Inconsolable Being

We are numb with the gravity and tortuous substance─ truth too real to view in high definition. Perpetual coverage, updates, stories and shamelessly gratuitous abuse of the innocent. What’s missing is a reasoned and intentional palliative for this troubling trend proliferating. Underneath it all, there’s a loss of hope. How can we begin to recover and find newness again?

Can we at least concede that in some ways WE are the problem? with the un-quenched desire to consume; we consume ─ violence, in sports, film, there’s a sort of violence in business and securing the “good life” It shows up in competition, the pursuit of beauty and power; when life is reduced to commodity, we are left with a loss of meaning and in need of restoration and cure.

We want justice, we demand Justice. We would PURCHASE equity if we could. The banality of filling our appetites once again, (recycling failure) we can take an alternative path: make time to breathe and think about what has happened, plunge into the reservoirs of our spirituality, and embrace what’s important in our lives ─ God, family, friends and nature and art. Perhaps retrace our own steps, see where we've been complicit in some cosmic way. The butterfly effect.

Most religions call for reflection and renewal, not only as a way to inhale (TAKE) in, but also as a way to exhale and breathe out (surrender). Realize we don’t live in a vacuum and we can thrive when we look outward and give of our resources to others. Christians and Jews are connected to the Hebrew notion of tikkun olam (to mend the world). On some level, all of us have the capacity to grieve and understand pain. If we are seeking “meaningful action” we should begin in our hearts and at home. Two things that move the heart: beauty and affliction. We’ve seen affliction, yet mercifully, beauty avails us to the largest possible life.

Peace

©2012 W.S. Warner

Tides of March

Hearing fogged drops of rain
Precipitate violence in the Amazon
Against the placid Leaves;
Left disheveled the unfiltered forest.  

Dampness divorced from its thin vapor blur

Plummeting memoirs retold, the cradled
Past returns its own, splintered─ light
Edging the threshold of infinitude
Axiomatic slippage each fell cold.

Fallen moisture recovered, once

Nourished the ancients;
Correspondingly, we align. Lineal descendants,
Tides of March, sibilant waters flow through us.

Hoary myths now hallowed imminent. Ponderous

Our torn skies cleft, clouds suffused in grey─
The emergent pour, casts a montage in this
Freighted silence, implicit tapestries
Sewn seamless; our kindred froth ashore.

Pedigreed continuum bound in common plight,

Unseen flood of halcyon
Dust and flesh coalesce beneath the torrent;
Genetic lines merge ─ intersection of
Time and eternity. From such water we drink.
Lineal descendants,
Tides of March, sibilant waters flow through us.

 ©2012 W.S. Warner

Epiphany

Providence summons
Natures purchase,
Beyond prosaic
Utility, toward
Communion.
Austere terrain
Ice crystal, dust –
covered
Haunt.
Divine disclosure,
Epiphany;
Ourselves -
Carnal cisterns of spirit
Enfleshed
Skin; merging
Luminous,
Savouring,
Design
Ordered by love.

©2012 W.S. Warner

In the Lavender Garden

Secretly bending glimpses, 
my eyes and desire align
in tortuous agreement –
reflections of you
are not enough
Drew Barrie;
to insulate my heart
from the cleft between us.
Perennials, the color of
periwinkle,
the smell of rain
and crayons
return you to me,
lend presence, a vestige,
to remember
the gift of you,
and fortify my resolve
to one day reunite.

Numbness and ache,
lavish tears set
against the
unimpeachable light,
the dream in your eyes
unequivocally green
each blink evokes hope,
found in
the blushing smile -
little one,
I observe in quiet
adoration, amid
our segregation,
ardor undiminished,
prayers give permenance
uttered in the pause
within each
drawn breath;
ephemeral visions, alive,
like ballads and rhyme
memories aflame, occupy
a sacred place,
my interior; profoundly
savored
never to erase.

Searching for treasure,
collecting prized sand
and stone,
your pockets, heavy
with plunder.

Somber tones fill
the gaps of our history
finding new contrast,
certain hues
oscillating shades of gray
stirring cues
and dearth of winter blue.
Trees, bare and lonely
in the crisp boreal air
of February
moisture, absent
like a father's
words; laconic
after
her irreducible gaze
in the
opaque imagination.

Oddly, the arid season,
of aloof precipitation,
the will of the wind
indefatigable,
euphony - sound unfiltered,
allowing me to grieve,
another year - gone.
Nervous Squirrels, sedentary
and quiet,
as if to mourn with me,
I miss my daughter.

The spring equinox,
poised with
symmetry, warmth,
elucidating
the approaching day
of your birth.

Collateral emptiness,
accompanied
penurious notions of
grandeur
compared to
the day you
infiltrated our sphere.
Stunning you were,
your prominent
entry into creation,
tiny noises,
nestled and snug.
You are here,
equipped with an
absorbing mind,
wrapped,
perfectly
designed, in a petite
fashioned frame.

Emotions, elastic -
diffuse and Compress,
in distance, friction
attenuates,
time and eternity
extend to the periphery,
agony
absorbed into Zoe.
Grace and peace wash
ashore, rinsing
as poetry;
cleansing with surprise
and vigor
recall the loftiest
of tokens.

