Get over it

 Get o'er it

Sure the oak is now long fallen

With all the fond recallin' 

Firewood to warm another

Boards for some deck afar 

It ain't doing a lick of good

To ponder on the what should's 

The oak bid it's time shadin'

So quit the pity pond wadin' 

No one even cared that ole oak

Meant so durn much to 

Only This ole Stok.

Upon a blazing star

 Transfixed upon

A blazing star

It wasn't how far

To see this Swallowtail

But how near

It was all along

The short story

 The short story

John Clare Stokes

Nothing saddens me greater

than to walk among the headstones

and know only born and died on

with maybe a line of scripture

Would there a writer for every soul

to etch a book upon their stone

for when in the cemetery we roam

the details of a life we’d know. 

All deserved more than a dated line

Many a novel lies never to be read

So many pages among the dead

Oh if only scribes we could find.

Price Creek Cemetery

All happenings

 All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message.

~ Malcolm Muggeridge (Painting by Pat Rocha)

Mike Mike

 The Missing

It's never the bruises or the cuts

We recall

It's the kisses and caresses that

Linger

And hit us brutally 

Bruising and cutting to the

Bone

Flaying the heart open upon 

The slab

Long after the lovers gone

Frost fishing

 Frost Fishing

Robert Frost had a knife

Cold steel taking life

Robert Frost went fishing

Not for the eating

But simply for the 

Separation

One side gulping

The other flapping

Robert Frost without a heart

His knife sharp

Herons staring

At the gore

And what for?

Separation. 

Stupid 

Separation.

Kissing cousin

 Kissing Cousin

I found I've got a 

Kissing Cousin

But now I'm too old

For lovin'

It would of been grand

To keep it in the family

Only

She lives in a dang 

Mansion in Mississippi 

And I live in a hut

In Flaridee

It would of been hard

To uproot her

From our family.

To boldly go

 Boldly Go

Bold the man who

Tells the lotto jerk

Move on dude

My chocolate milk

Warms.

I listen to the wind

 I’ll be out and about when suddenly 

a line will enter my mind and whisper

then a few moments later the second 

line will arrive. By that time I’ve usually

ceased from the task at hand and I’m 

getting them down before the third

and the forth enter. It’s then the process

slows to less spontaneous effort and

it’s when the word winds have settled 

that the sonnet or even the second 

couplet comes to fruition.

But I’m most grateful through the years

of being given this inner start.

Not standing

 I’m not standing in front of

pear blossoms composing

lines in my mind that the wind

blows in, fading to leave me

with my own uninspired lines

I’m not moving to a place in

Palm Bay or from Palm Bay so

don’t miss me today or any day

I’m just a poor boy

and my story’s often mist old

With wing

 To fly as a gull his desire

To walk as a child his aspire

Hands to shovel sand

Wings to currents ascend

And it was so

Nathaniel

 To the lad of o eleven

I shall ever sing

and for the brief time

The joy you did bring.