Tag Archives: poetry by request

The Speed of Now

The axes of this world will stay their course;
and with them, our velocity remains
a constant, knowing time but not remorse.
The humming center holds to its refrain

and with its gentle song, eases the pain
of steady transformation, death and birth,
of our pretensions, hesitance and vain
attempts at isolating our true worth.

You’ll find a serendipity of mirth
between these notes that constantly erase
the past and give the future a wide berth
for dreams that too will age and be replaced.

It comes upon the dawn with each new day,
embracing all and turning none away.

08 DEC 2003

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To Love Without Words is to Lie to Life

In this unspoken space where lovers, mute,
imagine beyond thought a world to come,
one comes to rest upon the hardest truth:
faced with a simple word you are struck dumb,

and know to speak of it and not to lie
would tear apart your fragile acted sham.
Yet from this conflict, weakly, your soul will fly,
where true love would not pause or give a damn.

To know the taste of love and to refuse
the sweeter cup, accepting bitterness
while denying passion its proper place,

is to play a sad game where all will lose:
making all life dying, breeding weakness,
and lying to all with a stranger’s face.

07 DEC 2003 (for Andrew J. Thomas)

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Blacksmithing

for LJ user occipitaldruid

Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from The Village Blacksmith

If you would have your horse’s hooves re-shod
or plowshares rendered from your tools of war,
a barrel wrapped round with an iron rod
or brand new railing where your fence is poor

Just make your way out to the smithy’s door,
his crucible will change your scrap to gold;
there on the anvil that he stands before
the future’s formed by the great sledge he holds.

But you must work the bellows as he toils
and bring with you the raw goods to transform;
your eyes will burn and your tears turn to sweat

as the inferno brings your blood to boil.
And then, at last, your soul, in molten form
will break free of the mold of past regret.

04 DEC 2003

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There Is No Mundane

The clock will stop that human hands must wind;
its mechanized contrivances will fail,
and in those precious seconds between time
the boundary between the worlds is frail.

On one side, secret lands where shadows pale;
and on the other, bright and vibrant dreams
where words escape like mist, and leave no trail.
In neither place a thing is what it seems.

The universe is woven from both streams;
it winds its way through both darkness and light.
The truth swims in its currents as it gleams,
where foolish souls will try to grasp it tight.

To value just the gem you hold, is tragic;
To see them all and let them be is magic.

03 DEC 2003

for LJ user novapsyche

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How Fragile Is This World

for LJ user i_dread

How delicate the web that occupies
us, spider-like, in our attempts to mend
and build this world before the binding dries.
We toil from waking to each day’s end,

constructing fragile lanterns for our light
that sway unsteady in each tender breeze,
imagining a world beyond our sight
where lives some power that we seek to please.

Yet, at the close of all our labor’s use,
just simple threads of gossamer remain;
and all the tidy ends of things unloose
in one short afternoon’s soft, gentle rain.

Still, we build on, despite such evidence,
And cast our shadows, for experience.

03 DEC 2003

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New Love

Each love, when new, burns with a lusty fire;
it feeds on what it finds without regret,
and warms the soul upon a glowing pyre,
not thinking on those things not happened yet.

Wrapped in the arms of amorous delight,
amazed as each discovery unfolds,
two lovers wait, expectant, for the night,
and in the embers nestle ‘gainst the cold.

They fan the flames and wonder in the heat,
providing fuel with each excited breath;
and when at last they lay as one, complete,
their ashes, like the Phoenix, know no death.

Ah, new love, if it lives through this event
Will be a fire whose source is never spent.

02 DEC 2003

for lj user dougs

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Poetry On Demand

why can’t i clean the palette with
a wide stroke of the pen, and then
when the tabla is inky black
use a beam of light to form new words
that leave their silver traces in the
fading mist of significance?

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