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Tracing that Long Path

Our lives pass like cherry blossoms,
snapped from hurried branch to ripened fruit.
We flit from first to fledged to finished,
put out to ash one hundred years an instant.
A truth we scarcely want to envision,
yet death and quantum mechanics will have it.

In human want and vanity we make
the cosmos roll into a ball and laugh,
as if our hundred was even a flash
to its endless procession of cold stars.
It’s like to ants a rose would bloom eternal.

Do not ask the cosmos or pyramids
of the atoms that went into their form,
or the rose of the ants that flit across its back:
for the pyramids would not even know
of sciences written in scales of man.

The seasons changing keys set fruit to fall
from mindful sagging branch to brutal dust
below. The ants divert their sacred path
to sweets divinely delivered on high,
like man attributing meaning to change.

Is it just we who contemplate the ants,
the Sagan starstuff, the music vast?

©JPV

In Another Time

If I was born a thousand years ago
perhaps the beauty of birds
or all the natural world
would have been enough for me,
but mere words in adoration
cannot stay my head from pain
while all the skies are pretty blue
and all praise of nature the same
as the poet’s eternal view.

If I was born one hundred years ago
I would have spewed industrial lines
and wrapped myself in soot and coal
to smell like rugged workers in the mines,

But I was born defined by tech,
made mad by the mechanization of life,
the robotics of being young
and needing force fed technical knowledge,
while nature grew ever distant,
and the unnatural act of living the norm:
the endless going and coming
amid a plight to work to live
and the weakness of starvation
brought forth through things that should make life better,
yet have taken the form of our Masters.

Alone

I would tell you
that you
are not alone
and reference
two bodies tied
to each other
in space,
as if
there wasn’t remoteness,
attraction,
and passing
souls in motion
toward decay
to save you
from the pain,
but each of us
alone
from birth
has this horror:
a loneliness
and strafe
from being
born into this,
that we cripple
under it’s weight.

The blonde
walking unachievable
beyond window
or reach,
or the syllables
to say
with ease
what one would want
to get across
without
translation’s cost.

Alone
fetal
we grasp
for each other
like computers
suddenly self aware
with such different code
that translation
might never be a thing.

Into The Trenches

We are out gunned,
out skilled, and ill equipped
for this oppressive force,
but into the trenches
and under the radar we go,
for there’s an enemy within.

Dig in, dig in.
dear men,
object to the occupation
and torture of your land.
For all it stands for
go deep into the trenches.

Into the trenches,
into the guerilla suits
of men forced to make David bleed
when Goliath is an f-16
and the money to buy men off.

Dig in, dig in
into the trenches once more.

The Serapeum at Saqqara

Precision and prowess is
clutched within the bowels
of the serapeum’s stone walls,
proud geometric boxes
of suspicious skill.

These six sided puzzles–
missed for countless eons,
labeled each a sarcophagus
without body or bull
to back that thesis up.

Laser like mathematics
stand as velvet to tools
now lost within this world,
while the walls are crude cut
above any suspicious marks.

Would an artist forget the roof
or a thief be after the bones?
What if the bulls never existed
and the granite was much older,
covered to simply protect it?

More on this topic in my poem: A Pharaohs Rise

Atlantis

I live in Atlantis,
sunk deep beneath the ocean waves:
hope is mere semantics,
for my people cannot be saved.

They speak of atonement
and whisper to almighty Zeus,
certain that death’s moment
is but a cleaver ruse.

The best surely believe,
and certainly they do;
the worst pick up where others grieve,
and certainly they do.

Long ago we searched for truth
and shined our light on what confused,
before the paid science journal,
before knowledge became profit,
before funding controlled the youth,
and the livings of those who’d dare to muse.

Long ago we made an honest living
and payed a hard days work
before the fuzzy math arrived
and set the family berserk.

Mom and dad both, two jobs
pursuing the Atlantean dream,
happy to work but failing
to make even simple ends meet.

Her last real vacation,
August 15th, 1972,
before the taking of nation
and the end of blue.

We used to go and play outside,
before the neon glow of phones
and the spider web’s rape
and capture of our hearts and jones.

Blinded by dopamine,
we missed the cracks above
and now Atlantis is doomed,
yet, there are bunkers–
just not for us.

Tears to Pay

What matters if we stop these bells,
—the toll and knell of guns and bombs,
the monstrous groan of metal wheels
the murmur of a boy gurgling on hope
before his breath is smothered out,
if we cannot quench the thirst of bureaucracy?

No body count will do for them
what neatly folded flag and flowers can
when mere youth is cast off to bloody war.

No, the bodies lie just as they are meant—
to coat and oil the tracks of greed,
to feed the machine that only leads to death.

The clatter of metallic rapid fire
has nothing on the cost of this:
our lives the fodder of the rich.

The poor go off to the old heroic war,
—always have, stoic in their rugged deaths,
stoic in their simple cut for the day,
with wages to pay the undertaker
and tears to pay the debt collector.

Amending Our Heads Into The Sand

Never let ideas die,
not with a man
be it Hitler’s one master race
or Luther’s dream for you
to be measured
by your content of character–

If dreams do die,
and we let them,
a father died
for you to forget him,
a mother fought for her
and her daughter’s right to live
as happy servants to men,
like two good Cinderella’s content
to live old testament,
as if we never moved forward
and still took the advice of a book
over the lesson
and the pain of living on Earth.

If dreams do die,
and we let them,
than our armies are dead
and since bled out to hide the truth–
that freedom is fleeting
while some will do their best to win
in a battle to use others as bread,
as salt, as bills to line their balls
and make themselves above our bones,
imbedded deep in the East Room
as if constitutions were written as jokes
and you haven’t the memory to end
the madness of amending our roots,
our truth, our head into the sand.

Where have the Lilacs Gone

Where have the lilacs gone?
Are they with the belladonna
that bloomed when we were young,
before the truth was known,
before the side effects,
before the taking of remedies?

I lived in a Victorian house,
a suburb house, with lawn
and trees and fence to match.

My youth was common as the grass,
but Gram’s was of German decent
and from hers I had grown,
and could see how nation’s give-up
or would if following that course

Oh Brother, my brother
how could you turn your back
and shove a man into that fire?

Was it the swell in the streets
when they made Poland so bad
or was it when they sold justifications
so smoothly you couldn’t just laugh.

Still, I have to get back to the flowers,
because one morning they will burn,
and embers will once again leap,
devouring human empathy,
and from then on a lilac may not symbolize love,
but blood, blood will always be blood.

Where do I begin

Where do I begin,
what words will convince you
that a knowledge of history
is not a conspiracy
and that no matter the cause
slick words cannot bring back
kids murdered and maimed by men
in search of profits and oil.

Truth, as written
by winners and their right hands,
is that democracy is the best way,
so children get mowed over
as we’re busy celebrating the 4th
and the shape of our lawns.

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