Tag: poems

A Scene of a Street in Ancient Times

A scene of a street in times long ago,

Whence colours, people and dreams did flow;

Almost beyond memory

Are those days of bustle and revelry,

Before the Misanthropes

Cried wolf, were heard, and stifled hopes

Spiteful seeking to legally blight

Ambition’s envy-breeding light,

And mask the Beauty and choke the Arts

Which tear the veil from their petty hearts,

They who preached themselves as warriors righteous

For the addicts, the poor and homeless

Now they fume, and curse, and turn aside

If shown the bankruptcy, ODs and suicide:

It is a poison pill; a bitter herb

This trading work and commerce for eternal CERB.

Yet they hide and scowl, and bawling demand

Their castles’ rent from calloused hands;

Those who strive, they mock and scorn,

As Living itself from life is shorn;

But just as from Winter’s ice and mud,

The apples bloom and maples bud,

However hateful, a herd of sheep

Cannot forever frozen keep

The Love and Faith and Livity

That are our True Humanity.

Pacific Highway

The highway snakes through the ocean of conifer trees

Through the fog-shrouded mountains, high above the sea

Where trucks and saws through the summer hum,

And fitful dreams sometimes echo with ghostly drums…

*

Sallow, amorphous faces

Drifted in from unknown places

Wait lonely, frost-bitten nights

Playing Russian roulette with each pair of approaching lights.

Dispossessed tenants who are their own rent

Paid through the nose

From meager accounts soon spent.

Trembling, sun-starved hands collecting unwritten bills;

The primeval stands of Douglas fir

Shading the stain of social ills…

*

Summer’s rude growth of reeds

Swallows, thrown from a passing van,

A black plastic bag of…old beer cans…who knows?

And a debt still owed

Contracted on the side of a Pacific road.

Exiled Among the Crowd

Adrift, whipped on by fear, fashioning a mask

Image of the doppelganger of defiant daydreams,

Frantic trembling, lest it should tear at the seams.

*

Hollow shells, growing ever more hollow;

It is easy to lose track of one’s soul;

In the suffocating darkness, the lonely vastness,

Where that which is scattered may not be made whole.

*

Some suffer in silence, some seek a prideful fall;

Ah, priceless is a knowing heart, a warm lamp amidst the somber pall.

*

A soft prison insidious cruel;

When wounds are forgotten, the heart abandons the battle.

The flesh unconscious indulged, the spirit, numb, slowly starves on watery gruel.   

*

The day done and the night still, the mind half-lucid wanders,

Losing the struggle to sleep, beginning to fret;

For misdeeds and deeds undone equal carry a life-sentence of regret.

*

Was it wise to part

If, when asked “why?” we armour ourselves with anger?

Alas, to spare us tears we impose an exile on our hearts,

And make of ourselves a stranger.