Black, Sonnet #594

As if nothing has a color

And tomorrow is an absence —

Our one emotion is dolor —

A period is a sentence.

Why do we dream in black and white,

Fugal shapes dipped in clouds and ink,

In word-concatenations think,

And in zebra characters write?

Art starts with paper or canvas,

Both white, but proceeds to darken

As hours of inspiration pass,

Approaching black with brush or pen.

These poems reduce ordered paint

To something both more and less faint.

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My Human Disguise.

Blind, Sonnet #593

Seeing all that has gone before,

And what little is yet to come,

I haven’t chosen my colors,

Not from the cathedral’s dim dome,

Or the canvas named by its frame,

(I can’t choose even my own brain),

Because I cannot see what’s seen.

I can’t distinguish grass from green

Or a male cardinal from red.

I look but find it hard to read.

I’m forced to think in images,

Most dancing on flattened stages.

I’ve not much time to choose my hues,

Thinking blood is less red than blue. 

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My Human Disguise.

Tallulah Falls (George Cooke), Sonnet #592

 

Evergreens cling to rock,

Which guides the waterfall —

Rising mists lave the trees.

Nowhere signs of a clock.

All durations stall.

Even the storm clouds freeze.

Earth’s stand-in is a ledge

Where men peek at the edge

In awe less of grandeur

Than such immensity.

How do we still endure —

Motes of infinity?

When all such cascades stop,

Gravity will drop.

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My Human Disguise.

Giant Squid Attacking Boat (W. A. Cranston), Sonnet #591

 

The Kraken, like all monsters, aren’t shy.

They live, not hiding, but where we don’t go.

Does each one have just an eye for an I?

Do they hunt us hungrily from below?

I wouldn’t turn them into metaphors

Because they slip thither on ocean floors,

Rising out of curiosity,

Fearful themselves of monstrosities.

They are too overwhelmingly like us,

Tentacle arms and a sharp teeth-like beak,

Astride their sea realm like a colossus,

In sum strong and in each single part weak.

Starlike, architeuthis came from space,

As did we, a fleeting elusive race.

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My Human Disguise.

Head Within An Aureole (Odilon Redon), Sonnet #590

 

The Glass Man looks in the mirror’s

Pupil and sees himself asleep.

The iris a gold-flecked halo,

A crowning of thought with errors

So lovely he must wake and weep.

His eyelids blink so: slow . . . slow . . . slow.

The Glass Man rouses and rises.

He foresees the coming crisis,

When all that he believes matters

Shivers from within and shatters.

What sonnets he has written out

Are more a whisper than a shout.

Like a mirror he turns face down,

Glass is all he has ever known.

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The Last Day of Pompeii (Karl Bryullov), Sonnet #589

 

Some chose to run, many to hide

Inside their temples and rooms,

Where every one of them died

In incendiary tombs.

I walk in a mourning fog

Outside and inside my mind,

Hand in hand with Gog Magog

And all the rest of my kind.

What are these floods and fires

And stupidity admirers

(Viruses in a cracked petri jar)?

How can I fight the coming war

We’re already losing day by day

As we run, slower and slower, away?

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My Human Disguise.

The Imp Of The Abstract (Rick Gydesen), Sonnet #588

 

“The abstract is the most we know,”

Says the blind, woodenheaded imp.

“Reality is just for show,

Like a colorful, leaking blimp,

Or eyes painted yolky yellow,

Which see only bye or hello.”

We might ask it, “How can you tell?”

It would reply, “There is no point

To my rejoinder or the joint

Where two knotty blocks form an ‘L.’

You may think you see something All,

A tree dropping leaves in the Fall —

They’re not even a chimera,

Just habit, your ephemera.”

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase at Amazon. Click here:

My Human Disguise.