The Unpublishables Read online

The Unpublishables

  By Steve Lavigne

  Copyright 2012 Steve Lavigne

  Creative expression is an intense means of learning - all of human experience can and should be our subject matter. However, it is the art rather than subject that determines a works effectiveness. If you haven’t already, I would ask you to consider reading Fork And Other Poems. This current collection, a condensation of a lifetime of off and on again writing, is (just like the title says) not quite publishable. For although there are little gems scattered throughout, putting this work into the public realm is akin to going to the beach after a long winter of becoming pale and gaining a lot of weight - it seems like a good idea until you actually get there – umm what was that? No, no really. I honestly thought this was a clothing optional area….

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Part Seven

  Part One

  Sweet comfortable you

  Our comfort is no sluggish slave to sameness,

  No erosion of the soul, no leveling to one plain

  Existence, but with a vegetable passion grows –

  Grows from the roots of mountains, and spiraling

  Through time with questing, untiring looks to thyself,

  Myself and back and back again, we grow together, always

  Changing, but ever with sweet comfortable you.

  Rabbit dying

  Hunted by sounds and hunter of petals,

  Nibbling and silently dropping the forest

  Home he lives in, he waits.

  Until there is forest silence, he waits

  In his seven course camouflage thicket

  And gyrates brittle twigs and fleshy grass

  Between white pucker lips.

  Contented, he hops to warm himself in

  Sunlight and triple kicks fleas near a turning

  Dinner bell ear which is answered.

  A fox squirrel shakes its tail and chirps.

  The shadow of a hawk screams;

  The earth is brought near a red straining eye,

  The other rises harpooned, an olive on a beak;

  Feet thrust slowly much slower against a

  Pine needle floor inches away,

  As all forest discords cease

  Except the methodic pecking beak

  When the quivering nose stops.

  When no tears come

  and still the self won't die,

  when feeling out of sorts

  with men and all their lives,

  then strength is desperation,

  seeming speed, a lie,

  all action becomes discord,

  a lifetime's work, denied.

  When tears flow

  and no poem comes,

  when verse slows

  in a melancholy sun:

  in a wrinkling time

  when future, past, now

  collide and refract,

  a prismatic show

  fracturing self,

  threatening ego,

  then the rose

  is more than a rose,

  each color says more

  than the words self knows,

  symbolic meaning fading

  to a universal close.

  When I am old and peel back this thin skin,

  This pulpy bark of a wind tossed fallen limb,

  Shall I see us etched in time, my rings and thine,

  Two grafted souls growing you and I entwined;

  Or shall we fade with smooth rubbed kisses

  When each the other a rubbing stone sees,

  And every touch brings such blisses

  And still more desirous wishes

  Till nothing but mingling dust shall we be.

  Love! Love is true but for this practiced eye,

  This paint by number niggling with love’s design;

  When thou or I see the others breathing fly,

  Love’s soul we’ll have seen in a meeting of eyes;

  This whole of knowing is like a ball,

  A child’s toy dropped in an eon of time,

  And we, some glimmer, while down it falls,

  And once picked up beyond recall,

  When shall we have time for each others sighs.

  If I would allow you to be you

  and still take you into me

  and me e’er be possessed by you

  and all the world turned with ease and free,

  if the stars shook their locks

  still from the light

  and night begat night

  with an oozing, darkling right,

  if all that we’d thought

  was a onetime thinking thing,

  if all became loss

  in this simple seeming Spring,

  even then I’d say

  my love would be true

  if I would allow you to be you

  and still take you into me

  and me e’er be possessed by you

  and all the world turned with ease and free.

  Trying to understand and put into words what the occupy wall street movement means

