Of Depth and Field

Of Depth and Field

L. Edgar Otto  07 November, 2013

If my mind is in a cave and that essential to know

Not concerned with wall cast shadows

that fade into the fog as the goodness in the warmth

of my autumn coat walks with me

My face wet like with dew, the fallen leaves, slippery,

still, make no sound by my footprints

The shadows of trees and artifacts, bridges across

confluences of rivers, come and go as I turn

or walk, seem to confine me

Or old houses, shadows of past times, pine and

hardwood forests long since removed, replanted

The depth of field a dome all around me and deep

within that fog as I recall how my heart changed as well

in isolation, Kristen, we owned the whole world

Where the fog meets the walk bridge, you afraid to cross

alone in the light of day you asked me if the world would end

All soul's day after whistling in the dark mystery of how

a kettle sings and boils, Halloween masks and dance-

a real skeleton on a balcony riding a bike as decoration

A black cat all wet but razor thin its once plush flesh and

globe of hair facing the funeral pallor next door

Where I saw my first dead body with his thousand friends

in line I leaned down and whispered to him "One day, though it takes ten thousand years...

You are one we will bring back again..."

* * * * *

Hiatus (new photos)

Hiatus while PC and connectivity issues solved.  Limited access via library and cell phone.

Of Honey, Roses,and Venom

Of Honey, Roses,and Venom

L. Edgar Otto  27 October, 2013

I. Mothers & Daughters Work the Bars & Dress Up for

the Other Halloween

The hidden side of one way mirrors work both ways

to lift a face and mask

Tammy Faye head on, imprinting, colliding with my

tee shirt, make-up, leaves here face a featureless cloud

It starts with children's shows, mom, dad, puppets, local TV

or Xuxa, once a pron star, now darling redeemed

Beloved by the peanut gallery

Of clowns and Captain Kangaroo

tragic masks, comic masks, epic preternatural

Bottle fed shadow sheep stuffed animals to be shorne

of wool, ride bareback on the prancing pony dream, or

Unicorns only to be pushed out of opened doors

puppy mills, already lost far from the strand and broken

Thru walls and Great Balls of fire until if lucky realize

the Rolex watch reward and large brass golden giraffes

Cheap knock off copies

II. Does God do Automatic Writing

We used to count by letters made of god-like

hieroglyphics, runes near to them

Then just put on the pictures or spoken story

alphabet of metaphor, history emerged entangled

Half babble Rosetta stones in fractured leaps

leaving clues

Alas, the numbers for their tally marks, recycled wood

to burn, contracts long forgotten or in commerce

Made of cuneiform then sealed inside ball of baked clay

masking them until they're broken.

This empire new slogans carve, a pipe or cave

filled with crushed pillars of Pharaohs past

The prophets speak of generations, empty, seething

brimstone, or successive layers, levels of hell

Echoed here in earthly tells, gods, ghosts, now aliens

from end time prophesy to predictions we call science

Women still blow pigment to spray paint on cave walls

their hands that leave a shadow.

III. Venom Razzle-Dazzle or Camouflage

Sweet Rose Etta, I left but with a withered blossom with

acid fire on a chain link fence see thru as you tossed with

Your wedding bouquet, Venus belt trapped on the fly

with stained glass slippers, the imprint of you open hand

Slap on my face, so I read the news report ow well you were loved, your general hospitality- I part of your pelts of motherhood

Boys and their puppy dong tails - I saw my pet speckled

slug as beautiful as your freckled mug-  Rhesus negative Who frets she cannot wear green or look like Christmas

cat fight claw my Rh-positive animus, the little red haired girl

Hell for me would be to take a younger Eve

tempted even if she were a nurse, relive my father's fate

Then she remove one node and all its links that our

new world encased upon itself brings conflict

Breaks apart love between my children's sisters, brothers

even step and half siblings, lost modern families

Even the last left of a nuclear one to fission itself

All this somehow foreseen, my path a little less

than my father's failures- beyond resentment biological

Mom took with her to unforgiving innocence down below

as you whom I doubt said loved him, there alone to pull the

Plug following the circle of your slime of slugs

May you - and whatever lesser god that cannot forgive and

struck you blind - rot and burn in a forgotten hell.

* * * * * 

For  imaginary garden submitted Monday... concerning masks... Only could see two of you before phone slowed down and main PC went on the blink (at library now) did read some others but could not comment.

I took the Vandana's flower picture as inspiration and the venom of fireblossom... sorry if it is too dark...

Watchtower

Watchtower

L. Edgar Otto   25 October, 2013


The bus stopped in Swavesey, by the old clock
late at night from Ely's Isle to Alconbury

That urge to lose myself in crises flight, some
endless space in but safe measured hours

That to desire to seek the far away drives me
back to home, there already, we cant return again

But while the rumble lasts, glaring light hiding the night
you Carol sit by me, I not the caboose chasing your train

The driver, and the couple between him and us, well
she setting on his lap, we pretend not to notice

You show me what you bought the day in Market Square
I have you give me your address so I might write in

An old book of wisdom from a bygone age, a sister's praise of
sisters, opium eater diary, or picture of the days of plague

You get off by the watchtower, its pale Roman numeral clock
a thousand miles away the book took another subway route

I could not write you, my words blacked out, returned by
prying eyes afraid of jazz terms I loving your isle too much

At the watch tower I see your ginger hair, freckles, smiles thru
the window while the night light clock grows dim behind me

There was nothing else worth to watch for you someone
I could have loved and more, friends, our heartbeats side by side

* * * *

For imaginary garden... thoughts evoked from the lyrics of songs, and barn dances once my home...

