Setaside's Poetry.... if you like...

OKAY OKAY... it took forever to get the thread posted, longer than I could wait.. here's one you may have seen before, but I like it.

ISLE/future holdings


The rain has stopped and the lightning has chased it's tail for the last time. No thunder to rattle the screens, threatening to be let in. The wind no longer shakes the trees, trembling in humility and bowing in unison to the invisible majesty that is any given storm... even nature must worship it seems. The clouds have slowed their screaming to a low moan and the sidewalks are reasserting their dull, grey, cracked exteriors as if to prove that nothing could faze them, nothing excites them, life is all so boring. The birds settle in, resigned to the chores of tomorrow. The worms resign themselves to almost certain doom come early morn and the babes sigh quietly having been shushed of their rumbling fears, the gods at play, their fates held by their own eyes still searching for something to actually see. Windchimes play their songless tune, the wind needing refinement and education for such a moody instrument so difficult to master in retrospect. Trophies no longer matter. The house is down. The dreams alight and settle on phone wires looking for a home. Water courses down a parking lot vein refreshing hidden cracks we'll never know until next season's dandelion rears its yellow mane and dons its powdered coat. Though the ribbons flutter, the angel never can tell where nor when the motion begins. Confused by the noise that surrounds he trudges homeward, the mud only slowing slightly to allow passage. Molasses is swamplike, he reminds himself. It is dark like chocolate, but it is a falsehood. A syrupy muck that makes way as if it were a moving tide in slow motion. Devious even. Sly. What was it they all got into? The door ajar, the porch light blown, the dog asleep under the rocker. Newspapers scratch the breeze, grabbing for purchase, seeking flight. The print holds down, holds back, never gives of itself, never fades. The stories hidden in between like secrets to be told in a second grade ear. The storm's passage only serves to ruffle and upset their timidity. They share their tragedy in silence, knowing that the rains can only wash away so much and that the city slumbering silent below the eastern horizon will have much to answer for. Transparent is the love, a wisp of steam, a tendril of fog... never touching for long, the fingers grasping yet weak. It basks in the accomplishments of summer and the burnt asphalt that is man's answer to the trailbreak. Sacrifice has never come so easy. There are only so many words to read in the aftermath of a storm, the books yet to be comfortable holding so many lives in the one binding philosophy of reach and affect and dreamreachhurtlovedestroy... what affectations must be reached to catch the rain? What emotive? This page turner is far beyond the skill of even the best of us to dissuade from its purpose- time has more enemies than any other- though it carries forward in gentle manner. It no longer treads with strength upon the graves of others, instead weaving its way amongst the headstones with bated breath as if superstition had finally bitten deep enough to withdraw. The grass bends only somewhat under the force of running footsteps and raising up afterward as if to witness the fleeting figure in the mist and darkness of the early hours. The docks beckon. The water calls. The gulls cry and circle their morning ritual, a life begun anew. The water has cleansed enough and their song has changed from the melancholy of well traveled and overflighted birds, to the joy shared by a chick in its first day of winged bliss. Once the sun rises reminiscence itself is but a memory, superstition a faded myth. No markings left of the barking lightning and love is once again allowed corporeal form, to whisper and wind and grace and to eyelash... the town shutters spring open as it gathers its first breath of the morning air, the dawn an oxygenated treat. And as the first of the townspeople, those who understand the day and its callings, make their way onto the cobblestone streets, a glint in the distant suggests that eternity has just winked at its own private jest; one in which, all in all, life and death are much the same. The blooming petal, the falling autumn, the daily balance... time is nothing but the measurement of what we remember. The ocean understands such laughter, the pelicans cry as fast is broken, and the new day has arrived.

Thank you very much for reading, lifeisworth.... I am glad that you did.

I have never tripped while reading the dictionary but now that you mention it, if I am ever to trip, that will be one of the things I will most certainly do. It sounds as though I could learn alot.

Another for you all...

“Ballerina,”

screamed the speaker
The sound molding its words
As glazed clay in the air
Lift your legs higher woman
You’ve nowhere left to run
Surrounded by the radio glare
Glanced off a windshield
And set aside to be packed away
With yesterday’s holiday
She
As they call her, thumbs pointed
Indiscreetly
Indiscriminately
In her general direction
Screams in silence
In midlife orchestral shutdown
The seed to
The beginnings of
Her own fallen grace
A misplaced step
A misdirection
An aerial misinterpretation and
She collapses in a heap
A multicolored
Multi-patterned pile of leaves
That is the woman of autumn
Sad and decaying
A butterfly losing its wings
In the acid rain
Such is the city life
For the natural one
Beauty
Grace
And a losing place
Lost in the gunshot
The sixhundredfeetpersecond
Of a misfire
Temporal perhaps
Hers was too hot
She was too high
And no one was willing enough
To crane their necks
To read the billboard
Upon which she slept
Pride is a crime
Shared and sinned by us all
And she was not the first
To die for our sins
The smell of sulphur
Swirling in the aftermath
Of some bastardized civilization
With no understanding of what lies
Between its gripping fingers
Entangled in her
Whirling hair
Splayed windblown across the sky
Are the lives and lines of millions
Butterflies without wings
Moths in the moonlight of the
Passing windshields
That wink nightly
Slyly
Like the secret that everybody knows
Why state the obvious
When all it does is undermine
What may already be undone
Like the broken shoelace
The frozen smile
The scream of a bullet
The melodic raucous encore
The soul of the dance
The ballet
“Ballerina,”
I screamed as
I heard the squall
Smelled the burning rubber
The melting asphalt
That acrid tar
The last thing I saw as
I fluttered my dusty wings
Enough to settle and dry
-the music hurts at times you know-
Was the fading red glare of the parking lights
Rounding the curve about a block away
Poor girl.

LOL for those of you with ADD or ADHD...

I thank you for your attempts at plowing through all this. Now I can only hope that some of you have OCD and will read it over and over and over and over....


New stuff soon.

seta

quote:

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lifeisworth wrote on 09-01-2003 01:09 PM:
why is she dying?

---

Why does anything innocent die? The reasons are as varied as the quantity of poppy seeds on any given muffin. I never gave it much thought because it was so Natural, really. She was dying, that was that. It was tragic and beautiful, like any other metamorphosis. But along the way I fell in love with her and realized that, regardless how natural, how run of the mill, how course-of-events all this was, that she maintained that "special-ty" that was oh so infinitely human.

It was her time, if you can dig that. Her last petal had fallen. How cliche. How true.

a new one in the next bit....