poetry

Enlightenment and Fall

Once was a wide world, wrapped warm with white wool, and wandering wights' o'erways;

beauty bent bountiful brow, bewitching brook and body with belonging;

inhabitants imbibed irradiance imbued in intimate intent;

until another, underhanded, undone, undead, and unfulfilled

voiced virile offer with veneer of value but vanishing

Slow the spool unwinds
in geometric lines
through space and over time,
the shape begins its hinting
at the final form
from molten plastic born
on base plate still warm –
now you’re 3D printing

An ambler at night
is told morning is near
but he scarcely believes
he’ll see clearly his way even then –
all his life he’s lumbered through
sunless and moonless rotunda
sans light but expanse-shrouded fires
nigh older than time

He's tracked the circular tread
of their wandering ways overhead
and studied their rolling reflections in vast black
span of the

Abaddon’s gate stands gaping wide,
smoke rising black in dark-mode lets
issue forth from endless depths
malign servants prophesied.

To gaze on it we block the sun,
cross threshold with our handheld portal,
Lucifer lets out a chortle
for our troubles just begun.

All-present abyss distributedly
covers the globe with its contents,
indestructible, continually
ra

When Moses’ eye descried the garish green torch burning,
burning brightly while he braved the turning of the day,
he must have marveled as the bush continued open spurning
of the countless tongues whose licks’ light touch invoked more flame.

Dry decades crawled across and cracked that barren land,
land that long left branch and beast well-tanned from

Signs of Fall
II.

In emerald seas overhead,
a few select leaves are already blinding red,
trying to hasten the changing of their brothers
who are not quite so forward-minded.

Signs of Fall

I.

A brown plume of infield dirt
mounts on a stiff breeze
as undefined and ephemeral
as the days of a summer gone
by the time the runner’s made it home
the dissipating dust cloud soars over
a neighboring field where town soccer
has begun – and then it is no more.

Long I lay awake last night

meandering through mournful dreams

in coal-black fields with slaves whose plight

was not what it first seemed.

They hardly noticed hunger’s play

nor even fast-bound iron fetters;

’fact if asked they’d likely say

those made them their own fathers’ betters.

“What used to grow here?”, queried I

to ash-filled field’s inhabitant.

“@g