Added later after thinking about how I used "dim" in this poem without thinking about it then seeing the same themes in the other poet's here... that and a friend mentioned too how he had to use the word dark matter or energy differently every time he used it... so I thought I might, as a source of terms made clear try to coin some clearer ones as seems it best a poet's duty.  The physicists run out of Greek roots it seems, or how creative the "gluon" not or quark that means cottage cheese... I used opaque substance or Dark matter like or obscure matter,  or anything with the simile the so called "God Particle" for awhile called Higgs-like.

So here a final thought as a poem after this daunting yet glorious educational prompt so much so at the beginning and way beyond the cycles of seasons and days intimate to our souls at the end of the line...

Crepuscles and Gloam

L. Edgar Otto  26 October, 2013

Why must my shining light racing off 
into the starry horizon
leave behind my cloud of gloam?

I slow in the salty scudy sand grain
broken shells of crystal waves
walk on water quickly sand sea foam

Poets as well feel yet the hidden scoff
so think unique zodiacal lights refrain
their own horizon's inky rain of tomes

Our compass North falls off the world 
ghosts vanished there yet leave their bones talk 
to each other as if to them, seek diamond double cones

Walk on shaky ropes of time up from our marrow
where we're close, may fall, riding one loves arrow...

* * * *

Glossary perhaps in this footnote:

Crepusculum and Gloam

L. Edgar Otto      26 October, 2013

crepuscle(s) : obscure or dark (twilight) matter and
gloam: the same for the concept of dark or hidden energy;  dusk dust

Starrizon: (the starry horizon) mirror compliment of gloam, gloamnium.

Calyptic Substance (energy, thoughts, or matter): hidden, esoteric (vs neoteric physics)

* * *

An Anthology of Flowers

An Anthology of Flowers

L. Edgar Otto

24 October, 2013


The shawled lady worked the amusement park
the theaters, restaurants around the penny arcade

She sold Kewpie dolls with long crape paper dresses
and bouquets or a single rose, her artificial flowers

How could the sailor refuse after the ride thru the
tunnel of love, was the neon light in her eyes as artificial?

Who with mooning gaze could refuse the wider ones,
pointed hair. for you Doll dressed up, hold your baby

Baby, baby face, you got the cutest little baby face
Oh don't you need one? Let's walk hand on hand

No one will know in the privacy of the instant photo booth
what sort of  poses we display, its OK I will show no one

The child that followed her on her rounds looked up at
the two headed man and poster, mushroom cloud splitting the earth

Leaving the ocean view, merry-go-round, roller coaster screams'
here's your cap mister, you left it on the carousel booth

He gives the boy a silver dollar, the small train smells of coal
I can ride it to the Promised Land or all around again

The boy thinks, more nickels for the Nickel, Nickelodeon
he cannot enter therein but can still point the way

As they leave the amusement park a Kewpie falls out of
her dress and they make fun of the swabbies he looks back

At the lady's artificial flower in her hair, then the dolls ruby lips,
sings goodbye Milk and Honey, goodbye Humpty and Dumpty


* * * * *


Kerry's prompt on Imaginary Garden

Epistle to Alduz

Epistle to Alduz         L. Edgar Otto   21 October, 2013

When the Intelligent Designer of whom we could not speak His name said
"Let there be gluons", the Chosen in their towers of babble wrote Him out of the Play

One minor species or tribe arose by chance from all the elements and exoplanets in
the image of Universal Law to which the people labored in exile from the imagined Gardens

Beholding the great supercollider of the sky, the source of mass was made manifest for
in the dark matter on the face of the deep so his creatures felt its telescope

That time repelled his amplification condensing into gravity as in the heavens so on Earth
that the creature could evolve fore-ordained who endures or is born again, the word

Spoken and written without the soul of vowels a mystery offending the left hand that
the road to Heaven was paved with infant's skulls to hell's bottomless potential wells

The sum of paths the same at every branch or around the canopy in totality
Enter Pythagoras or his likes all at once at a distance to begin alphabets and history

"Did I bid you keep separate your church and state, a lesser broken place your helpmate
Temptress of uncertainty first and last man, my eighth day work no rest begun?"

"O Lord, He whose center is singularity and circumference a hypersphere beyond
the stars and God dust string motes everywhere, did I not pray, ask you your design?"

God then looked at his handiwork tried of testing rainbows, tired of ends in fire then
Said to these mortal creatures he knew not ready, personally, " It is disgusting."

Adam kept a level head in flatland and gazed elsewhere shutting up to measure
the plots of mud left by the Nile, the cubits of pyramids and New Jerusalem

"You see in my perfection I  born without umbilical in your image and purposes conserved
In symmetry, a creative lesser god, where before the world was, I Am, we will be".

