On Hearing Diego del GastorAmong the twisted lanes, Al-AndalusIs home and rack for gypsies bred to fearFrom years of heartless death and cruel abuse,Their sorrows unappeased by loves that sear.This wail and beat of passion without hope,The stoic pain and dignity of songsVented to express a universal trope,Defying the death that magnifies the wrongs.A guitar whose silver frets ordain the pitch,The shadows mass, the spruce and cypress weep.He strops a razor on our nerves, with richRough rasps, intense and brutal in their sweep. A keening howl of shredded chords - this his Pulsing cry - the blackened sounds - of that which IS.
Web ShamanThe ronin building labyrinths of iconsFlying the web's collage of liquid lightThat summons us to quaff its frantic photons,Its soaring travesty of tunneled flight.The shaman of the fractal paradigmInscribes incantations only the arcanelySkilled may deeply read in virtual time,While shards of holograms contain ungainlyPalimpsests of pixels. Syntax hacksForging their hyperlinks in cryptic words,Scriveners of the void, a vulgate that tracksThe vibrant neon space...ellipses and surds. He seines the depths for images - mind hacking, To curdle chaos into clots of meaning.
FoolscapThe page once folded, remains - never to beUnblemished, the paper's grain never to regainThe purity the print conveyed to me.The written word creates a permanent stainUpon the brain, a pewter palimpsestConceals the tangled history of the mind.The name below the title echoes the questOf those forever mute who are unsigned.The flash and gaudiness of cyberspace -Computer words can be as often scrap As the untrodden route to inner space,So little time for patient nibs on foolscap. Our virtual poems inscribed in minuscule Can reconstruct the world in majuscule.
StratigraphyA layered section through the tell of the mind,To sort the strata of a buried past.The broken walls of old defenses bindUs in a dungcairn we will not outlast.Unearth the psychic potsherds, sleepless nightsOf votive offerings in the caves of fleece.The glowing rubble of futile dreams, insightsFrom artifacts that promise endless peace.Tell us about the man who left the palaceAnd its smoky light, who sought the wayTo learn about himself, impetuousTo regain his vanished past without delay. The cryptic sequences inscribed in ruins Portend what he must learn to read as runes.
TrajectoryLaunched from the silo of the womb,Controlled by initial guidance, everyone'sAbandoned to fly ballistic - we assumeA calculus of fate with course corrections.Since every worldly force evolves a form,A parabola describes our invariantResultant path, compulsion to performThe Now as the asymptote at a moment -Our trajectory approaching infinity.Engorgéd youth, ascend in expectation –Collapse in age, secrete a meager droplet.Buffeted by chance and choice, the gravityOf death, despite intense determination,Again will kill our hopes to rise to orbit.
Sta.sh
