterday’s visions go free.
What good their subtlety to you today?
Past boldness provides no guarantee.

27 MAR 2017

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New Directive: glosa, glose, gloss

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather – Robert Frost

Back out? How far? To what remove?
What will that further distance prove –
that some great reset of the clock
will change the past, and thereby block

the entropy and slow decay
that brought us to the present day,
where we bewail our world’s demise?
How could that fate be a surprise?

The detail wasn’t burnt or lost
without our knowledge; we helped toss
those leaves onto the burning pile,
convincing ourselves all the while

that an ideal of greater good
was possible, if we just could
change everyone else without first
changing ourselves. That bubble burst,

and now we cry alack and woe.
We knew then how this thing would go:
that words like fate and destiny
sound empty, but our vanity

insists we cannot be to blame,
and seeks an Other we can name
as the great cause of the dismay
we see as the threat of the day.

Those better days of halcyon,
in truth, ’tis better that they’re gone;
Just ask the disenfranchised then
how golden was that age of men,

how green their grass, how free their reign,
in that time we think free from pain?
If you would enshrine some day gone
as when the world was good, dream on!

Back out? ’Tis but a wistful dream!
Instead: become, instead of seem,
a human soul that wants to grow
beyond the boundaries you know.

24 MAR 2017

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Whatever Works: ghazal

To say positive thinking breeds success
is to a point the truth – well, more or less.

Reality, however, would suggest
what matters more is really openness:

acceptance of what comes as being blessed
with more experience and evidence

that life provides in both pleasure and stress
instructions for achieving happiness;

that seeing plus and minus makes complex
equations of existence that compress

the ebb and flow of being to a test,
a pass or fail we struggle through, at best.

Far better, say the sages, east and west,
to use whatever works, and leave the rest.

23 MAR 2017

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