Mirakee
Debris
Death rests in granite rows.
Boundary grass and plastic bows.
Adorned by mourning love ever broken.
Artificial flowers placed as lasting token.
Searching, seeking, desperate, healing.
Decorated plots till dumpster clearing.
Save your trinkets, enshroud them once.
Acknowledge your mortal beating pulse.
Live what remains of life, full and free.
Bury that past avoiding fanfare debris.
©kevinosullivan
#apprenticepoet
527 posts-
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My Birthday Flame
The wind blew out some candles on my birthday.
Middle age is the doldrums especially after sobriety.
Just me and my circle, as distantly close as tolerated.
No cake, cards, dinner, fanfare or celebration song.
Earlier I walked to stimulate my heart into rythym.
Living fast, loose and free was long my warring code.
The pack strings no longer burn joy in my shoulders.
My feet are soft and my belly sits low, long distended.
Scented candles sat lonely outside since last fall.
The puddled rainwater poured when inverted to burn.
Under the cool dusk, March stars, ruled by mars.
Temporal we all are, mixtures of matter and emotion.
Isolated on the porch as my family rests safe inside.
The incense smoke burns sweet as my eyes howl.
I sit listening to music penning my proof of existence.
Trying to remind myself how grateful I should be.
But inside I ache, fearful of what is left after mortality.
I still privately grieve for my deceased mother whos warm energy I briefly felt when lighting my birthday flame tonight.
©kevinosullivan -
Predation
Isolation is the ultimate poison
A caged solitary animal will eventually stop eating
Death of a spouse will institute illness in a survivor
Such natural notions seem exaggerated and novel Social attention and interaction opposites exist
Reverse machined threads on the silencers barrel
Trigger squeezed the rounds to isolate and alienate
Prey hunted by hungry carnivore killers, tuned perfect
Yet miniscule in comparison to solemn loneliness
©kevinosullivan -
Another Way of Life
Today, the gas station coffee seems better.
A wet and warming almost spring morning.
My laundry is sudsing in the washer next door.
The "Old 97's" "Bottle Rocket Baby" roaring on SiriusXM.
Reminds me of a fateful day hopping trains in Texas.
Today marks 7 years of continuous sobriety since.
Accountable & available, suiting up; wreckage away.
God bless those older punks who showed me a way.
Another Way Of Life without deserter status absence.
Today I remember a past, soaked, shattered and sad.
Not dwelling, I seek out all that separates us entities.
Back to the realities of the day to day of simplicity.
©kevinosullivan -
Geezer Sculch
Off to the flea market tomorrow
Its my first day as a vendor
I've been digging through gaylords
Bound for the dumpster
Picking out treasures
Trying to fill my booth
I've got pallets of power tools coming
Of course they are stuck in transit
So junk it is, inside that moldy mill
My storage unit in a worse mill
So off I go in the AM to load my wares
Into our sedan, plying my new trade
Haggling over quarters peddling geezer sculch
©kevinosullivan -
Shifting Poles
Molten iron seas drift as magnetic fields dimish
Liberating radiation stored from Van Allen's belt
Killig us off with immortal pleas ignoring extinction
We are but technological Neanderthals scared again
Hopeless while knowing that we cannot defeat time
Planetary cycles that occur every half million years
Taking thousands to stabilize we expire in decades
It is like a dumpster filled with the memories of life
The family photos, heirlooms, gifts, clothes and junk
Only our Planet is the repository of all Mothers loss.
©kevinosullivan -
Frozen Polarity
Icicles rest beneath cars sitting unemployed,
Frozen in position awaiting new chapters
As if Covid locked, stationary and stagnant
under viral weight coupled in emotional load
Write your own happy ending scenario soon
Till a sequel is revealed, worse and enduring
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
12w
January Porch
Mid thirties warmth, sun heating the clouds
wind still as the earlier rain drips and drys
Like the last remnant sniffles of a sobbing child
I sit in sunglasses waiting for the inauguration
I see the hydraulic arm hoisting the garbage
As if drinking shots of capitalisms excrement
From our stagnant, diseased, and isolated past
A new spring will arrive, ushering in hope again
We the surviving must remain grateful in simple
Be present today, if able, go outdoor and write
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
15w
Happy 2021
A future Year Of The Ox
As the rat of 2020 lingers
Losses and turmoil
Hopefully will give way
To a brighter calendar
Where peace and justice win
Go away virus
Let us all mourn and grieve
To lay our weighted heads
On soft home pillows
Allow a new future
That will rise from this ash
We are all burned
Smoldering still
Bring us hope and calm
Flipping the switch
Changing the calendar
Fingers crossed
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
17w
Work
The old man, hooded and hunched, long partial from a stroke; toils away in his backyard. For fifteen years I have observed his struggle from the frame of my kitchen window. Often, I quickly do the dishes in the stainless double sink. From above I watch. Never once have we shared a look at each other. He has never looked up or paid attention to anything but his work. With his good arm he drags and wields rakes, picks, scrapers and shovels. He tends to like holes. Digging and filling on he goes. Sometimes he grooms around over pruned plantings. Nothing survives his labor as he is out all day every day. A casual observer may think he is landscaping or gardening which he is not. The process seems to supercede any results. Could he be trying to will his weak side to recover by laboring with what is left.
Occasionally he gets put the hose, mostly for the experience I gather. The watering can occur while its raining and well into the cold of winter. I see him as a monastic prisoner in an asylum or hermitage. Though married to a dark clothing clad wife who also has never noticed me, her neighbor. She rarely seems to communicate with him, making me wonder that maybe he can't. Perhaps there is nothing of value worth discussing. Perhaps in his partial paralysis he has found an enlightened state.
