The Unpublishables
By Steve Lavigne
Copyright 2012 Steve Lavigne
Creative expression is an intense means of learning - all of human experience can and should be our subject matter. However, it is the art rather than subject that determines a works effectiveness. If you haven’t already, I would ask you to consider reading Fork And Other Poems. This current collection, a condensation of a lifetime of off and on again writing, is (just like the title says) not quite publishable. For although there are little gems scattered throughout, putting this work into the public realm is akin to going to the beach after a long winter of becoming pale and gaining a lot of weight - it seems like a good idea until you actually get there – umm what was that? No, no really. I honestly thought this was a clothing optional area….
Table of Contents
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part One
Sweet comfortable you
Our comfort is no sluggish slave to sameness,
No erosion of the soul, no leveling to one plain
Existence, but with a vegetable passion grows –
Grows from the roots of mountains, and spiraling
Through time with questing, untiring looks to thyself,
Myself and back and back again, we grow together, always
Changing, but ever with sweet comfortable you.
Rabbit dying
Hunted by sounds and hunter of petals,
Nibbling and silently dropping the forest
Home he lives in, he waits.
Until there is forest silence, he waits
In his seven course camouflage thicket
And gyrates brittle twigs and fleshy grass
Between white pucker lips.
Contented, he hops to warm himself in
Sunlight and triple kicks fleas near a turning
Dinner bell ear which is answered.
A fox squirrel shakes its tail and chirps.
The shadow of a hawk screams;
The earth is brought near a red straining eye,
The other rises harpooned, an olive on a beak;
Feet thrust slowly much slower against a
Pine needle floor inches away,
As all forest discords cease
Except the methodic pecking beak
When the quivering nose stops.
When no tears come
and still the self won't die,
when feeling out of sorts
with men and all their lives,
then strength is desperation,
seeming speed, a lie,
all action becomes discord,
a lifetime's work, denied.
When tears flow
and no poem comes,
when verse slows
in a melancholy sun:
in a wrinkling time
when future, past, now
collide and refract,
a prismatic show
fracturing self,
threatening ego,
then the rose
is more than a rose,
each color says more
than the words self knows,
symbolic meaning fading
to a universal close.
When I am old and peel back this thin skin,
This pulpy bark of a wind tossed fallen limb,
Shall I see us etched in time, my rings and thine,
Two grafted souls growing you and I entwined;
Or shall we fade with smooth rubbed kisses
When each the other a rubbing stone sees,
And every touch brings such blisses
And still more desirous wishes
Till nothing but mingling dust shall we be.
Love! Love is true but for this practiced eye,
This paint by number niggling with love’s design;
When thou or I see the others breathing fly,
Love’s soul we’ll have seen in a meeting of eyes;
This whole of knowing is like a ball,
A child’s toy dropped in an eon of time,
And we, some glimmer, while down it falls,
And once picked up beyond recall,
When shall we have time for each others sighs.
If I would allow you to be you
and still take you into me
and me e’er be possessed by you
and all the world turned with ease and free,
if the stars shook their locks
still from the light
and night begat night
with an oozing, darkling right,
if all that we’d thought
was a onetime thinking thing,
if all became loss
in this simple seeming Spring,
even then I’d say
my love would be true
if I would allow you to be you
and still take you into me
and me e’er be possessed by you
and all the world turned with ease and free.
Trying to understand and put into words what the occupy wall street movement means
This movement (and it is a movement despite the name) is about justice - a sense of fairness, a sense of empowerment, giving voice to the voiceless. And how many of us standing here- reading this, listening to this, truly have a voice. Those who support this movement feel that there is something wrong – know there is something wrong despite what the media says, despite what the politicians tell us. We feel the game is rigged- hell we know the game is rigged- and for most of the time we can kind of grin and say “yeah it's always been kind of rigged against the little guy, against those who teach, against those who serve” - we're not stupid. But it's gone too far, the problems are getting too big, the breadcrumbs to keep us in our place are too few and too far between. We all know the injustice when tragedy strikes individually – going bankrupt from healthcare costs despite having insurance – getting a foreclosure notice even though the bank no longer has our paperwork – has no real reason to foreclose- and then uses the police (who we pay for) to kick us out of our own home- when it happens to us we know the injustice – but with the occupy movement – as a group we feel the end game coming – there's really no more time left on the clock to dick around, the problems are getting so big so fast, our society as we know it could flicker and fade like that - how do we want our children to live, what kind of society do we leave to them - as it is now, we don't have a say. The adults have left the room and chaos prevails, greed is king, sociopaths running amok, the patients are in charge of the asylum, whatever analogy you want to use... however you want to put it, the normal people - the ones who don't gamble with other people's money and rig the game so they win no matter what, the ones who get bailed out and still do not acknowledge their responsibility to the collective whole (there have been no perp walks) - hundreds of years of social laws and conventions - habeas corpus, usury laws (how quickly what we take for granted can be taken away), the execution of american citizens by our own government without due process- we are in trouble- we feel it – we need to express it - we do not have the answers but until we ask the right questions as citizens, as media, as politicians those answers wouldn't matter anyway- raise your voice in the new media, in the street, with family, friends, live the dream that is empowered democracy....
Deep Feeling Nature
As thick as soil,
Rigid as endless grasslands,
Translucent as the sea,
Breathes as the wind
Whose purpose is unseen.
Passionless, she is the greatest lover;
Uncaring,
he groans with endless dying;
We cry forgiveness, she gives no mercy;
We spread our arms, abundance overflows;
He is one, there is no other;
We cannot count her endless forms.
My death over takes me
My death o’er takes me;
each moment, motion,
is a finer stringing,
a subtler tuning,
of this mine bodily instrument.
Déjà vu reverberates
in the core of my being
till each savored moment
fixes each to each,
every other on other
and all lead to still time,
a measureless attuning,
a nothing gulf emptied open
where there is no fear,
there is no love,
there are no opposites
to attract.
Although I love you
I can not love you.
What facade is this I have created?
I have longed for friendship
And gotten none by seeking it-
Too lonely in longing
Too lonely in longing
I’ve o’er reached my limits
Seeking ultimate
With others in knowing
And failed the boundless of my inner self.
Though I know this painful love
Is possessiveness,
And in possessing will lose
Whatever love there is amidst the pain,
Still my conjuring mind
Fills out fantasies
(Emotion laden delusions)
Spreading flowery thighs of desires
On a stage of submission seeking security,
An illusion of a vanishing act with a love
That never was.
Do not love me too much-
I do not know what it is to love.
If once I had known
Surely now I’ve forgot-
There are actions,
Remembered or not,
That wear down the soul
Surely as soft water
Wears the rock
Over which it flows.
Forging Love
My heart aches
From above and below;
My body saying yes,
My mind saying no;
For in this midst
The heart is being crushed;
A forging between anvil desire
And the hammering blows of mistrust.
I have seen her face before
Fallen and still with a sad foreboding
At times when she stands before the door
And does not see me seeing her knowing.
But grown comfortable with our love,
She sighs in thoughtless moments of my day,
And though I perceive without her perceiving,
I must be silent to acknowledge her being
Though silence be a slow death for me.
To acknowledge and accept without regret,
To pay your little child’s forgotten debt,
Is a butterfly floating in the rolling mist
Of a waterfall’s flowing cataract of bliss.
The fear of facing ignorance reflects
In quickly turning pages, labyrinths
Of desires, whose meandering treks
Seek only more and faster sustenance.
Part Two
What I Saw This Morning In A White, Flat-bottomed Dish
Baby blue
already been chewed
gum
dried green pea
orange cheeto bit
thin black hair
Happiness
the dark slate
stones
you always seemed
to find
in such abundance.
You always said
you can never find
more than one or two
at a time -
smooth rocks
tumbling in your arms
squirting
unbidden
like strange
eggs.
Crossing cars bleat
Like mad runaway sheep
Who have lost their fleece;
A bugging beetle
I fly in front of windshield eyes
Who care not a want nor a whit
For my hide.
Diving at four way stops,
The cars converge,
As sacred crossing birds,
Screeching to a stop
On thumbnail red signs,
Burping and pacing,
Honking and cursing,
Sea gulls fighting high tide.
“Let me walk’, I cry, vines
growing out of my snout;
they shudder to a halt,
my roots break,
I dive through the shell of a skull.
One day in summer when the sun went down
(For so it seemed alone with little thought),
In a vast wood freed from all dutied ground,
A solitary bliss I often sought,
My soul was consumed like the blackened west
Not from a love or a bliss that was lost,
But deeds of men mine never to possess,
Oh, bitter yield of freedom with such cost!
Then, cut off from men in my wand’ring wood,
The only paths were dull pride that barren end;
I searched not for fruitful love as learning should
With patient discipline as steady friend,
Nor let hard self knowledge be my rod,
No, nor conceived more than myself, some god.
When apples too full of life
Are brown red ripe
And no more pickers will come,
When the sun in a fire of trees
Its last ember bleeds
And in a dying westering is gone
Then it’s easy to believe
Thy soul will leave
Thy love, my life will be done
For I can imagine no spring,
No dawn of a seed,
When thy voice and breath are lost
And this ripe apple falls with the sun.
What was once so sincere
Now seems silly of a sudden,
What once was so dear
Now seems of a dozen,
This cozening, this affectation
Now seems so clear-
I look into thine eyes
And I see my mirror.
I am moved to these tears not by thee
(whole peoples have died with no such remorse),
thy cankered bud of inconstancy
is of but one tree of a single forest.
This pain, this weeping cry, is not for thee,
Thy soft impulse is but a mimicry,
A just picture of the world’s history,
Yet, still worth no more than the pain to me
Were it not that love, all forgiving love,
Has been proved false;
For in you, as with Christ, the world has been moved,
All has been your burden to bear, your cross,
And in denying true love to me
The world has been lost by little little thee.
Part Three
Introduction
Beyond one’s declarations of success
And failure
Is Nature’s slow grinding down
And rejuvenation,
Where nothing is wasted in the process of creation;
Poems being but a subcreation
Of joy and bless`ed thanksgivng
Wielding the sloughing of skins
To smooth, naked reality
And peace of mind.
To thee, Nature,
Words archaic, sublime,
Crude are for our use,
To reach some more concrete thing
Than the rational mind,
Some beau
ty of imagination,
Some truth, pure feeling,
Emotion, linking human kind
In deed to the web of life
And the inanimate sublime.
Our bedroom closes like a lobster claw
The underwater swinging of a door,
That secures our search for the pinpoint star
Dancing above us on a surface cloud.
In sheets of kelp, wrapt in a sandy cove,
We jig in a circling turbid crowd,
Swept feeler eyes growing erect, the clammy
Clashing of shells – shoals of breaking love.
And still when I rise from the damp day bed,
The sun undrowned in the microscopic
Sky remains, so I withdraw and backwards
Crawl, scuttling across crustacean remains.
Sweet were her breasts
In the swelling waves
Reflecting pale
The harvest moon.
Naked with yearning ,
We had shed our clothes,
Those foily rinds of fashion,
And swam lazily
Under the tow of our needs
Simple passions.
Until again, we ascended
Exhausted in our crustacean searching
To reach the sun,
Then brushing the sand
And our clinging hair,
We smile
And believe the other a fool
For still believing
That these simple passions
Can cure the ache
Of our being.
Sea creatures,
We glide
Pulled by the tide
Of our common humanity:
The placenta of salty solitude.
Breaking In Union With The Sea
I have never yet seen the sea,
Nor the sea seen me I believe,
But apart from my outer cup
And swelling tissue fishes with dreams,
My seething blue-red ocean boils up,
Breaking in union with the sea.
The Death Of Socrates
Three men high up on the juror’s stand look down.
Front center: white silken robe and jeweled crown clenching