* * * *

Speak No Ill of the Dead but Shout Out Our World is Living

Speak No Ill of the Dead but Shout Out Our World is Living  or
A Letter to His Mythical Home before His Last of Battles

L. Edgar Otto     20 October, 2013


We live free in a least government state to follow our individual purposes, fit in smoothly with the expanding society, or even ride the light of a God not our will unto a weapon unto others.

For as we are distracted by the fantasy's of those who see the state as everything, and hold its people individually without it do not exist at all, lies and charging all outside it conspiracy, the leaders feel the state is fixed and real so too the people fill their empty lives to heed, or fear, or redirect their path as salvation to the puppet strings they give attention.

The dead do not belong to the state that like in primitive tribes they can be tried for non-participation, their self-sacrificed corpse put on public display, confession by the ceremony of the circus.  The memorials merely serve to rewrite history, maintain regimes of accidental or ruthless victors.  The dead belong to the mothers, lovers, children and the soldier who sacrificed for what he believed, believing in others in sincerity or fool hardy, so serve a deep or small part.

The dead do not belong to the soldiers who dispatch them, not for superstition as once we ate the heart of our enemy, gained their power, gave them honor. The times moving us without control the fallen leaves in turbulent wind, here and there a pile of molding leaves to walk around, permit the living to forget lest it wounds their lives and lives to come, the troubled minds with flashback of the job, the test but unto death of strength, defense of genes pools and territories not forgotten the nagging guilt that we may have grown callous and uncaring to our fellows.

But far worse the departed and those caught in the crossfire, the hopeless rising in the ghettos, the children at war with each other overlooked as long as contained on the other side of tracks, and those who forgot their roots so to use the law as their chains... thus and is the machine of drones that moves by design and cold gears, inertia growing strong, that myth of spring we who recall its passion in the rants and rage against the twilight of autumn night far worse, as if above the clouds the bombs fall distance, our hands are washed from troubled dreams and face to face reopen wounds with bayonets, one military man to another,  the missing limbs not buried at Arlington hold no regrets.

The military man was not meant merely to just supply the seed, to grow fat on free loaded pension honey, the queen is slow to pay them anyway if they don't die but fade away.  For what, that his sons cannot bring to the world some poetry, or that his daughters are infertile workers for the hive without dreams of her own?

Work it is the ethic on which we build and self-rely, and work it is sacred that we bring to it what we can to ease life in this world, and work is the enemy in that it feeds on slavery with promises that it will make you free,  busy work for its own sake to learn the habit as routine so accept moving pointless objects around to sort them and if efficient find them jumbled again before the clock shift is over and the conveyor belts grow silent there relentless bone crushing sweat shop explosion.  Work is that which we find absurd to do if an animal, another, or a machine can do better.  But if we promise the least of that for a place in the society it is perhaps that the state still fears that we have learned to use our stingers and our ladies to make their own honey. Or worse that deep down they know but cannot test that we will not break down to violate in faith our good hearts without limits.

We may not fool the dead, our leaders some of the time for as such they fool themselves all of the time, and if the dead can vote or the voting dead the state remains unreal to which no rite of legitimacy or span of hegemony can insure a state endures- not when divided in its life and the life of its people.

* * * *
Perhaps for Open Link Monday  Imaginary Garden...

A thought in the back of my mind, I of lesser sacrifices alive but faded away, no more the sting of false promises reaching the summer outings, parades of Memorial Day that Lincoln promised care for the loved ones of those fallen...

Love in the Icy Cold of Space

Love in the Icy Cold of Space

L. Edgar Otto    20 October, 2013

The universe itself is a cave
what attracts, what repels
What in the sea of ice is hidden
nine tenths under swirling waters

There must be more than echos
as we cry out, make messages of song
Send them off inside bottles
after the wine bids us sleep awhile

I am not Virgil where imagination can
send my senses to a climax, no poetry can
Wait to penetrate the mystery of love
Yeats and the moon shaddow eaten

Somewhere weightless deep in space
doubled our stardust face to face
That I worship you, entwined realities
one again exploring new geometries

What in your ankle sent Frenkel wandering
in wonder far from the arms of Milky Way
His magic marker and equations on your
belly down to the end your belly button

Nature, no one can keep her in a pumpkin shell
crave on it our face that jack-o-lantern light shows thru
At midnight again, mice under snow cover
then the search to see who fits the one glass slipper

Against the cold of night the fall or bounce of dreams
we crave the cave as well for the cuddles in respite
Build our domes of blocks of snow but cannot know
If the spring returns its sun lost in midnight

* * * *

In the viXra an interesting shot film and book review inspired and kept me busy then I saw Hannah's prompt on imaginary gardens... sorry I am late, another fine exercise of love and the cosmos as poetry.

Sinkhole

http://africaunfinished.blogspot.com/ On Redemption, Fireblossom Friday prompt
see Peggy Goetz's Poem   One by One:  "...When one tiny hole
is patched a fist blow breaks another..."

