As July Passes Test Patterns

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Test Pattern Poet

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This is to inform you that

The poet is not in at the moment.

We have no idea where he is

And if/when he will be back.

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He could be out somewhere thinking

By himself in a place where nobody

Can get at him.

(He’s been doing that a lot lately)

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Last we knew he expressed he was

Just out of words that he thought mattered so much to anybody anymore.

His images and sentiments, trivialized or ignored

Just coolly appraised from afar without any passion.

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And he is as hurt as he is bored with letting that to get to him.

He realizes fully well how little

This poetry matters these days.

In a sentimental millstone to drown him

around his neck, heart or skinny ass

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Of course we have heard all this bullshit before

Rather self indulgent despondency

And we have told him in no uncertain terms to:

…..get over himself…

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So If we hear from him

We will let you know.

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But don’t expect much

He doesn’t.

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After all…….. he did learn that much

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From you.

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– Uncollected July 2012

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July 2012

    Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

–Ludwig van Beethoven

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Ordinary Roar

 

July will linger just near the door

as it is time now to go

and in a sigh or perhaps that ordinary roar

informing the waning afternoon in the calendars’

numerical voice that your number is up.

 

What startles you is the whispering in distance

Those concussions that wake the waves to break

and recede over the endlessly eroded

rocky regret infested

disappearing shoreline.

 

I hear strange voices in this ardent insistent wind.

I feel a tongue just inches from my ear that speaks

 

….in that sigh or ordinary roar that after all these years

 I was assured….. I wouldn’t be able to hear this anymore.

 

All about this hazy animation of dirty white foam

You get left behind …..driven madly upon, away  and over

.

So parade a secession of strollers across your face

Like on any anonymous beach.

They nod or speak appearing as apparitions

that drift windblown on the most silent of feet.

 

Only some will find the courage to speak

More will hide behind their own callousness.

 

Scraps of paper and fragments of prose

difficult to define

whip by in a helpless driven fury.

Now expression has little opportunity

for introspection

or reflection.

 

The art of language has been lost in

the stiff insistence of a brisk sound gust of wind.

 

And the sky above is so blank and blue

and it is almost like time herself has slipped out

of her harness and runs on the shoreline

laughing in the wind, being blown all over the beach

naked, wild and free…..

of  any memory

 

…… of the sigh or that ordinary roar

of us once

but now no more

……as July lingers near the calendar’s door.

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 -From Another Rubbereden  7/1995-2012