On a Trail Few Find

I suggest you scroll down and turn off my music player before viewing the video.

 

Fading Away

The old woman like a prophet sat deep in the café.

I took a table with coffee cup and folded paper at my hand.

“It is fading away,” she said, her voice a gravel pit of age.

Nodding politely, I tapped my paper and gave a grin.

Across the way sat condiments of sweetener and cream.

I reached the pitcher and poured a stream from the lip

And watched the dark brown color fade away to mud.

Fade away like the sun, like the day, like the time

And the lady sat dissolving into the background dim,

While I read of war and crime and drug abuse

And slowly sipped away the liquid in my cup

As if sipping away the bloodlust and greed of life.

“It is fading away,” she said, this soothsayer behind.

“It is gone,” I replied and went for another café au lait.

The hours passed and daylight faded from where we sat.

The paper lay wrinkled, no jobs were certain found,

Just hopeful circled blips in the shrinking classified.

I stared at my hands and the fading circle from a ring.

The skin was spotted now; the palms are growing soft.

“It is fading away,” she said this seer of cosmic truth.

“The world we knew?” “No,” she sadly replied, “my sight.”

Photo: The Canal, Lewes, DE. Taken by the author, 2009

In My Villanelle

I think I am the villain in my villanelle.

I wish I could break out and be free form instead,

But I’d rather stay the rules than languish in Hell.

Of course I want to do my own thing and rebel,

Not count my syllables, my rhythm or my rhyme.

I think I am the villain in my villanelle.

What if I changed the pattern, rambled a spell?

Is anybody counting? Is it such a crime?

But I’d rather stay the rules than languish in Hell.

Over the corpse of rhyme some have rung the knell.

Though it is easier, I’ll not lie in that bed.

I think I am the villain in my villanelle

Because I chafe against what others do compel

And rant of how I suffer to compose each line,

But I’d rather stay the rules than languish in Hell.

So it is the fate of man since Eve and Adam fell,

This struggle with obedience till we drop dead.

I think I am the villain in my villanelle

But I’d rather stay the rules than languish in Hell.

Photo: The author in Lewes, DE, January 2011 taken by Ronald W. Tipton.

Painters and Poets

PAINTERS AND POETS

Edward Hopper lived in my world,

He and Andrew Wyeth, too.

Stark, dark and bare to the bones.

No pretentious guile within them,

Just lonely truth in the shadows.

Nighthawks and Yellow Labs

Cornered in expectations.

Naked women with corn silk hair

Or questioning eyes,

In poses of expressionless emotion.

Every person is a solitary figure

In the geometry of the city

Or the vastness of the country field.

Rooms are claustrophobic prisons

Streets are exitless exiles of night.

John Donne was not right at all,

Every man is an island

That can never be explored.

Our shoreline might touch the sea of humanity

But our heart is a jungle impenetrable.

Like the ladies in the window light,

The woman of the “Morning Sun”

Staring straight into the view

Or the one of “Lovers” turned away

Every man’s mind is a mystery.

Illustrations:  “Morning Sun” by Edward Hopper

“Lovers” by Andrew Wyeth

Better Off Dead

BETTER OFF DEAD

First you kill all the lawyers,

That’s what Shakespeare said.*

This kills two birds with one stone,

For politicians would be dead.

Then comes the media,

Whether spoken or read,

We’d all be better served

If we severed some talking heads.

Our armies all could do

With much more fewer Brass

And let’s not overlook

Each and every pompous Corporate Ass.

And one final note,

Given how this winter has been,

I feel I could gladly strangle

Our gleeful Weathermen.

* Henry VI, Part 2

Shakespeare’s Statue in Leicester Square, London, England.

Faith

Some folk believe in fate and destiny

Say it caused all that was and will be

And don’t give God any slice.

It is their general sentiment

We’re all Big Bang and accident,

But the two do not jive.

If you have no God, no Divine,

Everything a freak of time

And nothing guides your life.

No God, no immortal scheme.

No earthly hope or cosmic dream

No reason to be alive.

If you wish to be an Atheist

Then you must forsake every myth

And accept a world of strife

Without reason, without rhyme.

Where human life’s not worth a dime

With no goal for which to strive.

Oh what a pathetic breed

If we are but mutant seed

Our worthlessness be rife.

I don’t know about destiny and fate

And have no proof on what I await,

But in God I will abide.

Illustration: “Hecate or The Three Fates” by William Blake

Dinner Conversations

The couples sat at separate tables

Sipping at their drinks waiting their food.

 The man at Table One said,

“George says that sales are down.”

The woman was looking at the walls.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said,

“About the colors in this room.”

At Table Two silence prevailed,

Beyond stating their order not an uttered word.

The man at Table One said,

“There is talk of closing a plant

Or two and cutting staff.”

The woman sipped her wine.

“I like the color of these walls,

We should paint the living room.”

At Table Two the food arrived.

The man and woman there said, “Thank you”.

The man at Table One said,

“If this economy stays down

Much longer, then I think we’re through.”

The woman tapped her chin,

“But then the rugs will never match,

We should buy new carpets too.”

At Table Two there was not a word.

They chewed their food and stared down at their plates.

The woman at Table One said,

“Oh, I hope we never get like that,

It is such a sad thing to see,

People eating out for dinner

Who can’t communicate.”

The man at Table One asked,

“Are you getting desert tonight?”

Illustration: “New York Restaurant” by Edward Hopper

Old Billy

Hay bales,

Out in a field alone,

Strange forms out of season,

Capped with snow

And withering in the winds.

The farmer lived long and alone

After Lizzie died that spring a-ways.