Sinkhole

L. Edgar Otto  11 October, 2013

The Earth's crust shrinks as its core expands
cracks like the emptiness of Heaven, yoke of hell fires
We still a planet all alone despite diamonded bands
abandoned in between, our whole world failed stars

Redemption, green tea consumed so chains, rations
to give back in gaudy glass books of green stamps
Abandon all hope, the gospel shelter, entering therein
lives rebuilt, renewed,  admit all are born in sin

For the tramps have nowhere else to go to sleep, to dream
save scarce wine, relieved in stalls or dustbins
The money changers glean those already broken and
they come from far away, tokens to a Field of Dreams

We know at the rock bottom survival will kick in but
at what cost the scars, the fall apart, pain to rise again
Indentured for a year, toss all sentimental, cherished
feral now your once family cats, yours no human bonds

They called it the House of Ruth, married to the Lord
all the virgins shaved and cloaked in black that your
Religion becomes their religion, hot dishes, deloused
pregnant black teen in the rain sang hymns too ghetto

She does not exist, I send her home, back to Chicago
like I called the police, a blind man sent out in snow
Not paid past his thirty days, sorting rummage clothes
they did not sign away threats to face the nuthouse

But how many times can the stony stardust graze the sun
in one lifetime to reach oblivion in last of waters?
I cannot write again my thousand poems, my junk
auctioned off by fraud, those who stole contributions

My hundred songs, children's memories, the landfill
I homeless again, they charge me with illegal dumping
Despite no bands, locked out of storage yet it paid
thieves scavaging bailment, I the one forgiving them

* * * * *

Footnote- It was only Dave King that gave me ground to carry on
somewhere in a confusion of metaphors worked in poems past
half aware I may half plagiarize myself, what we have built up
in efforts of our hearts... no imaginary garden, Dave... no more exile
from what you still give us of paradise redeemed beyond the night that
echoes full of things we half successful stars, sharing your poetry....

Between the Reed Symmetry of Tiger Stripes

Between the Reed Symmetry of Tiger Stripes

L. Edgar Otto   09 October, 2013

I carry my baby bundled near my breast
on the way home to the warmer fishing grounds

Too late to turn back, the twilight, wilder gully
I see the bones half eaten hidden there of horses

I walk cautiously though not aware of stalking eyes
a tiger appears before me, we both hopeless, frozen

Then the pounce like the playful cat that paused
to let the mouse groom itself before its end

I kick a small stone before awakening from dreams
parallel to some other plight in dream's sunlight

So casually we stumble then break apart the worlds
we cannot see beyond inference in the tigers stripes

Somewhere over there, the zebra fish sees me as
her spirit animal who diverts the turtle's snaps

While she protects her brood distracted by the tannin
peat that put her into exhaustion, replication frenzy

* * *

For the imaginary garden

Unistonium, Standard Theory and Einstein's Brain

Unistonium, Standard Theory and Einstein's Brain   
L. Edgar Otto      06 October, 2013    (an offering for open link Monday for imaginary gardens)

Yeats in the poem "Stamper in the Sky", made the universal point that the sentient creature paints an image of God as if a projection of its own mind.  We great apes as in the sci fi movie full of jazz and classical Wagner stand before the monolith to ignite new stars at a critical point of their replication in which each if we can partly see into them are full of stars.  We now motherless star babies will have to think of something soon.

It is clear that ideas of deja vu, the synchronicity of dreams as in Jung's thermodynamic model of the mind allows that over a small interval of time anticipating or foreseeing so far into the future we actually feel, across the hemispheres or in deeper structures of our mind... we have seen or been in some place of observation before.

But it is also true of dreams and their interpretations as in Freud that we have a vast sense of hidden regions, the dark subconscious of our thinking that inspires curiosity and vast reactions to superstitions, recapitulation of seats of process usually starting in sets of three from our fish souls up, that has us tell stories, hear and heed voices, become attached to and embellish them looking for a sense of unity in the truth and in our wholeness of well being.  In the act of living in a society we go thru the motions of processes sometimes defining our life by our roles.

Many of the great thinkers in physics start out to behold and praise the handiwork of a Creator who has care or moods. Yet often in the attempt they find or their disciples find, going way beyond the intent of teacher, that in analysis of ideas that do not always seek first the simple causes as physical, puts these ideas of higher ultimate being as ever more distant or vanishing from the cosmic landscape.  So Descartes with good intentions is said to be the meditation that undermined the world view of the Church that is a gateway of separation from the older unity of religion and science.

Cosmology is the tragic loss of such a concept painted on the sky of higher love to which the lens grinder Spinoza, for his faith was excommunicated as the general idea of atheism grew as a term of those who work against beliefs.  Anything supposedly higher that that point of awareness, understanding, and consciousness in the spacious now is derided as metaphysics even if the once schools of the subject gone fallow in the seeding of thoughts held we reach a speed of a maximum in the "psi plasm" by which after a great struggle we can sustain wisdom, predict scenarios of warning of higher dangers than that of the lower creatures in the wild, even imagine higher realms of dreams and returns to homelands and gardens, to the milk and honey breasts again of a caring mother thru the generations objects of desire.  We coin the idiom our head is in a spin so to speak, for where else does the light go beyond our cubits of building brick by brick from the quoin of birth, we drawn or in free fall?

So much depends on the exceptions to conservation of CPT violations, the breaking of symmetries, the focus of such abstract higher light and complimentary darkness into some level of contrast that the Standard Theory explains the observed sets and decay of particles as we go back in theory to arrive at origins as if in our microscopes we view in the depth of the small nearby or the distance in the large far away as if in time the threeness of unity in the staircase of forces.  In a wide sense this is the issue of chirality by which we as bilateral creatures, between the snakes or reeds and the starfish and lily pads self adapt the physicality of our brains.  Our brains, also hard wired on pattern levels like the chemistry, induction flows, nerves and DNA are also defined and limited by the totality as if quanta and loops of gravity.

Einstein's brain, from this crude level of analysis and of what we are to make of it in the search for physics genius or creativity, gives some hope to tell us something of all brains in structure and processes.  We know as in the sense of the urban myth we only use part of our brains, or DNA codes, or visible matter in the universe and so on,.  We want the magic bullet of respected and simple cures after a long climb of research in fits and starts to climb to the wider dream, think about it and bring back to our familiar home the wisdom again in ways with objective certainty new seekers can understand.

Some have found a higher connectivity between the hemispheres of Einstein's brain, certainly close to the foundations of things that the plasticity may adapt and compensate in non-average ways.  A proof by those cases of exclusion in average people with physical injury in specific areas or in the newer methods of today that imagines it can tell us something of our core souls and monitor our dreams our technology of scanning, our refinement of magnetic and other fields... as if we can be sure of behavior say we took a scan of Dalmer's brain to explain how some individuals against all the thrust for survival as if there is a death wish that disturbs our continuum of social values.  While we are lazy to go over data in the detail, we are not wrong to seek the universal simplicity of explanations of the world so trusting those who we imagine experts, geniuses who worked long to master their fields.

Some report that certain areas are advanced in his brain like regions where the ability to play string instruments on one side or the piano on the other side while music itself is a universal language of transiting if not unifying the whole.  Recent analysis suggest in addition to the old observation that one side of his brain had more connections between the nerves in the secondary levels... a condition we now know where nerves do attatch and connect to each other with more than simple connections, that the area is wider in the convolutions wherein a potential is there if not the indication that this speaks of higher intelligence where found.

Yet this seems to come at a price in the face of it... the larger brains of dolphins are not connected such that they must dream on one side, two healthy brains if unconnected that in the exposure of the open degrees of freedom in the sea half of their brain can stay awake.  For it seems that those areas close or at what is the creative and most abstract regions of human thought in Einstein are more separated.

So considering the grounding reference frame of unity despite the sparks of randomness of which one could imagine the formulas and process of electron work force as a grounding process as well, and the time aspects from that as a measure of our ignorance of the unknown, what happens in the dark depths of quantum theory and computation, the doubly symmetric awareness or the mistake we all make in geometry where we have to make our values half again in the influence of higher dimensions of force fields, there to bring it back home again to what we feel a physical grounding, it seems to me only natural that a human with such a brain structure would feel and imagine that things are not what they seem when it comes to time as simultaneity.

So some pioneer, by endowment can show the world and communicate what for him was the intimate vision as vision to which the average mind may stand in disbelief or awe.  This is not to say science is always done this way for much of it is the luck of secondary or accidental discovery, and much of it is the clues we work out in our dreams.  Yet, we should not as objective scientist dismiss in the higher longing of higher regions of a brain that wants both sides to connect into a still wider generalized theory to which Einstein as some said in his mistaken goals in the face of quantum theory that unifies everything in a universal set of simple laws that can with assurance reach into expanded realms so therein is the abstraction we know as genius, but of us all as specimens of humanity beyond local color and so on or claims for or against the exceptional evidence of the extraordinary.   Physics, as well as people, can be an enterprise that for our survival makes us too smart for our own good.

I stand midway between the very large and the very small at once still yet moving.  This much we know that what we see is influenced by the frame from which we view things as observers, and anything so observed including the miraculous organization that is our brains concretely and minds abstractly is changed by the act of our observation in the very small...  and a watched pot of helium mysteriously will not boil.

In this higher sense of unity, of a spirit that rides over the relentless and oft spooky eddies of a directed branching history we can see the world as a static and steady state as Einstein was surprised at the instability that leads to the Hubble expansion... that for me is an error in the restrained power of our existing mathematics and statistics, notations as well as ideas for a better language design of logic. Did he not consider in the hieroglyphics left near his death bed a sort of quantized sequence to consider the universe as cyclic? Did he not ride the light until the bitter end?

* * * * *

Synjazz

Synjazz

L. Edgar Otto    04 October, 2013
(for Friday prompt at the imaginary gardens)


The universe cannot be described only by
its cyclic bouts of epilepsy or mystery of memory

Nor without feeling all, the sum total, the Omnium
be more than a phantom aura beyond the flickering light

Induced into epiphanies of perception or
catatonic coma to stop short circuits, blowing the fuse

You who said there was not a theory of everything yet
imposed your chains of virtual totalities on others
have come late to the game in your one room old school

Perhaps you do not believe in magic or moral law above
but have you not seen the variegated universe within you?

