Tag Archives: #life

April 23, 2021

THE SILVER AXE

By EPRobles

He wondered with horror how so many memories, so many forms to be branded on his skin and engrave there.

Then the wet rattle of a twisted throat, and he beats his last breath to his knees, gazed on from above as the wheezing thing sagged, and began on his shoes.

One God looked in that one eye of him, took in the whole writhing weight of him, and, from the spine of that beast, blew the darkness that will not let me alone!

It is yet again where we find the Poet’s Muse. Her eyes are green, and they pierce backward and forward even into his head and his heart, his brain and his soul.

I have been chained to this post for six months and now I am to be hanged, it’s a winter morning, half-light.

The axe’s face is pale; its teeth are ready to cut; the poet stands slack-jawed; and waits with a satisfied grimace.

She smiles with blind malignity; I am hanging here, she begins, and her voice gears in his head, makes him mad with every anger and whimpers sound with a silver-sparkle, It is another wish shattered, this one made to whittle the Golden Ace’s life down to a ring so narrow and brutish and pale and inhuman.

The writer cannot see her but his ears are mad With unspoken sounds.

She has left dark-green circles.

He had tried to fill them with wonder and beauty; she: they’re her, only more so, every blot and abrasion cunningly and by dark cunning by her own hand, ever more revolting; why the hell did you bring that creature with you?

There is nothing for you to do, (the axe growls). You cannot even reach me.

I told you that I wanted the axe.

Then are you sure you’re not just nervous?

I am telling you nothing.

The truth is harsh.

This is not true.

Well then stop worrying.

I am telling you nothing!

The Poet looks up in alarm.

The axe comes down, it makes a hideous, brassy sound.

And it is still: I am telling you nothing!

Her face is as white as that of the blade.

He is sweating.

I do not want the axe, he says finally.

I am coming down!

A chuckle.

The axe’s blade is laughing.

The Poet spins in place, does a somersault, lands on his feet.

He moves fast.

At the touch of his right foot he has snatched up and spun into the air, caught, dangled over a canyon by the thin tip of his finger.

There is a rattle in his head.

Okay, okay, he whispers, I am coming down.

He lands and slumps, panting.

His face is flushing red, his hair disheveled.

He grins through the tears running down his face.

Just me, he tells the axe.

You are alone in this awful place with all the stupid, insane weirdoes.

Where is the fun in that?

This place is for people like you, not me.

He is in a mood.

The axe slashes through the air, a silver blur.

The Poet leaps into its path, somehow knowing, somehow having seen what it will do before it happens.

He leaps back and the axe cleaves the air, then comes down to strike his left foot, where it clatters on the ground with a dull clatter.

He starts to bend over to pick it up, but the axe’s weight is too much for him.

He stumbles to one knee and falls to his left side.

The axe rests, not quite pointed at him, but ready, at his right leg and stares at it, mouth slightly ajar.

The blade is warm against his right leg, the handle warm against his cheek.

He gets himself up, he bends over, picks up the axe.

He kicks his right leg up, the axe goes flying past his body as if to his left, and he stretches his left leg out to catch it.

He pulls himself to his feet and does not bother with the blade and bends down to retrieve it, and reaches, but there is nothing there.

The edge is dull. Within his mind and he frowns, picks it up, holds it up in front of him, glances behind him.

The axe is nowhere to be found. But it is mentally within his hand.

He looks at the blue-gray sky, frowns, turns to walk along the canyon wall, head down, watching for the axe.

He waits.

The axe sits on his shoulder, blades jutting up into his neck or so it feels.

Yes! he thinks.

The axe.

It is not true.

He is all alone in the world.

And an old man.

What do you expect him to do?

He thinks about the little old lady he saw in town today, and starts to weep.

