Irises

RECYCLED HATE

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

What makes a dealer or junkie base
is not what they do;
we have many kinds of dealers
supplying several types of compulsive desires.
But rather, its you
who revel at their misery
and treat them with scorn and hate.
To be made to feel less than,
a wonderful sentient human being,
that you somehow just don't belong,
is what causes them to become a base class.
Today's Shylock are neither Jews and Niggers
nor Commies and Queers.
Our untouchables are subculturals
who are merely victims
of this intolerant society's
old fashioned fears and recycled hates.

AMANDA

It is late September, but the mornings are not yet cold,
and the afternoons are still brutally hot;
from the upper reaches of the hill,
through the silent standing trees
that are already touched with fall color,
buses can be seen, on a nearby hillside,
unloading swarms of grade school children.
Beneath one’s feet, small fissures snake across
the face of the parched Earth-
its been weeks since the last good rain.
Not one breeze, even halfheartedly,
tries to stir the stagnate air.

Amanda, is walking down the steep hill
towards school; her clean blue blouse
and modest brown shorts are happily unobtrusive,
in a neat and tidy way. She has average intelligence,
and is one of a whole host of children,
whose upper-lower class parents
live in the near by apartments
and aspire for the homogeneous dreams
of a rapidly vanishing middle class.

She has a broad and friendly face
with plain, frank features. She has already learned,
at the tender age of twelve,
that its no fun being built stout
and the largest girl in her class.
Her small, round eyes wistfully look
toward two of her classmates
waiting at the bus stop straight ahead.

Its not so much that they are cruel
and deliberately ignore her. Its worse,
they just don’t even notice her.
They are small and slender and pretty;
they are average in every way-
in fact they are everything Amanda wishes she were.
They are ignorant, complacent and self-satisfied.
What else is there to say.
save they are extremely popular.

As Amanda approaches the bus-stop,
her presence is not even acknowledged with a glance.
Socially, she is to beneath the others
to even be the butt of some deficit ego’s joke;
besides, they are busy
carefully being meticulous with their personal appearance,
as they self-consciously imitate the manners of the actresses
they watch on superficial television shows
and insipidly stupid movies,
that are deliberately designed to program
societal norms and morays.
Would that her physical stature could shrink,
not so little as she feels inside;
but, maybe enough so she could be
smugly satisfied with herself
and oblivious like all the rest.

The promise of dawn had already departed,
the achingly empty sky is a harsh blue.
Before Amanda, stretches a dreary, bitter existence.
How is it possible people can behave this way?

WHEN WE EMBRACE

Wife when we embrace, I hold you oh so tenderly
encumbered by the human fruit
that swells from deep within you,
like red poppies. You are like
the arching sky variable in your moods.

I love you now more than ever,
love you for your fragile vulnerability.
Our child will be no mere carbon copy,
and will walk down its own roads.
We who seem so poor. You'll soon present me
with whole other Worlds,
you so delicate. Soon its time will come.
For love and a deep biological drive
you'll burst apart and scatter
our seeds to the wind.

Excuse me when I forget
the burden that you bear.
Your awkwardness in rising from a chair,
your difficulty serving supper;
but, I filled you with the seed of my loins,
and you a miracle brimming with life
walk awkwardly through the World
like a youth bewildered by
its fast growing size.

ONCE APON A TIME

Walking with my son this evening
Under storm filled skies,
We faintly heard wild geese calling
Unseen in the night.
To pass the time, they told each other this story:
"Long ago in a distant land
Across the encircling sea.
An old man sat in a
Lacquered garden,
Telling his son this
Already ancient tale.
"Deep in the year's darkest night
The young leper, already grown old,
Gave birth to a baby girl.
Frantically she sought after a light,
So she could see her child."
"What did the baby look like?"
The young son asked his father."

It was then the sound of the geese
Dissolved in the rhythm of the falling rain.

WHEN YOU PASS

When you pass, dear voluptuous one,
among the swelling refrains of Beethoven
dangling your insolence and lewd allure,
flaunting the boredom of your predatory stare,

when under the harsh neon lights I see
your painted face in an artificial mask
a candle that kindles a deceptive dawn,
and your eyes like a blind photo's licentious gaze

I think: what a pity, how beautiful and how fresh, and what a whore!
The huge skyscrapers of experience towers over all
and cloaks her in their sinister shadows. Spoiled fruit,
her heart is rotten to the core, as her body longs for the most
deceitful sex.