  This movement (and it is a movement despite the name) is about justice - a sense of fairness, a sense of empowerment, giving voice to the voiceless. And how many of us standing here- reading this, listening to this, truly have a voice. Those who support this movement feel that there is something wrong – know there is something wrong despite what the media says, despite what the politicians tell us. We feel the game is rigged- hell we know the game is rigged- and for most of the time we can kind of grin and say “yeah it's always been kind of rigged against the little guy, against those who teach, against those who serve” - we're not stupid. But it's gone too far, the problems are getting too big, the breadcrumbs to keep us in our place are too few and too far between. We all know the injustice when tragedy strikes individually – going bankrupt from healthcare costs despite having insurance – getting a foreclosure notice even though the bank no longer has our paperwork – has no real reason to foreclose- and then uses the police (who we pay for) to kick us out of our own home- when it happens to us we know the injustice – but with the occupy movement – as a group we feel the end game coming – there's really no more time left on the clock to dick around, the problems are getting so big so fast, our society as we know it could flicker and fade like that - how do we want our children to live, what kind of society do we leave to them - as it is now, we don't have a say. The adults have left the room and chaos prevails, greed is king, sociopaths running amok, the patients are in charge of the asylum, whatever analogy you want to use... however you want to put it, the normal people - the ones who don't gamble with other people's money and rig the game so they win no matter what, the ones who get bailed out and still do not acknowledge their responsibility to the collective whole (there have been no perp walks) - hundreds of years of social laws and conventions - habeas corpus, usury laws (how quickly what we take for granted can be taken away), the execution of american citizens by our own government without due process- we are in trouble- we feel it – we need to express it - we do not have the answers but until we ask the right questions as citizens, as media, as politicians those answers wouldn't matter anyway- raise your voice in the new media, in the street, with family, friends, live the dream that is empowered democracy....

  Deep Feeling Nature

  As thick as soil,

  Rigid as endless grasslands,

  Translucent as the sea,

  Breathes as the wind

  Whose purpose is unseen.

  Passionless, she is the greatest lover;

  Uncarin
g, he groans with endless dying;

  We cry forgiveness, she gives no mercy;

  We spread our arms, abundance overflows;

  He is one, there is no other;

  We cannot count her endless forms.

  My death over takes me

  My death o’er takes me;

  each moment, motion,

  is a finer stringing,

  a subtler tuning,

  of this mine bodily instrument.

  Déjà vu reverberates

  in the core of my being

  till each savored moment

  fixes each to each,

  every other on other

  and all lead to still time,

  a measureless attuning,

  a nothing gulf emptied open

  where there is no fear,

  there is no love,

  there are no opposites

  to attract.

  Although I love you

  I can not love you.

  What facade is this I have created?

  I have longed for friendship

  And gotten none by seeking it-

  Too lonely in longing

  Too lonely in longing

  I’ve o’er reached my limits

  Seeking ultimate

  With others in knowing

  And failed the boundless of my inner self.

  Though I know this painful love

  Is possessiveness,

  And in possessing will lose

  Whatever love there is amidst the pain,

  Still my conjuring mind

  Fills out fantasies

  (Emotion laden delusions)

  Spreading flowery thighs of desires

  On a stage of submission seeking security,

  An illusion of a vanishing act with a love

  That never was.

  Do not love me too much-

  I do not know what it is to love.

  If once I had known

  Surely now I’ve forgot-

  There are actions,

  Remembered or not,

  That wear down the soul

  Surely as soft water

  Wears the rock

  Over which it flows.

  Forging Love

  My heart aches

  From above and below;

  My body saying yes,

  My mind saying no;

  For in this midst

  The heart is being crushed;

  A forging between anvil desire

  And the hammering blows of mistrust.

  I have seen her face before

  Fallen and still with a sad foreboding

  At times when she stands before the door

  And does not see me seeing her knowing.

  But grown comfortable with our love,

  She sighs in thoughtless moments of my day,

  And though I perceive without her perceiving,

  I must be silent to acknowledge her being

  Though silence be a slow death for me.

  To acknowledge and accept without regret,

  To pay your little child’s forgotten debt,

  Is a butterfly floating in the rolling mist

  Of a waterfall’s flowing cataract of bliss.

  The fear of facing ignorance reflects

  In quickly turning pages, labyrinths

  Of desires, whose meandering treks

  Seek only more and faster sustenance.

  Part Two

  What I Saw This Morning In A White, Flat-bottomed Dish

  Baby blue

  already been chewed

  gum

  dried green pea

  orange cheeto bit

  thin black hair

  Happiness

  the dark slate

  stones

  you always seemed

  to find

  in such abundance.

  You always said

  you can never find

  more than one or two

  at a time -

  smooth rocks

  tumbling in your arms

  squirting

  unbidden

  like strange

  eggs.

  Crossing cars bleat

  Like mad runaway sheep

  Who have lost their fleece;

  A bugging beetle

  I fly in front of windshield eyes

  Who care not a want nor a whit

  For my hide.

  Diving at four way stops,

  The cars converge,

  As sacred crossing birds,

  Screeching to a stop

  On thumbnail red signs,

  Burping and pacing,

  Honking and cursing,

  Sea gulls fighting high tide.

  “Let me walk’, I cry, vines

  growing out of my snout;

  they shudder to a halt,

  my roots break,

  I dive through the shell of a skull.

  One day in summer when the sun went down

  (For so it seemed alone with little thought),

  In a vast wood freed from all dutied ground,

  A solitary bliss I often sought,

  My soul was consumed like the blackened west

  Not from a love or a bliss that was lost,

  But deeds of men mine never to possess,

  Oh, bitter yield of freedom with such cost!

  Then, cut off from men in my wand’ring wood,

  The only paths were dull pride that barren end;

  I searched not for fruitful love as learning should

  With patient discipline as steady friend,

  Nor let hard self knowledge be my rod,

  No, nor conceived more than myself, some god.

  When apples too full of life

  Are brown red ripe

  And no more pickers will come,

  When the sun in a fire of trees

  Its last ember bleeds

  And in a dying westering is gone

  Then it’s easy to believe

  Thy soul will leave

  Thy love, my life will be done

  For I can imagine no spring,

  No dawn of a seed,

  When thy voice and breath are lost

  And this ripe apple falls with the sun.

  What was once so sincere

  Now seems silly of a sudden,

  What once was so dear

  Now seems of a dozen,

  This cozening, this affectation

  Now seems so clear-

  I look into thine eyes

  And I see my mirror.

  I am moved to these tears not by thee

  (whole peoples have died with no such remorse),

  thy cankered bud of inconstancy

  is of but one tree of a single forest.

  This pain, this weeping cry, is not for thee,

  Thy soft impulse is but a mimicry,

  A just picture of the world’s history,

  Yet, still worth no more than the pain to me

  Were it not that love, all forgiving love,

  Has been proved false;

  For in you, as with Christ, the world has been moved,

  All has been your burden to bear, your cross,

  And in denying true love to me

  The world has been lost by little little thee.

  Part Three

  Introduction

  Beyond one’s declarations of success

  And failure

  Is Nature’s slow grinding down

  And rejuvenation,

  Where nothing is wasted in the process of creation;

  Poems being but a subcreation

  Of joy and bless`ed thanksgivng

  Wielding the sloughing of skins

  To smooth, naked reality

  And peace of mind.

  To thee, Nature,

  Words archaic, sublime,

  Crude are for our use,

  To reach some more concrete thing

  Than the rational mind,

  Some be
auty of imagination,

  Some truth, pure feeling,

  Emotion, linking human kind

  In deed to the web of life

  And the inanimate sublime.

  Our bedroom closes like a lobster claw

  The underwater swinging of a door,

  That secures our search for the pinpoint star

  Dancing above us on a surface cloud.

  In sheets of kelp, wrapt in a sandy cove,

  We jig in a circling turbid crowd,

  Swept feeler eyes growing erect, the clammy

  Clashing of shells – shoals of breaking love.

  And still when I rise from the damp day bed,

  The sun undrowned in the microscopic

  Sky remains, so I withdraw and backwards

  Crawl, scuttling across crustacean remains.

  Sweet were her breasts

  In the swelling waves

  Reflecting pale

  The harvest moon.

  Naked with yearning ,

  We had shed our clothes,

  Those foily rinds of fashion,

  And swam lazily

  Under the tow of our needs

  Simple passions.

  Until again, we ascended

  Exhausted in our crustacean searching

  To reach the sun,

  Then brushing the sand

  And our clinging hair,

  We smile

  And believe the other a fool

  For still believing

  That these simple passions

  Can cure the ache

  Of our being.

  Sea creatures,

  We glide

  Pulled by the tide

  Of our common humanity:

  The placenta of salty solitude.

  Breaking In Union With The Sea

  I have never yet seen the sea,

  Nor the sea seen me I believe,

  But apart from my outer cup

  And swelling tissue fishes with dreams,

  My seething blue-red ocean boils up,

  Breaking in union with the sea.

  The Death Of Socrates

  Three men high up on the juror’s stand look down.

  Front center: white silken robe and jeweled crown clenching