Category: The Early Years (page 2 of 2)

Momentum gives you balance, for as short as an instant or as long as a moment.
Classic credo of the wheel, of progress.
In a world
Where it is harder to give than it is to take
Where thirst persists while lawns are slaked,
Momentum can give you balance but only for so long as a moment.
Bottlenecks and tight squeezes do still occur,
When time will freeze to inspect if you are sure
Of the form of your stance, or whether thoughts are pure,
It stalls to a stop to see if you can endure.
The protracted second. That mendicant beckoning to direct your Reckoning.
More often than not, its just a bump in the road
A shift of the load that you have set into mode,
But dont expect the princess to come with the toad,
What is bought sometimes cannot be sold.
Yet still, momentum gives you balance.
Like how a mantra maintains its trance,
Or when you know someone’s soul in a glance
Or the eternity of one final dance.
But does that mean I should become like some roving wind,
Moving through rooms to maintain a measure from Doom?
And what shall I carry? Must I gulp my tea? Can’t I tarry? Won’t you finish your coffee, at least?
Will my saddlebags sway to splay me across the street like some display of defeat?
will a dream deterred or that Road Not Taken hang on my conscience like a heavy load, and then explode? How many more miles to go before I sleep?
How long is this road when even the horizon cannot know?
And when will the fear of happenstance, or chance itself scare my Self into destruction? At this speed,
I feel I need the thought of obstruction to steer me in the right direction. In fact, upon inspection, I am certain that surprise begets seduction.
Somewhere, there is dysentery in my decision tree
And Brittle, blasted rocks are enough to steal control, cold-cocked by piers and marine docks
to slow me to a stop. You see,
sand is surreal: it splashes yet stings dry
And has suffered the slowest death from the breath of the moon in the sky
pushing the oceans of the Earth.
And this motion, carried to its fullest extent,
is spent on stones that cannot parry their relentless torment.
And this persists until each stone has been divided by colliding.
No longer itself yet still something binding.
A potion of Time itself, distinct like a diamond.
Such Cause and Effect,
so that even when you reflect, each predilection is correct by its select dimension.
So when you hit that ditch, sandpit, or you age decrepit,
You will react or relax, collide or collapse, abide or simply prolapse.
And for all the time elapsed, could you say you missed a second?
Do you need a second glance?
Still they say, momentum gives you balance, to break bonds and to push borders.
Where Lords of Order and Mothers and Fathers are not welcome to court
the Edge, the choice between Now and Later, where the voice of Thunder demands
At every corner, Now? now? Or later?
Hunter chased The Edge down by bombing a mountain.
But not even he, with his intense violence and his gunman gusto,
Could touch It: that moment beyond balance, the instant after trance, the fall from a failing stance, or the dying notes of a final dance.

by Michael Cody Clarke
All Rights Reserved

I have heard it deep within!
‘Tis my soul, I am certain!

Listen! Can you hear the humble whistling,
Falling in-between the notes that silence found?
Like when the sun sifts through the silt of a pond upon the ground?
Do any of you hear this sound?

Or is it just the echo of my mind?
Do Darkness speak solely to me?
Am I prophetic in my dumbfounded sleep?
Is life the dream I thought sleep would bring?

I must be an old man fearing my farmland territory.
For death seems sewn into the landscape,
Seeded into the soil, slithering with snakes –
There’re rotten raisins where once were grapes.

And this bloated bladder and this tired brain,
This weakened heart and failing liver,
All serve the purpose to remind me again
Of how much pain my mind delivers.

Yet, I am unnoticed.
My words are writ in vain.
I did not compose this poem.
It was stolen from sunny Spain,

Where there is no future for those
Who sing to themselves at night.
Damned soulless spectres who chose
The isolation of poetic might.

And I who chose them am an acolyte too.
I am their scarecrow of spite who
Would fall to hay if crows had better sight.
I have simply given up on the war ‘tween wrong and right.

And so my soul stirs within my chest
Like a shark within a holding tank:
Always tense; Never at rest;
For I am rotten and my mind is rank.

I shall find the nearby foothills
To watch my family and farm fall to waste
And to listen to my soul’s poisonous ills
And bite off my tongue for want of taste.

For speech is as sland’rous as simony
And my mind will not let off speaking
It needs no tongue to converse with me
O! The damage it has been wreaking!

And how that poison seeps upon sound
Upon the breath of this plaguèd poet.
How thoughts of evil may abound
When breath and body do allow it.

Temperance! I will inoculate thee
From the horrors of sorrow,
If you would only see
How poetry dies every morrow

To be reborn upon the death of day,
For it feeds off fear and fading light.
And if I be wrong, then you may say,
“I am made of love and know not spite.”

And I will call you a liar and call it a poem
And sew seeds of doubt where orchards did lay.
For I heard from a child the words of this omen
And I felt my faith die when I knelt down to pray.

by Michael Cody Clarke
All Rights Reserved

So stifled, I think I’ll take a rifle, shoot it into the air to scare all these disciples.
Who argue over trifles, and stew over Bibles, like those lawyer trolls who learn how to label losers liable.
Whether they’re alive or dead.
That said, I’m glad I’m well-read and so I seek science, now prying into the minds of the Mayans.
They were so defiant, yet always paid penance, they had the common sense of a giant.
When you look into their history, I’m tying their bones to a mentality of some religious piety that was enraptured by mortality. Consumed by the rapture of depravity.
But this proclivity produces pithy poetry so I pray for a preacher’s pity or I ponder on the purpose of my prose and my posterity so I can wind up primary on the polls.

who knows? I may turn my stock into gold! Clean up corruption the way a street is cleaned with snow!
Let it blow! Hi de ho!

I’m screaming to the demons of winter, take me back to my childhood of splinters
Small-minded stutters, plastic rudders, nothing in the world that could hinder or bind me save udders.

I’m scheming to bring about a social coma induced by soma so that I can find some meaning whilst dreaming. But now that I’m awake, shake me from what I’ve seen! Bring me a steaming cup of java so this caffeine can pump reality through a screen, filter it into an
[Robot]: organized, compartmentalized
cubicle! Scrape my cuticles to make me beautiful! And I’ll be dutiful to my country and to my wife and to freedom!
[Normal]: Free-dumb! The Sum of all Fears sequestered in the tears of the Oppressed. Dressed down in dimness with Olympic politicians casting a shadow over their grimness. Urging them to be purging their souls for a brand new stereo or television set so they can be predictable. To make the people stutter with tourette’s, It’s despicable! How can they argue when you mine out their education? How can they sue for rights when you’ve blighted their imagination? You’ve taught them prostration without dignity while losing your own humility. Ground their dreams into a useful futility! A mind-set in utility. Yet all water condenses and fences are still made from metal.
You can’t trust rust and when it’s in the soul,
like corporal corruption,

And when moisture murmurs between anguished breaths then those small deaths never, ever settle. Then the water boils within the kettle and the toils of the populace kiss and caress the capital C capitalists. Dancing in the rain from the humanity of it all, they are all killed by kindness. For drowning is the sweetest of the big-deaths even if it is from the presses of the dispossessed.

by Michael Cody Clarke
All Rights Reserved