Retrospection

So quickly do we all return To that which plagues us thoroughly Even when we source discern We turn our hearts to misery Calloused hands do butter churn Yet churn we still in revelry Digging through my archives, I'm fain to recollect Upon the loneliness, angst, anger, ennui By which I was beset Amazing what the craft can do to tilt reality in favor Or perhaps it grants insanity a different flavor Peering at the snow-kissed mountains I remember mother telling me they looked like frosted shredded wheat I recall the rainy days, runoff making muddy fountains Pondering if deluge, would still be capable of washing sin from streets Writing annotations in the margins of mortality Gathering the pages, I deliver them as poetry Proposing to my destiny as I sow seeds on bended knee Look to my creations Where my glee, grief, and revelry Find their artful sublimation Where the sharp edges of my philosophy Fine chiseled by vicissitudes and edifying conversations Meets the soft countenance of meter and rhyme Through tears and versification The price of prescience is pain in present And trail tapers as the hours drain I've the paper to pay the Publican Watching, intrepid, the hourglass Through a thick crystal pane As grains drain through its thin glass vein Skating in an ice rink Cliff brink Sea below Life is but a long blink Sweet stink Pleasant bellow What is will, without time And what is time, without will? And what is anything without those ethereal dollar bills My soul loves to deal with the currency empyrean With craft-derived pleasure Like a model epicurean Wealthy, because my wants remain healthy Un-lonely, although my inbox is empty Making goals come to life like I play on Chelsea Hungry, for sustenance you can't find in your panty Come into planet so clean But you are as clean as the towel that you dry with Met an old friend during funeral keen He told me to listen to what he adviseth "Deep are the wrinkles and dark are the blots Heat unrelenting and pendulum swings Second hand will get you, with or with no shade spots Knell of the bell, perspective, brings" Intriguing how we speed, to the same stoplight Sowing seeds, albeit we sense the imminent blight I thanked that old friend, I'm always grateful for ken Worth the fleas, caught by howling with prowling wolves in the night If love finds me, I'll be ready And seek more than my whim's decree One's catharsis, is another's hell I smell shadows lurking in dell No padlock, upon my mind, to guard interiority Open book, I am, the sole confusion's legibility Still, I do stay wary of the asker's credibility Beware the serpent asking questions with sense of authority If you wish to know my stance on one topic Or the next Look no further than my stanzas They do evince The many ideas I have For either side of the Styx In those verses, truth I've parsed Through mortal game of pick-up sticks Drunk on the sentiment That is what I call it Slitting throat of intuition On the altar of a symbol Like the story of the family Cutting rear off of the turkey As a critical part of their holiday ritual What they found later is that predecessors Did it to fit the bird in the bowl A+ on your essay Valentine's chocolate and rosé It's not all the thorns in the bouquet It's that precedence has the comfort, and the charm To make us blind, to the toll Mark 7:8 is a great delineation Humans gravitate toward telluric fixations Perhaps greatness doesn't lie solely in sea's exploration But looking at the siren and resisting carnal temptation I've lined my closet with skeletons All upon respective coat hangers There's blood and craft's the culprit Pulpit told me life's a cliffhanger I've felled the tree of memory without saying timber While I remember when I was a summer rose in December