Thin Lines and High Roads

it’s all candlelight against infinite
darkness           deadfall into oblivion   .  .  .
a kiss in gethsemane’s back alley
one betrayal on the way to martyrdom
roman lash across the shoulders     salted
venom rubbed to wound the wounded     insult
to injury all in the name of wasted
passion sinking like blood into time’s sands.

yet who can refuse the next breath of life
given its mysterious alternative
terrifying in the face of aspirations
dreams and longings and gloried ambitions
even the love of the moment of sunshine
or the joy of drenching in a soft spring rain   .  .  .

Her Monday Advice

you’re a putz,   you know that?   she tells him crossly. 
pining over the-one-that-got-away! 
what,   you were trawling and she was clumsy 
enough to catch herself up in your net? 
she’s a woman who made a choice,   dimwit! 
take your lumps and go on your way,   romeo; 
loves are won,   love is lost,   love comes and goes 
like tides and seasons   —   tough it out,  another 
one is right behind this one.          forget that 
one-in-a-million bullshit,   boy,   because 
every one is unique   —   you know,   one in all, 
sole particular in infinity. 
just like you and everyone else.          open 
your eyes,   breathe deep,   step up,   go on living.

It’s a Good Day Dammit

well,   they can’t all be the best day of your life
she told me.          why not?    today is the only
day.     zen teaches.     only now.          so,   what if
now is a bag of suck?          what to do with that?
not to beat the drums of pessimism,
baby,   but it’s cloudy with a chance of rain
and we’re looking bleached as flour from staying
inside all winter   —   working nights ain’t helpin,

comes a time you have to be responsible
and take your mood in your own teeth,   bite down hard
and make that bitch bleed optimism as though
it were ambrosia,   which it kinda is,
and smile against the shitstorms life tosses
against your windows,   knowing shit grows roses.

Our Lovely Fairytale

your hands in my hair is salve enough
to stop the world awhile.          our mornings
run to afternoon and together
means more than sunlight and april showers
to these may flowers we shoot on hikes
along the stream flowing toward the elkhorn
river with its willows weeping   —   what
is it these willows know?     —   but your hands
in my hair still the doubts,   ill omens
haunting from experience and past
days,   loves lost,   abandonments,   life’s soft
parade taking separate streets away
from dreams toward something . . . but you and I,
have our exemption from fate herself.

electric butterfly

tuesday is gone and with her last night’s fleeting 
pleasure,     bandaid for a lonely soul seeking 
comfort from infinity with its vast unending 
terror and the angst of existence being 
only temporary   .  .  .   or,   more fearsome, 
unending in some strange cyclic turning 
from life to death to life to something stranger 
unknown and mysterious,     to human sense 
unfathomable in context with present 
experience and yet captivating 
in its inexplicable pull,   hypnotic 
drift and gravitation toward future 
metamorphoses   .  .  .   and in this strange fear 
hope emerges:   electric butterfly.

Waking to Fresh Paint and Passion

it means ‘suffering’,   you know,     dreamily
she rolls her eyes to glance over to my side
of the bed,     ‘passion’ means suffering;   you’d think
folks might take that into account before they
insist on their passion for this and that.
all night she painted me on canvas,   though
the figure there is no mirror,   hardly
recognizable really,   and in colors
nature might find untenable,   yet somehow
she’s captured a mood of me true to last night’s
wonder,   saturation of attention,
intent focus on learning her mystery   —
a journey worth a lifetime one moment
after another, destination unknown.

david m pitchford
29 April 2013

Thousand Poem Update

I was 15 away a few days ago
but then my hard drive crapped out bigtime
so far, from various sources, I’ve been able to recover
about 910 of the 985 poems.  so . . . I’m extending
my deadline to 11 May – which would make it
21 months.

thanks for your support and comments.

D

god: a Fibonacci Sonnet

god
maybe
agnostic
what is knowable
in dimensions beyond senses
it’s all speculation this side of immortality

infinity suggests all gods
as real as imagination

reality perhaps merely a single framed portrait
in our museum of senses
storing knowable
the gnostic
may be
god