Monterey

A smug—“I’ve got mine”—is the chant
as their houses slowly settle down
around their ears.
Tiny smiles of complacent madness
mask dingy yards
and rotting woodpiles, new paint façade,
heart of heartless spirits.

These Righteous People
“Go in peace—but go”
A city-wide library shushes me and
gone am I as I go in my way—sight choked with
visions of Paradise that only I can see.

This lost mine of fade gems,
Oak tree love ghetto, laughs
when confronted with its broken ones.
These fire-pointed people falling in wars
of human inhumanity.
Crying and dying in
brilliant despair,
they seek the solace of forgetting.

Shuttered windows like eyes that will not see.

Only the sea holds back the sprawl that embarks upon
this littered shore. Can it be that such beauty
as is here can only be seen by those who
don’t belong here?

Yes, the Emperor has no clothes.

Down by lawyered angry men—we helpless prey upon
those more helpless still. Pointless in full anticipation
we call for Jubilee to free our debted selves. But now
in heartless city,
by the heartlessness we feel,

our only end is that which we vision
and fall upon much too soon.

~ Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner ~

Redemption

Standing on precipice, dancing on the brink
Of chasm much too wide. We will never agree.
We look, Alice in the hall, for bottled drink;
For key to fit the door that sets us free.

In our standing leer we're looking for a sign
Of how the tumor that is our heart can find a cure.
Fit our formless fears to an outcome benign
Or for the strength to make us pain inure.

Fidelity plays with us on record ruined by wear,
Saying "Do you remember?" with hiss and scratch.
Costs are tally-marked with moss-backed care,
The sums not lied about, but colored to match.

As the sea gives up its dead we rise to look around,
Ahab's children shine, fretworked souls repairing to astound.

~Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner~

He Who Robs Me Of My Greatness

Under the counter, over the sill. Behind the oak trees
and over the hill, bundled in white drape left from before;
The man who I hated will bother me some more.

"You'll never be able, you just have no gift." An echolocation
returning quite swift. "It's good don't you see but not good enough yet."
Faint praised was my damning to make one forget.

Those who should help us now help us falter, our reasons to
give up a liturgical psalter. Invention and spirit, a tethered hawk's cry;
Passions left hidden and painfully shy.

So varied and clever the break-step confounded, then stepped down,
like fortress surrounded. Witness a greatness now reset to fail.
Look further still for the shackled soul's wail.

~Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner~

Ode To A Ripe Tomato

In ancient days you would have been
the norm amongst the many.
But now the combine harvester
has made you rare within plenty.

You're smell is like a musky rose,
you're color warm and red.
In olden time our mothers bought you
soft and easily bled.

Your cousins, found in shopping malls,
are hard and filled with greenish seed.
They have no scent and otherwise
will never bruise or bleed.

I found you at the farmer's stall,
in pile of serried match.
But you were perfect, best of lot,
the prize of the whole batch.

I'll take you home and eat you raw,
with neither salt nor dressing.
The sunlight soaked into your skin,
will fill my heart with blessing.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

Lament For Molly

Beneath the farthest rock, in farthest field
I found, I hid this note I wrote to you.
I don't know where the mailman finds you now
And so it serves as box and grave both one.

What beauty I can garner from my thoughts,
Is very like the widow gath'ring seeds
from fields of frost before the snow has fallen,
Wintering now and scythed like hoary chin.

Though once regarding looks were fashioned,
By evenings spent considering your face
I see, mind's eye upon a fictive tableaux,
A scorn I feel inside to be your mask.

Then once again I'm present, threshing moments
With flail, how can I ever have agreed
To this plot. My schemes brought to this final blush?
I fooled myself that love's promises were real.

You touched me once when evening's fire burned low,
A glancing blow, you gently brushed my hair.
And in that moment, if I could be frozen;
An ambered fly, I would stay ever still.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner

In The Combers

In the combers by the seaside,
rocky blasted busted rocks.
Ground hugging lichen likens

to

our daily white-fingered grip upon the shore,
limpets in the flora dripping.

On mineral outcrop broken daily by the waves,
we impotently view the plumes of freedom breathing.
Their force much too great to pleasure us here,
the poor insipid nature of their lost home.

Cows returned.

Once upon a day they slid back into the sea
and formed the whales which now roam the seas

and are smarter than we.

Once cows, I'm told, they no longer belong
on shore. Don't belong to us any more.

And yet we kill. Casting the harpoon for dogfood's
bleeding hump, oil reduced from blubber boiled, in
barrels to make eyeblush.

In the combers lost, in the catacombs of waves
we stand the shoreline watch and wish for flippered
freedom's song.

Where we don't belong.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner