Some Early Works of Mine
Just a trip down memory lane.
I won some awards and got published in several places many years back.
Some Early Philosophy
(Scroll down to the bottom!)
(a great, peer-reviewed, award-winning, undergraduate philosophy journal)
And Some Poetry
(Some poems and their prompts from over a decade ago.)
From Above
You had just left the comfort zone
in flight to the arts unseen
cake-walking over life's smaller foibles
when in the half-maneuver
of an aerial slip
you killed the cosmic engine.
You had been taught to claw for climb
which you recounted.
Subsequently it was a slow fall
from the celestial brow.
You executed acrobatic feats
performed small miracles
remarked to your acolytes
how in the panorama of heaven
the muck of the earth appeared grand
a rare commodity available only
to the denizens of the ground.
As they looked up
in pathetic understanding
eyes to the fathomless reach
the clouds parted ways
in the sign of the times
Prompt: A poem about charlatans and false prophets.
The Magi
they stand deliberating endlessly
what is more valuable:
the journey or the destination?
sharpened minds worn dull.
fungal beards protrude
like some primeval forest
culled in their wizened age
they miss the sight of trees
& the old sun's respite
that moon negotiating for time.
mountains leer at the sky-
under hangcloud over head:
who are we that pass them by?
not up nor down but onward.
neither journey nor destination.
not the road not the arrival.
not the becoming nor the become.
no past no present and the future
uncertain. do we hide & seek
still behind the star & sun
for what can not be crowned?
Prompt: Hegelianism and Philosophy.
J
It began as a tragedy
a short story abridged
along the row of tenements
where you waited disconsolate
lost as our parables are lost
in your broken room
where you wept your depth
grave as the disordered sea.
Two stories converged
in the rhyme of laughter
under the glow of a tangerine star
in the banter of film
chatted mutual disinterests
of love & of music & of art
you wondered what the hell
but could not decline
as tragedy became a comedy.
Comedy became drama
as the rain divulged its soft pour
in smoke & dim lighting
in the flash of errant lightning
with abandon
you took my hand
your eyes that were singing
the music divined of love.
The plot wandered off course
and our two stories diverged
in a compact of insouciance
second both to a third
player to the part
reaping the sacred heart
an end stop to the line
as one can so easy
profane the divine.
Prompt: a narrative-driven short-story poem that keeps a common metaphor running throughout.
Romance
In the dim lit meadow of my heart
you assert the promise of two rings
one for the impunity of life & one
for the dumbfounded groundwork.
In the chime of our dissembled time
the proselytes of sand insurrect.
For my impartial arcade you find
the tessellation of the plasticine sun.
I socket my necktie to the lamppost
mistaken for an otherworldly sign.
I am lost in your chimerical clockwork -
the shape of brazen earth in your smile.
Prompt: fumbling to find the right words to say when you're in love.
In Light
What hasn't been said already
about the stars
those multifoliate points
portending fate
freckling the heavens
guiding the way-word home? –
ghosts on the horizon
Humanity lost and taking on water
steering through Charybdis
to crash upon thy jagged & desolate shores
of eternity?
Don’t we all occasionally tune in
to their liturgical orbits
slipstreams pale
held constant cross
the cosmic maelstrom
confessing light
radiating in their great decay
the frequency of a half-life?
And in the iconography of dreams
and in death's dream kingdom
we are as countless
before us
wide-eyed at them
those wondrous marks we say
writing on the wall
of some supreme inspiration.
The itinerant culmination
of our collective aspirations
miraculously adorn the darkling skies.
Did not Alexander weep
for there were too few to conquer?
And like the ancient philosophers
who has not pondered
that uncountable plenitude
connecting one and one to two
the way that one implores the infinite
the hook of sky swirling slow
in the graceful waltz
of the earth's rotation?
And all the elliptical
ratiocination
of scholars who still inquire
what vague purpose in their origin?
They say we are wiser now
smarter even
so the stars no longer sing metaphorically to us
our eyes ever hopeful
and to them in their eternal reach
a million inflated platitudes besiege us
now they are direct and concrete
radiating hot white noise
strutting around in bikinis.
Nervously we chalk it up as pop culture
and high couture.
Now of their alchemic portents:
a few bleary hallucinations.
Of their nighttime inscription:
they are mere heliographs of the sun.
Their light we now conjecture
a constant to be broken.
Prompt: be didactic and critical of society. Poke fun at yourself. Decline of the West.
Heat Death
Nefarious worlds in their insurrection,
Collided planets in death's intersection,
Spiraled the stars in calamity's fervor,
The orbits collude in celestial murder,
Intrepid each comet in suicide lines,
Shattered the cosmos, and constellate mangled,
The meteors maimed, by gravity's angle,
Seized curvatures crazed in the breaking of time,
Blackened the sun, its swoll' furnace consumed,
A black maw seduces the last listless moon,
Rebelled fractured planets, they heaving in strife,
And broke apart heavens, in darkling plight,
This, our universe, in the silence, drowned,
Extinguished the entities, their essence unbound.
Prompt: The projected end of the universe is called "Heat Death" in physics. Go against Walt Whitman and combine science and poetry into one! Be visceral and write an Italian Sonnet.
Poetry
No, the poem is a word.
No, the poem is a book.
No, the poem is a line (-
that hooks).
No, the poem is divine.
No, the poem prefers to sin.
No, the poem is sublime.
No, the poem wrought (by men).
No, the poem is in (the) form.
No, the poem is (in) the way.
No, the poem springs anew
- shapes the (merits of its) age.
Prompt: criticize poetry in a poem.