A man with outsized hands

And sinewy arms

Who spoke in long silences.

Window

Shades on the old house

Pulled well down against the light.

Inside the shadows

And cobwebs mingle like lovers.

Barn roof

Sagging against the weight

Of age and the weather.

Silo boards rotting,

Only the odor lingers in the barn.

The bales

Curled in fetal rolls

Across the neglected landscape

Just a remainder that

At the auction no one wanted the hay.

Photo is of Bill and his youngest sister, 1903.

After a Day of Listening to Radio News and Public Service Commercials Blues

I suggest scrolling down and turning off my music player.

Give me a brandy,

Make it a double shot.

Give me a brandy,

Make it a double shot.

Got to drown me some blues, man.

Got to drown me a lot.

There’s been much rust and ruin

And closets full of moths.

Must have been so much rusty ruin,

Then closets’re full of moths.

I think the world’s got pleurisy,

Got that whooping cough.

I say if the terrorists don’t get you,

If they ain’t no riots up your street,

Oh no, if your workplace ain’t collapsing

And you still got bread to eat – maybe meat!

You will probably find your suffering

From, from terminally fatal stinky feet,

I’m sweatin’ out the news that the sun’s so hot,

If I open up a window my skin is gonna fry.

My, my!

And god Forbid it, if my team loses the super duper overhyped doing the pregame all day and night bowl,

My heart is going to explode and it’s gonna make me die.

Yi, yi!

And you know, and you know, and you know,

I heard it all on my radio

And broadcasters never lie.

So…

Give me some whiskey, man,

And follow it with beer.

Yeah, yeah, give me that Black Jack Daniels, mate,

And douse me in beer.

If I wasn’t so creeped, bleeping, weeping scared,

I’d be paralyzed with the good old, good old

Radio News and Public Service Ad fear,

That Service Ad fear!

Make that another pint, lad.

Photo property of Ronald W. Tipton: The author, his wife and the photographer at Irish Eyes, Lewes, DE, February 2011, picture taken by the waitress.

How to Make a Sandwich

Feeling kind of peckish?

What do you do?

A little bit of meat,

Cheese slice or two,

Squirt of some mustard

Slapped between bread.

Now your belly’s

Quite well been fed.




Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun!  

A Succession of Progression in the Sound of A

This getaway, two nights, one day, quiet hotel stay overlooking the quay near where the ship Overfalls lay along the canal to the bay.

But the weather was rainy and gray, which kept us prisoners not so gay.

February in Lewes may not be the best time I say, with even a sunray or two, and do pray, more fun and play.

What the hay, for yay, we survived.

Photo: Light ship Overfalls, Lewes, DE. January 2011. Taken by the author.

Ode to Masaccia Restored

That big or fat or messy, clumsy Tom,

Masaccio, the painting master

Realistically portraying God’s Kingdom

On canvas framed and on walls of plaster.

Upon the latter such he did receive

Censor by prudes who blushed and brushed his lines

With fig leaves put across Adam and Eve.

All do they hide is their own impure minds.

This artist deserves much more man’s respect.

Though died so young, he gave such influence

To those who followed his point of perspec-

Tive, the Vanishing Point for evidence.

            It is not the nudity that’s evil.

            It’s the censorship plays the Devil.

There are those delicate souls of less wit

Who take offence at innocence and truth

Fearful of natural depiction. It

Drives them to destruction with oh such ruth-

Lessness they hide from us the whole; forsooth,

            These many generations, until some brave

            Soul restored it to what the artist gave.

We perceive

Adam as he was

And so does

Woman Eve,

Thus not shamed by nudity,

Shamed by sin they be.

NOTE: This ode consisted of a Sonnet as the Strophe, a Rhyme Royal as the Antistrophe and a Shadorma as the Epode.

Masaccio (December 21, 1401 – autumn 1428), born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone. His penname means big, fat, messy or clumsy Tom.

The illustration and poem concern his painting, “The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden” (1425), which was part of a larger work on the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. This particular panel was many years later censored by someone painting fig leaves over the privates of Adam and Eve. The painting was smoke-damaged by a fire in 1771 and in the restoration the alterations were discovered and removed.

Wild Goose Fancy

First you hear the call, the cry, no, the cacophony.

It is the trumpet of triumphed recovery from near extinction

That edges up to the sound of a world’s destruction.

How do you turn away? How do you stand against such noise?

Over the hill they come, first in vanguard,

Then canopy of multiple V’s,

Darkening, darkening and it is an awesome sight

And a frightful fright

When the wild goose take flight.

I walk into the woods alone, into the silence of the trees.

The path is rough with ice-encrusted snow, the going slow,

And far behind the circling cloud, the noisome crowd

Is drifting off in searching groups,

Scouting out the water flows beneath our frozen earth.

But I see this no more or hear that roar,

They are there and I am here on my own mission

Finding my own solitude, I no longer listen

To the wild goose take flight.

That pale winter ghost has stolen everything,

Coated it with his seal and slippery trails

Are teasing, taunting my every caution step.

Sister wind blows love songs in my ear

That freeze my heart and soul to the bone.

How dare you, sir, steal into my home

And poke about with your icicle thumb

To gray my days and turn them numb.

When the wild goose take flight.

There is beauty everywhere and death.

All the color has been drained away

From tree or cloud or lake or field.

To fall is lost and you’d shiver there

Until the gracious sleep eased the pain

And lifted you upon its frigid wing

Into the last cold dark night,

On the last wild goose flight.

Photo: Over 300 Wild Geese in flight over Alapocas Run State Park. Taken by the author