The Well Versed Heart

In Light of my Father

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:35:00 +0000

In the aftermath of my father's death before Christmas and
the memorial nearly two months later, I have begun to figure out
that there is a reconfiguration taking place in me, a realignment
of polarities.
The gravity well of his presence once defined
the positive and negative return posts in the ellipsis of my comings and
goings, the alternating currents of my personality and character
around which I would then make my many ways between the equally powerful
bi-polarities of my mother. She, still alive, like me and my brother and
sister have just begun to sense ourselves in his absence.
Dissociated,
because the resonance that came from him actually being here has been lost,
I cannot simply re-conceive him as memory or even spiritual presence, because
there is an absence now as real as he alive had been. What is left can be
traced by memory, or re-envisioned as eternal,but even then
the imagination has no cure for flesh and bones and blood reduced to ash.
Dad,
tangibly gone, however present he may still be, has left me searching for
him in spaces he once occupied, and in those places instead, I catch glimpses
of me as I was.
I disturb me.
I dissolve myself through ache, shades of my father's own darkness still
haunting corners of my psyche, like ghosts released as I disintegrate.
In the shadow of his death, they remain, lost children, ruins of selves, forgotten, freed now.
Left behind,
the broken me's are gathered up as my father becomes light, his shadow
only slowly no longer shading me from those lost selves, burning them into one, revealing me as I am, other, waiting to be born different into the circumstances and incoherencies I have lived with for so long.

Making It

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:45:00 +0000

The car sputtered & steamed up Highway 5 from the Third Line towards Clappisons Corners at Highway 6, rising westward up the long side of the escarpment to crest above Hamilton, I said the diesel injectors were clogged but it could be something worse, threatening us with a stalled engine while a torn heater hose bled coolant over the motor & vapourized into miasmas that wafted through the dashboard heater vents as we climbed. I sustained the fuel pressure & the core temperature rise through the ball of my foot as shoe & pedal fought for continuum, while beside me you held your hands in your head and tried not to break down before the car: we held chaos at bay even as the upward nudges of the heat gauge verged on eruption & the fuel stream squeezed molecule by molecule between the gap sustained as forward motion while my will and your prayers crested that long slope under mounting pressure, our breaths held until we thought we'd failed on 6 in the northward drive when sputter & steam & fume came to a stop in Puslinch, where I stood in the dark night beneath the one light in the hamlet and coaxed the baked coolant scented car back into life & we made it home, only united in relief once we had parked in our spot behind the row-houses on Grange.

Julie, No Longer Sixteen

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:12:00 +0000

The remembrance of quiet places in the heart where long ago love
still lingers in the warmth of strawberry blonde hair and the lithe desires
of gawky youth all brought to mind in the opening of an email.
And there you were, full blown into middle age like me, your life lived
in the thirty six years between high school and my response,
delicate history, cherished, even as the cruelty
of the past which arose from my inability to love you or anyone back then,
is as painful to me now as it was to you then - when I could do no more
than what I did, except now I'm allowed at last to say I was cruel because
I was damaged, and that I really did care except that I was so unable then.

These restorations of the heart's long sorrows dissolved through shared memory
are manna, gifts from love for love.

Selected Works book Launch

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:30:00 +0000

A collection of my poetry & prose will be launched on Monday Oct. 6 at the Alma Gallery at 133 Wyndham St. Guelph from 7-10. Since I didn't start out to be a mob writer, I wanted to publish some of my earlier works, & so have selected a volume's worth. Not that I expect them to sell as well as the Morgeti books, the poetry market being what it is. Still I'll be hosting a party, with improv music & other spoken word artists as well as reading from the book. Everyone is welcome. Being an odd sort of human being, I believe my poetry provides a window into who I really am. And don't worry, I am an accessible poet, so you will not be treated to an evening of obtuse reflections or intellectual abstractions. A good time will be had by all.