:: 04.23.2021 ::

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March 31, 2021

FIRE OF HEARTS

By EPRobles

THE bad weather had subsided. \the sound of the spring equinox heralded the falling of a silence on the world. In the village, a few village men, young and old, sat around the long dining table, eating by candlelight. The village elders had gathered to select a new sage-the young had no wisdom, yet the wise men desired the young-and so they seated the young with the old, and none left alive would ever know. Before the elders sat the long table, with an old flint spear on it, it was cold to the touch as it glowed in the light from the candles. \(but it was worth it, it was the knowledge that I will not return. \) one of the young men said: \((I chose this spear, because, when it strikes, the spear will be split in two. Half of the spear will go out to become a bird, so the wisp of a spear can fly around, being a bird, and think about what we had, and whether to go on. Half of the spear, the half that is left, will come back to me, and I will become wise, and then I will guard it and understand the power of flight, and perhaps build a new village with a thick stone wall and and a trapdoor into the next world.\)) \((a warthog man-creature, \) another young man said, drawing into words his inability to remember his family and friends. ((I thought of my parents, my relatives, my village, my friends, but my home and my parents are gone now, so I do not miss them in the way that I could, if I could recall them again. They may as well not be a part of me now, any more than my eyes are part of my body now that I see without them.)) \((but what of the village, of my life? the wisp of a spear? what shall I do with it? \) the young man asked. \((I think I will remain with my people, but I do not know why I feel the urge to guard it. All I know is that it is a burden I should not bear, so I will not leave it behind. I suppose that in the end, knowing is not knowing, and the answer to the question is as elusive as before. And that is my answer to the way ahead, at least for now.\)) ((the other young man, here, said: I think I will go home to the city, and live among the people I grew up among. I will remember the things of my youth, but not the sorrows of my home. I will continue to be a father, a brother, a friend, but I will not become a part of that grief, it will not be mine.)) \((and then they said: That will be our voice, young man-creature, that will take flight like a winged dove, flying far away from us, flying away to a future beyond us, far away from our sorrows, and far away from our questions,\)) ((the old said: With what voice? what is there to compare with the way that can song that speaks words we could not have? I speak the deepest wisdom of the elders, and yet it is another mouth, another voice, and yet it has it own power, with words so beautiful and profound. Look at the blood of your children, and remember, look into your wife’s eyes and see, hear, hear, hear our song, which will return to us someday. Our words will leave us, to be another’s song. But our song, which was our voice in the first place, and remains ours by right, will return to us someday. It is not the way ahead. Yet even in that deathly quiet of remembering, you will know us. You will know the words that we sing, for they are our voices in the darkness, that will return, if we are lucky, to us. They will not sing the words that we have said. We will sing a new song, the song of our next, better life, which has more meaning than this one. The words that speak of sorrows, of homes and families that are gone, the deaths of young and old, those words will all have to be lost, for we will lose ourselves in the voices of our children, if we continue on.)) \((the young man-creature took some of the spear-wisdom that was given him, and drew it into a kind of pouch, and a strap of leather. He then cut his wings away, and his hair, and changed into the likeness of the wisp of a spear, with hair of copper and gold in it. He went to a chamber that was like the eyes of a hawk, and looked out at the world through its eyes, and looked for a long time, at the passing of the years. He was the first of the owl-creatures that would travel, the first to leave his home and leave behind the old, dark-lit chamber, and go to a different life, away from the old and sorrow, and into the new and waking sun. The old of the dark chamber that he had entered, the wisp of a spear, the old but dearly-held wisdom, the owl-creature, the other man-creatures, all lived in the chamber with him, in that world that he had created for them.))

:: 03.30.2021::

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March 29, 2021

VEGETABLES

By EPRobles

VEGETABLES, summer sun, a touch of salt and chlorine — his take on Italian art restored by frescoes who I don’t know well and a hundred times better than it says so — almond and lime ginger lime broccoli baked on a day during a season where there isn’t any snow and everyone outside to have a picnic on the one flower in the pool that everyone is using to make salt with since everyone can slather it all over their bodies and throughout their bubbles that they carry everywhere with them yet also simmering in pools and those that surround the one they are doing it in that the length of a slip of leg is not about how long the youth can stay and carry such things in his youth and how others have never felt as they were and how how he has never looked into their eyeballs knowing that the greenery remains awake, in a world that has been turned off and some even have forgotten how to look and still are drenched in cool water, and the scent and the texture of what it is in you and around you the fragrance of the space and the darkness and the sweat and the heat and the syrup and the celery that goes along

:: 03.28.2021 ::

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March 24, 2021

FRAMELESS HEADS UPON EMPTY WALLS

By EPRobles

On the single side of my art song—my parodic air—the loveliness is perfect
because I am “last in the line.” When you sit there pondering how you got
from here to there, you forget to be there, and the years hurry by like birds,
yet without wings.

Maybe that is what poets mean by the grass between the toes: it is the kind of beauty
that strikes me as singular, and then makes me forget where I was going.

Could that be the air I am inhaling, that gorgeous little dew, the sort of fragrance
that one asks questions about. That one is good, and leaves you for another week.
I am not asking about the individual, about the wit or the sex, that one; the other
thinks she is too good for poetry and wants to hang out her pants.

The trees on Central Park West have not only dimples, but very high struts.
Many passers-by make like jumping spiders and creep along the white beech bark,
tearing off the strange multicolored pods that are the leaves of the American locust
and varnish the unenclosed bark.

For a while they seem to be all yellow, then the green reasserts itself and they all turn red.
Red like earth, red like hell. I say what I mean. Why do we make so much of appearance
and so little of meaning? If you were to sneeze on a weekday you’d make a million dollars. I’m lucky
to get one or two dollars a day for my poems, and that’s all. All my life, I’ve been scraping
and clipping in hundreds of un-sexy places. I once walked out of an interview with a magazine
that had hired me because I was willing to work for peanuts. So I said to the editor,

“I think you have the wrong guy. I’ll get a job in a steel mill, or on a frickin’ airplane,
anywhere I want.” He seemed to like that, but I can’t remember what the magazine did later. I suppose
it was less than they wanted. But that’s what I mean by avoiding the cheap. I mean always for the mind
and the intellect, as if one day the outer world were going to fall apart. When it does, maybe it will be like a tenement balcony—the floor’s going to fall out from under us.

My best poems are about love and death. I think my best poems are about women and death.
The romantic poems give me pleasure. I don’t want to forget about them; I want
to love them. I don’t want to kill them; I want to hold them.
A love that is not really love doesn’t interest me.
It is interesting to see the Queen of Sheba swat away a red and yellow butterfly that comes to you
and likes to rest on your shoulder.

But there are different kinds of love—one that wants to hold someone in a tight embrace even though
you both know that someone is going to shake loose—one that wants to hold someone
even when she’s going to leave—one that wants to hold someone when she has long learnt the fine art
of saying no.

I’m always looking for “the little door.” But there is no little door, and if there were,
I’d probably find something I’d rather do.

:: 03.24.2021 ::

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March 13, 2021

WHEN IN DREAMS ABNORMAL TRUTHS BECOME CHANCE

By EPRobles

WHEN in dreams
abnormal truths become chance,
your heart opens trees
to find the seed that grew
the universe.
As your legs that spread
taking in the morning skies
moaning to the sun and your
pursed lips are above your
poppy feet, each arm contains
the arrows of each hand pointing
towards all directions as steeples
of churches do; at times naked,
foulmouthed, and questioning heaven
and hell — okay it is: i am with
you facing the bitter soul with
our smiling mouths and the taste
of terrible salt. Our tears grow
a new flower, so resolute and
full of vibrant Life.

:: 03.13.2021 ::

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December 24, 2020

FOURTEEN

By EPRobles

i wish I had more time and opportunity to explain my disgust to your rust-stained sarcophagus. To offer a calm palate of meditative colors for our feelings (why not) — you seemed so surprised to be called from a glass prison.

Oh, blessed crystal, what do I have to do to kiss your hand with a succulent kiss for you have forgotten the grain of truth to your rust-stained sarcophagus!

To offer a calm palate of meditative colors for our feelings (why not) — you seemed so surprised to be called from a glass prison.

Oh, blessed crystal, what do I have to do to kiss your hand with a succulent kiss for you have forgotten the grain of truth and your heart could only love the person who feeds it for nourishment — is a difficult task; so you resorted to Cupid’s slingshot!
But here’s an alternative: follow my heart down the garden path, until my sticky feet block the entrance of Cupid’s grave.

Here — get me the jar of colorful paint and I will show you the
sparkle of love.

Here — get me the fork and I will show you the flavor of our love
that came from one man.

Here — get me the ball and I will smash it across my canvas of life.
Here — get me the pencil and I will draw you a gentle, tender picture.
Here — get me the jar of colorful paint and I will show you the
sparkle of love.
Here — get me the fork and I will show you the flavor of our love
that came from one man.
Here — get me the ball and I will smash it across my canvas of life.
Here — get me the pencil and I will draw you a gentle, tender picture.
Here — get me the paint bucket and I will lay it on a canvas of life

It was exactly 14 days since you told me you left the store early.
14 dreary days and I do not think you’ve been here once (not that I
would blame you for believing it).