I ponder on the fragrance of the firm flesh of autumn apples,
a marble wall with forgotten names covering urns filled with ash,
aromas evoking the distant gardens of dreams,
embracing cool sheets, bouquets of cut flowers.

I have seen eyes that were deep wells of sadness
whose pain contained no secrets from my observations,
paupers accounts, beggars worm-wood fare
more corrupt and emptier than you've made yourselves.

Since I have sworn to tell the truth, I must say that the vast void
of heaven, beyond the universe, is an apt enough comparison to your souls!
What matters superficiality or stupidity?
Heil, fair faced lie, power driven lust! I acknowledge, your blind eye-hate!

OUR LIBRARY

My son brings me the book I have lent him.
Its cover is missing and its corners are bent and worn.
We carefully mend it, and return it to the shelves;
where, the other books sit quietly looking down,
on the waking dream that is today.
I fondly gaze over their various covers.
They are old and dear friends to me.
How delightful it is watching him make their acquaintance.
In this deceitful world, may they be as helpful to him
as they have been to me.

THE FLAGPOLE

The flagpole is as barren as an unkept promise
where evergreen trees tower green,
but not until now have we known
what the blessings of liberty mean.

A Spring melody surges throughout the land,
it sings of future victory;
but, only in hushed whispers through closed mouths
under the oppressive Puritanical yoke.

A faith has been reborn among us
life and freedom, we learn,
are one, by a need as basic
as breathing to all of mankind.

We have felt the sinister threat of bondage,
and suffocated in the stifling hold,
like slaves locked in a sinking slave ship-
and will not die that way.

Worse than the murders and blown up buildings
is the genocide society doesn't see,
which spreads as a terrible pestilence
covering cities , towns and country in its filth.

By coercion, and base informing, and terror
a vile poison is placed in our homes;
but, the dreams we have cherished, differ from those
they force upon us,
and are things we'll never forget!

EULOGY

What startling scenes
reflect from your glowing ashes.
You who were herded
through emaciated days,
through its graveyard
of abandoned hopes and destroyed dreams
silent goodbyes old cobwebs in transient conjunctions.

Tenderly, the darkness washes with dew
the corpse of all your years.
Life's burdens bear down and oppress
your tender Eros wings
on the rose
which wilts in the Winter sunsets' dying light.

What startling scenes
reflect from your glowing ashes.
What a blank Sphinx expression
faces the enigma of the star lit night.

FOR THOSE WHO WATCH

For those who watch,
while one by one they are being killed,
I have only this simple question for you,
how does it feel,
to have boring into your souls
the unblinking stare of the dead?

Do all those dying eyes,
with their tortured look of mute appeal,
make your skin crawl
like someone suddenly aware
that a stare's barrel
is trained on them?

See every tortured gaze watch
while you,
complacent in your garden,
cut flowers for your arrangements.
Hear the martyred trees moan to the breeze,
as they lift their thin twisted arms in supplication.

How many memories pour their blood-benediction
over the sea at sunset?
The unsung dreams strangled in their sleep
while the hoarse fog horns wail their futile warnings.
Where are the stars that might have blazed so bright?
Now the sky is a dark and empty cistern!

You who watch.
You who didn't wield the blade,
or pull the trigger, or detonate the bomb,
but do nothing to slacken the thirst
from their desire to repress,
you who wait while the ashes
turn to dust in darkness.

REMEMBER

Remember when we were young,
and alone in the darkness
would lie together just like now;
the house an island of silence,
the city a sea of sound,
and great ideas
filled our sorrow, fumbling hands,
worded shadows; and, we futilely
trying to read fate's cryptic symbols-
the wonder, the shy intimacies,
our dreams of life, death and love.

Tonight, too, sacred ideas visit us
to bring solace and happiness to our souls;
your Spring sprey is budding,
our modest home is clean
though slightly cluttered with a family's business,
a family that shuts its eyes to sleep amidst peril;
while, behind gently swaying moonbeam curtains,
we cuddle close, and my gnarled oak hands
reach out to you in the dark.