CONCURRENT CHOOSING

By Charles Robert Lindholm

I can choose you
but what does it matter
unless you choose me too 

Heartbreak

Did you
hear it

The sound
was deafening

An intense roar
in my ears

The reverberation
rattled my bones

And thundered
through my soul

Your ego muffled
the sound

But I heard it
loud and clear

The sound of
my heartbreak

Copyright (C) 2023 Penny Wilson

See my blog for more of my writings Penny Wilson Writes

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Good Teacher

You were a good teacher.

You taught my skin to delight in your caress.

My fingers learned to search for yours.

I learned to listen for your whispers.

My sighs learned your name.  

My desire learned to match your heat.

My pulse learned to quicken with your embrace.

You taught me to thirst for your touch.

I learned the loneliness of empty nights.

You taught my tears to fall in your absence.

You taught me how to say goodbye.

I learned of a broken heart.

© 2018 Penny Wilson

For more of my writings please visit my blog: Penny Wilson Writes

This Glorious Passage

Photo by Roger Levien

My past is as implausible as
the tale of a frail
butterfly that flies from Mexico to Canada.
Why? How? To what purpose?

Here and now, I’m between
million-year-old mountains
and the damp, salty shores of
one of an ocean’s quiet, protected bays—
where the fish and the plants and the chemistry,
change day by day, but where the whole is eternal,
where a thousand centuries is as a day.

An ocean and mountains
show us who we really are,
Mere children pretending to be
some heroic captain,
braced on a stormy quarter deck
defying the gale,
the rocks too close.
But the ocean knows it
has swallowed many like us before,
and will take many more.

Eyes

I met a widow once,
wrapped in loss.
She said
she could not see a better
day coming.

I looked over my shoulder,
along the long road,  
and gave her my eyes.

A Modern Man

I walk too often in the echoes of a cold canyon,
sometimes accompanied by my wife,
dead now barely two years. She’s silent, amused,
faintly attached to this world and soon to go again,
impatient with me for hanging onto melancholic vapors
when it’s obvious–to her, anyway–that I just haven’t wised up yet.

But I’m a so-called modern man, allergic to undue connections,
Even when a dream comes and I
am lurched through a deeper portal and part a
gauzy barrier to walk with skeptical ghosts.
All I know when I wake is this bag of meat and its
pedestrian priorities.

She knew. She told me to find someone.
Knew I would only trust the secrets, the warmth and dampness,
the round softnesses I could hold,
with nipples like rosebuds and mysterious eyes;
knew that all man’s scripture could be held on a 3-by-5 card,
if he weren’t so stubbornly drunk on himself.

19 February 1974

The knock at the door
I remember it well
though forty-six years have now passed
The vicar right there
with something to share
for a slap in the face that would last

It was anger I felt
with a fist in the air
that my father had left in that way
And I heard not a sound
from that hole in the ground
as I stood on that February day

Cowgirl

I encountered a young Colorado woman, once,
from a distance. Our trails crossed in our personal badlands.

A beauty, she had the raw fire of a mustang.
I caught her at a terrible time in her life.
Or should I say, she caught me.

Her marriage was coming apart,
her husband having lost interest and sunk into cruelty and betrayals.

We never met, except
as passing
electronic ghosts. She writhed and wrote of her pain,
her bruised pride and injured beauty.
She touched us with her anger and anguish,
her soul’s search for beauty nonetheless,
In that state she painted lurid images of
what she would do with me,
to me, what she wanted from me,
pinned against a wall, legs apart,
full of anger, fury, revenge.

What Comes Before Silence

Death is not bitter
death is a silence
But dying is bitter.
Dying is hard.
With you,
it was the sound.

It was like drowning,
no detail spared,
in slow motion…

with metastases of cancer
that filled the lungs
and grew, sending out
ghastly spawn to live in bone

It Was the Sound

Note: Don’t be alarmed. I am OK. This poem deals with something that happened nearly a year ago, but I’m just able to work my way into it objectively. It will be in a collection soon to be published, but as I prepare the pieces, I find there are still loose ends that need to be tied up by remembering. This was one.

Death is not bitter…
death is a silence
But, the dying is bitter.
Dying is full of the noise
of the going out.
It was the sound, I think,
that still haunts me,
the sound of your
struggle, the
death rattle.
(Such a bland phrase,
nothing like the
horror of the real thing.)

It was a drowning,
slowly,
inevitably,
the lungs full of fluids produced by
the metastases of cancer
the ravisher of lungs,
scatterer of foul seeds,
ghastly, evil children to stick in bone
and brain.

The relentless
sounds of drowning, your
poor, battered breastbone lifting,
tough heart refusing to stop
long after it should have.
Morphine hid the pain
but took your mind,
filled it full of phantasms
but it at least lay a
warm blanket over the pain

But the lungs were full
and drowned you deep
in dreamy waters, hours
after your spirit had
abandoned the failing husk.
An old friend said you visited her
in a dream hours before.

You had a spirit body,
alive and vigorous and young, happy, she said,
dressed in spring clothes
and driving a sky-blue convertible.
While I tried to give the body
some peace, and listened to
the rising dreamy waters, rattling,
It was a comfort to learn
you had escaped, and
driven away on your
great adventure.

In bright sunshine,
free, in a blue convertible, like the
one you had when we met
50 years before.

hemmingplay.com

Kintsugi

 I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me

–Charles Bukowski

And now, for a time, I must find the parts of me I’ve lost, and glue them back into a new whole. Kintsugi, finding beauty in imperfection; the art of precious scars. Perhaps I’ll mend the broken edges with gold this time.

 

A Morning*

I remember certain things,
how it was a Sunday in
April, and the daffodils were late.
How the sun was out and
poured through the bay windows
of the bedroom, happy and warm,
like nothing was wrong,
like everything was normal.

I can’t feel it now, the exhaustion
of that awful last night,
blessed by how the brain
softens certain things with time.

MY FIRST PUBLISHED POEM – ARIEL CHART MAGAZINE

I’m So Very Happy To Announce That My Poem – “You Are My Forever And Always” Has Been Published In The Magazine Ariel Chart – January Edition.  I’d Be Honored If You Checked It Out!

It’s My First Published Poem!!

Come Check Out Ariel Chart And View Their Submission Guidelines  If You Have An Interest In Seeing Your Work Published.

Thanks So Much To You For Viewing, Commenting And Following My Blog!  I Appreciate It So Much!!!

Chuck Lindholm
The Reluctant Poet

 

Common Grief

A local story tells
of a dam that blocked a creek in late ’60.
The water rose, year by year,
seeped over a poor family’s
rocky homestead,
the one that was supposed
to be an assured future.
58 years under
the dark, cool waves,
bass and perch swimming past
foundation stones covered in mud and algae.
The loss of a dream
is a reason

Crying

*Part of the “Saying Goodbye” collection to be published soon. 

Do you remember our babies’
crying through the night
with colic, red-faced, kicking,
little fists clenched, punching the air?
We took turns with
futile soothings,
new at this baby thing,
desperate to comfort, to
silence that infernal noise
so we could go to work
in a few hours and not
fall asleep in the elevator.

They didn’t seem to want
comfort, did they?

YOU ARE MY FOREVER AND ALWAYS

By Charles Robert Lindholm

From The First Time
I Laid Eyes On You
I Loved You

It Was Love At First Sight,
And You Stole My Heart
Forever

That Moment
Was The Start
Of Me Loving You

Father, Son, Stars, Loss (for Bobby)

I start to count them and stop
Not because there are too many
But because I cannot hold them
Accountable; the code sparkled
From their eternal glow calls
Me to be accountable to my life:

Altered Carbon

I pinned my phosphorus heart

to the crisp linen sleeve

of my mourning suit

where all could see

your initials

carved deep

On Missing You Too Soon

I find myself imagining
how the differences will
play out…
The unfamiliar,
lengthening silences,
stretching into the dusk.
The way dust devils will
gather in corners, waiting
for something that
will never come.

Unsettled

The misty ridden morning
waits like a pendulum in mid swing,
cross and blue, no longer alive,
leopard printed in death’s oily colors.

I untie the souls, with the windows
curving swards bent under the dewy dunes,
haled by dawn’s wet forehead,
no graves have been dug for this.

An Ordinary Day

She had wanted to
sell the house.
She thought
he’d go first
leaving her alone.

Everything happens
on an ordinary day.

It Is Something To Have Been

“Karma,” New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. An impressive sculpture is located in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, which is found at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It is made by Korean artist Do Ho Suh.

I am well past my 20s,
that golden time
when I only saw a little—and even that
with optimistic eyes.

I’m past the days of cheap
apartments with friends and wine and roaches,
lentils and rice for breakfast,
or leftover cold pizza.

I’m beyond learning of
war and death and pestilence.
The visitations of grief
have marked me, too.

One More Burned Out and Innocently Gone

There’s miles ‘till dawn –

Even the moon’s moving on.

Another day, another song;

One more burned out and innocently gone.

Blinded by the Light

night turned Armageddon

on a guitar pick

flashes easily mistaken for fireworks

eclipsed neon lights

further fall of civilization

A Tale of Two Towers-Christine Ray & Eric Syrdal

Locked away in stone tower

rest of the world

fades

becomes dim memory

time loses meaning

becomes shapeless

days

nights

Tripped

I stumbled

over our history

didn’t mean

to leave it on the floor

where anyone could find it

In the Park

He wakes up on top of me
Wearing the same tattered clothes,
As dank and filthy as garbage
On a hot and humid afternoon.

He slips away every day before dawn,
Before they come to check on me
And clean my worn out skin,
And clear my space of thrown out dreams
And rusted needles, still dripping
With the cheap thrills of last night.

~ To Loss

Loss perched

Perched upon my days
As I walked through life…

Life in a daze

Enduring what could not

Be changed.
O’Prunty

6/25/17

Photo by: O’Prunty

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