Poetry

FALL
 

    Shades of leaves -- flowers
    burst forth their final stages of beauty

    Magnificent hues
    fill the eyes in shades of amber, red hue.

    Harvest aroma,
    squash and pumpkins,
    ready loving families
    and wide eyed ones to start
    first year at school

    A chill grasps night,
    signaling season's end
    Although, my limbs now tell the secret of the seasons,
    without scent or colour.

    I have loved watching fall
    It always amazed and reminded me,
    that I'm not alone
    and that all God's creation must take the same journey
    chameleons, we are all

    To me, fall represents majesty of mother nature
    Depicting a portrait of life;
    A rising and a descent
    back to the maker’s arms
    we speak so much about
    For all things must pass

    We leave a legacy in love,
    in our triumphs and yes,
    in our losses
    All things combined,
    create a great tributary
    that grows as a river,
    to flow to the ocean
    of new beginnings

stunning Autumn
 suns the afternoon
 in splendor
 sweeping her hem
 o're summer's castoff cloak
 dried and drifted
 golden-flecked
 in spent brown showers
 to mound the forest floor

 She bows her final encore
 to grand guardians
 towering ablaze
 in regal
 clinging
 reds and oranges
 steadfast upright
 nobles
 standing watch
 until relentless
 Winter wind arrives
 to strip them stoic
 until Spring

 ~ 28 November 1999 ~

The last oat life preserver
bobs in the bowl, soaking up the pale white skim
of milk once whole, its fluid thickened
by sweet sucrose.

I pause to contemplate.
How round you are, with your boundless
uses: on a string, in a bowl, fun for us all.

Soothing a baby's child tears
with your shape and crunchy taste,
the cycles of teens munching on your sustenance
while grappling with life's quandaries.

You are a piece of this earth my Cheerio;
built with minerals from her soil.  You even echo her shape,
the circle of  life spins along your perimeter to be repeated
in the bowl, the spoon, my open mouth.

Do you miss your center, I wonder, scooping you up onto my spoon
Is that way you try to drown in the universe of lactate or does the
sucrose
call you home from the bottom of the bowl?

No matter, I accept you
soggy and soft.  Let me look once more
before you are gone.

Today is a hazy day.
Like a long blue snake
Lying along the horizon
Of the bay, the escarpment
Rests, beside the sky
A different kind of blue
With puffs of white cloud
Unmoving.
Today I can lose myself
Inside the earth's
Silent soul.
I can unravel dreams
Inside a perfect place.
I can taste the harmonic rhythm
In the waves.

Each year the cycle continues
Into summer
When we both shake off
The trappings of how we survive
In the world of dollar bills,
Then try to wear
Our different clothes
With fibres woven in the soul
Of our existence
Not loomed together
In the fabric of society.

Each year the transition
Becomes more difficult
As if some essence
Of what we are
Of what we dream to be
Has been lost
In the shuttling.

There has been a searching
For a sense of place,
A private construct
Where we both
Can create in harmony,
In solitude,
But as we unravel
Our dreams
The place eludes us
Confuses us with its
Lack of perfection, and
We drink deep
From cups of bitterness.

Where on the cycle
Is this perfect place
Where the trappings
Of our souls
Can hang upon us
Like leaves on trees,
Or grass dancing
In the wind?

Where is this light
To dapple day
Through a needled forest
Or to touch
The underside of leaves
At sunset?

Where is this place
But in each soul's
Own weaving.

Calm Waters

Why does your beauty make me feel so sad?
It is a look as rare as it is good,
A fine and calm perfection that is clad
In mystery that's more than understood.
And yet I'm sad, and I would know the cause
Or I'll go mad and round the world I'll rave
Yet never find the keys to the closed doors
And lie down ignorant in my lonely grave.
So here's a guess: I think that I've been hurled
With sudden gentleness towards a peace
When all about me in the actual world
The hatred and the violence will not cease:
And you a haven of what ought to be
That can't be reached through such a stormy sea.
 
 

Poetic Consequences

If I should say a worthwhile thing at last
The planets would collapse into the sun,
The cosmic worms would double up in fun,
The future would reverse into the past,
The double helix would become undone,
And Descartes' evil demon would have won.
So it would leave God dead and me aghast
If I should say a worthwhile thing at last.

unconventional pain careens through the soul:
shouting, writhing, clenching, begging,
blinding!

conventional wisdom places blame exactly
where it belongs:
listen brother, god’s mad, purge yourself,
Confess!

While the pain keeps screaming
the soul cannot hear.
The soul cannot embrace the face
of Beauty obscured by
sharp pangs of wounds and words.

Job, what have we done to bind your wounds?
What have we done to sit in silent shadows with your darkness?
What,
Have we ripped your soul apart with our words?
Have we tortured your hearing till deaf?

God is silent today, like morning among the pines,
and watches you today, like the sun over waterfall rapids.

Wait,
but my words have outdistanced my heart once again.

Let me listen with you, wait for you,
watch till the conflagration ceases and the
forest is renewed again.

Till your pain is no longer such drowning noise
that submerges the gentlest Voice beneath.
 

learning to be there for those in pain,

LOVE IS BLIND
when your lover could do no wrong
when you walk around happy singing a romantic song
when you feel closeness and warmth like you belong

when you only see what you want to see
when your emotions are played on and climbed like a tree

when you are overwhelmed by the attention, companionship, and
tranquillity
when you don't see the obvious things before your eyes and suffer
humility
LOVE ISN'T KIND

"LOVE GAME"
~By Monique Nicole Fox~

To study negative emotion and behavior
Love is the savior
With unprovable assumptions

A subjective field
Too emotional that social scientists yield

Countless studies on war, hate, crime, and prejudice
Studies of love are often missed

Not comfortable studying love per se
But what happens when love is deficient, thwarted, warped, or absent do
they
Love is a small word in life's ocean, sea, and bay
The game of love we all do play
 

"FACING LOVE"
~By Monique Nicole Fox~

To face love head - on afraid
With my heart someone once played
Hesitant I am made
A sort of traffic accident of the heart won't fade
My heart was cut with a blade

Vagueness of the word foiled
For another man I am spoiled
Vulnerability toiled
My rusted heart must be oiled

Understanding the appeal of music
Understanding what makes love tick
Understanding how to heal from heart sick
Understanding man's deceitful trick
Understanding how to cope with this blow--this lick
Understanding how to rebuild brick by brick

To face the majesty of love with vigor
To face the Serengeti of the heart like a trigger
To face the cupid's arrow now I'm much bigger
Love's a wholesome violence to figure
 

"LIFE'S OCEAN"
 

That Ocean Of Men And Boys
That Ocean Of Sadness And Joys
That Ocean Of Kids And Toys

That Ocean Of Disease Like Aids
That Ocean Of Homo's And Gays

That Ocean Of Violence And Drugs
That Ocean Of Pushers And Thugs
That Ocean Of Vacuums And Rugs
That Ocean Of Sockets And Plugs
That Ocean Of Ants And Bugs

That Ocean Of War And Welfare
That Ocean Of People That Do Not Care
That Ocean Of Hurt And Despair
That Ocean Of Parents Not Being A Pair

That Ocean Of Women And Men
That Ocean Of Sex And Sin
That Ocean Of Beer And Gin

That Ocean Of Marriage And Divorce
That Ocean Of Sad Children Of Course

         Being the object of a side show goodbye
         drawing near a close to a short time
         that could only mean
         there was something there in the first place

         with as many yesterdays as history bothers to calculate
         could only bring the ending nearer as the free
         give a rebirth to the dreams to waste

         armed with lines premeditated
         that would say whatever you want them to mean
         while you still have nothing without your effort
         a soul that lies unspoken
         saying nothing
         in an attempt to flush out death
         into apathetic reasoning
         killing it with a power moving the darkness
         into a direction other than where
         it burnt thru in the development phase

         as with microscopic eyes
         looking into the lens depicting the weakness
         unmeasured by optic rays uncensored in
         psychedelic resonated haze
         encompassing the retina
         freezing her look into memory

         believing that a glance would last forever
         and hide until morning the apologetic reasoning
         that disappears with the dawn