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:04:00 +0000

Selected Works, Volume One On Sale
Jerry Prager, author of Legends of the Morgeti vol 1 &2 has published selections of poetry and prose from three of his previously published books, his blog The Well Versed Heart and unpublished works. On Sale at Macondo Books, the Bookshelf, in Guelph and the Eden Mills Writers Fest.

Silence Come

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 01:49:00 +0000

The Gulf Islands & coasts flee before hungering hurricane winds
that curl in on themselves & spiral havoc that overwhelms leeward:
terror is natural, essential for human understanding.
The death prowl catspaws catastrophe out of the tropics northward,
disavowing temperate niceties, blowing categorical speeds
beyond proportion to the instant of landfall.
In the moment unleashed spirit meets sentience
the ground is shredded from its plant life;
the animals that were able to have already fled to higher ground,
the serpents were as wise.
Fresh waters fouled, riverbanks flushed of life;
oceanic solutions dissolve into lakes & swamps & become
miasmas of suffering.
And yet the still small voice was not in the storm,
nor in the torrent nor in the terror: but within each heart
where the code for survival was beaten out in the cause of coherency.
Within each soul there is a centre
that will or will not fail depending on providence.
The I that receives & the I that transmits
are a message mediated by the similarities & differences of their natures.
The hurricane may be a breath of the divine, but
the words that define its theological whys & wherefors
are human; they clamour to be heard above the aftermath opinions of others.
The Other is heard within, when night stills & wind wisps through willows away.

Double Haiku Limerick For Guelph Library 125

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:49:00 +0000

There was a writer,
Tom King, who wanted to rhyme
Library but di'n'...

He said, just nothing
rhymed with library; I thought...
brib'ry does, Tom King.

125 years in Westminster Woods

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Fri, 09 May 2008 03:49:00 +0000

The room full of words
awakes the urge for phrases
woven to meet a need
for those assembled:
utterances bird-songed by
humans among bookrows;
Dewey-decimal spines breathing
with conversations, absorbing
decibels of burble that
rise and fall between bebop
and slide-show soundtrack;
while the clatter of cups &
wine glass clink
are captured articulate
by camera-shuttered staccatos
and digitally sequenced
annunciations of living voices celebrating
a century and a quarter of tales read from pages
born of a thousand imperatives,
like stories for children, or large print
editions for aged eyes to know by,
mysteries and factual accounts and imaginative
litanies reaffirmed, tender mercies found
among the perfect-bound volumes around us,
recorded
while time slips out of hours
and the gathering vanishes
into ways home
through the dark
of Westminster Woods.

Reading Through Walls

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:14:00 +0000

At the reading of Legends 2, currents ran through the room,
empowered with possible outbursts of anger and outrage
over the broaching of old sorrows and shames, laying bare
the need for care, forcing the depths of intentions and
expectations to the surface, and around which
we gingerly trod in the aftermath
with feet too large among the hurts
and family prides, feeling our way forward
through questions and answers, first as a group
and then one by one as individuals lingered
to find a way to say something, anything
about buried rage and grief from long ago,
pains so very near, yet still unable to circumvent
omerta silence, which was wound like a wall around
some of those there, leaving only nuances
for the heart to decipher.

Legends of the Morgeti; Volume Two

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 23:16:00 +0000

is now available at the Bookshelf Guelph.

Democracy American-style

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:27:00 +0000

The pack is turning,
the wolves in the donkey skin
see the elephant's weakness now,

Bush will be unlinked from Cheney
threatened with impeachment
if he wars on Iran,
and Cheney will fall
because Dem backroom pols
now realize McCain must
defend Cheney or break
the elephant's back

and thus stumble to the pack.

My mother is also

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:04:00 +0000

My mother is also something of a nutbar...

an experiment to those in the mental health industry
to be tagged and studied and drugged into sense,

she is also an aging wild thing from rural Ontario,
a force of life-hungry wonder walking and busing
and making her way through Northern Muskoka
arthritic knees barely slowing her down
come granite or pine rise.

She laughs and cries and calls damnation down on the dour
and the lifeless living the dull devoid,
a whirlwind hospital visitor and friend
of the broken and the downward-spiraling
outcasts of all systems.

She will abide any suffering but
having to listen to bullshit from those
who know best, because she always knows better:
she wants to live until she's 150
because living never ceases to amaze her
and because those who think they know best
live half-lives of decay
that just get in her way.

With her purse and her bag in hand,
she hobbles about, squeezing life out of pennies
as she has for decades, dissecting
the politics of poverty around her
with the same communist analysis she
learned off my father in the 1950's,
bastards, she says, and bastards they are.

She laughs like a crazy lady, infectious
and effusive, like laughter was meant
for tearing light out of darkness;
meant to be flung into misery
like a rope to those floundering
in the long sadness of loss.

They have broken my mother,
but she will not stop living,
she will go gently into many things,
but she was born on the banks
of the Mad River, and loves
its wildness;
though grief consume the land
she will wade into the water,
she will rejoice
and damn the bastards
and she will guard the broken
until she falls.

Well Being

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:47:00 +0000

The light fractures the room, fissures
the spindles of chairs. Long shadows reach
for the back of the cafe and lay
window-prism rainbows across hardwood floors.

Autumn falls winter in the steam and
the frost glare of the front store glass
as the waitress wipes the milk and
honey shelf, dusting sugar motes
into the air.

Late afternoon turns
mid-November evening down the street where
the red maple holds rust leaves in abeyance
while the lamp post Christmas snowflake
glimmers decorative before a farther off chimney,
smoke blown horizontal by north winds streaming
steady over roof tops.

My feet slowly warm
from a day spent re-pointing stone, the scents
of lime and mortar and earth-must mingle
with antijitos and coffee and the dirty wool
of my pullover and the spices that drift
over the kitchen divider.

The work week
is over, hours diminished, pay dropping
to the cold weather, to ice and rain and
snow from sun-hot Monday to frigid Friday,
tarped-over into a kerosene summer.

Money already banked onto my bills, I have cash
in my pocket and crafted hours of rock-hewn
wall-set satisfyingly behind me.

The clatter of dishes accentuates the chatter
from tables, the waitress thanking customers
as they go, while the stereo and a whistler
at the cash sound the coming of dusk.

The sun slips behind Victorian brick.
The heat-fogged windows begin to glow
with well-being.

Rage

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:03:00 +0000

My seventy-five year old mother
has been a psychiatric experiment
since 1958, when she, suffering
post-partum depression
was first diagnosed as schizophrenic
and subjected to forty insulin-induced comas
that ended only when my father insisted
they release her from the horror-room
where she and seventeen other women
were being "treated" en masse by
the best psychiatry Stalinist Russia
had to offer, transported to Canada
at the same time that the CIA
conducted their infamous
LSD experiments on patients in Montreal.

Released in time to see my sister
into kindergarten, they put her on Mellaril
which left her emotionally quieted
for the next fifty years, minus
the seven months my father went into
alcohol rehab in the 1970's and
the nuns at St. Joseph's Al-Anon
program in North Bay told her she
didn't need the drugs and so
she stopped taking them until
my father fell off the wagon
and the worry drove her
through stresses suppressed since '58.

Anger and frustration again became madness
and so she went back into the void where she
remained until 2005 when they stopped making
Mellaril. Put on Respiradol, she went into
psychotropic zones so intense she ended
up trying to strangle a nurse
at the local hospital where she had just
been honoured for 25 years of volunteer service.

Sent to the new mental "health" centre
in North Bay she was re-diagnosed as bi-polar
because the shrink there believed
post-partum depression is a symptom
of bi-polarity, and for the next four months
she ranged through Respiradol hallucinations
among the cellars and attics of her long-lost
emotions. And now, two years later, my sister,
who has born the brunt of living in a house
and in a town with our half-lunatic mother, assures me
that the psychiatrist from Toronto who has been
working with Mum has devoted her life
to seniors but I want to know where
the scientific method went,
where is the control in my mother's pharmacy ?
Not once has anyone since the nuns
thought of trying to see what she's like
without drugs. I will not say
that this new doctor is not kind or caring,
only that science without a control
is not science. Where is my mother
unaltered, unattenuated, undistorted ?

