Tag: Poetry

Today I Don’t Have The Devotion

Today I don’t have the devotion

Today I don’t feel strong

Just a living thing in motion

Just a creature trying to get along

Maybe tomorrow will be different

Maybe tomorrow will feel true

Sometimes I reach out to touch the sunlight

And put my hand to my face to know its there

Sometimes the warmth feels all right

When a hot shower hits my body naked and bare

Today I don’t have the devotion

Today I’m slow to move and think

Just a living thing in motion

Waiting until quitting time for a drink

Gene G. McLaughlin 2013

Summer Heat Decay 1985

Across the highway

I see the rendering plant

Smoking all night

Smell strong of death

Soap to be

Stand up slowly

Plants stink is stronger

In the hot depth of summer

Walk slowly down the road

Next to the lazy warm river

Shad run strong float

Dead and bloated in the water

Payment heats my feet

I walk in the spill off stream

On the side of the hot road

Sneakers wet feet soothed

At hill bottom stream runs strong

Water cold and white

Rolling over the dark unseen rocks

Tall chain link fence

Surrounds stinking sickening plant

Walking in the woods around it

I see a couple in a side meadow

Lateral pants at their knees

Finding some meaning creating

Condensation summer heat

Woods are dark penetrated

By rays of sunlight

Rear entrance of the plant approaches

Behind the truck is my goal

Dump of boxes junks refuse

So ugly decayed I feel more alive

On the mounds of garbage move

Sifting smooth shadows

Scavenging searching securing

My cat sits among them

Champion king victor stud

Amongst all others

He is not amongst my world

Any longer, He has passed over

To the dump primordial beyond

Conventions of dishes collars flea less

Existence, surveying his surroundings

His cock hard teeth bloody with pretenders

Flesh taste of their defeat strong in his mouth

His defeat will come soon, momentarily relatively

On the fumes exhaust waste from the plant

Cancers of progress touches us all

Summer day sweat of heat plant oozes fate

Gene G. McLaughlin 2004

Fiscal Cliff

They have always written poetry

Even without 401K’s

They have always made music

Even without health insurance

They have always painted landscapes

Even without tax credits

We have always loved each other

Without government approval

Take us over

We will meet you on the other side

Gene G. McLaughlin 2012

Winter 1989

Listening to the Replacements

Rain is coming down

Yellow Walkman in hand

Mud and dirty ice crunches

Under each tired stride

There is no pleasure in this today

Only the comfort of routine

Yet it gives little respite today

Searching for something

In between the rain

Looking for the cold

To bring true words

To my frozen lips

In youth we struggle to find

The simple paths

We run down cold roads

Hoping to lessen the burden

Of our uncertain futures

Where little is clear to us

And we have little guidance to

What we are or what the blurred

Images of our future selves

Off in the distance represent

In later years our burdens

Will be concrete and have numbers

Solidly affixed and attributed to them

The finding of the paths

Are no longer romantic runs of longing

In the cold winter rain

But carpools and commutes

Cubicles and colonoscopies

Where we know where our path takes us

And do not have a longing to find the way

But to leave it

Gene G. McLaughlin 2012

The Swirl

The words get twisted and repeated

They bounce and imprint

Over and over

Their meaning was clear

In the sick heat of the fever

Sometimes sounds echo

Will not leave

Until they decide to fade

Is this how it starts

I guess if

It were starting

I wouldn’t know

The key is

Ignoring that

Which is not real to others

Because it’s all real

To you

Gene G. McLaughlin 2012

Christmas 2012

To know the heart of the holiday

Is to know snow

And cold

As where it is dark

The worst is yet to come

Around fires

The bold sit

Drinking beer made in summer

The taste of wheat and citrus

Upon their tongues

Warming them

They gather

As they always have

Little was known of

The man behind the rock

In the cave

In the early times

Yet

No matter who the day

Was named for

People always gathered

When the shadows grew long

The cold is the thing

The dark is the thing

The reminder that summer

Is a blessing or aberration

And even winter

A warm exception to the rule

In late December

We acknowledge

How precarious

This all is

Gene G. McLaughlin 2012

Something Decides To Be

The garden was the garden

When all was stone and still

The dead spinning rock

Is sitting in the sky

And something decides to be

In the cold dead

Cosmos of black

Something chooses to move

The grey black silent stone

Slowly grows blue and alit with color

Trudging forward stone to water to bone

And then it is

And then it moves

And then it thinks

Ever in motion

Always afire

Can anything which has chosen to move so

Ever be still again

In the effort to pull back

There are rewards

The gift of the stillness

Was the definitive self knowledge

Not obscured by motion

And to constant hum of knowing

Gene G. McLaughlin 2012

Christmas 2005

Sunflower

Behind the house

Across the dirt road

It is a husk of its

Past self

Seeds scattered on

The ground before it

It is cold

It will grow colder

The sunflower will sway

In the wind

Be bitten by frost

Its death not the end

Of its decay

In the dust

Snow and frost

The seeds shall take shelter

For many

Things are born

On the cusp of deep winter

We know the seeds make a promise

Yet we cannot hear the promise

Drowned out by the winters howl

We wonder if winter and the sunflower

Have a covenant

Where its decay

Is only the beginning

Of the story

Gene G. McLaughlin 2005

Other Times

Sometimes I listen to the radio

As the day slowly drifts away

Sometimes I talk to the cats

As they stare at me with perplexed eyes

Sometimes I make love at noon

As the sun shines bright above

Other times

The moments

Just get away from me

Sometimes I drink coffee

As I sit on a shaded park bench

Sometimes I look at graffiti

As they wash it from the brick city walls

Sometimes I drive to the drug store

As the cars grind all about me

Other times

I just wonder

Where it all went

Life is not a narrative

Life is not a song

Life is the inanimate choosing motion

The formless fog grown quiet and long

Gene G. McLaughlin 2012

We Are Any Army

We are an army of some

We are an army of none

We are the troops of self doubt

We are those with and without

We are the agents of change

We are the with-standers of pain

We are the bringers of wealth

We are the seekers of health

We are the ninety and nine

Awaiting the moment and sign

We are an army of some

We are an army of none

Gene G. McLaughlin 2012