My personal plot

My personal plot
 
Come away from the world.
Putter about in your flowerbed
 
while you are still able.
This poetry is my personal plot –
 
colors and scents,
charming and unworldly,
 
springing from the dark soil;
lively and comely under my doting care.
 
Stop reacting to the world
and it will soon leave you
 
to the ethereal peace
of your garden’s budding beauty.
 
O child of God, abandon the dream
and move nearer to Reality. 

(painting by Joe DiSabatino)

              

So many words

So many words
 
A ghost of my former self,
I’m floating high above the hostile terrain.
 
My mask has been jerked away
and there is no one behind it. 
 
Words are mere stains
on a page, flat and stodgy
 
or wind through the larynx,
empty as a whistle.
 
Waiting with a blank mind
for the poem to come
 
while it is the blank mind
I should be trying to express.
 
Every surrounding thing
now has become extraneous,
 
keeping me achingly shy
of my one central purpose.
 
O child of God, so many words you use
to describe the ineffable.                             
 
(drawing by Rich Panico)

 

Tongue-tied

Tongue-tied 
 
Analogies are a poor substitute for actuality,
as the dream-life is a poor substitute for Reality.
 
I’m coming to the end of descriptions,
writing poems few will ever read.
 
As I fade into singularity and eccentricity,
words become clumsy under my fingers,
 
more ambiguous, less precise.
Not from a lack of vocabulary
 
but a lack of Truth, a tongue-tied lack of God.
I’m chasing down my own death,
 
after which my insufficience  
will return me yet again to the quest.
 

O child of God, listen carefully to the silence 
you keep trying to fill with words.   

            

Rabbit hole

Rabbit hole
 
Words again (and again) after
waking up from some rabbit hole dream
 
to the more familiar one (known as my life),
having lost my command of words,
 
especially the verbs, which demand
I take some sort of remedial action.
 
After a lifetime of interpreting/
explaining myself (and life) to myself, 
 
my stable of words has become as rebellious,
untethered and empty now as the rabbit hole itself –
 
(not a scintilla of wonder or adventure left in it).
I chalk out one more two-dimensional conjecture,
 
tasteless and stale on the sidewalk at my feet
as it is in my mouth and ears
 
and I ask myself – is it my words
that are so ineffectual or is it the dream itself? 
 
O child of God, how difficult it is to put into words
that which you know nothing about.

(drawing by Rich Panico)