Religion Among Us

The religious among us know that the planet is a slow-draining tub with tiny black mildew-

stained holes in the sealing caulk

They know that stagnant water cannot stand,

its seepage drains through until gravity takes hold and shapes its course correction all the way down to the bottom of the floorboards

Opening in idiosyncratic waves through daylight hours in advance of sycophantic displays

            escaping scrutiny, they call it for what it is

They recognize that master carpentry and architectural drafting are among the noblest

professions, yet are defined within their bountiful constraints

The religious among us sense a third dimension in translucent casting and enlightened stanzas,

            viewing them as transcendent while sensing their nascent decline and disturbance

Possessing a belief not in what can be possessed,

            but in the riches of the transitory and the fulfillment of transference

They forge ahead in stoic grace, making good on internal resolve to procure modeled states of

being, while improving the deterioration and desecration happening around them,

warming grave hearts in fellowship along thin air space between laughter and tears

MM 3/17

American Street

Summer’s writhing beauty,

grieving in isolation’s stain, paved over –

bountied thickets, turned earth,

fallowed fields

Pillars of stray sticks and clay

paths to the top. Unfettered in their view

of imagined decades

Bloody battles laid bare in pages

of the World Book

Statistics of the dead –

gruesome and grotesque,

bravely reenacted by boys on the street

Supply runs,

the exchange in Doraville – ‘Old Sarge’

Replica, semi-automatic, battery-operated M-16

charged soundscapes, flanked

in the woods behind our houses

Bunkered in camouflage gear,

with face paint sticks,

and hot water canteens

Go-cart trails across the street,

written in the trees,

too afraid to ride or drive, I’d watch

At the edge of a long backyard,

a creek dammed in piles dug out,

erosion of its banks,

attracting mosquitos, and the ire

of grandmothers

The street we’d roam,

packing Daisy pellet guns. Distressing friends

shooting at squirrels on power lines

Kicking fences of angry yard dogs

Spying and profiling,

across and between a ditch and some yards,

our tormented neighbor, brandishing,

and his idle threats

My older cousins played stickball

over Miller Lite in the backyard

of their bachelor house

Wiffle balls wrapped

in black electric tape

Thrown heat, it would welt your skin

if pegged, your bare hands if caught,

off a wicked yellow plastic bat

A trove of dirty magazines in their front

bathroom closet, not

just Playboy or Penthouse,

they had Genesis, Gallery and Oui

Taking one from the bottom of the pile

in my waist band, I’d sneak past

them and their friends, drinking

and talking about the lines on games,

calling their bookies

We traded baseball cards out of plastic sheets,

re-visioning series’ in the yard,

reimagining each future and past

season of major American team sports,

but not hockey or soccer

Night games of Capture the Flag,

epic in the darkness

with only one light on the street – pitch black all around

Explorations of the spring, the destination

of the neighborhood creek

A live crawdad was swallowed whole

on part of the journey

I blazed a trail, bionic speed,

over rumors of wild dogs,

all the way home

Summer’s blissful abandon,

rezoned for posterity,

its development passed

in memoriam

MM 3/17

Spring Solution

As it were, the last memory,

wafting across blooming countryside shelter,

from spring’s whipping Mistral

Time’s effortless pass left us stranded

on vistas, vines untethered, atop cobbled soils

Grand meandering currents to the west,

and mighty glaciered peaks of the east

Offroading in a French rental car –

risking damage and stern consternation,

for the sake of blathering discourse

on the significance of a slope

Fascinations defining all composition,

and the storied evolution of dirt

Origins upstream,

from steel and iron

locks, setting the flow adrift,

splitting currents from adjoined waters

Passersby waving away, unbowed

A culminated city overlooked

by ominous clouds and gothic brows,

through colors from an age of enlightenment

From coliseum slopes of granitic density,

terraced erosion, too steep to tread

out the bitter blood and iron

from its sweet fruits

From ancient stone crosses,

monastic rhythms over centuries,

laid in pastoral patterns,

on gentle grades, gleaning redemption

and a kiss of sublime, resting

in an unkindly giving moment

To pastel brick-stone street cafes,

amid bustling city markets, oblivious

to monuments of purposeful past

Retreats of forgiveness

in shining fields of lavender, stone outcroppings

overlooking the vast indifferent sea,

or the enveloping meadows

harbored from crumbling ruins

of solemn futures

MM 3/17 

Transitional Landscapes

Undulating, unveiling, timbered pines

in the country, on the interstate, east of Dallas

Across transitional landscapes

into the rocky planes, north-central

Heading west, cross-fading

from a bizarre winter wind,

dull and balmy, that December from the south

Charmed discomfort, or surreal confusion,

headlong into dissent, away

toward all that was unknown

The dry-ice desert-scape along the 40

in northern New Mexico,

tracing its gaze across the southwest

as the moon shone

the snow in stunning black light

From eras glazed over mounting exposition,

abstracted from within and dutifully charged,

defined in propulsion, then deadened in tracks

A lier in wait, unknowing, rearranging

weaves of ill-timed, esoteric inscription

read aloud in earnest –

in tender loving cruelty

Dress Rehearsal Rag bellowing omens,

touching raw nerves, eliciting your tears

Rattling window speakers, raw baritone slicing

meditation through air, like Santoku blades

carelessly cutting our silken skin

Dropping weight in symphonic clangs,

spontaneous gasps, staggering away,

projecting ahead – remains on the road

When we met, I’d asked you where you’d been

over swaths of time, both toiling and spent

cratering distance, charting a path, away

from points where we may have intersected

I’d marveled at the grace and ease, your words,

the presence in the shaken space

where your eyes glimmered the darkness

Yet drawn back and muted,

my eyes crusted over crucial intervals

An opaque journey, unclean and unclear,

fed and spawned, bountiful and unrequited

I could only hope

to take you there with me

 MM 3/17

Introduction from the Prism of Past (Part One Theme)

