The sun warms my face
My body is not cold
When I am with you

With you there is only light
The darkness is gone

An unfamiliar feeling of happiness embraces me
There is no anger, no sadness
When I am with you

Only a short time with you
I must return to the darkness… the cold
For my own reasons

Orders
Wrongful
No protests

Unjust actions
Punishment
Either way

Crossed over the line of confession
Stepped beyond the goodness of light
A bound past the darkness of evil
I have gone crazy

Creating works of hatred
Then destroying pieces of pleasure
Crying for the moment at what has happen
Laughing at the next

I no longer need answers
Nor the use of questions
Emotions long lost
Feelings passed away

Violets are blue

Trudeau is dead

I rode past an abandoned factory today, near the northeast corner of Ossington and Dupont. It is a beautiful building underneath all the grime and neglect, brick frame, but large-paned windows making up most of the facade.

The windows are very dirty. Through them, I could see shelves on which files and binders were stacked up just as someone must have left them on his last day of work some years ago. There are things inside that building that someone just walked away from, or that many people were told just to walk away from.

They say he cried out, and lifted his head
And sat on mommie’s chest
Though he was always pale.
He was dead before we left the bay.

Compressions seemed to crush his chest,
His soft ribs bending like a plastic doll’s,
He lay in a pile of bloody trash
As we tried to think of something else to do.

Pasty, unhealthy-looking skin and a useless heart,
Flogged with epi and atropine, tossing out
A beat now and then. The tube sends air
In and out, but there’s no one there.

The white limp child is allowed to be dead.
Cleaning begins.

The suddenly idle crowd reacts
The nurse cries, and the OB cries
And the attending.
We pack our gear and leave.

Across this city uniforms alight like birds
Darkening the skies at the threat of death.
Yet elsewhere other experts in other clothes
Undo the work that others do.

Silent, it stands.
Bricks and mortar, erected with sweat;
Now dusty; abandoned; stark.

It stands,
Waiting for the next shift to begin;
Machines at the ready.

But the workers who once gave it life
Will not be back. (they're now working at Wal-Mart and Farmer Jack)

Still, it stands,

In misty tendrils at highest peaks,
have you found all that you seek?
Has soaring breathless through the sky
Taught to you the meaning why?
With laboured breath and body sore,
what makes you love the challenge more?
What ancient bond is there that ties
you to this lonely place so high?

Or was your heart to battle born,
the roiling madness of the storm?
A coiled spring within your frame,
what makes you play this deadly game?
With charge and circle, cut and thrust,
What makes you know your cause is just?
And if your struggles bring you fame,
what gilded laurels crown your mane?

But as you fly through craggy breaches,
what darkling cloud is it that reaches
out to smash your wings and bind
you to the earth for all of time?
What stabbing pangs within your breast
Have clawed you from the highest crest?
Whose arrow, spear or poisoned dart
has flown so true and pierced your heart?

With fearsome cries the air is rent
as shudders wrack your slow descent,
but don’t you know, within your soul
the earth is not your destined goal?
The higher sphere where you have flown
will now become your final home,
and you, whom Muses have so blessed
will ride the heavens, now at rest.

quote:

---

Originally posted by skdadl:
Thank you, steffie.

And rsfarrell, that is beautiful. May I ask: have you been a paramedic? If so, I'm sure I owe you thanks too.

---

Yes, I'm a paramedic with American Medical Response in Portland, Oregon. I'm glad you liked the poem.

It's a privilege to be able to work in my field and help people. Even though it may seem to be in some ways a romantic occupation, everything we do is just one link in a long chain, and everyone whose work affirms life is a part of it. No thanks needed.

[ 24 June 2005: Message edited by: rsfarrell ]

OMG I dropped to my knees, it is so beautiful and evocative. I never feel that way anymore. Thank you so much heph. That poem is simply stunning in its simplicity and oh-so-easy-to-understand to its fullest.

I actually wrote one poem in my whole life. Please forgive me that it was written during my College years, when Women's Studies were not even given a credit. I was the sole "interloper" in the class. But I listened as best as I could (have a bit of a hearing problem).

Please, don't make fun of it (if you can't help yourself I understand that too)

HOPE

Who says the Great Chain is an anachronism?
Granted, Darwin left it somewhere down
Among the mussels and jellyfish of human thought,
Here is an unexpected comeback for hierarchy of life.

First come the American soldiers. They have names;
Ranks, unit designations, even sometimes,
That crimson throat-sack of memory, the Feature.

Trailing far behind we have the allied dead,
Proud Estonia, scourge of tyrants
They have their proper number, and a nation.

Beneath the list itself, invisible but present, like bacteria
The niggers in their several kinds: those that died for us,
Died fighting us, died unheeded in the skirts of our coming.

A one-legged black man died sometime in the night,
That being anxiously conveyed to AMERICA via the BOEC,
An emergency was declared, and a troop of men was suddenly sent
In his house, to his bedroom, ostensibly to revive him.

The wails of women filled the house.
His surgery was one month ago; diabetic, he sacrificed a limb
To go on living. What’s worse than dying at the peak of heath?
To strike a hard bargain with decay -- and be taken before the ink is dry.

Striding though the thin-walled house,
Dropping to their knees on the disreputable carpet,
They began our rituals of death,
Beating on his chest, searching for a vein, the cords.

So finally the state, so limp to the cries of living,
Floated the man along a sacred boat of lighting,
Along a river of vasopression, lidocane, and atropine,
Thousands in expensive meds trickling through his inert veins.

