I’m seeking a truth within these fragmented words
My thoughts won’t cooperate with how my fingers move
Typing on this old handmedown machine to transform
My mundane existence into a magical, deliberate groove
I am not afraid to expose the flesh of a wilted soul
There are no heroes in these parts, just broken misanthropes
Internalizing the segmented society & all the villains
Returning to coffee so black the void regains precious hope
Knowing the sun will shine again
I sit here basking in the midnight air
A quiet sip from my enduring courage
Thinking naughty thoughts of my lady fair
Knowing I can’t sleep when I can write
I fall back into my imaginative stupor
Only to be shook by the dawn’s yawn
Daylight kicks me swift, right in the pooper
Alone with my thoughts
Shut up in this temporary, two room apartment
Thinking through imagination
Rack my brain to conjure anything Heaven sent
Ink spilled, but nothing to write home about
Languished notions in an attempt at creation
Yet a vision of satire is all that I am
Craving a spark; anything to produce elation
My time has come to a close on another trip to Japan. Over the past 15 years I’ve been blessed to visit 3 times, including a year in 2007. I’ve experienced a lot that I never dreamed I would do. I don’t know if I will ever be back, but I’m glad I’ve had this trip to soak in a beautiful culture once again.
Japan is a mind blowing country. I have never seen anything like it.
Days & time confuse themselves
The bending of the sun’s first rays
I don’t mean to bother you much
But I’m lost between a solar phase
The details of how we exist
When we peer before the day comes to be
Glimpsing the chance at happiness
Stretching our thoughts around reality
Transactionally stealing poetry from her diary
Thinking pretty thoughts, my lady crooner
Shedding our shared idealized past
Ravishingly disheveled from another nooner
These things are seldom spoken aloud
Angels sing out; no longer so distant
Breached actions distorting our thoughts
Heartbroken; leaving you feeling resistant
I’m out here worshipping my secular goddess
Looking for quiet now & avoiding unsolicited advice
Passion not always akin to pleasure
Focused to ensure my kisses are nice & precise
Unclasping the dreams & insinuations
Lucid thoughts beyond the outer pale
Transpiring within fragile realms
A bared soul on the brunt of our fairytale
Image by Gavin Seim from Pixabay
You cannot pick your thoughts
The conscious can’t be steered
Without love, hope and magic
The future will be as dark as you feared
Don’t forget to repeat our truth in unison
Stand up straight with proper military bearing
Forget your conscience; such things are done
Keep on moving toward the triumph of the daring
Unfurl the banners so that we might recite
Let the people know what we’re fighting for
Light the fires, so the boys may march by night
Let them live out their dreams in the glories of war
Remain focused- don’t live within your heads
For the battle is real, so is the carnage by the blade
You need to stay loyal or your sons will wind up dead
Listen to the drums, forget the thoughts we’ve forbade
This existence is painful, but hell will be hotter
Don’t return with blood soaked memories to spurn
Live up to the fullest; embrace the full-bodied slaughter
Raise your swords to the sky & let the traitors burn
Resisting the urge to flatter
Never taking such a leap
Beauty the heart of the matter
Ignored in your idle chatter
Left feeling like a forgotten heap
Resisting the urge to flatter
The thoughts come, but soon scatter
Keeping me from peaceful sleep
Beauty the heart of the matter
Love served on a silver platter
A tarnished memory much too cheap
Resisting the urge to flatter
My soul simmered to splatter
But our dreams aren’t that deep
Beauty the heart of the matter
Your image makes me all a-patter
Never wanting to come off as a creep
Resisting the urge to flatter
Beauty the heart of the matter
Dancing in a moody cabaret
Your hand in mine
Wondering your thoughts
Your soul I can’t define
Clutching your hip
Feeling your energy now
Falling without remorse
Unrestrained; anything you’ll allow
“Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor… Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.”
–Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Remember the old ways
Scribbling out passionate jots
Secret notes to my beloved
Sharing all my lucid thoughts
Remember feelings of yesteryear
& how we were perfectly aligned
Don’t lose who we used to be
Through time – love remains undefined
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” – William Butler Yeats
Image by Brin Weins from Pixabay
The grand rubbish
That we display here
Our soul’s bleeding
Harking back to fear
But we push ahead
& slowly expose
Our personal thoughts
Fighting the reality of those
Image by Khusen Rustamov from Pixabay

I’m tired of being so dry
In need of an outlet to release my brain
Creativity gone; leaving me stagnant
Building into a wreck of anxiety & pain
My thoughts stunted by vapid feelings
Finding myself too tense, filled with stress
Needing to drink from restorative waters
Like those I found under her dress
Thoughts of another calendar year
The hopes & dreams you wish to achieve
Dropping needless burdens – disappear
Regrouping; returning to what you believe
How do we move forward toward our goal
To be resolute & live to be heart-whole
***
Authentically alive with a smile & a pure soul
Persistent chants in the Winter breeze
Thoughts of her beauty & I start to wheeze
I wish to taste her freshly bathed skin
Through all the heartache, I’d do it all again
For she’s still the one to knock me to my knees
Oh, where does our journey end
Or begin, as it so often might seem
Futile attempts to erase the past
The unknown details of our dreams
The open road panders to a false escape
The mere opportunity to rewrite a sojourn
Jesus perambulating with Uncle Walt
Debating the path; perchance to learn
Shaky prospects in apportioned time
Manifest destiny teases Ginsburg & Kerouac
Further roads leading to ornate wisdom
& we keep it concealed out in the back
Thoreau mocking society with his solitude
Knowing alone is the greatest we could ever be
Thoughts come to us in gentle waves
That perhaps our visions should become the sea
A reinterpretation of westward expansion
Route 66 cross-contaminating Highway 61
All roads have never led us home
Emily tempting Death with her life left undone
The growing wisdom of our consumed space
Emerson’s penning pre-revolutionary blues
Introducing our souls to unrefined grace
The Good Lord providing Her unfiltered muse
Feeble humanity; lost across the tracks
Original sin that we’ve taken on the chin
Sifting thought; we might be welcomed again
But knock off the Devil’s dust before you come in
“Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.”
― Yogi Berra
Waking up to deliberations
An itching need to create
Warming myself with coffee
Unfolding thoughts I contemplate
Catcalls at dawn
It’s too early for this
I haven’t had my coffee
Please settle down there, Miss
I need a moment
For I enjoy this attention
Such important thoughts
Are beyond my comprehension
“Having a low opinion of yourself is not ‘modesty.’ It’s self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not ‘egotism.’ It’s a necessary precondition to happiness and success.”
― Bobbe Sommer
“Eating the peach is a meditation. Your mind empties of all the must dos and should have dones. You are pure being. Your lover’s tongue is the key that turns the lock that opens the pleasure box. Life has few perfect moments; moments of cunnilingus score the highest on the sex blissometer.”
― Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
Poseurs, pacifists & poets reek
Sitting high on a lifeguard shack
Nighttime cloaked down upon us
Words in darkness never taken back
Ocean waves break the silence tonight
Only our thoughts to be heard otherwise
Isolation not what you thought it’d be
Tearing out your incessant broken eyes
Midnight sounds to be held on tight
A swim where you can never return
A fatigue to be felt deep down
Love exposed to moonlight will forever burn
A woman not marked, boiled in thought
Slowly escaping melancholy with each sip
Sitting, staring out her kitchen window
Contentious dreams emitted from parted lips
Coffee can stimulate a bored mind
The house to be prepared for a festive banquet
A morose morning, lingering in the cool air
Providing a bounty for the Heavenly set
Transfiguring lips into Fabergé petals
Feeling decadent painting the night sky
Let us rejoice with our illustrious words
Palpitating deliberately when bliss is nigh
These fanciful & bountiful thoughts of yonder
Possibly plentiful but not quite enough for us
Imaginative; creating a softer substantial side
We’re most serene when we’re a bit mussed
These notebooks drip with inspiration
Thoughts of passion in so many words
Raw relations developed from a focused mind
You want more, but you used to call me a nerd
Back in school, you were the height of popularity
I still remember how your indifference stung
Time does wonders in both directions
Beauty fades even while this life has truly just begun
The indoctrination is complete
They molded you just right
Removing the will to struggle
Stripping you of the desire to fight
You work for them these days
A concise, common goal
Gone are the thoughts of freedom
An iron fist smashing your soul
No longer an individual
Lost all your character traits
You belong to the system now
Let your bones fill with hate
No poem today. I’m going to take the day to grieve for Kristoff. I’ll be back tomorrow.
