Category: Life of Rob

Life in post-it notes

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

You live your life in post-it notes

pinned to the outside of balloons,

shaved, polished and properly named

for your amusement.

 

Skipping through fallen leaves, all with names

of used to be friends, now just concerns,

you pepper your imagination with pretty bird calls

and nice stories with happy endings.

 

The bad people, the ones unlucky enough

to fuck up somehow are safely tucked away

in the soles of your shoes, right next

to the dried dog shit you leave for posterity.

 

“Come, love me,” you say.

“Come, watch me live,” you say.

“Why are you here?” you say.

So, I came and loved and watched.

 

Now you say nothing. Why would you

when life is a singular word with only two letters:

m, e?

Stop shouting

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Warning: not for kids! Oftentimes, the most inhumane violence done to others is that which we inflict through our passive-aggressive silences. Sometimes a punch to the face is easier than seeing the back of someone else’s apathetically silent head. I explore that a bit in this rather visceral piece.

My ears are ringing, ringing,

ringing from the deafening roar of stony silence.

Someone has been shouting at me for so long

without stopping,

never stopping,

ever.

The lids of my ears are pinned back

as scenes of your violent ennui pelt my psyche.

Ghoulish shrieks of the banshee gash holes in my bowels

and any remains of touch and sound lay shredded and splayed

on the table, once of communion, now of refuse.

Quickly, cut open my gut with a heated knife of angry words.

Split my head with the axe of honest, unimplied hatred.

It is more compassionate to watch another bleed,

their blood still wet on the tip of your axe than it is

to watch through a mirror as another

squirms and writhes under the torturers knife

of guesses, unanswered questions, pale assumptions, made up half-truths.

Like the wanderer, banished and scapegoated,

the unforgiven walk in barren, featureless landscapes

peppered with the memories of better days.

The shrieks of silence are so much louder

than the shouting of angry, cutting…but honest, words.

Wordless words spill out into the aether

through sealed lips, drowning in their own denial

of non-communication. Oh, I hear. I hear. I hear,

SO STOP YOUR FUCKING SHOUTING.

Your victims are only fed enough sanctimony to forbid reality,

deny context, withhold boundaries for the untold story.

The din of merciless words is quicker,

the pain, short; the gouching, swift.

Silent pain is relentless, without pity,

casting scorn through indifference,

hatred through unspoken speech,

unforgiveness through apathy,

vengeance through willing ignorance.

_

In seeking truth, you’ve become the biggest lie.

scattered in ashes of light

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Moonlight in Vermont

 

 

 

 

 

there you were scattered in ashes of light

outside of time’s ballooning source

the triadic perfection of unanimous singular gaze

eloping with butterflies light on the sill

and I am loving your loving our loving

there are no more songs fit to sing

where you lay dreaming your hair unyielding

to the moon held at bay too dim for your eyes

a cool and stut stuttering night bares her dark breasts

and draws herself up to tuck in the spindly stars

who point their bony fingers toward my love 

still scattered in ashes of light

 

Picture this

I-You-Holy Ground

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing Poetic2 Comments

I am the dusty ground, low and dry

thirsty for the imprint of holy feet.

Despoil with radiant prints, this virgin ground.

___

You are the rain, falling deftly

upon my brown soil. Now is left

your footprint on this ground.

___

I am the ashen leaves, curling and broken

awaiting but a whisper. For only then

can I fall on solid ground.

___

You are the soundless wind, howling, still.

You creep up behind me and

exhale me to the ground.

___

I am the snow, disembodied worlds of cold

and chance encounters with hand, or tongue,

eye-lash or palm needing ground.

___

You are the frozen air in which I am held

aloft, drawn slowly down

to meet with others on the frozen ground.

___

I am the waning autumn death

soon to give way to the long silence-when one Voice

becomes the loudest ground.

___

You are the Voice that speaks

heard best in dying, power given for

rising from this shivering ground.

___

I am the distant hours, the midnight passing-

the refusing minutes, trapped in hours,

running from the years of ancient ground.

___

You are the many, and the one, and all time

and nothing and everything from nothing

where time has no ground.

___

I am the weeping, the squalid groaning,

the unrequited miseries of misery’s company

laying crippled and diffused in the ground.

___

You are the end of tears and years, the question

and the answer, the sutured nerve of joy, not suggested

but present, here, on this Holy Ground.

Poetry: rebuilding the world through the un-wasted beauty of redemptive syntax, cont.

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Music and the arts, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

When, as a boy, I was expected to be cleaning my room, doing homework, weeding the garden or any of a host of other chores, I would more often than not be listening to music in my room. Or, perhaps I’d be teaching myself to sing like Robert Plant or Burton Cummings or Dan Fogelberg. I might have been writing music once I got to Junior High School or touring as a musician by the time I was a senior in High School. Suffice it to say, art, music, poetry – literature in general has shaped my life and provided many hours of delight and avoidance. It’s the mirror into which I’ve learned to see my own face. It’s also the looking glass through which I’ve learned to see others.

Music and poetry can become for all of us an answer to our disheveled hatreds, our worn out prejudices, our tired judgements and our need for a language with which to say, I see you.

Traveling light in serpentine winds

Traveling light in serpentine winds

this haughty craft, held aloft, sequestered

inside hints of journey’s end.

 ***

Earth’s edges, blunter now but rippled and dented,

provide the places safe to sing

the bawdy songs of youth, sung too soon, before

the second hand is wasted on the whirling clock.

 ****

Were it anything more than salvageable

solitudes, trapped in their dusty orbs,

such voices might bloat to consume me,

dine on my liver with older words,

rich but thick and unchartered.

 *****

So then, forage I shall for colors unmuted,

songs yet without voice, paths full-trod, seen with

eyes withholding nothing but a flute and a scalpel.

One to begin, the other to end

the sharper edges of this catastrophic

beauty – this undulating goodness.

 ******

I think I’ll take a walk.

Poetry: rebuilding the world through the un-wasted beauty of redemptive syntax

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

Dylan Thomas, a favorite poet and writer, says this about words in poetry:

And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing…There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. -as quoted by James Hillman in “The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart” (a must read, by the way).

I bemoan earlier days when poets were the prophets of the people. Words, stories and cultural anecdotes were the food-stuff of our existence, not the quaint, winter-hazed mist on the edges of our choked, windowed lives. They took center stage where the very words themselves were the Homeric epic of small existences writ large through bardic retelling to others thirsty to feel their enjoining on the stalk of shared time.

I begin here a short series of poetry about poetry, words about words; the metalanguage of the language, lost but longing to be refound, non-linear and non-pragmatic, seeking instead to rebuild the world through the unwasted beauty of redemptive syntax. To that end, I give you…

I

There you lay, face down in a puddle of

old dreams. Your brow, damp from

sweating out doubt-filled promises-

the mantric words of small men, of sullen women

bathing on stolen rooftops of run down tenements.

* * * * *

Goliath has defeated David with small,

pebbled words, slung out quietly across

the distance between them, too far

for slings filled with ancient anger.

Gruff prayers traded for slick threats.

* * * * *

Setesh broods his flustering fare. He sits

at the table of the unmemoried death,

serving up sighs and groans – the language

of lusty crows, too boisterous to still

their cantankerosity; too new and

untested to feed even their open-mouthed young.

* * * * *

Brush off the fog that settles on

your hunger for colored story, embattled songs,

for words floating and submerged under the borders,

planted in places too deep to be found

by spade, knife, wallet or hammer.

Longing letters taste like a lover’s kiss.

Driving school, autumn nights and thoughts on poverty

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing Poetic5 Comments

Poverty never ceases to surprise and disarm. What is truly alarming however is whenever I grow indifferent or worse, apathetic, to its crying dishonor. May I never be unaware or distant and always prepared to enter into the suffering of others. Lord, have mercy.

I

Don’t let me be found waiting when,

like water on a mirror, I slide

from corner to corner,

unwieldy and unpredictable,

the scab before the fall,

the tears before the pain,

the gain before the loss.

Running toward is always better than

running away when haggard eyes

silently proclaim my complicity in

the hollow halls of ownership.

II

I need to simmer long in cauldrons

of grieving for ones lost on the loom,

dismembered patterns refusing collision

into any kind of shape. Can you smell

the paint on my brush, richly bristled,

bent away from their needy canvas,

dry and parched, stretched too thin

to hold more than grey or black?

Colors here only reveal what stolen

chances never offered have done to ones

who just might wear them best.

III

Plumbing these altitudes, I grow weary

from my swan dives upward,

expelling all reason for some ritual,

denying them time for tome,

confusing their ache for my art.

Fixed, stuck am I on stolen intrusions

of short memory too bent to sort,

too cold to move, too sharp to soothe.

But forward brings me closer

than any other path, not placating,

or even prosaic but parallel with promises

unveiled only through the repetition

of laughter, laughter and

the solemn, sweet, irrepressible smiles

of the poor.

Dismissals – on considering responses to things

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Parables, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

That same girl passes him in the hallway, more aloof than ever;

like the neighborhood cat that pisses on my door.

There is no response to the constant

calling of her name. Just an unambitious purr,

the casual dismissal of a creature to

unreasonable expectations.

_

I passed him on the street yesterday,

that guy I met at the poetry reading.

It was hard keeping his eyes long enough

to finish a sentence, let alone fragments

of a conversation fraught with the dismissal of a

 “yes, it’s really me here” mystique.

_

She stood with a cardboard sign that read

hungry and unemployed with kids pls help god bless

I could see her through the Starbucks window

where my second Americano was already cold.

That second guy wasn’t as good as the first.

He never leaves me room for cream.

Is that too much to ask?

_

She wasn’t typically a make-up gal

preferring the girl next door simplicity

of less-is -more. But tonight

she dressed up, even eyeliner and dark,

red lipstick and skin-tight black dress.

He glanced at her twice at dinner

through the glare of his cell phone screen,

 that never dimmed.

_

I sometimes shudder to think what remains

in the shadows of what’s left after encounters

dense with the unwieldy results of non-praise,

of missing the open doors, sips not taken from

frosty mugs of welcome, the sleepy

dismissals of what’s right now,

hesitant on the stoop of another’s hopes.

What can they expect from me?

Gratitude? Platitudes? Assuredness? Distraction?

A snotty hanky full of rare humility, raw and pink?

_

The game starts in half an hour.

nighttime songs our fears erase

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

a story lived, now story told

we, early young, now later, old

see stranger things than daytime held

but not without our sorrows quelled

____________________________________

we fluff and tuck and yawn and brush

pray God remove all sinning blush

the air now cool in silver glow

what dreams may come we do not know

_____________________________________

divested now of time and chance

we bid adieu and leave the dance

till thricely woven round with grace

the nighttime songs our fears erase