Photo by Heath Truitt posted to my Facebook page

I cut my teeth to attention deficit,

impulses, and anxious shifts

To the tension soundtrack of hardcore

punk and manic thrash – all caustic assessments

Under the specter of Cold War arms races,

movies about the day after,

kids taking up arms,

or harboring aliens

Images of horror crudely circumscribed

in a cynical understanding of the future

void. Bomb threats were a supplement

to recess

Coming of age when the Berlin Wall toppled,

and slow currents of social justice swelled

and smoldered,

slow but steady like drought-ravaged green

in the Olympics’ basins,

so close to the sea

Informed and administered through a shift

toward unfiltered introspection

Carving out existence from a foundry

of conventional wisdom. I joined in around

the table to gain approval through osmosis

and relevant topics

Taking oaths in the cult of expectations,

with one eye toward knocking off

the proverbial chip, and one eye fixed

squarely on the past – hands steering away

Bought in on flawed premise,

in cynical acknowledgement

of the absurdity of burgeoning war,

and potential collapse

Cashing out – triangulating

what could be reconciled. Caving and carving,

but henceforth marrying what was saved

Finding hope in quasi-enlightenment forced

on the unsuspecting middle mass

Seeing the strain of humanity grappling

with the tilting axis to and from

its future, but finding

illuminations within the journey

Part One is a disturbance, an appeal,

a disappointment,

and an acknowledgement,

that the perspectives of past inform the future

more than they provide a cure

It’s a picture of the present

MM 3/17

Living Tones

Public Domain- Orbis Pictus

Written up in fragments of many

piecemealed verses trading onward

To each, a partial payment in its grace

            An ascent……….

The brilliant remnants of dissembled youth,

unclaimed,

fraught with enraptured turbulence

A steady beacon beams forward, warm, unafraid,

in your steady, guiding content

Undulating, uneven lines,

strewn about in their wake

Miraculous in reconstruction, pulsations in rhythm,

marked in hypnotic beams, brutal concealment, and mercy

The justice of your journey

Whimsically unbounded in spades,

                        injected with humor

Kindness unassumed and freely disposed, issued unawares

Uncanny in bright open fields, unfolded in simply sketched

shades of your enlightenment

Mystically connected,

bound in respite

A flair for unforgettable moments along its magnetic flow

Alighted from a knowing glance, shined down

in the ravished steps of your beauty

MM 2/17

Give it Back to Them

AP Image, Public Domain

Give it back to them---

Their country maimed and reclaimed,

sterilized in iodine, fortressed,

stripped clean of nascent perceptive reason

Fodder stoked for the risk averse,

clamoring for safe keeping, and securely

clutching chemically derived commodities…             (in lieu of…)

Give it back to them---

Primal and uncured,

basking in lust for fearmongering

hysteria-colored lens, encroachment of the other

Rights versus privilege, in mutual exclusivity,

in birth and bleeding,

in worship of the suckling pig…

Give it back to them---

Anesthetized psyches return,

in a revised dream deranged into order,

its religion an indivisible mass

of narrowly defined inversion

from ingrained and learned principles

into delineated acceptable outcomes…

Give it back to them---

Leaching in the well, indefensible

trails of plastic diluted and divided,

infinitely halved, invasive digestion,

washed along, or emitting stacks

The parties return to shell games,

in concerted concentration

MM 2/17

Common Margin

Kneeling, born and bred, at the foot of an edge

Prostrated, upbraided, tilting over in ritual free fall

Deconstruction broadcast in speeches and songs,

from magnets’ opposing poles

Withering supply, flippant recourse,

there were days when the summation worked,

and future paths outstripped

the stunning cruelty from which they were laid

But the sun chafed the plastic smog,

an amorphous view guided its path,

the margins’ present retrograde was splayed

in shaken sand beneath its glass

Churning from the inside, the sight

of those who’ve lain in near constant

rippling tension, in fraying exhibition,

exploited, their plight across brazen wire

Meanwhile, in common margins alight,

mercurial shifts spontaneously contrived

gears aground, a combustible dawn breaks,

then collapses against itself

Questions aren’t unasked nor dignified,

they’re painted on the cave walls

in their stark painful context, frozen

in exhibition of their endorsement

MM  2/17

Threadbare in Repose

My sister, you wrote to me

from your laid bare dying bed

Dotting eyes and crossing tees,

just trying to reconcile me

And what sweet words could I transcribe

to ease this passing bind,

or tie it all together,

to justify

the difference between our minds?

Ironing a crease,

driving great distances to never forget,

to not make words on a screen the last

moments of being reconciled

If words were passed along

in years fixing foundations in caste,

each person’s a niche in an imperfect union

My sister, older and wiser,

administrator of black-white protectionism,

your questions that day, they cut

across and burned a hole in my screen,

planted resentment and guilt

to swallow in your memory

A seat in silence for many years,

strapped to the point of convex,

molded my mind, mending time

in unraveling the explanation you were seeking

The justification of divergent paths,

of politics, philosophy, chains of events,

still unraveling so many years on,

after passing

So many worlds apart from that place,

sans the shade of reconciliation,

sans stain of justification and shame

MM 2/17