“Home is the nicest word there is.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder
“The world’s big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”
― John Muir
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“After all, perhaps dirt isn’t really so unhealthy as one is brought up to believe.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia
“There’s nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.” -Walt Whitman
“I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the alter of language and purity and tolerance.” – Stephen Fry
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“I may not be a cactus expert but I know a prick when I see one.”
– Dorothy Parker
Image by icondigital from Pixabay
“Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
“He didn’t mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn’t matter.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
― William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.”
–Pope St. Gregory the Great
“When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
This is amazing.
“Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset.”
― John D. MacDonald
“If you’re in the middle of the ocean, with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.” – Tom Waits
“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women
“In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.”
(Frauds on the Fairies, 1853)”
― Charles Dickens, Works of Charles Dickens
“I don’t trust anything that popular. It borders on the levels of Nazism or the Macarena.”
“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“Even his fucking was binary, a sorting process by which certain practices could be tried and found wanting or approved and accorded benchmark status.”
“Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.”
― Walt Whitman
“We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
“I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversations.” – George Bernard Shaw
“All it takes is faith, trust, & a little pixie dust.”
– Peter Pan ✨
“I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”
― Tana French, Faithful Place
“What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; th’unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.
– Milton: Paradise Lost, 1667
“My honor is dearer to me than my life.”
– Cervantes: Don Quixote, 1604
“The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.”
– Leon Trotsky
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”
― Edith Sitwell
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
― Albert Einstein
“Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.”
― Joss Whedon
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anaïs Nin
“By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them.”
― Christian Dior
“To try to become a saint.”
– John Coltrane (when asked what he was going to do next)
“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
There are few things better in this life than day baseball.
“You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”
― Margaret Chittenden
“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle
“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“…Anxiety makes more heroes than history would care to repeat.” – Nikita Gill
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” – William Butler Yeats
Image by Brin Weins from Pixabay
I’ll just leave this here…
“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Music gives color to the air of the moment.”
Karl Lagerfeld
“Don’t vote, it just encourages the bastards.”
-P.J. O’Rouke
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin
“Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.”
Ambrose Bierce
“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
“A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.”
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”
― Jerry Garcia
“Show me a man who doesn’t go down on his wife and I’ll show you a man whose wife I can sleep with, tonight.”
– Leo Durocher
“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.”
― Robert Frost
“A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.”
― Coco Chanel
“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
― Oscar Wilde
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
― Pablo Neruda
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The time has come, my little friends, to talk of other things
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings
Calloo, Callay, come run away / With the cabbages and kings”
– The Walrus
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.- John Quincy Adams
“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
― Coco Chanel
“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.”
― Rita Mae Brown
“It always seems impossible until its done.” – Nelson Mandela
“My second home is a third world cantina.” – Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers
“I am not young enough to know everything.” – Oscar Wilde
Rachel! It’s not exact, but here you go.
“Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”
– It’s A Wonderful Life
P.S. I’m super excited that I can figure out how to insert links. An old dog CAN learn new tricks! Ta-da! (spirit fingers)
“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”
– W.H. Auden
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain
Captain Q 