Never say AMERICA does not heap goods upon its people’s pyres
We practice a democracy of emergencies.
A man who lived a slave dies a pharaoh.
Though he might have wished it the other way.

[ 09 November 2005: Message edited by: rsfarrell ]

The Wanderer (Se Anhaga)

Though sorrowful, traversing icy sea
The Wanderer oft seeks the Maker's grace.
And knowing well that what Fate wills will be
With war-like thoughts, he grieves his fallen race.
In twilight there arising from his place
He tells his sorrows to the rising sun
Remembering man's life is but a space
Of friends he thinks: of them there live now none.
A lord's heart, fast-bound lest he be undone
He knows must hold, that he survive The Fate(1).
And he must too with joy his sorrows shun
Though skies above grow dark and night grow late.
For if defeating courage he be meek,
He'll find the grace of God where that he seek

Some passable flower, passive in its passion,
Tenses beneath his fingerfrippery;
A slight wind, wafting down from heaven,
Wanders through his mimicking mind.

Up above the world, so high,
The bird-watching bishop remembers his physics
And mimes the Miltonic emotions he thinks
Thought thinks she might be feeling
As she rolls rolled green in the grass in the lolling below.

His feet...all perspective flutters away. He feels
--A fearsome feeling.
She is not far away
But rather, tiny, tiny, tiny.

Cheers to the rabble-rousers here,
Argento Shiraz.

Tombstone Blues.
By Bob Dylan.

The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
The city fathers they're trying to endorse
The reincarnation of Paul Revere's horse
But the town has no need to be nervous

The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits
At the head of the chamber of commerce

Mama's in the fact'ry
She ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley
He's lookin' for the fuse
I'm in the streets
With the tombstone blues

The hysterical bride in the penny arcade
Screaming she moans, "I've just been made"
Then sends out for the doctor who pulls down the
shade
Says, "My advice is to not let the boys in"

Now the medicine man comes and he shuffles inside
He walks with a swagger and he says to the bride
"Stop all this weeping, swallow your pride
You will not die, it's not poison"

Mama's in the fact'ry
She ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley
He's lookin' for the fuse
I'm in the streets
With the tombstone blues

Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief
Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief
Saying, "Tell me great hero, but please make it
brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a
fly
Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and
cry"
And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky
Saving, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken"

Mama's in the fact'ry
She ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley
He's lookin' for the fuse
I'm in the streets
With the tombstone blues

The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save
Puts jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves
Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the
slaves
Then sends them out to the jungle

Gypsy Davey with a blowtorch he burns out their
camps
With his faithful slave Pedro behind him he tramps
With a fantastic collection of stamps
To win friends and influence his uncle

Mama's in the fact'ry
She ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley
He's lookin' for the fuse
I'm in the streets
With the tombstone blues

The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone
Causes Galileo's math book to get thrown
At Delilah who sits worthlessly alone
But the tears on her cheeks are from laughter

Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great
thrill
I would set him in chains at the top of the hill
Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after

Mama's in the fact'ry
She ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley
He's lookin' for the fuse
I'm in the streets
With the tombstone blues

Where Ma Raney and Beethoven once unwrapped their
bed roll
Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole
And the National Bank at a profit sells road maps
for the soul
To the old folks home and the college

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

Sometimes a suddenly sullen Sunday afternoon,
A slopply bed, unfolded landary in the gray-blue gloom,
A man is struck with a sudden fear
That no one calls because no one’s here
I am the sloppy emptiness; it’s as if
An actor standing on the stage suddenly forgot the script
Starting out into the lights, forgot it all
Lines, cues, the name of the theater, and who he was supposed to be;
Though I fold the clothes, make the bed at last, that is me.

[ 27 November 2005: Message edited by: rsfarrell ]

Ogden Nash

For Dixon, smothered in his parents’ bed

Cruel as it is, I would take us all;
Friends, enemies, strangers
Place us in that room
To listen to the mother’s wail.

The pleading, incomprehension, the keening sounds of grief
Lay a weight over everything
From righteous rhetoric to riots,
Every hint of that, that ends in that sound.
The fun’s gone out of soft violence.

(Tomorrow I have to crawl
Back out into this death-eaten world
With this lesson on my back
And try to be better.)

[ 21 December 2005: Message edited by: rsfarrell ]

They should be laughing
They should be playing
They should be having fun ....

March 24th

quote:

---

"All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people like Us, are We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They

---

AUTUMN MAPLES
Lampman, Archibald (1861-1899)

Now that you are gone.
My thoughts are of the past.
When we were friends and comrades.

I have tried to write down the words, which describe you.
Attempt after attempt I fail.
No words hold the memories of you.

In my mind and soul there is a special place.
Where the past lives.
Where memories are recreated again and again.
And we are still friends.

Cold mists surround me, as the winds tear across the wastelands.
The light reminds me of a long forgotten past.

The image of your face, still hunts me.
The scars covering my heart are in constant pain.

The light is gone in a matter of moments and the darkness covers me again.
The pain you caused me is pressed deep into my soul.

Travelling the wastelands, I seek to find the answers of why I failed you.
The cold mist blocks my vision, prevents my understanding.

Your acceptance of me stirred thoughts of what has been lost over the years.
I understand that what has been lost was worth the price.
The music so strange to me yet I can feel the sadness of the song.

We have both have lost love for different reasons.
Desperation, hatred and tragedy have taken away your friend.
Believing in heroism and honour cost me my love.