She is at the mercy of drug dealers,
of a corporate culture that feeds off
the Canadian health-care system.
To them she is a "consumer" on whom they practice
their dark arts in the shadows of the hearts
and minds of well-meaning people who work in
an industry where even less
in known about the human psyche than
Freud discovered a century ago.

Part-times lucid and other times rambling
through drug-burdened incoherences,
my mother's soul has been broken open,
poked and prodded and medicated
as they shuffle her towards oblivion.
Only her spirit remains indomitable, refined in
the fires of their tortures. And I, ineffectual
against their machinations, rage and am
accused by those who love me of being too angry,
my fury erupting at times
in blazes like madness and I AM
too angry at times,
but my rage is fueled
by what they have done
and by what they keep doing
to my mother
and in the fault lines
of my childhood
I still don't know
how to form
these pieces
into a sledge
to smash my way
into the darkness
where they
keep my family,
where the demonic power
that lies in the heart
of false science
feeds on the misery
of millions.

Moflower Mornings

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:12:00 +0000

I give you these words, to roll all you are to me
And package it for your forty-second year of
Striding, beetling, dancing and otherwise
Making your way across the landscapes of
Your lives: student, mother, friend, loner, lover,
Dog owner, sister, daughter, grandchild, niece,
Wild creature of urban nights, companion
Of glorious days where nature strays the line between
Humans and creation, house-mate with a book,
Mistress of a smouldering immodesty,
Yearning sacred-hearted for simplicities
Amidst shadows and darkness spinning
Towards the sun or staggering after-hours
Towards dawn with a determined intensity
And a glazed look of satiated pleasure;
Listener and sensible shoulder to
A handful of us and to strangers,
Drumming evenings into spoken words
That be-speak beat sorrows
With uncommon care,
Bitter, sweet and salty on your tongue,
Tasting meaning in yourself and in others.

So, this is for you, as you make your way
Through this time and place by intuition and by reflex,
Your skin attuned to the rhythms
Of estuary rivers, a home within a home within
A corner of this Age
Warmed by mercies and blessings
Streaming through the days we share.

Canadastan Support

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 22:32:00 +0000

More soldiers die in Afghanistan
and we are told it is our duty
to support our troops because
they are willing to die to help Afghanis
and I believe that is why the common soldiers
are there, for it is not so much
they who wield the weapons as it is
those who command them, those who create policy
whose aims I do not trust.

What the Minister of Defense
wants from Canadians
is an adherence
to political, economic
and ideological idolatries
I do not share: their public policy
masks a privateering imperialism,
and conceals caves of unholy alliances,

false reformers parading their faith
behind patriotic proclamations
in unison with Bush League bunglers
and Babylonian Whore mongers:
survivors of WWII anti-fascist campaigns
in Europe where Canadian
soldiers died by the tens of thousands

while North American profiteers and
black and brown shirt collaborators
were left free to grow strong and prosper
until the day they finally seized power through
the breaking of chads and the tampering
of electronics and through lie upon lie
still emanating from the Terror war-room
in Washington.

This nation's
right wing liberals and conservatives
benefit from the sustained hostilities
that fill the coffers of
America International Incorporated and
its subsidiary principalities and powers
and despite all that, I accept the belief of soldiers
and their families that they give their lives
and loved ones in the cause of Afghanis.

As for Minister MacKay and his generals
their words are deceptions
and the utterances of the Prime Minister
are a sulfurous stench.

Shame

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:23:00 +0000

The Board resigned one night;
the next day the Church shut
down the youth night-shelter,
home of Change Now in
Norfolk United.

They fired the staff
without explanation,
giving birth
to a bestiary of rumours
about what sins or crimes
the staff might or might not
have committed
to warrant their fate,
serpentine speculations that made
their way through the downtown core

as the post-mortem proceeded to
the process which led
to the youth-in-crisis operation
reopening soon under the auspices
of all the proper authorities
and with the involvement of the kids.

The old staff have been told
they need not apply,
a position taken
without stated cause,
without public disclosure of
their presumed failings
or faults,
without mercy or justice
and without a protest
by the co-opted teens whose
cause the workers once defended
against all comers.

And still no one
will say what sin or crime
the old staff committed or omitted:
it's as if they have been condemned
by conspiracy, banished by a cabal;
by those who prefer the sounds
of their mutual self-congratulations
to the cadences of grace.

And the lesson of the day
for congregated Guelph
is how to sacrifice
scapegoats
to institutional expediency
while doing good.

Elaine Campbell 1925-2007

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:21:00 +0000

"There is a golden summer
waiting for you,
spinning a dream by sunset
til it comes true."

Gone now the gift card notes in verse,
the long ago birth on the steps
of the morgue in the Dome, the
Northern Ontario mining town child
grown to lose her first lover
to the War as she guided bombers
onto airfields of New Brunswick,

gone now the forger of peace in the aftermath
when the survivors sought to build
a nation and a world that would last,
the friend, the stalwart of the
National Ballet Board in the days
the company stormed international dance
with an esprit de corps
sprung from the depths
of post war convictions like hers.

She strove for the mind of God
with a will of steel and a kind word
waging peace in a broken world with a gentle
intensity that diminished the darkness
as nothing more than shadows
of clouded thoughts
contrasted with Divine Light.

The sister, the mother, the mother-in-law
to me, whose kindness outlasted my marriage,
the grandmother of my son, her only grandchild,
whose place in her heart was an eternal spring,

her beloved husband gone a few years ago now,
like the strains of loss on the Grand Piano
in their home edging the ravine that began as
a ravaged urban hollow returned to the wild,
bordered by gardens and music and laughter,
a quiet constancy wafting with the scents
from the overlooking kitchen.

Prince Edward Island's
golden suns and deep red earth
became theirs when the keys
to a farm home and the summer joy
of their children's youth
were hung for them by a grateful province;
the undaunted airs of a musical
staged year after year
as the core of a small island's economy,
woven beyond the commercial hawking
of Lucy Maud's orphan into
dreams of an increasingly fragile
post-war visionary,
who died as she lived
spinning hope into sunsets
to the airs of that unsilenced Grand,
melodies strung with now unsung verses
for the passion that was theirs.

Twilight of the Lake

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:11:00 +0000

Lake Ontario stretches from Sandbanks
towards the distant smog of the Golden Horseshoe
but here on the edge of the dunes
the half dead lake survives
in traces of its former magnificence,
a wilderness once untamed, unbroken,
unbattered, an inland sea of bounty
systematically pillaged and poisoned
by the bacterial spread of humanity;

the water is surprisingly clear and
the toxic sources
of the great lake's injuries
are a hundred miles away
lost in the green shore
that fades into the loom
of endless city
and surburban drudge
that marks the north shore
of Ontario turning
towards Hamilton's unseen steel mills
and the pesticide realms of
Niagara's wine country,
heat rippling horizon mirages
like promises;

and although the lake falls into
the slip stream of the St. Lawrence
around the thrust of Prince Edward County
behind us,

and thus, undoubtedly, the currents
that wash this sand
carry the effluent
of the multi-millions
who foul these extraordinary waters
past this
blazing beach
on this summer day
as on all days

the land retains its pastoral realms
and its birders' paradises, hidden away
in coves and bays along the private shore,
where - inland - a new wine industry is taking hold
and where its toxins will eventually
lay waste to the herons and hawks,
the waterfowl and the red wings,

and yet for now, the river that cuts the beach
and turns combers' feet inland
remains a living path to nearby East Lake:

for this vast sea of fresh water
can still shake off the degradations
of human generations,
still offer up its ancient glories,
still allow glimpses
of its power, its vitality,
it's welcoming shallows
cooled by undercurrents
from its depths;

and you and I
touristing about on our first holiday
in five years,
partially protected
from the deadly sun
and the dying waters
are revitalized by the age-old ways of
the watersheds spilling their
remaining life
into the lake, and

you and I, almost alone on the beach
(or so we are allowed to feel as the weekend
hordes disperse back to the small towns and cities
from whence they came) swim and wade
neck-deep along its' sandbars;
I growl and pursue your legs
as we belly our way back to the shore
like amphibious returnees to the land,
sand in our suits, and the wonder
of the lake in the eyes of
the countless races that
make up the nation,
and those of its visitors,
the tongues of distant places
quietly alone together
as we pass the lingering
among their folding chairs
and coolers and umbrellas:
the bright colours of beach fashion are
surreal in the glaze-work of setting sun.

I am like the caretaker
of a grand estate that has fallen into ruins,
I find comfort in the little pleasures
experienced by those who travel a long
way to find the remnants of
an earlier age, I horde
their happiness against darker days,
as I horde your langour
for the night and the fire
we will discretely start
seperated by cedars and dunes
from the tents and caravans of those
who imagine themselves - with each other's
consent - as alone with their loved
ones in the twilight of the lake.

Through the Bottom of A Wine Glass

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:16:00 +0000

Rather then speak my random desires for passing beauty
as if every woman was a sun setting across a lake or a flash
of wonder inspiring unchecked compulsions
I will commit more of myself to the page,
hold my words for the printed phrase, write my depraves
instead of spontaneously confessing my sensualist impressions,
and so temper my less than sober declarations.

For desire needs neither youth nor age to make
itself known, and urge needs neither encouragement
nor excuse to surge beyond where the unspoken
lingers. For if the greatest of lusts
is the yearning for sanctity, then the next greatest
burns only a little less complexly.

I don't hold it against me, for what man can carry
the sacred and the profane to their conclusions
without making himself ridiculous?

The knee bent in prayer
rises thigh-wise to the ways of
passion unbound, the parting of
appropriate constraint opens the lips of
pleasure, the groin feels the belly hungry thrust
to the breast where the heart races
to the pulse of neck and nape
filled with throaty exultations
that become psalms or the guttural utterances
of sweat and blood and spirit.

The imagined and the possible
are contoured by muscle and flesh,
by taste and holding and by
the rhythmic entering of inner urgency:
goodness and sweetness become salty from
refusing to speak because wisdom has had enough
and because the love that infuses intermingled senses
knows where defilement lurks and how sublimation
traces the sear of beauty and longing
to its source.

20 Year Old Honeymoon White Pants

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 01:00:00 +0000

I don't remember when I decided to work in my white, honeymoon pants
but it was summer, hot; and the thought of wearing a white shirt with white pants
seemed suitable for landscaping, but today, my pants tore on the job,
and throughout the day ripped down from my thigh like a leg-wound opening
to below my knee.
So I wear them with that one leg rolled up, the slit in the open thigh parting each time I kneel, causing me to remember that I had owned them for 20 years.
Last week, we would have been married two decades, the last ten years of which we lived apart, divorced. Last week's forgotten anniversary was remembered today, when the pants tore, when I remembered where they had come from.

As I kneel and rise I make the tear worse throughout the day.
And as I do, the loss that my ex-wife and I still share lingers.
She and I speak frequently but haven't yet spoken of that forgotten anniversary, and nor did she remind me of it at the time, she, who never forgets.

My mind negotiates its way to our 17 - nearly 18 - year old son who is
mourning a love withdrawn by a woman in his own life.

I take the scissors to my honeymoon pants and cut shorts out of them.

Tomorrow I will wear them while digging post-holes by hand,
and my knees will remember white linen lost to circumstance
while my bare thighs glisten in the humidex,
soil becoming dirt in the cool earth touched
as I lie with my ear to the garden bed.

