sw00046usabys-15.aug.sonnets.15of25

15 of 25                                             

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (214-228)

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August: Year-day 214

The prosaic and poetic truth is:
a world-class athlete should not be controlled
by the government of her or of his
flag country, or else world games ought to fold.

Money and power ruin everything
even as they build everything anew.
In the waves of starlight the life sperm swing
wending orbs (circling their stars) green and blue.

To be of and compete against the best
in one's class is a hardship filled with joys
no human force has the right to curtail
I repeat/ because of my soul's high zest
for the women from the girls, men from boys
who so grow, regardless which win, which fail.

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August: Year-day 215

Censorship?  Feed 'em hell, the brilliant little
things, mother, father, who in your God-fearing
ignorance/ fuel hate.  Let 'em toss your brittle
responsibilities against rocks, sneering.

So what if empathy withers, compassion
and understanding drop, and respect never
grows as each body grows.  What deaths we fashion
because we're insecure!  What heavens sever!

O complicated creature, answer chaser,
who needs the solace of a place of honor;
who cringes at his faults, extinction's arms!
pray for discernment, that sacred eraser
of generalizations that cast on her
or him brute spites.  Heal.  Spread each/ other's charms.

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Note:  Just after typing the above, I said to myself:
       "You're not to be believed."  And then:
       "Don't believe me.  You fall in hole."
       Take this for what to you it's worth.
       For myself: I am not quite sure what it means.
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August: Year-day 216

What's remembered last is remembered worst
may not be as true as at first it seems;
as everyone's blest, so everyone's cursed
no matter the tints of actualized dreams.

My body refuses to give and give;
my spirit likewise implores me to sleep
who/ with his allergies and else/ must live
as . . . the athletes who jump and hug and weep.

So I mark this page with signs you may read
if you know the language I'm using here;
I plant this garden with rows of good seed
you may name and eat from/ to help kill fear;
I touch prayer.  Happy birthday, sister two.
Strong grace for each soul, however dark, cruel.

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August: Year-day 217

Noises in the park, nighthawks screeching peace,
the Great Bear watches from an open field
as corn, wheat, alfalfa crackle to yield.
I'll give you a spirit shorn of its fleece
that yours may be warm while pleasingly dressed.
The rivers flow backwards to lay their eggs.
The stiff teetotaler's in his kegs.
When your eyes are closed, your vision is blessed.

Handsome as the grasses and trees may be,
as the flicked clouds and invisible gales,
the night makes ghouls of the movable world.
Mirrors invert what of me I may see.
At the height of its beauty, a rose fails.
In our hearts' caves/ who knows/ what awes lie purled.

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Note:  A hiatus is upon me.  I have been spending 
       much of this day readying for it.  Saturday
       I expect to be moving.  Tomorrow I will be
       dismantling and packing my computer system.
       Am not sure how soon it will be back up.
PM 10:05 Thursday 2006-11-30 - Brian A J Salchert
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It is Friday morning.
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August: Year-day 218

Being Supreme, Rune, thank You for my life;
as harried as it is, it is much blessed
in the mind I have, in my special wife,
in the lands my emotions/ pop/ redressed.

Maybe some choices I have made were wrong;
maybe some choices I am making now
are not the right ones for that or this song;
still, here, I can make them, can even bow.

Ha ha!  Ha!  Ha.  Ha-ha, ha, ha!  What fools
prance the towns and countrysides of my heart!
What wise men ride my spirit beyond schools!
Sometimes where we finish is where we start.
Whether or not I hold the/ proper tools,
I hew and play contritely/ each learned part.

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August: Year-day 219

Lord, let your great ones/ rise up from the poor,
for their numbers are greater and more true,
striving or waiting, depending on You,
fronds light & airy, fronds bouncing with spores.

Lord, let the triumphs that/ render men whole
march through the humble and seemingly weak
so the tongues of waters constantly speak
peace and strength to the source, the ragged soul.

Lord, let violence built by the false prides
in a man, whatever his color, bury
him, though I, certainly no matter my
strivings, my victories, my grand asides,
won't believe I'm holy enough to tarry
with the saints.  Precision, Lord, each man's eye.

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August: Year-day 220

The end has come; the end willcome again.
And always I will find a way to go.
It does not matter how, or where, or when,
or even why, or what I do not know.

Down paths erasing in a shifting snow
or7nbsp;trails of blood dancing/ from murdered men
or into spaces where whipping rains blow,
I prepare fordeath, and was, now, and then.

Though entire worlds can pass without a trace
or suddenly appear as from no source,
apocalypses wander through your face
with unremitting pride and long remorse,
another time we'll enter at this place,
welcomed; another, reached/ only by force.

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Note: I am back up.  It is Sunday, 2006-12-17.
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It is Thursday, 2006-12-21.  A belated note follows:
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2006-12-06  (after 3:33 AM)
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   Before I go on, there is a field of concern I must write about.
That field of concern is sexuality.  This is what I believe.
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Sexual persuasions (sensitivities) are innate (are inborn).
They reside in one's psyche (in one's spirit).  As one matures,
one comes--by means of reflection (of self-examination)--
to recognize them, at which junctures one can either deny
or accept them.  Any attempt to change one's sexual persuasions
is a form of denial.
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Sexual expressions (activities) are the results of choices
 (of the use of free will).  They reside in one's neural-
muscular constitution (in one's body).  Any thing can
be a source of sexual arousal.  Examples are: the trunk
of a tree, the smell of a flower, the wink of an eye.
Wisdom is the monitor of free will.  
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One's sexual nature is highly complex.  However,
one's sexual persuasions may seem quite simple.
Nonetheless, to say that one must adhere to a
specific vision of the human condition is blatantly
irrational, and can never be more than a matter
of faith.  Note: I do not mean to imply here that
faith is silly, is without value.
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   Getting to me:  Due to my low sex drive, I am
essentially nonsexual, afterwhich I am primarily
an autoerotic, and secondarily a homoerotic, 
and tertiarily a heteroerotic in both my sexual
pesuasions and expressions.  As it is, I am my own
monastery.
AM 4:22 - Brian A. J. Salchert
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August: Year-day 221

The weary traveler rests his bones.  Oh yah?
The weary traveler lets his ashes blow.
No--the weary traveler leaves ma with pa
and trundles out/ to catch the bounds of flow.

