10k views, 2x BestPoetryCollection. A nothing from nowhere cast words to a world wide wind |
I’m disabled by more than blindness. Writing: Like one of those adventure games where you go off questing in different directions but you don’t advance in life. Pretty medallions sought for words/my soul, a slow burn now. Life is full of misdirects right back to the start, you still quest with a thirst. If they take time to notice, must be doing something right. Life of turmoil produces stuff like this. Not going to call it beautiful agony…it gets a bit uglier. Minced words too pungent. scripturam in hoc non mutamus, quia stultus es et differentiam nescies. hic honor, quem accepistis, non est operae pretium, sicut non est bonum. si hoc legere potes, gratiarum actio pro tempore. The beautiful mess you made. | Without knowledge, who’s to judge? | No gavel; no voice. I had a lover's quarrel with the world - Robert Frost | I'm sorry you got caught in the middle. - me *Neurodivergent poet. *I yearn to love without that fart in the room. *Honesty without mincing words. *Stay clear of those surrounded by rules. *Real dialogue accepted. Diagnosed with new disabilities in 2020: On the spectrum/ADHD (it gets complicated by PTSD and brain trauma). Been suggested by doctors I might want another brain scan. As it is: My words collect, arrange on a kaleidoscope spectrum. The true experience/acknowledgment of my writing yet to come...long after I’ve left WDC, am dead, or both? Truly been a blessing, but I've been pushing it — envelope, push world and all inhabitants away, push buttons, find boundaries, no clue why, where I've lived in your dark. Now and then, push dirt out of this hole; someone/thing/entity might envision me the way I need to be viewed (if I knew what that was. Cryptic, I know. Try living in my dark, find comfort amid the strange, virtual walls that tempt me to try). *The parenthetical ‘lawyer up’? Foot free, I’m all over the place. Best Poetry Collection 2X, nominated three years. What does it mean? I was enjoying myself, head bagged. A happy idiot. Something messed with that. I won’t be a coward; not starting feuds or wars over ideals and beliefs. We all know that’s a pile of crap packaged with dreams of pretty things to sell t the next boob that walks by. Been more than I could imagine or expect. My achievements aren’t going on a LinkedIn wall. I dig deeper than I should, push boundaries. Aimless words, brave or veiled cowardice, flinchingly flung, inadvertently hit targets. Get a ‘back off’ shoulder shot when asking your motivations to write. No prize to eye; not incentivized. Dealt the worst two cards before the flop, do the best with what you got. My Pluggers: You are an icon here. You suffer, but you suffer brilliantly. Wow, what a great writer.{/blue} It’s like plugging myself, but using other people’s (reviewers) words…Review of "Epigram ‘n Aphorism Samwiches" Your poetic muse is on fire! Some great emotion, well-balance(d), lovely lyrical qualities -- even the ones that were written out of sadness or anger came through in a clever cadence…It's obvious you've put a lot of work into each entry and the totality of the blog has eye appeal. Published four times with one a literary journal, including… "The Tender Core (Sedona)" I don’t submit because it’s too much work. Truly alone, know no one cares to show they believe/support me. Lip service feeds delusion. I’ve seen a lot of smoldering and snow. Try not be cynical, work hard at openness and consideration — work, sooo…gut thing. August 28, 2006 this blog opened ▼
No specific aim going forward (2014) ▼ This is old…. What? Oh, this? A rhetorical, self-motivational speech I'm working on. Don't just read the parts to construct your theory, as if to confirm (construed out of context) your opinion, mentally-stunted Neanderthal. Therapist wants me to be less negative toward myself. I see it as attacking, rather than being defensive. Fear I will chomp too many bullets unintentionally sent toward the unsuspecting. If you can be triggered for stupid reasons, then I? …just looked like me rolling around on the floor with myself. What Was NEW Who am I, you ask? My mirror knows that question, repeated daily. Just trying to create a little buzz, not boost my ego. #amwriting #poetry #blog #contest #freeverse #award #bestpoetry #freyaridings #lyrics #music #video #YouTube Can you believe it took this long for someone to put a quarter in me and push the button GET ANGRY? Mud 4 My Eye: Is that you, Poo? 💩 Secret Back Door ▼ |
1st Taboo Words, 2/22 On a dust plain, you can see heat distort dry fauna fading green. My bones ache, but blooms in your eyes distract, help me heal with precious, amber light. On shaded porch we rock and glide, side by side all these years. Silence so perfect, I kiss you passionately, again, feel the cicadas unrest and tremor. We could strip to salt flesh I long to devour. You stand to refill our lemonade. My hand brushes the tender underside of your boot cut denim. Not long ‘til dinner, sunset in Sedona. We can afford the loss of sunrise. Cayenne canyon of soaring rock fences us willingly within. No taste for dinner but soft cotton. Aroma of sandalwood encircles. Hot limbs entwine and cool, before I feel beating beneath breathing and hold the tender core like a baby. Thankful, all these years absorbing color of sunrises and the view across a shared room. You could be a memory, constant in dreams. Somehow, here, my soul’s match. I caught a star beneath an endless vault in Sedona. 2.28.22 32 lines, freeverse I'm going to ... SPOILER: Cayenne canyon of rock surrounds two lovers in Sedona where he finds her heart beating.
February Prompt: HEART taboo words: love romance blood red broken or any derivatives of these words Published in Wisconsin Fellowship of Poet's Publication, "Bramble", 8/2022. Last two lines cut...my choice. |
Life like window shopping coffins, knowing I'm headed for a dark jar that a lone soul will be purposed to clutch, feel the heft and probably give a little shake, muttering some final words for ash with more purpose than this container I occupy beside you. Roses could lay upon my mouth, coins could straddle dull eyelids, but what purpose for flesh freshly embalmed with a painted face that could no more emote in an early afterlife than the 100 years it will take for me to lay down and give up this ghost to inhale a final breath. The lights shining directly in my eyes, misdirect. The dim light of a mortuary, maybe a few will reflect. The chairs they stack and the hall swept keep ready again to receive the lonely dead like me who spent an entire life in futility trying to remember what they came here for, as the sun rises again. 2.23.22 who knows me here, or anywhere, especially, after I'm gone? |
I try to smooth the steel edges and then hop back in. Mirrors adjusted, I see where you are, a pilot in hind view (backseat). In the throes of January, it’s a mystery why she’s deceased. We looked through the obituary for clues. Someone just like us, but different in one way: dead. Really dead. Our vehicle is getting warmer. But soon your distraction is well seen, and settled in my cockpit I go. The mirror is clean, yet from this vista I get a dim view. For 60 long years an immaculate machine in and out of repair always attuned to you. As my engine revs, all I notice is a lonely horizon. How many times when you exit this cabin did I consider a journey alone? Instead, I wonder aloud, should I turn here? You say, try again. Should I drive straight, I ask. Again, try again. All my life wondering how’s my driving, where are we going, I wonder why you don’t sit up front or take the wheel. I start to question the need for repair, tune ups or even a garage. I forgot the true purpose of this machine I’m steering through sleet on arctic snow. I think of the words that will be chosen and paid for print. Dying is not free. This whole life and stubborn machine are wrought with cost. Under the hood, I rewire and rewire until I don’t know what goes to what anymore. An entire life trying to perfect something I did not create, overhauled and rebuilt…to go in direction that is meant. But in order to not be a lonely traveler, I accepted you as navigator and reluctant co-pilot. And from the backseat, you seem to have directed me. Request you take the wheel, you deflect. Maybe, I’ll steer this thing into the river. No. I forget the cost. The sun is directly in my eyes as I dream sundown into lonely, equatorial senectitude. 2.20.22 I plead for understanding in the midst of my own ignorance. |
