A Sentient Being

I love poetry. I love all kinds of poetry. It can be lyrical, free verse, blank verse, sonnets, terza rima…and on and on.

I like to write free verse; however, rhyming poetry has a special grip on my eyes, mind, and pen. Maybe it is a residual of my love for the verse composed during the Georgian, Regency, and Victorian eras.

The names of Shelley, Byron, Blake, Southey, Keats, the indomitable Brontë sisters, and many more have left their undying marks on me.

A Sentient being cries for unfound advocacy

Neglected and forgotten in lost despondency

A railway track follows a fading fate

Forged from a grinding thing—disconsolate

A final chance for realized recompense

Vainly looking for some innocence

To reconstruct what should have been

A tattered page renews not again

Dreams can be fleet and much too hard to hold

Yet unrealized, remain inside and fortune not always favors the bold

And still within this lack, this dearth, can you hear a call?

It matters how you rise, not how oft you fall

Like a final shift of clarity

To ever wage war with the insanity.

My Foray Into Photography.

Conduit

Gypsy Woman

On the Right Hand of God

Writer's Window

Princess

Road Traveled

There is Something

There is something that runs around and around in my head. He is reckless and careless and fearless.

He is an unwanted visitor that takes liberties that were never given.

The space where he resides is a lonely place; a place no one gets to go but him. It is a place no one dares to go. It is a place that harbors those things that can only be written or said in a whisper.

In here he makes wars rage without mercy or conscience.

In here he deals in worlds and destinies.

In here he is free.

He is the owner of creation while dealing in destruction. By the throat he holds these things.

There are no rules here—no time—no protocol.

It is through his eyes the truth is seen and written.     

  

Word by word…

He is the storm and the blade.

He is both the tear that falls and the blood that runs.

The abyss is his repository for the marks on the small white canvas.

His cost is high but necessary. His freedom is the very elixir that becomes both poison and antidote.

He deals in empathy but is devoid of it. The chaos that brings It forth also unravels.

But do not try to look; do not try to understand. His domain is fragile and yet guarded by an unknown force that will not trifle with niceties.

There is something that runs around and around in my head. He is reckless and careless and fearless.

In here resides passion.

In here is lightening.

In here is fettered freedom.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2UfCTtNXjk

Emily

Emily

I wonder as I contemplate, your novel in my hand

How did such a thing your mind create in that windswept Yorkshire land?

Your life, your breath forged onto every page

Your heart, your soul your pen defied the Age.

Her dark hair and his dark eyes, now immortal in desire

Her passion, his rage, her choice, his lies,

She the wind and he the fire

From whence did you learn of such love and such hate?

Of loss and of revenge,

Of torment, and of fate?

Did the moors tell you secret things as you walked upon them all alone?

That life is a type of fault, and men’s hearts become as stone?

Did the things that you lost, give you things only for you?

Or was it the wind brought them, those fierce thoughts written true?

Those cold gray walls, that rose up from the earth

Became your world and the magical birth—

Of something eternal that moves me still today

And like you, I am happiest when I am most away.

A Miscellany...

 A Miscellany of Favorite Quotes and Aphorisms Concerning Writing and Life

 

“This creative power and imagination is very tender and sensitive and it is usually drummed out of people early in life by criticism (so-called ‘helpful criticism’ is often the worst kind), by teasing, jeering, rules, prissy teachers, critics, and all those unloving people who forgot that the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life. Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not the self he thinks he should be.”—Brenda Ueland

 

“Normal people, people who haven’t been misled by a faulty college education, do not read novels for words alone. They open a novel with the expectation of finding a story.” –John Gardner

“Vigorous writing is concise.”—William Strunk

“Without art a man may find his life on earth unlivable.”—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect, who does not at least checker his life with solitude.”—Thomas De Quincey

“Depression was not tears. It was deadness. Immobility. A black hole.”—Doris Lessing

“I know of no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either spiritual or physical, for what the gods had given him.”—Max Beerbohm

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”—Mark Twain

“He that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.”—Anne Bronte

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”—Sylvia Plath

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”—Jack Kerouac

“Who am I? I’m a poet. My business? Writing. How do I live? I live. In my happy poverty I squander like a prince, my poems, and songs of love. In hopes and dreams and castles-in-air, I’m a millionaire in spirit.”—Rodolfo

“Iucunda macula est ex inimici sanguine.”—Syrus

True writing is magic, it is alchemy.

Dialogue makes stories live.

Begin with conflict, make the stakes high, and don’t let all your important characters live.

  Write Fiercely.

 

Survive

Survive

 

Walking this confused world as a map-less traveler

The stars cannot provide that guide−

Those points of light shine endlessly down, dying as they come

And the roof above my head shelters me only from the weather outside not from the storm within

 

That battered soul; what protects that?

 

Apologies for a wasted life—too many things not done or done too short

Things unfinished, stacked like so many dusty boxes in the corner no one wants to see

Dreams are like butterfly wings; they are so fragile…

You can touch them, but not too hard or too much

Like the dying star the butterfly cannot survive…

They lose all their magic, and are not what they were before

 

What am I after my name?

 

 It is true “From dust we come and dust we do return”

Do our actions make us, or do our thoughts?

Intentions do not matter in this false world of men. They bend down with the storm.

People listen, but only to themselves, because they too are lost in their own sameness

 

All they do is try to keep the pain away

 

The pain of not being enough

The pain of existing and not living

The pain of surviving

Voices from nowhere- they call to me. They whisper secrets I cannot speak nor do I want to.

Each day the dust of yesterday falls off of my worn body. Each day less falls away. It builds like a monument to all those words unspoken.

Of deeds not done

Of wrongs not righted

Of paths that went too far

Dirty and brown and yet mostly unseen, the heaviest things we carry around day by day are hidden inside.

Are we all ugly inside? Do we need to be to survive? We learn to hide it, but it is there

Can you see it?

Or are you just surviving? Am I?