Take a Breath, Isaac

A giddy surge of shining glee
Abruptly intercedes the gloom
That had before so hounded thee.

The uproar laughing its way free
Casts blinding light upon the doom-
Enraptured ones who yet will see.

Contageous of a hearty kind,
Those sounds of laughter come in force
And capture all the neighbor minds

I do so love the bouant feel
That brings a certain woe divorce
And has unequaled gift to heal.

Ahh, laughter. What a joy!

Moral Sinks

"Contempt" would not describe in full
My heart's disgust with worldly man.
Little wonder, then, that I
When gazing in upon my mind
(As I am apt to do for hours)
See bubbling up like molten lead
A vengeful, reckless will to "fix"
The problems plaguing man's good heart.

The roaches found at darkest night
With drunken slur and vicious fight
Should be destroyed or be disarmed
As one would missiles Devil-sent.
Too harsh? Perhaps, but loathe am I
To ease the weight of social right
Placed here by man to mirror sins.
Their acts belie a pious word;
The cost of sinning must be death.

And arbiter of Truth, I'm not,
Nor any perfect soul besides,
But I despise those moral sinks
And wish for one to rid their stink.

There's a bitter Eastern Wind
That tosses golden leaves
And plants the unborn tree
In deep, unknowing soil;

Is the fertile land
Aware that in its hands
Are placed by fiery wind
The protégé of Hope?

No.

After darkened hours of ceaseless swirls
Of mind-plays seize my eyes and stop my sleep;
And just before the gentle night is slain,
An army of songs is set upon the day.
Do these wondrous feathered songs burst forth
From knowing hearts that recognize their worth?
And do they sing for me, their weary crowd,
Who hangs on every note and ponders each?

No.

Did ancient likes of man
Ink walls intent on aid
For modern study's use?
Those grand and eerie shapes,
Those ancient mental maps
Of man's first steps;
Were they for us?

No.

Nature knows no need for pleasing
Any senses of its greatest minds;
How, pray how! can man defend
Its desperate, constant quest for
Glory? Can we?

No.

Does this fit nature; Eastern Winds;
Fertile land; blustered seed;
Crying birds; ancient man?

No. Like the birds' depthless melody
A writer of Truth is never bound
By human whim; am I?

Yes. Mine.

Wisdom?

No.

Critical Correction

In my most recent poem, "An Autollegory," I tried to gauge my ability to write meaningful and relevant things without having experienced much in the way of hardships. I proposed a solution to that problem with personal introspection. My error was in looking solely at myself, and not enough at the world around me. After accidentally exploring some things online, namely "Fort Liberty," as well as reading comments about the recent school attacks that absolutely appalled me, I have come to rectify my mistake. This, combined with the cumulative actions I've seen at "one of the finest institutions of learning in the world" by "the cream of the cream of the crop" I have realized that it is the WORLD'S fault that my voice should have any weight, because I remain (God keep me thus) a marginally moral individual. Most of the world is going to the dogs.

Critical Correction

*(Most accurately read out loud with clenched teeth)*

My fingers shake, my ears both pound.
This vile screen swims 'round and 'round
Inside my mind, a wild beast
That ravages the mental feast.

My stomach knots, my clenched jaw sears.
To watch the top, the best of peers
Dismantle any moral sways
And toss them in the blazing haze.

My throat constricts, my eyes burn hot.
This fury in me I knew not,
Which gnaws and bites my self restrain
And tempts a blast of highbrow pain
To overload and loose its chains;
At last--AT LAST reap vengeful gains.

What scum surrounds, what filthy souls
Corrupt by imps with evil goals.
I'm saturated, swamped with it,
And no quick bath will rid the spit
Of vermin's words that, uttered out
For all the world, like sewage spout.

Do they think? Have they minds?
They toss Humanity's dry-picked rinds
To feed the poor they will not see,
Content to take and spew and pee.
They arm their young, and send them off;
Like demon spawn they weeze and cough
Their message to the thoughtless scamps
That give them soapcrates for their rants.

They have no wall to check their voice,
For by our laws they claim their choice
Is safe from scorn, well think again!!!
I THIS day promise to begin
The bloody struggle of moral fire
That has been beaten back by dire
And heartless rogues that aim to kill
This country's meaning with their ill
Interpretations of our laws.
They choose (surprised?) to clamp their jaws
Around the throat of struggling faith
And shake the bodied soul to wraith.

I’m done, though still not entirely calmed. You still have no idea how angry people are making me. I know I’m not the only person who tries to be decent, but they’re getting so hard to find. And THAT, the rarity of anyone outspoken for morality, not any ability or experience of my own, is the true reason that I write compulsively and why I feel like my words NEED to be heard... which they are not. It aggravates the living daylights out of me.

An Autollegory

A question has begun to plague me: how could I be destined to write poetry when my life has been so blatantly free of events that would normally drive a person to true wisdom. Simply put, can a person achieve knowledge of difficulties without being challenged himself?

Abe Bennet lived a solitary life,
Perusing rows of dusty, gentle books
That lined the walls that bound for him his world:
A store of truth for any seeker’s quest.

Abe’s lord was Soodoe, King of Abapax,
Who ruled with mighty hand his spoiled land.
While battles raged, Abe watched them from afar,
And wrote of what he saw without his walls.

Abe’s life was charmed, protected as he was
By brutal lord and equal vicious luck
That placed him out of reach while thrusting off
To fight score’s scores of men with equal worth.

So what could Abe, who suffered no in life
Nor dabbled e’er in man’s corrupting oils
Expound in verse what might have weight to those
Who triumphed daily more than Abe had once?

But, lo, his poems, scripted cleanly through
Held gems of wisdom wrapped in gentle cloth,
For watching, reading, hearing others fail
Will teach with force but spoils not the man.

Pray, who is wiser, Soodoe King or Abe?
The master of the sword and seer of sin
Or master of the word and seer of man?
Abapax says Soodoe, but the wise would answer Abe!

Attention!!!

If you read this blog and skim the deeper poems because they just don't make any sense, this is your lucky day! I am going back through my poetry archives and writing notes and explanations about the creation or meaning of my poems. If you want to get emails with these annotated poems, leave a comment here with your email address or email me at i_am_ihop@yahoo.com . From now on, every poem I publish here will coincide with emailed versions with side-by-side notes to those who want them.
Cheers, oh acolytes of versed (almost) wisdom.
Ihop

Professor Shadow

Nikes cast twin shadows
Each on a side
In perfect oppositiong
To flourescent rays.

A loose-curled hand
Becomes a fist, a
Mass of dark upon
The speckled rug.

Drowning in Romance

Briefly, to explain this, I had just finished a 6 page paper on Wordsworth's "Prelude" and then found out that I had to read the Dejection Ode by Coleridge for the same class, which did not amuse me. So, instead, I wrote my own dejection verses.

What wishful thinking had I in that hour
When challenge met with deep intuit power,
That last o'ercome was last of all.
Great virtue pulled, uplifted from my cower
Until I was upheld, but now the sour
Aftertwinge of duties left did call.

At two, now three, the lines of raw poetic woe (1)
Obscured from time to time night's daydream show;
Good writer true but man of wrong.
Dear Coleridge chanted, overcome with slow
And dark enshrouded thoughts best left alone
For despairing ones amongst the throng.

Itching eyes and sagging brow;
Sleep take me, if thou will, right now!


1. Coleridge's, not my own

An Unfinished History

AN UNFINISHED HISTORY
and A Rebuke of Former Musings

Light gathers on the crust of dawn,
Releasing drip by drop
A trickled arc of palest sun,
That vests our heaven’s top.

The dawn of peace may take an age,
But comes with waxing pace,
For in the blackest, cruelest page,
The man of yore found grace.

Ah, and here I sense an urge,
A primal, whelming call,
To draw these lines that I might purge,
The fog from verse for all:

To counter songs of bleakest sight
That from these fingers flew,
I write assured that human plight
Will stain the hands of few.

For champions of mental man
Will cleanse – are cleansing now –
Through open hearts and gentle hands:
Acts in reach of every brow.

Join that partial throng of beast
Who walk (in partial line)
Towards partial light above the East.

Oaken Arms (10/1/07)

Mist hangs loosely around the limbs
Of the ancient oak. An owl inquires, with
Sinister calm, as to my identity
But pauses not for an answer,
Storming away on silent limbs,
Swirling the hovering fog.
A reverent heart will suffice,
Win entrance to the core of Nature.
This great tower, this totem, of life
Whispers in the ears of all who listen;
Who seek with honesty to balance
The human with the real,
The fleeting with the immortal,
The ignorant with the omniscient.
For where can humanity learn its place
But from the lips of its elders.

Heed the voice, gentle as it is,
In the Wind, mind the warning
In the Sun's destructive, life-giving rays,
Commune with the Day,
Rest by Night's side.
Learn to love the Earth,
Not for its gifts to Men,
But for the wisdom, the order,
The grace and balance, that
Humanity corrupts.
Transcend, for once, the greed
That grips the reigns of man
And buries the spur, charging
Ahead with a lack of intent
But irreparable harm.

Love.

A Far Too Brief Caution in the Battle for the Mind

Can you imagine the weight of such time?
The crushing inertia of thousands of years?
Like Atlas's burden, the words and the rhymes
Of numberless forebears will not disappear.

The stone has been deeply and boldly engraved,
Far harder to change than the stroke of a pen,
For centuries' poets did not write enslaved
By paper; their pad was the fabric of men!

And now, in an age with a dwindling mind
That scatters by hours of flickering lights,
A Bic-pen swirls patterns so true to their kind,
But empty of hearers, they silently fight.

For battle this is, for a much greater cause
Than that championed chiefly by medial fears.
Their world is without, thus they only find loss
In external misfortune and hope in their peers.

I tell you the struggle cannot be en masse!
Each soul must establish dominion within,
And then can the Kingdom of wisdom surpass
And be built here, with peace flowing forth from all men!