I don't think e.e. thought to ponder why WE might think ourselves important while feeling diminished in an endless plight to overcome. weak, sometimes, yes. but, I am undeniable. yet, I fail, or feel as if, unrecognized. someone out there has leveraged power. I am unsuccessful as yet at lighting my lamp on their flame. maybe, I will get a spark of my own, as yet. maybe, I have flint. but, tinder? then, firewood? and, keep it going? now, i feel tired. I'll be back later to try again. sharpen those pencils. and light that screen. I'm coming inside again and again until I'm dead. 2.20.22 (dated) and yes, I realize what I just said. it's a process. and if it gets you nowhere but chasing yet another metaphor, then yes, like that. |
what am I thinking about now? sometimes, I'm in that place when I realize the chair back lean with hands enlaced behind head, view angled toward the north wall. mid-process is where I land. sometimes, you don't get answers but more questions to ponder. what is real is how much time spent in consideration of life's machine. what is eating me now? I may continue to ponder in this place, resolute to stare at peeling paint. I may dream of a beach from time to time, knowing it's just erosion caused by time. mid-process is where I'll stay until I'm buried in my own sand. 2.20.22 17 lines, free verse Edited 2.26.22 with a new leaning. Just caught myself thinking about the potential for a poem after edit and how the words might appear to others. then, realize how much time is wasted on things that give little reward, these little mysteries of curiosity openly composed, seen from here to that wall where my eyes suddenly focus on reality. I could sell this house and sit on the beach next to her. But, does it (the poem) always have to end in death with you (speaking to myself): another thought. I either live in the past or in the future. the present can only be assessed in past. then, dream of what the present could be like. I guess, I'm not really here, uncelebrated. Disclaimer? clarification not needed. for the few that read, use your imagination or your own personal taste. these words I pen are never mine. I do not own a thing, literately (as we are in and then out of this world). I might bullshit you, figuratively. perhaps, as I look in your eye and see a gleam. aha, yes, I see you are on to me. We have that in common. This will tie up somehow, someday, when I re-read. Or not. and, move on to the next... |
I could tell you life is supposed to be uneven as I watch you tie on pretty blue bows. the package looks a mess, so much tape adhered. I think back and wonder when will it come unglued. I leave your wrapping intact with marvel of sacrifice, a gift I have come to learn never meant to be opened. life has always been awkward as a little one who could never learn beauty is just a delusion on printed paper, held by cellophane, topped in looping curls never unfurled. Put the scissors away and dream beneath these primary lights illuming dark illusion. Smell green thicken, lying inside here. Celebrate before the tree comes down. 2.16.22 2.20.22 edit 21 lines, free verse not sure, but what we do might really be ugly and unhealthy, but gets us through life, anyway. we all die, anyway. Quill Nominated Best Poetry Collection two consecutive years, 2020 and 2021. |
…but you’re not there from our shore I swore I could smell the mountain air — majestic, stoic, lowering in dull moon light, but less romantic for one stiffly unbelieving. water absorbed a string of light-connecting beach fires, collectively incinerating bark-bare wood combers in flannel and cardigans hauled. wandering waves obediently encircled our nimble toes stripped bare, yet never dared run free, or hand-in-hand down an extended scene, because I didn't know you and you never asked me one single question, while waiting on friends to gather, silence filling, building mystery. a dull blue lake chilled darker by minute time. my head clocked infinite expansion in our vacuum until it ran past limited eternity, as long shadows finally interceded. whenever smoke lifts to the moon, my heart skips upon Superior blue. I feel you idle next to me in oversized, cable sweater, swirls of over-applied sweet scent mix in earthen-steeped steam. I reach for your hand... 2.16.22 7.11.22 12.21.23 tweaks unrequited can be the poet’s eternal disease. 2.20.22…and who cares now when I wrote that? #romantic #summer #moon |
My organ throbbed love for fire red hair, a cherub who could not conceive her reflection, a devilish grin on pottery-glazed cheeks -- matter of fact ignored blue piercing her green when she openly spoke to a crow. and when we hit a smoky Lake Superior with that college clan who drank and dared to bare skin, one sweater castoff... yours, the only one who stripped to panties, when I shoved off on a long dark shore, defeated. I didn’t want to share you. I didn’t want to know if the yip, yip, yipping jackals owned your body in moonlight... until I realized: too severe, stern, stoic, an unknowable, self-protective wall of man, too afraid to go naked with you, risk their judgement again that night I lost you to tumbling waves drowning out a spirited animal baying. I didn’t sacrifice and freeze virgin skin in ice black air -- flesh dedicated only to entwine another soul's warm container, not be a public spectacle. yet, not immoral, but not my vision for you. and, had I known we'd never table together again... who knows? I rejected myself, not you that night, in pursuant days of abstinence and regret and replayed scenarios -- cliché. I hope life gave everything you wanted. me... not so certain, as this quandary might show, still perplexed. 2.16.22 49 lines of long free verse she skinny dipped. I didn't. No one else did. I wish I had. How could I? Not so much as a bare toe tested those waters back then. |
Like those little yellow labels hungry with a thin sap each of you pasted to a little man who did not have a clue, cruel. You were warm with sweat when I was cold and afraid, because I roamed without her love in your sand lot domains. You stickered me with your notes because you could not conceive of someone with so much love, sunlight you could not contain. Thus, rejected a greasy blond boy with runny nose in mismatched clothes, tear-streaked cheeks pleased your declarations of what I was not. But, separated from her apron, who was I to cling to and trust before I learned on my lonely own you are the fictitious one, and peeled the pale skin, scrubbed it clean to reveal a glow you could never stain or blemish with paper and glue, or the uneducated part of you that used labels like division in your mind, because a little boy could kiss you out of love. 2.14.22 They labeled me gay because I loved. I became afraid of myself before I knew what I truly felt, pity for their ignorance. Hey, I was as much a fool, just not as desperately mean to hurt others to protect myself. |
Dandelions Kissed Roaming yellow fields of love in youth before the end of innocence. I'm a child now, puffing your downy head, lifted light on seamless waves, consuming oxygen, time and sky reaching hidden stars and gooey Milky Way. Somehow, this aged memory thrives. Imagination better than a setting sun, blond hair flowed, lemon hands and feet roamed. Blown puffs sent filamentous achenes from dead dandelions, our wasted time, before waking to her warning clock. Freely held hands felt foolish when they told us stop displaying tender emotions, vulnerabilities that laid in a once yellow field. Never imagined two lips parting, buss warm beneath a buzzing vault. Gentle, we clutched and tugged each stem of time, separated from rich veins of an infinite, golden patch to raise up and declare this unending love, blowing kisses to approving clouds above. 25 lines, free verse Too young in those early years to know true love, but warned the closer we neared its hot core. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/236934/engineers-uncover-secret-thinking-behind-... original ▼ "Paper And Glue #rejection #love #youth" |
We're all kinds of ugly and deserve love. I see your loneliness like mine waiting for eternal sunshine. We're two birds with ruffled feathers, similar but alike. We are fowl and a stream rushes so fast between us. We seek the sun when it's safe to play. Awkward and silent, hide where we roll and yip in the fresh grass. We're all ugly, deserve love and want to play with one another if only we could find a way to say, 'Hi.' Hi. 2.13.22 |
You see eyes narrowed a man seething heaving ugly words scarring a mess, when he is just a child wielding weapons he wasn't meant to swing, untrained to the disciplined, patient eye, waiting for you to be the parent, say no He rampages through your soul because you are as weak as the toddler. Accept he needs love just like you desire, because he can love you too if you don't hold so tight to your own mortalitty. Before you press that cancel, remember we are all human. 2.13.22 Just saying, cancel culture and telling people what they can or cannot say is between facist and dystopian. It takes a community to help the ignorant catch up to speed, if you don't shame the way you feel and love the way you can to help others who might seem threatening but can be easy to know in kind if you try. I acknowledge, a few are untrainable. But we must find ways to co-exist. |
I don't hate myself. It's just easier than loving you, beautiful mystery. My skin longs caress with the simplest sweetness like everlasting candy. I can't savor love; not easily defined, fleeting temptress I see undress. I don't hate you, in silence contemplating turbulence by this open sea. I don't hate, sparkling, a container full of redeeming wine; a dusty bottle I don't hate myself. Temperate in the dark, stowed on shelf, waiting discovery. Sorry, if I'm not looking for you. 2.12.22 19 lines, free verse |
The Merit Of Looks By your scalpel’s edge I could beg sew back up this waste of skin just let sag wires gray stray addled head couldn’t conceive romance with other dead in decay vibrant red, a dream lifetimes away. Vitals encased restrain swoon when your lovely bodice brushes soft fibers In our shared room. Using mirrors, I take account how you deploy your gaze, consider this shadowed figure, unintended mystery. Maybe posture, lack of return, I notice your attention veers away, as gray melds in black night into a tumbler of colored ice a man melting, legs straddling a dead leather-top horse. With surgical snips and about 10k would she be in my arms., anyway? 2.8.22 She doesn’t read me. |
The snowman winters in our hallway. Not every day. Just when the cats are at play. Greets us in the morning when we’re late risers and we haven’t fed the beasts. All since Christmas when the decorations were out and we were celebrating, the plush fellow with sewn on scarf cavorted on the floor between their paws like a puck they chased. The snowman lifelessly looks up at me now begging his return to the Christmas box. The reindeer, elf, jolly man wait. He is done celebrating this extended season. After I finish my coffee, okay? The attic is especially cold. Originally 12/31/21 Posted/edited: 2/10/22 |
Burning With Time Not the shimmer of gold-leafed monuments, Nor handsome silver outlive beauteous rhyme. Your crystal shines, less bright in these contents, Stoic as stone smoothened by churn of time. Crumbling statues etched with lonely concern, On masonry made, seem ordinary. But with trembling sword, a quick fire did burn Eternal record of your memory. Eroded visions shine eternal doom, Rising to meet lonely wanderer’s eyes. Set forth, your praises fill a Sultan’s tomb, Hopeful, as posterity seeks the skies. Written on blue vault, true romantic blue, Only time knows how my heart burns for you. 2.6.22 Sonnet We cannot know if memorialized love will last, but look to the sky that fills with stars and mark time. |
Like your finger deep in my full red wine, your skin wets to sample, your eyes linger, never leave my wondering — will you taste anything more? Is burgundy bitter, beginning to turn with age? Who couldn’t savor, yet you are not at my cup? Long ago, a moment replayed — hope when a vine was not fully mature. And though we desired something cheap, imbibed enough for one to forget. Now that I’m hardy, you could tip my glass to your lips. I’ll pour it out, with nothing else to offer but the last draught from a dusty, green vessel. The vineyard produces much more, but I’m afraid none spared ever again for me. 2.2.22 written to: "Say Something" |
I had empathy for the love starved before I was underfed could not find a trough next to yours now will a gold, engraved plate to dine on their tender mercies whenever you need when suddenly I realized how my father felt. But what is this? Why do I still starve? 2.2.22 |
With a finger waggled, she can get all the love I need. With a wink or sad expression, she has them eating out of her paw — while I, who humanly hungers, learns to curb craving while starving of affection in the darkness of sadness — yearning to reach out, feel human touch, but know if I approach, they will revile the slothsome judged unworthy. I could give comfort to her to heal myself. She knows and denies me that, slowly suffocating, killing me, a prisoner of shame and guilt — burden from mother saddles a weak soul in savaged form savoring small scraps alone. pathetic creature collects to survive in obliterated, cold space like any incipient void would. I don’t cry out because you will point out what is akin to bitterness — your final, manipulative move to know you own all in my world that i need to survive. 2/2/22 |