These are poems that aim at reflecting something uniquely American in experience. Be it a place. Or a person or an experience. It had to happen somewhere to become something.
Classic icon of the West
The great steel horse, chief driven
Western power charging across the
Iron scars of a landscape torn open
With industrial desires and the need for connection.
Ancient mode in modern time, still carrying the promise of the dream across American desert. Anticipating your latest desires, in tow.
Carriage.
“Hey, is #489 running late?”
Thousands of years of rain
Washing her bulbous face,
Chipping away at her grain
By grain, by boulder by grain,
Until one day a great collapse
An earthquake or meteor perhaps
She splits in two, dropping
Half her mass in an avalanche.
Sheets of rock splitting off
Tumbling in tumultuous shambles
Of her once bold face, until
Once again years of rain
Washing her caved in face
Chipping away at her grain
By grain by boulder by grain
Smoothing her, curving her
Revealing her true color
And character.
“Hello” hello “Echo” echo
Whatever I say, repeats itself.
“Hello!” Hello, Hello, hello…
As my eyes roll over her curves
Arching over me, bending in
Streaks of red and yellow
Broken finally by azure
Sky that offers the only light
Inside this giant bowl dome.
A cathedral, a great place to
hear the violin or guitar. A
Symphony or maybe quartet?
If you sing the canyon songs
You are blessed with a chorus
Of your own voices from
The echo chamber.
“Clouds, oh clouds, speak to me…”
The sun is slow
To rise here.
Obscured by
Eastern peaks
Light streams and flails
Rails and breaks forth
Across the valley first
Then the waking city…
“Wake Up!”
A thousand eyes
Are above you
Looking down
Reaching the light
Before it’s even near you.
Floating, clusters
Of characters, colors,
Bursts of enthusiasm
Blanketing the sky.
“Did Balloon Fiesta start today?”
A place
Is a place
with or without
You
There
In That Place.
But,
without you
Un-real-
ized lies
This
Place.
We can not
leave this
place alone
or it will not
Be
A Place
As a place
with
A person
Becomes
Real, As
real gets
For then
it is seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, tasting
or otherwise, known!
Looking up
Bubbles dot the sky
A rainbow of
Colorful forms
Separate Vessels
Full of lives
And danger…
Hundreds together
Inhaling thinner
Oxygen than
Those below.
The roar
Tearing through
Silent, cloudless
Skies, Alarming!
Then warming
Then lifting
Then floating
In the parkie
Morning…
I am interested in place as place, a single objectified reality that is changed only by subjective interactions with it. This as a separate pursuit of the human experience that is influenced by place which is history and human presence objectified.
The park
Neon and forest green
Rolling blend of Kentucky blue
Clover and dandy lions
Shaded by old line of elms
The park
Neon yellow and navy
Zipping children chasing and surging
Tearing out clumps of Kentucky blue
In pursuit of glory
You can have a place
And use it too.
To capture being
As we are not things
As “things” go
Us Being
That Is or shall I say
I Am
No thing
So this is where it gets confusing, you see
So often we write of things, describing things, filling empty pages with empty rooms, filling them with words about things to fill whole rooms. But, then enters the main character and that’s when it goes to hell because lead role players are always such emotional beings so it’s tough to say where it will all go and what will set them off so the room fills with emotional predicate.
We enter
Asking for your attention
The town crier
Speaking of the here
And the now
Present for this expression
Of the hearing
Spoken in clear and present tense
The words of the people
So that they may be heard:
What they say—
How they say—
That we may say about them
And this place; The good
And bad and in-between places
That people go to become their
Very own demonstration of their Human
Being. We are here to write it down.
Oil over metal
Fuel into fire
Inertia soon released
Smoke off tires
Green lights blink
Foot off clutch
Pedal to metal
Checkered flag rush
Open up throttle
Chaos in control
Chasing white line
Racing’s in your soul!
“Start your engines!”