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This Is Not Your Poetry


by Darryl Price


 




Your begging hands are hacking me up again like garden

claws that know not the difference

between a delicate

solar powered flower

and a tightening choke of killing

weeds.It's not like it's even

mine to keep-- like a legal

document I'd somehow give over

to you in some kind of forced walk away, of tearful broken awful

treaties. I wouldn't want to,

of that you can be sure. Oh

please don't name it wild and then

call it dangerous.You can

only pronounce correctly

 

what you will let live this time

around and all the other times too.

It always belongs to just

itself in the end. Befriend the fact by

being as you are,not as they would have you become for their amusement. You could

say I'm but the latest of these modern

keepers, still alive on the nest, but I'm not the only

lost one it will come to in the end;

with its saintly seeking in and out of all space and all

time it will prove its own powerful

freedoms to you above anything and everything

else. It exists without you

and within you. I'm only honored

to give it my own sad little

 

tongue,my caught in the trope

throat, a heartbeat to travel

along for sending a sonata

of eternal messages to the unguarded heavens surrounding us on earth.

We all shall have our fleeting

agreements you could say with

this mysterious one's holy visit--

like a sudden full moonlight

entering our feverish

dream-tents at night.It comes and it 

goes as it pleases but drops

a startling illustrious feather

(or two) my way (only) periodically;

these jewels I will 

 

wear in my own hair as a

sign of respect and solidarity.

But they will be

taken from me by the enemy

sooner or later as war booty.

They will kill me thinking they

have somehow silenced a happy bird,

but angels will lift the difference

with their prayers and

nothing else will be lost forever,

except ignorant doubt

and restless fear.Peace is a

kind of lasting beauty that surpasses

its own meaning and waits.







A Bonus poem:


The Amused Gas of the Literary World's


 

flames palms the glad air like a kitten's pleasurable mitt on a ball of string; laughter's a hole

to escape through once the going's gotten far

too serious to have enough

forward motion for any real
love to ever happen. It's our dance partner
when everyone else has secretly
long ago disappeared
behind their own fraudulent circle

of half-asleeps. Don't let this happen
to you.Laughter's your pulled silly
face inside the foggy ether. It
will scare the pompous straight and the
tiresomely arrogant will shrink
back like miniature shocked tigers so
surprised by our Mr. Moonlight's voice that they
can no longer bite the young

backsides of the innocent with
their usual frothy and stony-eyed
impunity.Laughter is a fun 
magic, a true and ongoing magic coin.Spend it wisely or it simply disappears up your sleeve in a puff of feathers and smoke.
You may never see it buy
you again so much wholesale freedom.Laughter
also works upside down. When
it's a broken thing it can sting you

like a fat whip. You didn't seriously
think it was all for good all
the time did you? That's so funny.
Or sad. Or is it both? Laughter's going
to ask you now the very
latest in questions set before you. It
wants to show you something truly

amazing. But you'll probably

tell it to get lost. That would be

a huge mistake. Well, it's always up
to you. Here's laughter ready to
race you if that's the game you're playing.
And if not then you'll have another shadow boxer
for your shadow playtime,another
added layer to your clay cake of justified choices, for your many layered
selves to pretend to eat. Hint.Just don't place more than you have to give onto the board at any one time. 


P.S.

Author's Note

We might as well. And by that I mean you. I mean me. Who else is listening? This is at best a forest full of promising pools. But beware. There are two sides to the poisons of the world chart. You are being sized up one way or the other. The problem as I see it is how to gracefully decline the awful mirror.Even if we all crowd into the picture at once it's still an illusion. And we still need to be oh so merrily on our way.

 

 

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