John Clare Stokes
Every time her sultry profile picture
would appear
I’d press that heart
Pack my lenses
And head out toward
the Suwannee
sure she’d be there
knee deep
Sultry siren she seemed
when my friend
from over Suwannee way
would say
She’s all the way deep end crazy
and I’d remove that heart
until memory faded
and she posted tomorrow.
If you ever need to feel loved, let me know, I got
just the rock for you.
What can we say?
They tore down Joseph’s barns today
Folks around these parts
never learn
So much history burned
dozed and destroyed
Forgive us Maude Gray
This old world has just gone crazy
Johnclarestokes
We sell our lands for bowls of porridge
Tear down the old homes for gain
Settle for a double wide dwelling
Pave the shady canopied lanes
Wide and free of pesky trees
Landscapes of unhindered view
Easy on the locusts passing through.
Johnclarestokes
Once we danced where sabal palms now sway
Cruising up to tops of hills we went all the way
down
Some beyond the water tower toward
Bronson's barren hills of scrub and sand
Others past the eastern other side of tracks
To Spook hills ghost light chills
A few to the Blue Grotto's air bubbles wending upward
from divers in caves suspending
One of many bravely trespassing to skinny dip in
Dens of Devils beneath watermelons
No Tiny or Gene or Luther's Lord calling could keep us
from Jackie and the boys in the band at the top of the hill after football
That certain kind of light
That shone on us
From the towers Christmas lights so innocently knowing all silently glowing on Friday nights
The sabal palms forever swaying.
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in fight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
William Butler Yeats
"The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fairy-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament." (Marc Chagall)
Bouquet boy
Had a single lily
And he pondered what
It meant to him
Does it make him melancholy
for the past he sees
Or is it simply a thing of beauty
that he enjoys presently
Can through it he see future
possibility
Of hope that will be
It’s but a single lily
That speaks to
bouquet boy