* * *

Some hold a central place, only the higher angles to face
what beyond it is but half Adam's face beholding God

Or in the numbers game, grinding lens or making potions
tinkering with nature's sea-foam taffy steel simple machines

So cleaver that in the end philosophers can build the lever
that can lift the world, measure Earth by our axioms and runes

Or that gated cathedral space ship an endless array to which
all paths in the endless beach and plane yellow brick roads
we come home, time walk outside a canvass of our visions

The peach that was the embryo of your soul sorting errors
fetal dreams of birth to come then more beyond night terrors

* * *

Arise! my child of Earth, the fall persists, the grays, the nothingness,
colors greater than Aurora's sources in our sky

Blinded by our own light or walls against the stars, doubt our worth
so choose if our world ends in a flood or fires

The rim of your volcano sleeps beside me multiple fits, starts
my once fire cracker then gets to the how to find the why

That we lose ourselves in the drinking, probing the Big Bang
drakes and damsels together for a season in groups to hang
migrate to the depth of stars enticing us with their wares

Can the thinkers find themselves deep toward nature's womb,
can also blind fainting fem fatal rolling eyes find otherwise?


* * * * *

Twenty-one Words, Twenty-one Lines

 Twenty-one Words, Twenty-one Lines

L. Edgar Otto   03 October, 2013
                   ( for imaginary garden...)



borrow laughter, return tears of snow
   weather birth of fences
        deck of death

   children, weeds
        teenagers, trees
           parents, garden

      neighbors stoop,
           barbecue potluck,
               handshake

borrow tears, return laughter
   weather death of fences
         deck of birth

     teenagers, weeds
           parents, trees
               children, garden

        potluck stoop
            barbecue neighbor
               handshake

parents, weeds
   children, trees
       teenagers, garden

* * * *
 

The Reincarnated Zookeeper

The Reincarnated Zookeeper

L. Edgar Otto      01 October, 2013

(for last Fireblossom Friday)

If there is no final end of the world, it renewed

all the returning sentient souls chimera reviewed

The polliwogs try to cross the border, dandelion

pickers digging our fields far from blue eyed DeLeon

So history would relentlessly chain us in its clockwork

but were we not once brothers, so too where alights the stork?

Still, in another time my pincers red, not blue black ants

mongrel donkeys revolution red, no blue elephants

Like all unbirthday souls at the Hatter's tea party

that fill his top hat cups with laurels so hardy

Let Larry, Moe, and Curly gouge out their eyes

the peace sign knocked us down past knee or thighs

While Shep and sheppards flash their dairy aire

Doing hard time with them, we souls Lucky Pierre

* * * * * 

Apple Chill

Apple Chill

L. Edgar Otto  Sept. 27, 2013


Did you ever write something that as the author you had to pause and take a breath to laugh?  Hey, Myrtle, I'm still fertile, thinking there is always time to save yourself for the right one... Otherwise, how would life keep on imperfect yet always nothing new of promises under the sun?

* * *

You do a lot of sleeping in your Margaritaville
Too hot to wear pajamas so keep me up, your tempting garden traps me in the thrill gouging out, covering my eyes in your Apple Chill

So I wrote a song for the doll house ladies
at their tea and poetry, about some loyalty to a place
like your warm body next to me and thin iron curtain frilly lace - no time for anything else, unrequited love
fulfilled always to do and chase

Help, call 911, I've gotten up and I can't get down
Madam I'm your Adam - nothing works, no sleeping pills,
no cold showers in a Viagra monologue helps your night sweat hours moonlit fog- I know in your change in innocence it was not me that got you wet

But I'm not ready for the old folks home yet
in the afterglow no sharing of a cigarette
addictions, pre-existing conditions Obama mama care bills
I playing doctor like a Chaplin on a hill yet
only human hairy true man still alive
despite your apple chill

So, here's the rub, lub dub, lub dub, I your caring actor
no co-pays that rob, no chiropractor, can do the job but its gotta work both ways to fill the loom of days
So keep me up, your tempting garden, trap me in the thrill
covering my eyes in your apple chill

* * * * *

Footnote: you see I almost went to bed before I wrote of the New Mexico miniature room for the imaginary garden... a friend I have let stay in my front room until she finds a place- a dignified safety shelter has me rub her neck by the fridge where there is a problem that may need surgery or heal on its own - I went out earlier for advil and a cheap can of margarita...and I better start reading the ingredients in those energy drinks if I buy another for myself...  I wrote this because a new tune came out well on my guitar this morning and I hope the poetry here is taken as humorous, for the open mikes comic scene and our graying human and current event conditions.  Maybe comic relief from the dignity and professional bar of your poets- so this still related to the prompt but it is about an overview of what we are near or at a distance from our homes, times, and each other... mastering perhaps the inside jokes of cliches as philosophy.

Navajo Rug and Table Made of the Cottonwood Tree

Navajo Rug and Table Made of the Cottonwood Tree

L. Edgar Otto   27 September, 2013


You see we do not know when is our last supper
We can make a calendar for the era, aim our stones and
pyramids to the season's clock of skies.

As if there is a past, our ancestors around us but
Receding into the distant dreams now miniature yet
the Virgin mothers all stars and moon beneath her feet.

Dry and hot the dusty desert yet night cold the need for fire.
Inspired eking out a living, time painted in still-life waiting for
better dreams to come, that this dry flower feast be not stillborn again. 
.
The clay pots and teeth decaying corn, the woolly rugs
Woven with the colors of the clan and gleaned silver turquoise
mirror glances, windows to within.

Hearts spiny needled against the drought like starlight on a
Moonless night guides us to the once wide ocean time
That even ghosts gully dry cherish, drink the morning dew.

Returns again cattle rustlers dangling from the cottonwood
Trees, vigilantes and lawless poverty, a feast in a bowl of fruit,
the sprouting cactus flowers amid the smoke of sage.

* * * *

Footnote:  see the photo  New Mexico Dining Room (1940)
September 27, 2013
Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

Sometimes a horny toad's eyes squirt blood...

(Inspired eking out a living, time painted as a still-life 

that this dry flower feast be not stillborn again)  Marian's revision approved.

I was thinking of the fruit in the bowl in the pictures and that art student exercise as well, trying to capture motion in a snapshot or slice

forsooth, you  give good advice       In the flurry of writing this I did check some of the editing and spelling but did not think about the accidental coherence of the underlying themes at all...   life is a long prison sometimes and to escape the mundane we are given a runaway sentence...

You Were No Angel (Chapter 1)

You Were No Angel (Chapter 1)

PublicFriendsFriends except AcquaintancesOnly MeCustomClose FriendsEau Claire, Wisconsin AreaSee all lists...FamilySelf Employed forthcomingGarringer High SchoolCraddock High SchoolUNC Chapel HillUW-MilwaukeeAcquaintancesGo Back

L. Edgar Otto   26 September, 2013

I had the urge to write this for the imaginary garden's next Open Monday...

Chapter I.  Walking with Jubal by Silent Sam

Jubal left the psyche ward at South Wing and faded into the streets of summertime among the stoned hippies in the university's quad by Franklin Street.  A casual passer-by the wall along the sidewalk were people would sit and meet would be hard pressed to tell what in Jubal's thoughts and manner was the difference.  I could not at first until he started shadowing me and I invited him to sit and talk as I was wont to do anyway that summer sleeping at night under the magnolia tree, by day meeting a wide variety of people. I was waiting another semester to finally be admitted to the school after coming home from the service, yet so free and Southern lazy the pace so many hours to spend in thinking and laying in the sun and grass waiting for my tie dye tee shirt I washed by hand and put on to dry.

We walked through the quad then sat at the base of Silent Sam,  a statue in honor of Confederate soldiers with the quote the word 'duty' as the most sublime sentiment, word in the English language, and a note of just how many this one state above its sisters volunteered for the Civil War.  The locals called him that for some reason I never found out, yet he was a center of focus for graffiti constantly sand blasted away as some students protested the Asian land war and Nixon spelled with a swastika or Amerika with a 'k'.

"So Jubal, why are you following me around my walks?"

"You are a god sitting on the wall or bench writing.  When you shuffle your feet sparks are given off.  The streets are filled with empty people, as well some dark demons and others hiding away in hope their evil schemes are not discovered.  There are a few other gods also, some come by you, but when you sleep as so many students do in the quad you find the perfect spot in the open not to be disturbed.  When that girl threw her kitten on you, you did not startle or lash out but cradled it looking up at her and smiled."

"I am not a guru you know... I am just passing my time trying to make sense of these twelve dimensional equations so I can find good themes in music."  I told him thinking he sounds smart and that I might just bore him so that he goes away. He seemed have an effect of keeping my other friends distant save for Sleazy (we all had nicknames back then and few knew he real ones let alone the last ones. I just kept my first name, Olney... then again I missed the drug revolution, and the free love revolution, and he revolution revolution.)  After Sleazy sit awhile then left with his air of seeking a brother acting out the theme and philosophy of the series Kung Fu, Jubal said he knew Sleazy was one of the gods too.

He replied to me in a way one cannot really tell how sound someones thoughts are, especially if such confusions may be caused by the confusion in the society, the state environs- the schizophrenic society but as Kikergaard said. to the corkscrew the knife is crooked.

"Well, I understand really, I used to go to school here before the airplane glue burned my throat.  I have a whole proof of the four color theorem really, worked on it for years.  Now I just sell matchbooks on the streets.  Match Scratch! Get it, match scratch..." he said with pride of a poetic grin.

I saw Jubal twice later on after one of my many moves to and from the small village, university town of Apple Chill.  My bride and me took up his offer to stay in a trailer with his girl for the night, a redhead he met in south wing we found out later.  But she was so angry only his touching her calmed her down but it turned out he would beat her and Jubal's visiting brother told him it was unmanly and called the police.  We got a ride from them to city line of the next jurisdiction as Jubal was living just outside the village line.

Much later we lived farther out into the countryside in an old farm house of brown wood our kids called Gingerbread house.  One day Jubal is on my porch and wants to come in but he is lighting matches just for fun and says he could not get into his trailer next door.  He used to live there when he was still a teen.  I had just heard from my black neighbor that a white man had tried to climb into her screen window and scared her little girl.  So I told him to sleep on the porch on the hammock until morning.  He also asked if he could keep a veterans plastic card trying to sell me insurance that had come in the junk mail and fallen on the porch.  I said sure as it calmed him down and seemed to make him happy.  These were after the days this new credit card  idea was no longer investigated by the city's detectives  as theft or fraud with fines worse than for marijuana.  I mean all hippies knew where the unmarked cars were, once even  Taylor James yelled across the street if a friend needed grass and tossed him a lid.  The detectives near by did not seem to know what was going on.

"It is just I am afraid of the snakes." Jubal said as he climbed into the hammock between the back porch poles. 

"You will be OK as I have caught all of them.  My wife afraid of moths up North is not used to the black snakes climbing up the tree when she is outside crocheting  or reading when they rain down from time to time while looking for bird eggs.  But whatever you do. do not open that white five gallon bucket full of the snakes I intend to let them go across the highway and river.  I just cannot wake up the wife and babies to let you come in." - which I thought must sound to him like just the evasive polite excuse it was as we talked through the window screen.

Of course there was no way I could sleep even after he ran out of matches and asked for more which I of course said I did not have any.  Then nodding on and off trying to stay awake in a chair  I hear a very large crash, a gasp and the sound of running off the wooden creaking porch.  Jubal must have thought I was lying to him about this too so he opened the bucket and let out a dozen and a half of various sized black snakes -  I never saw him after that.  But apparently in looking back that explains why some of my relatives were called by the deeper mental facility and for a year or so thought it was me a crazy veteran confined to the state's nuthouse.

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Footnote:

I add this as a list of comments for the  secret life of bees Sunday mini challenge (my schedule is all mixed up). as it is likey some of the toads may show up here Monday Sept. 30th.

Jumping from Lilly Pad to Lilly Pad     L. Edgar Otto   Monday, 30 September, 2013

Maybe something like this would be good to include for other hard prompt projects?

Since the imaginary toads evoked so many poetic moods save the prompt sentences I did not at first respond to,  I decided to put them in one spot... all the bee stuff, and the back to the earth and good rhythm of life in the fertile soul... Bees can collect pollen for honey over thousands of acres far from the hive...  but I have made a lot of candles after all...  To all the Toad dreamikins...

* * * * * 

Testing if I could post... Well, this quote has interesting images too.  I mean, life is like that running in braids mother to child... or unwinding it with schoolmates...and of course occasionally the boy in the desk behind you dips one in ink and maybe learns to write a poem...   To Kay

I once saw a toad, he too on the hunt for small things in the grass and do more than aim for a moving small object...  I almost laughed when it rolled its eyes around and blinked them hard... for it had swallowed a bee...  I saw another that swallowed a lightning bug and its belly was full of blinking light.  Thanks.    To Margaret


Wow, I get the sense that this bee prompt for all our stories and your reaction can be seen as starting from the idea of the situation from the flower’s standpoint.

Thoreau in Walden remarked how he was struck by the intimate specific relation between a particular insect and a plant… Even in the dust and time here you have touched the transcendental.   To Hannah

I should add, that the sting can sting you long after the bee is dead
I think nothing of grasping the hornets off my child... but bees, they will put up with a lot before they sting and many times
I cupped them in my hands and let them free out the car window... We like them are individuals but then
so is the hive one life that depends on the health of the Queen.  To Susan

If I had posted on this I would have singled out that quote too...

But what Mama Zen said... only there would be too much to comment on from inspiring poetry...

I can hardly imagine falling asleep even with a few pages of this book

I suppose if I were a bee I would not say we bees buzz... but drum.  To Susie C

No wonder, down home in the South, bittersweet the broken combs and propolis,
candle wax and lingering sunset, the work of a gift of thousands of flowers to heal,
a spoon of sweet with the songs of medicine...drawn out sincere that calls casually or cradling another
Honey or the will awakened to live in a sugar pill...that as one precious bee can sting but once
Alone again and winged, we are and find the sunrise sunlight...  to runaway sentence

Wisdom indeed, and enhanced... you rock...  To mama zen

Kisses sweeter than strawberry wine, we lived among the reeds and Christine Ressi's, damn rusty tractor. love a compensation as much a distraction that we to build a garden must toil the ground... yes, I recall, but it is hard to when the vision was still not far away though we could not take it all in then deeply- our longing heart held firmly beyond distance.  To LaToyna


So true, how much we taking it fore granted that at the end of day we find we have to learn to love again. But the birds sing at sunset as well come morning, and even at high noon when eclipse. Beyond this and far from the city lights not one bee that fills our night…but a thousand thousand suns a swarm of starlight…  To CC Champagne

Or the mournful whispers of stars as the rest of the universe flies away from us...  To rene foran

* * * 

Birds and bees and wall flowers...yeah, songs and audible buzz, But without this there would be no Honey Dew Mellon's.    To Herotomost


The stealth of the star covered inner jaguar that knows sometimes it is better to walk away from a fight and that takes as much courage.

The moon drives us Menead crazy but its drag is lagged and O so strong, just out of reach our desire to flow with the streamline dolphin's grain until vanishing into unknowns past cloudy horizons to find our self at naked singularity and the spacious now...


Or I could read it to say it simply in lesser enduring lingering words where at fleeting last we could touch   "I am not asking that you love me, I just want to know my friend..."  To Fireblossom


I cannot recall as a young child I noticed the stars in the sky had depth and were more than white dots on black... a little later I aimed my telescope to the moon, some trick of  chipped lenses that painted its caves and craters with all the hues lost in its stark white.  The outline of the bear or Hercules and Leo vanished on the celestial globe come florescent night inked at day...  Mystic prism indeed as well from deep within our thought dyed far richer than those stars, my poet friend. To Debi Swim  (I had to post comment here)

To bee or not to bee... we still walk around chained to each other in doubts and all that fake honey on the shelves that fool us thinking it is just as sweet... we are still trying to tweak that poem...  To Ella

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