My down-stretched hand scoops the ground within,
and I pull up clenched sand,
surrogate beaches walked newly wed twenty years ago
while pelicans flew sentinental over jetties
as we dreamed.

After the Deluge I Sing

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Wed, 30 May 2007 12:20:00 +0000

As the heat deepens and the dews and mists
of the cool of the night are
vapourized into humidity
they mix - during the long simmer of the day
with emission particles and with dust
- to create a roux that
thickens the air into a toxic stew
stirred by breezes
and the brewing of thunderstorms.

The sky cracks and fragments
in cacophony and torrential pour
as red-eyed lightning rampages
and the Earth rebels against the outrages
of distempered time.

Only in the de-ionized aftermath
of the tempest does nature
reduce misbegotten man and
his defilements:
air-molecule vitalities
regenerate us
cell by cell;
the possibilities
of living well
on a planet no longer
holding its breath
allow each
inhalation and exhalation
to bring wonder into being.

Reminders of nuance
become as immediate as
fragrances sensed,
ways forward revealing
themselves
in counterpoint.

Not Dead Yet

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Sat, 26 May 2007 15:55:00 +0000

Mortality lingers in the accumulating aches
of week long labour,
the left shoulder stiffens and the knees
accommodate begrudgingly,
and the sun baked pate slips out of time
into a two lane stupour that
allows comings and goings as the mind shifts gears
with the sudden memory
of water and blood sugar and rejuvenation.

And I know full well that I am a relatively easy-paced self
free from Third World
wage slavery and earlier era employer indifference,
allowed to care whether
I live or die on any given day, but I'm there anyway,
on the continuum of
fardel-bearing sweating and grunting under a weary life
enlivened by the joys
of being, the pleasure of the plate and the singing cells
of caress and kiss and
linger and the wiser growing realizations that impetuosity's
consequences can be
tamed or left wild, like an English Garden, an Eden of knowing
and wonder run riot,
stilled by reflection and the body's strength remaining,
the proof in the aches,
a measurement of existence stretched to the limits
then breezed cool
in the heat of a hard day:
the utter gladness of rest and the sensation
of vigour's return.

Heresy's Wordsmiths

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Thu, 24 May 2007 04:14:00 +0000

In the heresies of daily reflections recorded
the word turns to note the way the mind
dissociates from custom, and plays infidel
while casting bread upon waters,
the quick tongue and the casual glance
and the falling light
of the skin sweet breath held in camera sight
beckon, like temptation understood,

for all paths are as narrow as the foot takes
to cross and uncross the sacred and the profane,
the desire and the yearning pale before the contention
of the final lust, piety insistent, denied,
refuted, held off, while the possibility of sense,
hair and voice and taste and smell and feeling
conspire to stray the line where gray shadow
merges with dark urge and cannot comprehend
the way the light slips cracks to find
the soul untangling from spirit
like bodies caught undressing
in a half open door by
a lover betrayed,
forgiving,
knowing too much
to do anything else
but remain the truth
when the words cannot even begin
to say what became of the life
we meant to live before we turned away.

In the blood and the loins and the lips
and the fire in the belly and
in the flash of freed thought,
new felt certainties
and perplexed nuances conceive
the heresy of experience
while debating innocence
with the willing and
the unwilling alike.

Drowned Worms

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Prager) — Sun, 20 May 2007 15:25:00 +0000

Like dropped noodles the drowned worms
lie elongated, dying on the tar
of the Mariner's Cove mini-golf parking lot.
The still-living undulate in search of soil
nowhere within reach, the night's rain floods
having carried them yards away from the land
from whence they came.
By day's end they will be scavenged by gulls and
crackles and crows. The endless tunneling and
displacing of earth through the tubes
of their bodies is over. The asphalt is ungiving,
indifferent to their last burrowing instincts.

And even if they could get
to the mini-putt course,
the holes are plastic lined,
impenetrable, and the synthetic sod
is glued to the concrete fairways.