Where I see useless busy work, he may find freedom and respite. Outside, alone; he is occupied and autonomous. He may exist in a perpetual meditative state by playing with his tools while working his small square of earth and patio of concrete. Improvement and or mastery may simply be illusory. Perhaps, a level of liberated acceptence exists or perhaps his lack of abilities is his ever present tormentor. A reminder of a past where once youthful, capable and able. His aluminum cane balances on the hose. I see our shared mortality in his witness.
Surely he will eventually die, maybe if he ever stops and his tools go idle. Perhaps he will die on his square of grass some day. Perhaps on this day, I will be first to notice. Should I take over his work? Would it be best for me to dig his grave right there? Keeping his work alive while using his tools to mark the time between my own expiration.
To work is to live, often in suffering, unappreciated, unnoticed and with little improvement to the world. Pain is a measurement that we train in ourselves as character. While his penitential cross and witness ceased in the form of his labor. When he expires, I will look on to an empty yard; never knowing him or his name beyond the security of his shuffling work.
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
17w
childlike
Her breadth rolls like rythmic waves on the pillow
Still, calm in sleep, safe with perfect contentment
No anxiety or worries can trespass our sovereignty
Our lives coalesced, expanded and fell in serenity
We are like symbiotic beings conjoined as one unit
Beside her I lay writing, alert to the fleeting of time
We live such temporal lives, wasted on trivialities
While childlike equanimity is asleep here with me
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
17w
The spirit stays
Kitchen tongue tingles from the bug spray rain
Golden cobwebs on shimmering silica ceiling stars
Square linoleum tiles cover over well walked floors
Cracked plaster as the house shifts underweight
Original caramel wainscoting, doors and molding
Simple antique locks of brass verdigris keep watch
This is our tenemant home, urban and near perfect
But vsitors as many families raised and past prior
The spirit stays where love and heartbreak dwelled
We too will exist in the deep marrow of time here
Looking on in support of that struggle to survive
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
19w
Padlocked
Absurdity speaking
Young tender curmudgeon
Inwardly tweaking
As emotionally bludgeoned
Cast hard against sin
A frozen still snapshot
Yet sunseting within
All childhood padlocked
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
19w
In bondage
Stationary still Beaver full moon dances on top the
viscous cold ripples of water, resembling crude oil.
November nights so windless few, as we unload our cages of ocean quohogs, soon asleep at home.
Morning back for gear work, warming expected but
the wind has us tied up, in bondage but escaping.
Fishing is a sentence with the ocean the jail, each
boat but a differing cell, ever incarcerated by it all.
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
20w
Black Friday coffee
Early, eastern Black Friday dawn
Steps silent, wet our neighbors lawn
My sandal foot brushed silver grass
As I early took out Thanksgivings trash
For cream we need for coffee to drink
Simplicity halts an end nearing the brink
No competition today as disease reigns
Capitalism kills! my core annually exclaims
But my mug has yet its morning warms
So off I go to quell today's simpler storms
And if you must fight, scrap, scratch and claw
Know that I have ceased fighting in sober draw
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
20w
Human Pageantry
A justice of practicality yet dreaming of ever more,
that damn dream again, whitewashed picket fence
Like peacock feathers of uniformed human bees
Dogmatic capitalism corrupting from sole to skull
A buskers pine rosin rasping a worn horsehair bow
Subteraneum beneath the cities commerce streets
Seconds of musical distraction wafting in the rush
Hurried competition, as standing room sardines go
Back to there nocturnal domiciles, winding down
Perhaps a shepherds pie or leftover casserole dish
Soon, off to slumber to rise early again to disperse
Washed, rinsed, repeated but the soul never cleans, never
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
21w
Funeral of Saint Martin
In the garage where the wine press and barrels live
Where mower, shove,l screws and tools also stored
Collected, crushed; once stirred with an oaken oar
Cut, raked, cleaned, affixed to negate a hovels rot
Gods wrath of grapes has rotted my torpid innards
Its fuel gone sour, rusting blades and hardware bits
This Funeral of Saint Martin in November drought
For no home needs sustaining without life or drink
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
21w
For her love, I keep it
My graying beard, wild and unkept
For her love, I keep it
Perhaps it softens my hard angular face
my ice cold blue eyes
I long believed that bad luck and emotions dwelled in the scruff of my facial hair
My demeanor will finally coalesce perfectly with
it's masculine over growth of testosterone
Then shave it I must, lest be at risk of madness
This gamble that she will still love me, plays out
Hate it though she may, I still begrudgingly exist
independently connected as the same organism
This steadying cycle is fast to reappear in days
As if growing on demand of her demanding love
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
21w
Cramped
Inside the hotplate motel, that charges by the week
A family astring on the skids, folding cot; no sheets
The remnants of innocence slow auditioning away
Sorrow deepening as the scenes losses playout
Smoke, despair, addiction synthesized as bad luck
A cumulative almagamation of pain casted in life
Ever recycling scripted roles of villains and victims
That felled in between shared cracks of suffering
Cramped in pressure where all joy is stagnant
©kevinosullivan -
kevinosullivan
21w
Natural Return
Trailhead creek in brackish splendor near uprooted decay
Evergreen saturation on muted brown leaves backdrop the carpeted forest
Healing exhaled from the resting trees while my restless soul breathes in peace
Temporal solace walking past granite boulders as if unspoken gravestones to time
Majestic swans royal and pure awaiting winters inevitable chill
We are the mothers carbon ever connected while living lost and afraid
Yet serenity surrounds us, enveloped by
nature; inviting up back in the fold as hikers walk and herring swim
©kevinosullivan