When one dreams alone, one's dreams remain dreams;
when with others, reality begins:
to paraphrase a priest.  Leaving, it seems,
requires returning.  Nature/ correctssins.

The BigThompson, a part of its course/ changed,
churned insidiously past the swank homes
raised on the landfill it blithely had owned;
the buried bed (from which it was estranged),
insidiously also--waiting with its gnomes
for the night now done/ when the canyon groaned.

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August: Year-day 222

Hurricane Belle is ringing up the coast,
whirling toward Long Island, my sister says.
So what if/she's not one/ likely to boast.
I'm not one likely to put on a fez,
at least not today, happy as I am
my ears won't be hearing Hurricane Belle,
my meek bones feeling her toppled trees slam,
even if she hasn't surged up from hell.

There are certainly better things to flee
and face/ though often we/ can't pick and choose
the encounters we want/ or where they'll be/
or when or why or how.  None want to lose.
It's a rare spirit that keeps itself free,
though violated by merely soft screws.

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August: Year-day 223

"Still to this world its wondering beginner"
o Howard, I too trim, elide my reason,
endless desire to supercede the sinner;
rejoice in those changes that shape each season.
Tutelary poets, abstractionists,
desperate at times, faced with mysteries,
it does do us good to learn of & list
rocks, minerals; flowers, insects, birds, trees:

butter-and-eggs, snapdragons, foxglove, phlox;
monarchs, even cabbage moths, sugar ants;
barn swallows, robins, goldfinch, meadowlarks;
elms, willows, birches, cedars, maples, oaks;
myriad other others in our camps
who whiff skunk, savor bass, feel dawn winds lap.

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August: Year-day 224

Wladymir Cieszynski: deep poet, seed,
whose V-bug veering into a parked truck
sheared the growth of his enchantments, struck
a fortune that froze the fires of his need:
read.  Death, I should appreciate you well,
often enough beside you in a nod;
left wondering why I was kept by God
from Atropos' scissors within that spell:

To live to die; to die; to die to live,
exploring, so/ one's words will smile and cry
and laugh and sing and hold; that where they give
no one will have to seek the reasons why;
no one will mind/ much flows/ through reason's sieve,
the rooted man below/ leafing our sky

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August: Year-day 225

"Hell is other people" said Jean-Paul Sartre;
and the young and old in Lebanon weeping,
and I, and perhaps you, forced to depart
from who we are because of the hate leaping
from the spirits of others, feeling, know.
We aren't even sure Antarctica's free
of the grime ofour conflicts, the soiled blow
after blow by which we raise misery.

Yet heaven is other people, too, hands
sincere with food and clothes and comfort, lives
willing to give even themselves for us.

How dark are men's attachments to their lands,
how glorious!  Each of us, where he strives,
should learn:  "We are all Bozos on this bus."

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(Regarding the words in quotes in line 14 above:
 see FiresignTheatre.)
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August: Year-day 226

Conflicts of the spirit.  Life against life.
Whether it is holier one's own breath
remain, or be sacrificed: for a wife,
a child, a friend, a stranger nudging death.
Rock candy, sugarless gum, soybean oil.
Somehow in a garden an aster strikes
its white pose at a leafy breeze, the soil
stands up for rain, enemies/ set their spikes.

The life I've lived against the life I missed:
Have no regrets I'm told, for regrets kill,
but I do: people who asked me to stay,
people I maligned, left, but might have kissed;
the high school I attended on the hill,
the high school I didn't, my dreams astray.

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August: Year-day 227

Many of these sonnets many may say
are but fair rhymed prose, sing-songs for a nose
to snub; will not see here any repose
of light or wall-shattering, sharp foray
or honest, caring touch; will mark the day
each was written for/ among the lost.  Those,
however right they are, let us suppose
these sonnets will outlive, as thoughts we pray.

How fervently I dream a perfect love
is entering my life, not just a wisp
of beauty I'm barely/ able to see;
how darkly I likewise dream/ others shove
me into death/ with poetries more crisp.
When I tell you I'm insane, believe me.

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August: Year-day 228

America, you crawl, walk, run, leap, fly,
fall down.  In Idaho they ride past groves
of apples, tomato fields . . . dream of stoves
hot with crackling pine, slopes numbing the eyes
with the sweet smoke of snow.  Wisconsin, I
extinguish you, light you again, the droves
of Chicago / New York not yours, the coves
of Maine, the grains of Kansas not; yet my

our beings thrive in each other: your lakes
refreshing, shimmering my blood / my nerves;
my images ghosting your waves and weeds;
the streets of West Bend / Fond du Lac, the takes
and shots they spawn, cutting us/ as they serve.
Always/ work to grow/ regardless the needs.
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15 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert