Not Easy The Path Which Took Me

Not the easy path which took me. Not understood even now.

I gaze transfixed. Like pole-axed film buff I view the screen's illusion remarking on confusion. There in the montage incomplete, tea leaves are interpreted.

North, facing away from the sun, to polar star project I have become a priest.

West, towards tomorrow and across the sea, I am Columbus blundering.

South, seeding mustard to mark my path, I pace the missionary's quest.

East, Oriented to the ruins of bas-relief, glass in hand I examine the past.

I -- Crisis in her eyes, the nun ran down the steps to plead her cause, Minced words bit back, her habits in and out in disarray.

The remembering is. Many we are one. Legion is but legend.

II -- Curse the bloody tide, the fisherman rocks upon his need for safe passage. The fruits of his labor strain for market validation.

Why not the many false starts? Why not a reckoning in the fusion?

III -- Cold handed king locks the strong-box and gloats upon his mastership. Never knowing the rat that gnaws his passage rifling.

These and more we all have seen, but form will pass away.
And mercenary souls shall predicate, "Until That Day."

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

April In Paris

Don't be fooled by circumstance you are alone right now.
These city streets hold no one that you know and all those
passing people are but statuary moving to a rhythm you
will never understand.

The circuit of you wanderings are laced with regret and
passionate longing. Wet through and through you know
you should seek shelter.

Steaming coffee and a fire to dry by call you but you cannot
leave. You are the patient wanting and this is your domain.

Under umbrella, lashed by winds but loyal to the last, you
stumble over pavement stones which would be declared
monuments of aged posterity in your home town. Here they
are but utilitarian footpaths waiting for the next revolution to
pull them to the barricades.

Boot click and stares surround you but still you are still alone.
Gene Kelly should be dancing by any time soon.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

A Band Will Ring This Daily Canticle

It's Fool's Gold to see the bright and wish it better.
I blame the Hasbro ads which made me want,
the x-ray glasses hidden in the back
of all those comics which saved the free world.

Superman was fallible I was certain
The green lantern was really my hero
For no-one liked him but he persevered
to do the good as he saw fit.

I wish I could make this song better,
for I'm a fool and glitter makes me look
for pans to sift the sands away,
superficial priceless grifter I.

And dancing now at edge of what is witnessed,
I grant that people will not see me cry,
a broadside bill announcing our inclusive
self-congratulatory worship sigh.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Blind Man's Walk

You get there when you get there and any way is wrong.
It being equal, I’d rather not detail,
The things I’ve done to get here and why it took so long,
And all the efforts that were sure to fail.
My forward vision’s hidden by a veil.

Those chaos-spouting scientists will lecture you about,
How minor choices brought us here this way.
But all they want to clarify is theorems that they tout,
No wisdom that is useful for today.
They’re like a pack of jackals in their bray.

The bruises are like badges, I don’t notice how they gawk,
Except when I would stop to reckon cost.
The path is strewn with random turns just like a blind man’s walk,
Indirection’s wreckage over-glossed.
I won’t admit that I am probably lost.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

The Found Pressed Leaf

Inside of Deuteronomy, I found you.
Maple, I supposed, though botany defeats me.
Your flattened face a reminder of a Summer passed.
I wonder when the hand that put you here
Came last before I found you in this book.
When was your scriptured prison cast.

In gone Autumnal splendor you set down to mark,
a passage to the solstice Yule in colors flamed.
Thrilled wonder at the day when frond was stored,
Set in the dark, in plane of paper fixated
Until the moment when at verses turning,
The leaves were riffled to show the leaf adored.


Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Homecoming

Leave a light on.
Leave it burning in the window.
A fine and proper marker for a place to call my own.

Use a bright one.
Let it burn against the Shadows.
Let it light the path where stands the place that I
Would call my home.

Leave it burning high, please.
Let its light become a beacon.
Reduce the miles and show the way to where I
Would be home.

Just leave it burn now.
Leave it burning ‘til I get there.
I need to know there’s someone at the place
That I call home.

I need to know there’s somewhere there at a place
That I call home.


Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Wet Season

I say it’s the mud.
Mud that I hate.
It’s bothersome stuff, glue/sticky/slime
that gets everywhere.

Feet and ankles heavy with the trudge,
wheels slipping and digging down.
Inside/outside slow-motion drag.
I cannot avoid it.
Slog/beat/inertia saps the heart
and makes the legs unwilling to move.

It isn’t the cold.

The cold it can be hard, whipped windy chapping skin
and blemish hard goose/flesh/shiver.
The woolen/warming/cloth cannot keep it out.
It slips like a lover’s fingers under the sweater and
invites the skin into balls of muscled tightness.

But mud is the Culprit.
Mud brings us down.

Give me snow and frozen ground.
Layered freezing jackets stiff.
Here is motion valued – Quick/stepping/march
Across frozen tundra to places hiding by
Fires. There we try keeping warm
with mugs of steaming tea.
Hot fire defrosting, dripping ease upon tiles
and wrapped in blankets shivering.
Crystal breath unfurled in stillness air.

Winter is hard, but mud is harder.

Spring mud is painful to behold…
In Northern clime when frost abates the mud advances.
‘Tis there always.
A rotted clumping, bumping bog that’s
bug infested at its best.

But Winter mud is harder,
Winter mud can kill.

Cold and plastic/plaster casting
it wraps around and around my shoes.
Boots become lead.
Shortens the tread.
Slip-footed concrete goo I dread.
Goosepimple anticipation
DON’T TOUCH ME WITH THAT STUFF!

Give me summer so I can complain about the sweat.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Already In Progress

...the freeway never stops. Rushing waits no more
for my timid introduction and induction. Vapid and
willing, the sad-faced four-banger grinds another
revolutionary song mashed from my intent as
downward pressed, my foot explores its well-versed
friendship with the floorboards.

Then cruelly, I notice my life and the exits made by
fellow traveling friends, bye-bye they wave as
one by one they leave. I ponder their paths as
soon approaches my looming exit, and wonder
whether we will meet again.

So now my route is marked and soon I must
leave. Quietly I whisper his name and hope
for transit equipage.

~Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner~

Notes On A Late June Rain

The presence of the warm droplets displace
The sweat coursing down my face as I watch broiling
Expanses of vapor rise up conspiratorially from the South.

I leave this tin-roof shelter to feel the full force pouring
Drench my heated brow and cool the fevered knowing.
Descending patter not ceasing within my upturned mouth.

A deluge written slowly on rooftops chatter time mark,
The soupy breathing atmosphere has soaked the wetness into it.
These dribble-tendered droplets compile to depths unknown.

Please excuse my lack of industry but here I must remain.
Soaking gravid flecks of cloudy souse into my field-like hair.
Waiting for that one true droplet to awaken dried-up bone.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Mating Time At Año Nuevo

But that the selky's cries, stolen by the
wind and sifted by the dunes,
should call forth a scene of fires
in ancient caves remembering the
Mother's needed invention
and the first hand fight for life.

Then I would harbor pillared worshipful
fetishes that uphold the wildness within
and tell me of nights my ancestors
huddled to tales of the hunt.

Here could I lay down my sullen
existence and bow to that which looks
disdainfully at scheduled hysteria
and stays aloof even in the longest queue.

But the greed tethered to rationed survival flits
a single fingered salute to the kindest of hearts.
Necessity laughs at our good intentioned sentiments as
nurture proves herself to be heartlessly efficient.

Beasts of burgeoning power call forth in repose
and challenge. Humans peeking marvel.

Here at the furthest edge of Sun/Sand/Sea, we
dip a timid toe into waters of chaos recollection
and watch as a terribly real fight begins on the beach.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Wide Spot Fever

There's a wind in the desert
that walks the highway hitching for a ride.
Powerful, it scratches at my face as I hunker to avoid the furnace.

Here the road leads to the sky in any direction as pondering
the way to destruction or redemption folly the travelers
halt at our roadside attraction.

Pure. Dry. Hot.

The reasons which brought us basking to this spot don't matter
but it is the purity which keeps us. Petrified.

No sooner do we haul out our conveyance but that hand which
made the Eskimo squat upon his frozen rock weighs our shoulders
to the shaded chair. It advises our unrelenting flop.

Yes, we have beer. Gas. Lodging.

Don't get too close to the bin, it's got baby rattlers within.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Exhale And Inhale

Exhale and Inhale

This black bakelite madrigal will sing no more.
Poised on three-legged pedestal
it holds an altared place within my strange abandonment
and here on the fog-bound exile westward procession
I wait your call, infinitely.

Yesterday's urgent challenges defeat me with simple implacability.
I swirl drunkenly across a pigeon-toed sidewalk and sing
my heated breaths in undertones of effort. Cruising the shops
of lower Clement I searched for just the thing to give to you
so you would know my love without knowing how much.

So tiresome newspaper piles rot upon my porch and I wonder
where the point of vanishing can truly lead.

Can you see the missing underwear I hold and sickly cherish
so that you will never leave? Can you feel the hold I place upon
the ether as I spin my loose-laced web of calling and pretend it
is merely a dream-catcher. I know there hides a choice. Denied,
it festers in a pool I will not drain. Wistfully, I make the bed.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

I Am That I Am

In labyrinth lost, we wander lonely wondering if we met,
the wise, content and knowing one, and could our finding get
us further toward a living heaven where all things are bright.
Or would we fail to recognize the presence in our sight?

We’ve sought to know how to refine the lives we feel we should,
be living in our very midst within the place we stood.
What is the wheat and what the chaff, what purpose we attend?
Why are we here, and when we fail how do we make amend?

Perhaps we’re looking out of place, and never could connect,
with teacher, guide, perfected one when outward we direct,
our seeking drive to validate our hope of good complexion.
we need accept inaptitude for earning our election.

It is a gift, we come to know, no wage that’s labor won.
When we submit to look within, the journey’s end’s begun.
We are the very learned ones we seek to lead us far,
when we discover who to be we’ll find that’s who we are.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Imperfect Future Tensed

The welcome word, it is not heard,
from hereabouts no more.
But winsome lasses, will wear dark glasses,
when I begin to bore.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

The Sins Of My Father

The sins of my father are legion.

They marshal in the dark in ranks and assault me in flood upon
my addled sense. There arrived, they shout in persona chorus
accusations which echo in my self-doubt and lash my timid heart
with chords fashioned from ungrateful filial neglect.

The sins of my father are fragile.

Call forth the cuckoo’s egg. Careful tending of same marks the
harbored parasite’s incursions. Supplanted needs and hopes of
manful attainment tend this changeling foster-child in desperate
exhaustion until they drop unmourned.

The sins of my father are helpful.

They line the courses of my racing thoughts and call out their
encouragements in left-handed tones. Such dulcet sounds brace
my tired strivings. Whistling the catcalls of impossibilities, they
save me from the excesses of victory.

The sins of my father are comfortable.

Like fresh-fed hounds they gather to wrap my legs in lethargic
warmth. Such happy connection weighs like the mud from
rutted path. Leaden-shod, my aspirations halt. The padded
burrows of defeat lull me with the familiar.

The sins of my father are musical.

Melodies of lectures long past cast certain inevitabilities down my
throat. Humming with fractured harmonies they rasp a modern
tone-poem in perspectives both brittle and angered. These songs
of lamentation mark me for what I am.

Know that I am my father’s son.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Accounts Pending/Payment Due

Accounts are pending-Payments due,
I thought we’d come to this.

Cars and coolers keeping sane a people on the edge.
Curve expressive metal thrust!
A howling blur of light beamed cutting asphalt ribbons in
Darkness to stretch out night to morn.

We’re burning way too much


Accounts are pending-Burning pride,
Oh Brothers! We of this disenchanted fairyland are tired!

Why can’t we see that how we speed the hours through
Our days is killing us?
We run from that uncertain knowledge of who we are
And quit the balance that heals our earthen home.

LOOK AROUND AND SMELL THE FEAR!

The burning is in our hearts

Accounts are pending-Interest’s long accrued.
Bulging from principle long neglected.

The water is poisoning our children’s children’s child
And STILL we drink the cup!

Effluent rivers stink and run their courses long, warmed well
Beyond the healing stretch of nature’s knowing care.

The burning begins to be beyond repair

Accounts are pending-Debt called in.
Come see the last retreat.
This dance macabre comes to lead us to the killing floor.
Paid is the piper. Called we the tune.
Our feet tap a tattoo upon sun-dried skins until the rhythms come undone.

Melted mountains flood the sea as circles of death boil up from the
Tropics and drown our very hopes.
We hide in day-worn cares and die knowing nothing of our lives.

WE ARE THE BURNING!


Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner