Ears Remember
Down a hole insane?
Shouting out absurd commands
Time twitching places
© j.kiley ‘18
Haiku
Ears Remember
Down a hole insane?
Shouting out absurd commands
Time twitching places
© j.kiley ‘18
Haiku
At A Time
I feel your loss
You are not here
You’re in a there
A place I cannot be
At least not immediately
We have certain times
When we are called
Before it happens
We stay in the here
Or the there
Depending greatly
On which one
Is meant to be
We’ll reverse the order
And begin again
We belong in one
Or the other
But never
At the same time
Always alternating
Just like here
And there
Being different
We are only in one place
At a time
© j.kiley ‘18
Non-sense
LOST IN WAITING
Lost in waiting
Tripping on two ended words
Looking for comfort
Anywhere it will give
Feeling uneasy
Trembling in word salad
Brain inside it
The constant echo
Of continual searching
For messages
The past
Understanding it
But it won’t let go
Confusion
Definition make no sense
Skin feels raw
No settling into ease
What is so unstable
The mind is unfocused
Tearing security to hell
Dipping into the acid
Of disbelief in reality
Breathing nonexistent
Trembling replaces it
Nothing soothing
Calling in the troops
Of stability
Will it come
Concentration
Calmness
All will settle
In its time
Not anyone else’s
Does one feel the corruption
Does it call out the demons
Or send them away
Looking into the eyes of the devil
Unsettles any calmness into fear
Anxiety and uncertainties
Let go of the pain that haunts
Escape into fantasy
Seek the rewards
Permission granted
Join the fictional characters
Freedom of behavior
No punishment
A feathered cat inside a canary
Like a woman inside a suit
And a man inside a gown
Freedom to feel the real
Real it is
Afraid of the words
What tempest they hold
But surrender to the “who”
The “are” and the “streak”
Learn to be fully “unrestrained”
© j.kiley 2018
Free Verse
The Past
Time doesn’t change it
No matter how far back it goes
Life is the sentence
© j.kiley 2018
Haiku
The Past
Time doesn’t change it
No matter how far back it goes
Time is stationary
We only travel through it
Time has no influence
What happens to it
Time fiddles
While life is the sentence
© j.kiley 2018
Short verse
Poet – Billy Collins | Born: March 22, 1941 (age 77), Manhattan, New York City, NY
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright © 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press.
John Keats by William Hilton | Born: October 31, 1795, Moorgate, City of London, United Kingdom – Died: February 23, 1821, Rome, Italy
“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”
By John Keats
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.