24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
I help people for a living, by showing them the way.
Learn about diet, exercise and play.
Natural therapies like massage and more.
Herbs and supplements are part of the core.
Natural health isn’t just take a pill.
Change your life and learn to chill.
cw: none
The canary hates when the curtains are open –
it hates the light, the bright,
the thousand stars.
It hates what a clear-view window tells it,
what it wishes it could not see.
Ignorance is bliss:
hands that hurt are wrong,
and what it knows it cannot stop knowing.
It wishes:
close the curtains.
Leave it to its darkness and vellum,
leave it to its black-ink blood and poetry:
voiceless, wingless –
but now that it knows
if the curtains are closed
it would miss it.
Lightbulb
Ideas flash
I hear the beat of the streat underground like a beet
The tremor of bass beneath my feet
I carry the jacket of jackin and packin
shelltoes, cellphones, elcos, elbows, hellnos melrose, eggrolls deathrows.
Rolling in buckets a box full of fuckets
We couldnt play trumpets
And so we play glasspipes.
Melanin cinnamon hooked on the medicine all my bucks go to Exxon and Edison.
No carports just cardboards
No artforms, no elk.
No bayou, no no,
We hardly afford milk.
Look at what my circumstances built:
A brown man with white guilt.
American dreams fulfilled.
Give us your children
when you don’t know them anymore.
Give us the eye rolling masses
obsessed with making it new by remixing the old.
We’ll force them to read
and question everything they think they know –
since they think they know everything.
You’re welcome.
Give us the lost
who are seeing for the first time that they’ve
never actually seen many things clearly before.
Give us the self-absorbed, and we will show them where they intersect with their neighbors.
We’ll meet them in the process of becoming a bit more human.
Harness the abundance of energy and force the eye of the clever rogue toward the Good.
Give us the quiet pubescents
Who wear coats during heat waves
And shorts during snow storms.
Give us impulsive youth.
We’ll try to stay one step ahead of them, and
help them survive their teenage years.
Then we’ll march.
March to the homes of legislatures
who threaten our pay, who misuse your children’s funding,
and who make stupid laws that keep information from them.
We’ll beat down the doors of those who make this hard job
even harder.
We’ll march onto the sports field and support teenagers and their families.
We’ll march into our second jobs and pretend that we aren’t dog tired.
We’ll march to the store to buy the supplies we need to help the teenagers.
To wrangle them, we will study
make, process, plan, and
create
until we are sharp enough to be the
iron that sharpens iron.
Every workday, it’s a flop showtime
Feels like frustration, looks like I’m in exam hall
Reviewing content, Grading expert’s view
But they confuse and remove my brain fuse.
The auditor audits me with stern remarks
Point out my mishaps, and slaps with his marks
You are not up to the mark, they loudly bark
in the online meeting, a laughable chatting
But it’s a humor hour to office manager,
it’s a time to make presentation tricks and tips
I’ll mute voice with silent mode, I say you are correct
He laughs and giggles, I am worse, in this rust
i never insist you are wrong, he’s boss, he’s weight
Prompt -13 Hour-13
My profession, which one? the official one?
or on the side ones?
I worked as professor of electrical engineering
for 38 years. I just read some books, memorized
them and told what I had memorized to students
in my class.
Tough job? mathematics, science, construction
of electrical circuits, sending signals far away at
the speed of 300,000 km per second.
Ya, that was the public image. I lectured four
hours per week, played games behind closed
doors, and took a nap in the afternoons
Told everybody we were overworked and well
underpaid.
Really? I had one month vacation around the
Christmas, more than three months of vacation
during summers, could have stayed at home
when I did not have to give a lecture at the
school, which was just four hours per week.
I also worked for General Electric as consultant
for Aircraft Engine Vibration Analyst. That more
than doubled my salary.
At home I worked on stock trading, made
a $4,000 fund into $1,400,000 in about
15 years, that quadrupled my salary.
Nex time a professor says he is underpaid,
send him this poem and on the enevelop
write: Are you kidding me?.
I do not scare easily
The concept of horror has intrigued me since childhood
And I have consumed it voraciously
For as long as I can remember
I am not afraid of spiders
Or snakes
Or dark empty corridors
Try as I might,
I do not believe in ghosts
Or monsters
Or any manner of fantastical creature
And yet
I know fear intimately
It thrives inside me
Whispering insidious remarks
That curl themselves into the folds of my thoughts
And make a permanent home
I do not want to believe
The lies my fear feeds me
But my mind would rather play Devil’s advocate
And gives them the spotlight anyway
I used to think it could be beaten into submission
Drugged into oblivion
Locked into a closet
And never, ever taken out
And yet
You can’t remove pieces of yourself
No matter how hard it is to live with them
You learn to hold hands with your fear
To tell it you understand
And kiss it on the forehead
There is a difference between
Accepting your anxieties
And letting them have power over you
The human experience is complicated
And hard
But I’d rather be present
Than not
Leaves sweep down from trees,
covering the ground below,
creating piles of mingled colors.
Oranges, browns, and red
become a beautiful palette
for the beginning of Fall’s artistry.
Shortened days give way
to crisp, cooler air,
making jackets and sweaters
come out from closets.
Coffee, cider, and any hot drink
is welcome,
as cozying up with a blanket
becomes the best part of the evening.
Bonfires, hayrides, fire pits, and spooky season
make me want to cheer.
I’ve waited so long for summer to pass,
but now my favorite time of year
is finally here!
Black and White with a Touch of Gray
Crystal clear and black and white
Things seem so cut and dry
And yet, sometimes that is not quite
The case before one’s eyes
More times than not, a touch of gray
Is accurate to view
As lines are blurred and rules un-clear
For fairness to ensue
That touch of gray, a mid-point space
On which most can agree
Is safer for keeping the pace
Of peace and harmony
Black and white thought can leave some lost
With no place to fit in
Such thinking is not worth the cost
Should hurt feelings begin
And yet, within the touch of gray
Everyone can feel embraced
A spot no one should feel that they
Should ever be disgraced
Casting aside the issues found
In black and white ideals
To blur those lines for peace abound
Where all involved can heal
What is love?
It begins and ends within.
Expands like the breath of the universe,
moves with the fabric of time,
and lives within an eternal soul.
Love is…
Just as I AM.