Verses Serious

He wasn’t too much
He wasn’t too little
Had a normal amount
At the ends and the middle

Twinkle little star so faint
You’re out there, but I sure ain’t
The Tesla headed where you are
Made Elon ask “Dude, where’s my car?”

Make merry every single day
And you will chase the blues away
But if you choose instead to mope
There really isn’t any hope

(published in Plants and Poetry)

Tiny mushrooms pushing through
Soil that’s all around you

A wonderful person I know
Is spending today all aglow
Having come to the Earth
This day with their birth

I went to bed too late last night
And woke up to an awful fright
But now it’s done, what can I say?
Tomorrow turned into today

We want to live forever but
We’re limited, you see
From a stop watch that is wired into
Our biology

I had self doubts, late yesterday
A crisis existential
Am I for real or might I be
A dream, inconsequential?

Now Daniel, though I know your name
I don’t know you, but just the same
I write for you this science verse
I hope that it is not the worst

Like a teenage kid in a red hot rod
Your muffler’s loud and stinks, by God

You push a pedal, give it gas

A flower in
A forest grew
Its color no one
Ever knew

“Pray for me,” the man declared
“I’m having surgery and I’m scared”

I asked him what a prayer could do

The look in your eyes
Vacant, bereft
As if there is
No person left

In COVID times
Of troubling norms
The soldiers wear
Different uniforms

When this Covid thing is over
Some things I’m gonna do
Like walking down a sidewalk
Without avoiding you

What is the crazy love affair
In prose today that's penned
By writers who compose it with
Exclamation points at the end

(written in the early stages of COVID)

The doors are locked and knobs are wiped
Overdue emails are getting typed

You have no mask upon your face
Inside this very public place
Perhaps you can’t afford a mask?
I’d give you one, if you would ask

So it is graduation day
A time that once seemed far away
Now after this hip hip hooray
It’s time to do your thing

Trails get blazed
Paths get followed
Cattle graze
Piggies wallow

Now I lay me down to sleep
With religious thoughts awake I keep

God gets credit for all that haps

Question things that you get told
Never waver. Never fold
Don’t get left out in the cold
Just question

There is joy
There is love
There is beauty up above

Humans went and conquered Earth
Killing most of the species here
With no animals left to point guns at
Everybody now lives in fear

In a little house in Illinois
Sitting on a hill
I spent my youth til 17
My head’s there still

So you had unprotected sex, oh did ya?
And now have a very bad case of chlamydia?

When will you learn, you oafish lout?

They say tomorrow never comes
But it also never goes
The carrot on the stick positioned
Just before your nose

Just looking around confused, it’s true
Traveling on the same time machine as you

This thing is crazy in regards to riding

That science is true
While doubters spin it
Has nothing to do
With believing in it

I dove into my consciousness
And landed on my head
The truth that I desired just
Gave me surprise instead

Everything’s in cycles
That no one defeats
But why is it just awfulness
That history repeats?

Summer is the season that
I eagerly await, for sure
There’s time off from my job, it’s clear
But work I must endure

Her, smiling at the camera

Perfect teeth
Perfect face

They stuck a needle in my arm
Protecting me from viral harm

Its tiny little RNA

Wallowing in emotion
The poet bemoans fate
Revealing it for everyone
“Cathartic,” they say. Great (?!?)

There is no infinite
There is no forever
No absolute answers
No constant, no never

When climbing the mountain of success
Remember as you seek
A slope has many marvels
That are not found on the peak

A truly insightful person
Rarely gets into a bind
Because they don’t fight to change the world
When they just need to change their mind

Racism is a system
Unholy and unsacred
That removes the need to know someone
In order to engage in hatred

It now is long past New Year’s eve
The time when many folks believe
Better things lie ahead

Here’s some advice
That I was told
“You need to stop playing”
“Before you get old”

In times of peace, sons bury fathers
When their time on Earth is done
When war occurs, the opposite’s true
Fathers bury their sons

A company needed a worker
For which many folks did apply
After sorting through all applications
The boss settled on one young guy

Youth is a time
In the knowledge biz
Where you don’t need to learn
Cuz you know all there is

Peacock feathers
To the world
Look rather plain
Until unfurled

God’s on his way to becoming myth
So easy to deduce
It’s happened many times before
Perhaps you’ve heard of Zeus?

Upon the Earth, your time’s not bought
You only get to rent it
And when the lease is up, my friend
No way you can extend it

When priceless things
Get bought

And unthinkable things

If you cannot count your blessings
Here is a thought for you
It’s usually cuz there’s too many
And not because there’s too few

Pillaging gelato and souvenir stands
Clutching t-shirts in their hands
This is the part of vacation, I guess
Some people like the best

The path that’s gonna make us great
Cannot be paved with words of hate

If it is true our course is shifting

Some say that man’s invisible
But him I still can see
He only is invisible
To the party GOP

Here are my thoughts. I’ve organized them
In hopes someone will super size them
North town, south town, east town, west
Just what will make Corvallis best?

Here lies a dog
His name was Bruce
I often saw him
Running loose

The truth has just been laid to rest
At the end of an illness long
The folks in power its passing blessed
The rest knew it was wrong

Remember . . . .

When magic was real
And reality was realer?

So Mr. Z has gone away
And won’t be coming back
He died of something yesterday
Perhaps a heart attack

The red-hot Mustang loudly squealed
Too loud to be ignored
A teen-age mind behind the wheel
Had its gas pedal floored

The stranger came
A refugee
One single aim
Sanctuary

A corporation went bankrupt
It was a big event
A corporate raider quite corrupt
Got all its money spent

“Float like a butterfly”
“Sting like a bee”
Those were the words
Of Muhammed Ali

Mary had a little LAN
It’s traffic very slow
The cause? The FCC has banned
Neutrality, you know

You take from the Earth everything
But give nothing in return
Dirtying the air and water too
And forests all get burned

My buddy Stan
Is living life
He’s had his kids
He loves his wife

(Someone on Facebook challenged people to tell “Once was more than enough” stories. This was my take on it.)

In school as just a youngster
My teacher - rather gruff

Is life a dream of consciousness
Of entities up high?
Who go to sleep when we’re awake
Then rise when bedtime’s nigh?

(For a friend who enjoyed crossword puzzles. Her name is embedded in the verse)

Love joined with a spirit
On the day that you were born. A

What’s the price of prosperity?
The answer is very strange
You pay for it with money
And get back climate change

You think you’re smoking when you’re smoking
Sucking on that ciggie
Envisioning Greta Garbo
The classic look of Twiggy

Asleep is awake
False is true
Endangered is safe
Old is new

You’re a woman we heard roar
Who just could not be ignored
And whose ballad was an anthem for all time
Nothing like it e’er before

Ecosystems end
In piles of trashes

Financial worlds end

When Rosa Parks made such a fuss
She had no problem with the bus

And Gandhi wasn’t being rude

They say that time is money
But what if it were love?
Or joy or kindness or charity
Or all of the above?

One disadvantage of getting old
Is watching history repeat
Seeing mistakes of the past unfold
While having a ringside seat

Smallpox isn’t stopped with essential oils
And tetanus can’t be beat with organic soils
Rabies will kill despite the auras one sees
And cleansing and purging will not cure disease

I’m not a rock
I’m not an island

I’m someone who, as he’s gotten older

Not worrying what others think
Is the greatest freedom of all
When you care, you empower them when they say
You’re too short, too fat, too tall

(with thanks to John Lennon on 9/9/21)

It was 50 years ago today
Mr. Lennon taught the world to say

Belief is a bias
Prejudice to the max
A provider of “truth”
Without any facts

Why is it everyone thinks their god
Is the only one around?
In the written history of humans
There’s 5000 we have found

The America that I once knew
No longer in the public view
Now caters to a favored few

It’s easy to be depressed
At the news on the street
Cuz it seems only the worst parts
Of history repeat

The world is ugly and depressed
It needs more to renew it
Instead of sad sack poets
Adding negativity to it

Scrawny eagle flying high
O’er purple hills and plains
Dinnertime has gone awry
Little still remains

The Little Guy died
Late last night
After putting up
A gallant fight

Love is a cliche
That is getting very old
There’s nothing worse than heartbreak
Or so we’re often told

The soldiers fighting modern wars
Have silicon hearts, the generals rich
If you think today is bad, my friend
Tomorrow’s really gonna be a bitch

A toddler with her parents
May feel so all alone
If when she needs attention most
Her parents stare at phones

When it comes to
Patriotic matters
The harder that you wave a flag
The more it tatters

A gloomy fact
For all to discover
Hope is a tool
That permits one to suffer

There goes another drama queen
For whom a poem provides the means
For venting teenage spleen

No snowflake makes an avalanche
No water drop a flood
And there is many a corpuscle
Inside a spot of blood

Remember this
With your last breath
Living is
The cause of death

If people are happy when we arrive
And saddened when we leave
Then it is true within our life
There’s much we did achieve

An empty life
Is what you find
When a corpse is all
That’s left behind

Democracy has
A power balance
Never bullets
Always ballots

Before women’s suffrage
Never fail
It was totally
Vote by male

Every single fascist
From Hitler to the Shah
Did not respect the law as king
Instead, the king was law

Beauty is not forever
It’s only nature’s kiss
So sadly we remember
Flowers wither, thorns persist

Life is a fairy tale
With love and pain and laughter
Except not necessarily
Happily ever after

Youth dies early
Aging lives on
Until the big stop sign
Says you can’t go on

Be careful, children
Or you will see
That you’ve become people
You didn’t wanna be

You’ve left
I weep
Bereft
Can’t sleep

Fight darkness with light
Wrongness with right
No matter the consequence
Fight

If belief had any power at all
We wouldn’t be able to fly
And way up there above us
Zeus would rule the sky

Hope is a tiny voice you hear
In the middle of a storm
Reminding that evening weather
Disappears by morn

Gods are dying
Left and right
Much as one
Expects they might

I’m finding getting older
Is really not so much fun
There’s aches and pains and memory loss
Common to everyone

It’s good to be back to Illinois
My home when I was just a boy
The years have rapidly slipped by
When I spent time at Unity High

She told me she was
“Living the dream”
But today it comes
In a different scheme

Fighting battles every minute
A way of life with no joy within it
Happiness you move toward
Only when you drop your sword

Please launch the hourglass of my life
Deep into outer space
So the sand in it will stop its falling
And I can stay in this place

He said to his friend
“God’s got a plan”
“A plan in store for me”

So his friend smacked him

Experience, they say’s a great teacher
But I’m not so upbeat
If that is true, please tell me why
History continues to repeat

We learn to talk
And how to read
And how to walk
And how to feed

Why do TV sports fans need
Announcers to say what they see?
When they can see for themselves what happens
On their big screen TVs

They say you can see
The “magic of Christmas”
In children’s eyes

When you engage in conformity
I hear it’s true
That everyone loves you
But you

I was fighting an uphill battle
But after a while, I stopped
Cuz I realized that if I won
I would be on top

The cost of living keeps rising
Raising prices to the max
But not as bad as monetary wealth
With shortened lifespans and heart attacks

For winter, a sick bird
Down in mouth
Oriented self
And then flu south

What is capitalism?
A modern rule of thumb
Is that it focuses on
Income rather than outcome
(and that’s the problem)

Stacks of dusty World War II Life magazines
Tin soldier toys, recollections, and dreams

Equality’s just math, you see
No matter how it’s branded
And so it’s very clear to me
Why some don’t understand it

Wealth is weird
No denying it
Some say, it’s money
But you can’t buy it

If I lived in Commercial Land
It would be really great
I’d drive the only car on the road
And have yummy food on my plate

Love is not a simple thing
That’s not the way it goes
It involves a paired perspective
With four eyes nearly closed

A lot of farm
A little town
Rural charm
All around

Working forty years did I
Stressing, fretting, scraping by
Why go through this fuss?
The answer - it was needed cuz
The price of money is high

So many interesting personas
There are in the world, I find
Making me wonder if sanity
Is just a socially acceptable state of mind

New world people
Young and old
Guardians
Of the land

Our good friend Jerry’s gone away
And we shall miss him every day
It’s thanks to him that we now know
How much good can fit in a soul

Before the world came to your door
And begged to be let in
You were a son and brother
With a very toothy grin

In a time of cruelty and inhumanity
It’s easily understood
If you really want to be different
Be good

Dear Ellen:

Not much new ‘round here, I’d say
I took a long walk yesterday
Thinking about the season

Greenery
Scenery
Machinery
Obscenery