Sonnettics

To live a scripted life, a fool must act
The world’s a stage where all we do is play
Some spill their blood to sign a binding pact
As if the words the write are what they’d say

No words are true, come read poetic lies
I spill them on the page, the screen, the ground
The Word Is God (with all that that implies)
What’s lost is only lost until it’s found

If you should lose your ink, you’ve lost your blood
Some writers know the truth of every lie
Some see a drop where others see a flood
Some bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and then they die

But others live forever, by their ink
We are because we write, not simply think.

​
Our forest world is full of mighty trees
I like my tree the best; it’s tall and strong
It’s filled with leaves that rustle in the breeze
The winds of time produce a mighty song

Our leaves all sing; our root provides their tune
Though like their songs, the leaves all come and go
But not the root, the root remains, a boon
Established and ordained to help us grow

Our root provides an anchor in the storm
Fierce storms have blown down leaves from time to time
All leaves will fall; it’s just a forest norm
New leaves will grow, our tree remains, sublime

Regardless of the leaves, our tree bears fruit
I hope all leaves keep faith within our root

​Nobody sees what’s amputated, lost
And yet it’s gone, as surely as some limb
Invisible, yet not without a cost
This TBI’s annoying, if not grim

What’s gone is my ability to show
Emotions that display humanity
My feelings still exist; a fact I know
As surely as the sane know sanity

And so I write my feelings time to time
Like carving some prosthetic lines of verse
At times they limp; at other times they rhyme
At times they seem to say: “It could be worse.”

At least with my prosthetic poetry
I’ve found a way to share humanity.

I walk beside the waves, upon the sand
The beach reveals my destiny, divine
Where flotsam comes to rest, I often stand
The divination of the beach is mine

I’m not some Hamlet, asking what to be
I just survey the driftwood, buoys, and rope
The tides have cast these pieces here for me
Like random lots to read in faith and hope

It does me good to contemplate my finds
Like contemplating life beyond the now
Beyond the simple fate of simple minds
The treasures of the sea have taught me how

Divine, like divinations on the beach
Such mare sortem maps my fortune’s reach.

And now that I am well, the dreams have ceased
When time was out of sync, I sang my song
And now that I am well, my time’s increased
The right to sing is counted mostly wrong

Come sing of time with one who knows it well
He thinks he knows it better now than most
And yes, the “he” is me; I’ve come to tell
How time reveals the depth of God’s great boast

That man was in His image made, divine
And yet, His chronoception must be skewed
He’ll never see a day like I see mine
With clocks that have mortality imbued

I see the darkness in the light of dawn
And know before I wake, the dreams are gone.

I plunge my mind in filth, and what appears?
Some shit that rhymes and jingles like a song
A sonnet bathed in putrid shit for years
Can only come from words that don’t belong

Profanity is quite the fucking verse
It sounds like holy scripture or a fart
Though neither one is better, both are worse
And move until they find the life of art

Take five iambs and shove them up your ass
In fourteen days you’ll crap a sonnet out
The stench will linger on in methane gas
No matter what your sonnet is about

Then wipe the joy of filth like fecal ink
And flush it to the cesspools where we think.

With years of rust, reflected on the sand
While ocean waves still crash the boat’s old bones
Imagination’s memories are grand
At least the ones the time of tides condones

Though tides recede with time, they’ll flood once more
Like memories imagined in the dark
When memories or tides approach the shore
On life’s reflected bones, they leave their mark

The cargo of our dreams may be washed out
When waves of rusted time precludes desire
And yet we still remember they’re about
Dichotomies of ocean waves of fire

Some dreams we have may rust on time’s wide beach
And yet time’s vision stays within our reach.

I found an old notebook with writing in it that I believe is the last things I wrote before my accident on 4/29/2010. This might be the last sonnet I wrote before the accident:

My feet, repulsed by darkness and the fruit
which rots between the rows of orchard arms
alone, organic sentinels, the root
of evil growing silently. Alarms
of touch, repulsion marks the solemn path
between the rows of withered lives. I walk
in silence, like the culminating wrath
of stagnant, rotting life, protruding stalk
which stigmatizes flesh, my feet are bare
I feel the piercing call of dreadful night
where dreams of darkness permeate the air
and danger bleeds my skin a ghostly white
I flail and moan in spasmic steps. The coup
of life is death, which life can not renew.

Sweet apathy is more than just a shrug
“Who gives a fuck,” is personal and pure
An apathetic cord runs to a plug
It pulls itself, of that you can be sure

Sweet apathy compels the null to void
The void compels sweet apathy to null
Compulsion isn’t sweet; it’s just annoyed
That apathy’s a glass that’s just half full

It should have been half empty, like the time
“Who gives a fuck” was power, plugged for naught
By empty seconds, pointless and sublime
That felt the freedom apathy had brought

In time we see that apathy is sweet
Without it, null and void are not complete.