I too
encountered
an esteemed rock,
smooth and orbed
summoning
long thoughts,
(my)citadel made
of three,
uniquely ensconced
inside -
priceless gems,
that sustain me.

Enclaves of privilege
possessing vacant
mirrors,
until notes and
words gather to form
your story,
the world shifts,
altered anew.
Minor resurrection,
simile to
our reconciliation
visceral and singular,
teardrops of euphoria
resemble waters
of an April freshet

In the lavender garden.

©2012 W.S. Warner

Inhabiting Sorrow

Underneath the anger, there are tears. Beneath the fury, there is hurt, a river

of affliction - the day that possibility evaporated. I knew, the moment

it was gone. Telos obscured, like a mist, had left me.

Frost in February, morning at the local coffee house, perseverating, sedate

in privatized, cogitations - certainty dissolves into irony, the transient

collective with predictable cadence and singular objective. Borrowed

energies - preferred anesthetic in defiance of the placid, quotidian horror.

Angst wrapped in skin, clothed in remorse, like a muslin coat unable
to keep me warm, the palette of truculence, dislocated savant,
with guarded aversion - faces enucleating in tacit harmony, the muted tragedy -

of the forgotten.

Yoked, the metaphorical satchel, freighted with the sentient debris, sifting

the fuckage, memoirs of failure, privation of venture and honor, objectified as

mere portent. [Existence] - the daily riot, becomes the necessary crucible.

Dissonance and detachment resonate the cultural banality, [being] displaced by

icon; [branding], ideas about ideas, life several times removed,

emblem over essence.

Existential renegade, exploiting the counter intuitive, the paradigmatic prodigal,
favor squandered, in the absonant passage, bearing fruit of the undone.

Bones of contention lament, interminably, like a false friend, present in absence,

perceived in the lack, subtraction, slip-stream - the disheveled
palaver of the broken.

Acutely self-referential, misery enfleshed, its own reward, a post-war
discontent inhabiting sorrow, compressed and narrow, begetting
apathy in springtime.

Commodity of youth, the currency of beauty - permuted, commerce of the
ethereal and diaphanous. Human caprice, post-modern fog,
the flattened self,
the enemy of us is us, drowning in a decorum of narcissism.
the fattened calf,
immolating on the sword of autonomy.

Recycled grief, a recursive loop of gestating thoughts, marinating fluidly
within the interpretive grid. Confessional cyber community - exposed wounds

and concrete suffering, abstracted from virtual solidarity, refracted through a

reductive sentimentality, maybe they will ‘like’ it.

Iconoclast in exile, inhaling the incense of barrenness, surrounded by synoptic 

drivel in understaded - present tenses - alight in the now, axial axioms of the privileged,
who genuflect to the god of unfettered freedom.

Peripatetic intervals of isolation, self-imposed, hidden in a sanctuary of
derision, colliding with immutable otherness , the waters of chaos- calm.The

proleptic display, announcing eschatology. An ancient text written on the interior
expressed in myth and narrative the courier. The carnal and cerebral

arise, rightly flourishing. 

Sense thresholds stirring, surprise and turbulence, reverberations of altered

domains merging - the temporal and ubiquity, the indissolubly resplendent

inversion - the invisible made visible. Opaque intrigues subsumed into the

balm of reconciliation - the first shall be last…

©2012 W.S. Warner

Venus in Bloom

Frozen moments,
Embraced,
Visions of
Luminous things,
unpretentious
pearls dancing;
embers of memory linger,
elegy of the lachrymose,
this horizoning self
lying low in saturnine
tranquility
and repose – paternity lost
to the provisional.

The cross of lassitude,
Forming
Scars of loss;
Estrangement,
Preface to
Ineluctable autonomy.
Earthen treasure –
Immortal Footprints,
The migration
Fair maidens across my
Effusive heart.

Venus trio in bloom,
aesthetic allusion,
ephemeral incarnations
of beauty - perishable fruit,
transcending the plebeian.
Aerial substance -
the hermeneutic,
betraying desire’s
ambrosial tyranny;
The permuted passage -
savor the sojourn, submit
to the fated peregrination.

Purple orchids blossom,
immortal creatures,
culminating
in perfection
from the sheath
respectively,
each plume,
singular,
the continuum of
splendor, mediate
the inviolable.
Eternity compounding,
time and essence suffuse
the already and not yet
into an
orbiting mosaic.

The susurrant devotions
of a satellite father,
summon the quest -
both, and,
absence and proximity,
conduits of
distress and peace
ironically,
solace and
terror
traverse the
same path.
Plunge though,
deep, the depth of pain;
deeper, sweeter
the taste of pleasure.

Engender and witness,
window into
preeminence,
surface azure,
the sacred -
inimitable gravity of
grandeur,
ma petite,
you - are
lived poetry
seen and heard;
cosmic order,
a mediating heuristic -
to love is to see,
in the dismal,
gift of distance.
child of delight,
evermore, Don’t I hold you?

Beauty and strangeness,
music found
in linear,
secret places
beyond the tangent,
purview of limitation,
arousing imagination -
infinititude as near
as it is far.

Long loneliness -
dissonance that
resolves;
perceiving,
the tertiary refrain -
as exquisite verse,
and matchless liqueur,
sublime gratuity
derived
through
doors of surrender.
Daughter,
in adoration and wonder,
I hold you.

©2012 W.S. Warner