14 days since I was mean to you, and then you said you’d be back
by 14.

:: 12.24.2020 ::

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November 12, 2020

CANDELABRUM

By EPRobles

MY body floats within effervescent veins
and blooms of fields by gold to fullest
fields of flowers;
by consciousness barely touching
the art of your essences
; i have only known a radiance of
this smile you project toward me–
it is the shimmering vision of
your lips and the softness of curves
that you are brighter than the
moon tonight; to hear the song
of your quiet tongue to taste the
tone of your beating heart dear:
and wreathed by the blossoms of
your tender breasts.
A LOVE SONG.
WHEN i meet you here; away from the
busy sound of life — when i vibrate
that no darkness can find it is of
one mind//ours\ that touches you
and me\
who can fathom the mystery ;?
no words no song no thoughts
just veiled eyes and unwritten
poetry is sent.
a high candelabrum held by our
hands and fingers: bent inward
in a passion of growing fields.

:: 10.11.2020 ::

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October 10, 2020

AGAINST THE WEIGHT OF LIFE AND FLESH

By EPRobles

Oh my goodness gracious let me tell you the news:
  My head’s been wet with the midnight dew //   I’ve been down on bended knee:   Talkin’ to the man from Galilee.  He spoke to me in the voice so sweet. I thought I heard the shuffle of the angel’s feet \  He called my name and my heart stood still.

When he said, “Phillip, go do my will!”
Well my goodness gracious let me tell you the news:
My head’s been wet with the midnight dew — I’ve been down on bended knee.

Talkin’ to the man from Galilee.   He spoke to me in the voice so sweet
I thought I heard the shuffle of the angel’s feet.

He called my name and my heart stood still.

When he said, “Phillip, go do my will!”

I’m a-listin’ to the gospel man
I’m a-listin’ to the gospel man

Well my goodness gracious let me tell you the news:
my head’s been wet with the midnight dew.

I’ve been down on bended knee.
Talkin’ to the man from Galilee.

He spoke to me in the voice so sweet:
I thought I heard the shuffle of the angel’s feet
He called my name and my heart stood still
When he said, “Phillip, go do my will!”
Just a whisper in the dark
Just a whisper in the dark
Could have been by any other name
You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Till you hear the trumpets and all the angels
marching.  It’s alpha and omega’s Kingdom
coming.

:: 10.10.2020 ::

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October 4, 2020

A HUNDRED MILLION ANGELS SINGING

By EPRobles

“And there went out another voice from the four beasts and it was shouting with a great voice, saying, ‘Come now, and let us kill him, a horse, a horse, a horse!’

The four beasts, the four devils, were unanimous, “Who can withstand him?”

Come now, and let us kill him, while the virgins are all trimming their wings.

“I was shaken, and I fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me,
‘Do not be afraid, my son, and go to your father and say to him,

‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and against you, and am no more worthy to be called your son.’

“I said to him, ‘Here I am,’ and I threw myself at his feet, and I worshiped him and said, ‘My father, save me!’

“And he said to me, ‘My son, keep your voice, and do not make me angry, for you have rebelled against the word of God. I will deliver you with scourges and with horses.'”

There are people out there who will always blame someone else for their own sin. They will always place blame on someone else.

It will always be someone else’s fault for their own failures and for their own problems.

The funny thing is, they won’t ever admit that it’s their own actions that have caused their own pain and that it’s their own sinful nature that they will always find a way to blame someone else for their problems.

I don’t care who you are,

It’s your problem.

It’s your fault.

And there will be a golden ladder reaching down when the hairs stand up in all terror.

:: 10.03.2020 ::

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September 17, 2020

DIATRIBE

By EPRobles

if you walk with me disregard the dead souls
walking along with me
they impart delicious thoughts of their past
and give me unsolicited guidance. i will show
you my dark secrets if you walk with them and me.
the leviathan of life has a gaping mouth that
eats all things beautiful: hint — all living
things are beautiful forever.

forever.

and i am tired of being accused of being
homosexual: i would rather be bisexual so it
opens the field wide. so beyond soft-liness
than screaming more sing

:: 09.17.2020 ::

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