Cheat of Thought

Tags

disintegration, expansion, letting be, letting go, manifesting, new love, perception, perspective, re-creation, signs

The string between the cans we used to talk
through snapped and hit me in the eye today

knocked out the scale that enlarged the speck
in yours to timber size & now I find I’m lost.

If I can’t see your flaws or hear the mutters
that once passed for conversation, what remains?

I hold an empty tin, a bit of string;
the tintinnabulation in my ear has ceased.

I catch no words, am cheat of thought beyond
the possibility of shapes of things to come.

A tune I used to hum is gathering
momentum on my lips, I feel the buzz

surrounding me of poets who sing only
of love’s presence, met one yesterday and

couldn’t think of what to say. Too fluent I’d
become in retro-specks. So now’s the time,

it’s obvious, betrayed of thought, to learn
a brighter tongue. So far, I know the words

for get and give, for let and live, and while
the space between us grows and falls away

I witness something tender that accommodates
and has no fear to speak aloud my name.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Neighbours: A Creepy Little Horror Poem

Tags

a bit of silliness, Elaine Stirling, eleven syllable lines, hendecasyllabic, humour, minding one's business, my crush on Alfred Hitchcock, nosiness, parody, perception, poetic justice, poetry

Those people that keep to themselves, curtains drawn,
have you seen? Never say where they go when they
smile, say hello. Something funny going on,
you can tell ‘cause he walks slow and sneaky, way
after dark, doesn’t smoke—what’s the point? He should
stay in the house, it’s not safe in the park, and
the woman, her arms black and blue with tattoos
so the bruises won’t show, mark my words! No good
ever comes when you let loose your guard. A hand
will reach in, snatch it all. Don’t sing me the blues
when your house crashes down. You heard it here first!
…
Ka-ta-boom!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image from the 1954 Hitchcock film, “Rear Window”

Castles

Tags

cycles of time and space, friendship, impermanence, movement, perception, poetry, reconciliation, relationships, romance, sand castles

Everything I draw to life
begins with sand, a line
two points from yours to
mine, in waves we reach
and touch or fall apart, the
walls we build in times
between to fortress heights
and castle beauty reach
dividing me and you from
them or worse, my self alone
exiled, throwing stones that
once were bits of coloured
glass through which I saw you
spectral pure, a rose, and now
the grit of stiffened jaw my only
means, it seems, to breach
through walls that once were
lines of poetry we wrote
and read upon the sand.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Photograph by Lisa Bobechko, 2010

The Outer Law Does Not Need Me

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, #GreyhartPress, Alain C. Dexter, brave new business leadership, circularity of glosas, Dead to Rights, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, glosa, Law of Attraction, moving beyond duality, perception, Rumi, The Corporate Storyteller, vibrational reality

“If there’s an abyss between what you promote and how you live, chances are, you’re screwing up both.” —Alain C. Dexter

~~~

My wailing is heard in every throng,
In concert with them that rejoice and them that weep.
Each interprets my notes in harmony with his own feelings,
But not one fathoms the secrets of my heart.

—“The Song of the Reed Flute”, from the prologue to Book I of The Mathnavi by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (trans. E.H. Whinfield, 1898)

I could make it easy, pretend it was a dream;
those who fear fiction, you can think I made it up,
my meeting in the city with a man who brought a cup
nearly empty of its content and a page for me
to sign. Your yea or nay, they matter not, you’ve
earned the right to see what’s left, not wrong
or right but true. I looked inside; the granulated
residue of some disgusting potion lined the fine
bone china. The troubled feeling I had grew strong:
my wailing is heard in every throng.

Each of these bits of grit are what remains
of argument you think you’ve won by pressing
hard, suppressing. In the instant you believe
you’ve proved your point, its opposite springs up,
empowered by the deep and unexamined that
is no less you but learns, by need, to creep;
it lives denied, a madman seething in your attic.
As you strut along, laying dynamite to bridges
you still need, he conspires while you sleep
in concert with them that rejoice and them that weep.

So can we throw them out, these grounds,
I asked, grossed out, or do I have to drink them?
Neither, said the man, unless you harbour still
a taste for non-digestibles. The document he
pushed at me appeared to be the index of a billion
unresolvables: violence, corruption, slave rings,
romances unrequited, thoughtlessness, not
knowing what I want and settling for less. There
was no end, and I was having trouble breathing.
Each interprets my notes in harmony with his own feelings.

This list is yours? I hadn’t noticed until then
his nose looked rather beakish. They are
mountains made of glass, he said, caused
by lightning hitting deserts over time, for every
better feeling you’ve neglected kills the green.
I am in charge, but so are you, electric part-
icles of change. So will you sign them over
to me now? God, yes! I took the pen, he smashed
the cup. His final words before he flew shook me apart:
But not one fathoms the secrets of my heart.

~~~

If you enjoyed this glosa, you might enjoy an entire book of them, compiled by Professor Alain C. Dexter in a most peculiar way. Take a look here.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of Simorgh, bird of divinity, from The International Conference of Quality Managers website

Spring Break

Tags

beginnings, continuity, Elaine Stirling, letting go, Palm Sunday, perception, poetry, revival

When there’s not much going on
when all positions have been tried
and cast aside, the years of playing
house and chasing Indians or being
chased have proven in the adult form
to lack their former mystery, it’s easy
to fall back on history.

What could be safer to this bored of
weary mind than what I have survived,
revived?

Comparing notes we pass the time
in passing notes create a time for us
to nail upon a tree with certainty.

They were the days, those days,
unlike the days that lie ahead, the ones
I dared not trust, for fear they’d prove
the lie consumed when droughts about
the truth of me rolled on and on
until the tributaries dried and veins
subsided rusty roads they cracked
my lips until they bled.

Rich pleas I formed in pleasant rhyme
to please and keep a roof above this head
till shapes appeared as lush and greener
pastures of a kind that might be kind:
how wondrous are the disappointments
that we find and find again—

But, no!
I break

this rumination, come from
ruminants of multi-stomached
cows, this gut I have but one
it sees me through and asks for
nothing but continued trust the
nutrients of which the light and love
and joy of life incessantly provide.

We have a history, the you and I, ‘tis sure,
as multi-branched as future our
capacity to choose the good and true
of it, eternal spring…now here’s the
bridge that only I may cross and so
I pause to kiss your mouth and look
once more into those eyes. Farewell,
my friend, and hale well met, my
love, my deeper love.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2012

“Rain, Speed and Steam: The Great
Western Railroad”, painting by
Joseph M.W. Turner (1775-1851)

Pain Glyphs

Tags

Elaine Stirling, imagination, laments, pain, perception, prose poetry, sad poetry, snow shoveling, storm sewers, transitions

The husk around the heart hurts like hell when the freshness within breaks through. Gibran said it better. So did Harry Nilsson who called it belly achin’.

Pain while it gurgles away loves to have its say, but the flow of slush into a storm sewer doesn’t interest me much, even when, especially when, it’s set to verse. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I ignore laments, including my own, in favour of the advent of crocuses.

Shoveling wet, heavy snow, I mourn the friend I can’t get near because of the one who’s deemed herself the myelin sheath that coats his neurons. Two intelligences halved, coconut closed, which, I suppose, is where that unfortunate phrase, “my better half”, comes from.

Well, the melt is under way, so I shall ignore the plow that delivered a fresh rampart of snow cement between me and the world’s roadways. The freshness that broke through kindly allows me to sift through the fragments of erstwhile heart-throbs and desiccated grudge, one of which appears vaguely boat-shaped and may be float-worthy long enough to sail me past and over the gurgles.

Sure enough, I spy an island up ahead, not far at all, with a swaying coconut, lime trees, and a boombox with a sonnet.

See you there!

Essay © Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image from mindbodygreen.com

Agoraphilia: Two Sketches

Tags

abundance, agora, brave new leadership, commerce, Elaine Stirling, favourable trade balance, marketplace, Mercury, perception, poetry, self-pity, sonnets, The Corporate Storyteller

You asked me how I’d like to celebrate
the day we met, as if the wild terrain
we share like foxes needs some kind of gate.
All right, let’s swim the currents of your pain.

Walk me slowly through your imperatives:
show me the caged beasts whose jaws clamp shut when
others find means to forget or forgive,
and let me touch those vows that never bend.

No masochist am I nor therapist;
details I don’t need, for all illusion
is the same, looping densities their gist
of pity in self-reflecting fusion.

Take me deep, love, beneath your chemistry
where Nature’s dance beats on, no cover fee.

~~~

The marketplace is a dim provider
amplifying echoes of demands not
met with pretense of supply, our driver
knows the faster route, the sweet perfect spot.

Ignore the chaos of before, no thing
from that jumble can be worn or borne, used
goods are only good when used to be’s bring
laughter or a thought, gently love-infused.

Source your merchandise from gods predisposed
to balance of trade that favours all, no
service give nor lend to latitudes closed
by self-neglecting attitudes. Just flow!

Trust the hidden springs of impulse to lift
the agora to reach your mighty gift.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image posted by Georgios, 2011, at walkingtoursathens.com

World Peace

Tags

alignment, Elaine Stirling, inner peace, perception, poetry, sublime, the bigger picture

Image from Sewaholic

Can you see it, can you see
the peace inside the walls
that rise and meet in corners
with flawless verticality to hang
collages of your holidays in Venice
or your MBA, wood-framed, those
windows, blinds pulled back and
pouring in a perfect sky—look up,
way up—regard the roof across
the top that keeps your powder
and your paper dry, while on
your plate a crusty loaf awaits,
thick-sliced with provolone and
cucumbers and olives, black
shiny in a heap like Lilliputian
cannonballs.

Or is it that you’ve seen
all this, and now you’re better
trained to zero in and stay with
things that matter more, the data
and the measurements, you scan
the news of mudslides and those
wedding guests in Kandahar who’ll
never taste the lamb, slow-roasted
stuffed with saffron rice and dates—
that IED got in their way—you turn
the page to stocks and bonds,
you didn’t know them anyway
and here you are inside four
walls that keep you safe; there’s
something on your plate, you eat
but scarcely taste—and when did
food, its succulence, the salty and
the sweet, become the enemy?

The ones no longer here, Afghanis
and the twenty-six, a mother and her
son, gaze down at us, soft-angled,
they are whispering, reminding you
and me that every detonation in our
brains is sparking fireworks of peace.

I am the source, you are the source
and cause of bliss now gathering
inside the walls that keep us safe,
that rainbow through the window
is our smile, vast multiplied, a
curving arc that rises to create
the scalloped edges of a tablecloth
that spreads across our firmament
to hold the joyous platters of
the universal wedding feast.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Crosshairs

Tags

duality, Elaine Stirling, perception, poetry, self-importance

He snipes from a corner
visage with a view, from a 
tower not of ivory but of
melancholy hue;

the quadrants of his
crosshairs split the world
in two and two again; I’ve
been the target of his sights
and, lightly grazed, I know
he seeks to right what
can’t be wronged,

and every time he loads
to fire anew, intelligence
sends out a tremor that
alerts brigades and
cavalcades, a blush
of spies report the
movements and
intentionalities that
wholeness does not
see, and while the
sniper feels assured,
his crosshairs tremble.

We are each of us an
infantry, tin soldiers, washer
women, boys and girls, we play
at hide and seek, and as we flush
the grouse and peasantry from all
we fear to lose, our woods deplete
until at last, as integers, we stand
alone reflected in the center of
a crosshairs not our own.
~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2012