         how could one look for tomorrow
         when there's music inside each day
         when there's no answer from anything nothing
         unsaid endings accumulate
         when there's life in a world unknown
         to the animal inside

         would they breed fear into our society
         with pain of guilt
         a fear to feed upon
         feed into
         out of concern knowledge would be replaced
         and run thru their blood
         like spiders to crawl
         upon you in a web of lies, a nest
         where I place my head to take my sleep
         and without this there is no point no laughter
         in how the maker or your answer
         when its raining
         should begin to record memory in fantasy
         a moment chosen
         worth more than blank space
         when the new is washed into a pool of blended effects
         when the wind takes the place of water
         mistaken for rodents
         chewing through yesterdays museum of sounds
         you try to replace
         and a wave of loudness
         overwhelms and evaporates
         into an atmosphere clouded by warmth
         and echoes back across the morning
         taking more than it could ever replace

The security moved the puppet people
around the stage
the truth was lies
the laughter was sad
and the pre-acted motion
turned into bad lines
to be drawn
into the pit of lions
teeth in the airwaves
the security moved the puppet people around
in violation accompanied by many brand names

There is anarchy in the summerfields

The soybeans
are Socialist Democrat
with each
growing to a uniform height
never wanting
greater height than neighbor plants

The corn
a Monarchy,
tall, proud but thin, fragile;
standing on dirt

Wheat is Communist
using the manifesto wind
as an excuse
to wave in unison,
but only managing an occasional ripple

Green Beans
are Democracy
thinking they can grow
as long as they want, but
just getting tangled
in each other's vines
 
 

(res(ent moons
 

(res(ent moons are for wishing, she told me

A new tiny rip in the sky letting
a just of light through is a (hance...for something

Day slips into her festive darkness...
Somewhere a ripe dream is sagging
and a gloved hope is rea(hing up
to plu(k
 
 

8/?
 

Let us lie
in the cool grass
of an warm August night

And a soft blanket of stars
shall be all that covers us

The crickets shall sing
The trees shall sway
The moon shall blush
And only the evening
will know our secrets
 
 

God's Imagination
 

In God's imagination: a fertile plump infinity,
each soul a joke seeking to be cracked

He births each into a precisely planned deformity
with voice dry and face straight

And the Universe so laughs
at each new clever twist God puts
into his mundane assembly line job
of cramming priceless impeccable vapor
into cheap flawed bottles;
that even God chuckles

BELONGING

The concept of midday was coined
by the sun.  In some places, the fig tree
belongs to grief, as sleep to the wealthy
and dark to unfortunates.

Courage was never bestowed
upon concrete, nor understanding
to a vault.  The eye sees
what pertains to vision.  The mouth
will always be hunger’s pawn.

Airplanes hang in a sunny sky, or hazy,
as if the heavens had taught them.
The minutes revert to God.

This is the truth.  The wisdom
of man is to be longing.
 

LINE-UP

We were all in black and white.
Every family album was, back then.
But such a predictable monochrome
family – Mom widening her cheeks
in a smile, Dad striking the serious
pose so a quirk of wit wouldn’t show
for any shutter.  Also grandmothers,
visiting aunts and uncles.  A cousin
from France who knocked at the locked
back door one night, so Mom imagined
burglars.  See, he poses, unlikely
in a Hawaiian shirt (white on black),
forever a stranger to English.

Nobody bothered to write down
names, just dates.  All the faces
stayed the same, imperceptibly
aging as they stood.

What did we do when a camera
wasn’t lining us up?  How did we
live?  What toys, cats, turtles kept
a childhood?  Where's the still-
life of a breakfast nook, the knob-
less door that swung open and shut
a hundred times a day?  The carob
tree for climbing? someone climbing
the carob tree?

Right there, that's me standing
stiff before the lens (smiling),
bandaid on a bunged-up knee.
 

DAWN

came and went
like light from tinfoil
waves like knives tossed
not at random, precisely
etching shapes of ponderosa
at horizon, binary
incision.  Its glance
reflected off the blackbirds'
flight --
the blackbirds blackening
the oak all night, then
lift-off, light.