The Forge

Immolation, Ashes, and Rebirth - A Poetry Manifesto

2009-04-27T18:35:00.004-06:00

Two Pirate Lords

2009-03-16T16:17:00.001-06:00

There once was a Scandanavian, a Viking he was
Scourge of the Saskatchewan, fear's cause

His heart grew cold, cold as ice
No mercy or pity, only greed would suffice

He grew tired of raiding the poor grain barge
And decided to roam the sea at large

Across the seven seas his shadow spread
With fearful rumor and tale dread

Till last his reputation reached the shore
Of the lost continent of mysterious lore

There lived a terrible pirate queen
Who loved most the doubloon's sheen

Upon hearing of this upstart Viking
She declared, "This is none to my liking

There's no room on this cruel sea
For two pirate lords such as we"

Her aspect was fearsome and uncommon grim
Yet as beautiful as a old haunting hymn

She sat and honed two cutlass' quick
And with a flash, sheathed them, snickety-snick

"On the high seas, I shall meet this upstart,
And skewer him with my swords through the heart!"

She boarded her bark, the Black Medusa
And sought out the Viking, his presence, anathema

Far and wide the Black Medusa would range
Across waves untouched and wondrous strange

Until the Norseman she caught
And in her trap was the prey she sought

With the wind on her side
His Norse boat had no cove to hide

Her fierce cannon unleashed a full broadside
And for the first time, the Viking's mouth dried

The blast of these guns did sear
His cold icicle heart with fear

The pirate queen grin a fey grin
"Throw out the grapples, bring the buggers in!"

Her murderous crew pulled the boat over
A thunderous game of maritime red rover

She grabbed a line and swing over to board
"Where are you, you bilge rat," she roared

The Viking, who'd felt his 1st taste of fear,
Trembled seeing its source so near,

But drew his saber to face his foe
Sparks soon fell on the decks of ruin and woe

Full hurricanes could not contend
With the force that theses swords did rend

Until with a twist of the wrist the saber flew
And his fate, cold and grim, the Viking knew

As he looked in the face of his conquerer
A most curious thing did occur

His hoary frosted heart began to melt
His feelings, sharp and dark became soft as felt

"At least I shall die seeing Paradise
And not waves sweeping over, cold as ice"

And seeing her foes strange wonder
And heart feeling a furious thunder

She said "rise my old enemy
Today is a day of my clemency,

And together we shall rule the great blue sea!"

Wordpress or Blogger?

2009-03-15T16:33:00.003-06:00

Lately, I've been experimenting with page design to figure out what fits me best

Here's the wordpress version of this site: http://forgepoetry.wordpress.com/

Let me know what you think!

Crash

2009-03-14T15:20:00.003-06:00

Words meet in thunderous impact, a sonic cacophonic attack,
jack-knifing through your eardrums, rumbling through your chest,
and you anticipate the rest with bated breath.

It's an 18 syllable pileup but it's no accident.
It's a poetic axe - hellbent on smashing a rent through the fabric of a complacent mind.

You hear that?
It's the basso boom of the gasoline tank of the tongue going up in stereophonic flames.
The concussive force of this ballad's blast breaks through the barricade of boredom

It crashes through glass windshields of mass ignorance,
And shards of shining syntax penetrate the cerebrum
And here there are no airbags of empty MTV soundbites,
No cushion of cotton-candy cable tv,
No pablum opiates of over-produced American Idols pandering panaceas to bleeding ears
No seatbelt that will save you from the sibilant soundwaves that meet in destructive interference
No, there is nothing to protect you from this incoming contact that creates a craters out of chests

And now your mind is a wreck that needs to be checked over
by the paramedics of prose who apply bandages of passionate poetry,
sutures of sincere sentences
They perform CPR of rhythm and beat,
flailing the chest and ribs creak with its marvelous movement and meter,
It's a Mouth-to-mouth of Milton, Mary Shelley or some Margaret Atwood
It's First aid of Faust and they're pushing in an IV of iambic pentameter,
Quick! you need 10ccs of Tennyson, or some epinephrine of the epic that Eliot wrote.

They're rushing you to the hospital in an ambulance of alliteration
You're in the ER of Emerson
And the doctors of diction are working feverishly to stop the flatlining of the imagination
Because it's just been in a car crash of creative force

It Has Begun

2009-03-14T14:41:00.001-06:00

A few months ago, I started to brainstorm a second web project that would focus solely on my poetry. Since then, I've been writing, but not online. I've been compiling ideas, putting pen to paper for poetry and essays for class, but nothing on the web

Until today.

So, here we go! I have big dreams for the website, and ideally this will become the online repository for all my oeuvre... and perhaps some gold.

Welcome to the Forge

Headshot

2008-10-27T14:37:00.000-06:00

Fingers tense in sudden excitement
Palms sweaty, a shallow breath
Held in eager anticipation
BOOM Headshot!
A wicked, glorious glee
And a foe defeated, a player pwned
Bloodlust captured, transformed,
Ameliorated
The gritty pixel, a battlefield of bytes
There are new heroes, new laurels
of respect, cred, and cool
And they are but a construct
An achievement is a tick on a screen

A bloody warrior, avatar of grim justice
ripped now from myth and legend, made
Alive to hew at the ephemeral
seething flanks of an imagined enemy
A boyhood imagination's playground
Transmogrified into half-reality
Power lies in the controller, the flick of a
thumbstick, and a thought commands armies
fleets, a KO, a Superbowl victory
The nectar of triumph, a sweet drought
to a thirsty imagination trapped
in a dull and pallid existence
Where there is no war to win
No fight against desperate odds
or a clarion call to courage

Coffee

2008-09-26T14:51:00.000-06:00

The black grind, the black rind

Dark as coal, Dark as kohl

Sinful and bitter as a cynic suckled on the

Fruit of a burnt scorched earth

The smell, the smell, oh gods, the smell,

A siren, a siren, and I give in.

My mouth, My mouth, the oil seeps in

A Styxian ambrosia

Ghetto Farm Kid

2008-09-26T14:29:00.000-06:00

I'm a ghetto farm kid, trapped amid the bustle and noise

Of an urbanity, the hard press of humanity

where I have no choice but to breathe its gasoline fumes,

so different than the smell of diesel,

Wheat, and the hard honest sweat that you get

when your sweeping a bin, or pitching the hay in

On a hot heavy day

I was never meant to be a farmer, to my parents dismay

My course lay instead, in literature, fantasy, the books I had read

They inspired me, widened me, and taught

My mind to ignore the simplicity what lay around

Sowing the ground, the beautiful haunting sound of

A chinook wind, or the sight of hawks hunting in the fields

where the harvest is coming in

And the row of combines marching in the lines

Of swath on a land like quilted cloth

With swatches of green and gold, a pageantry

As old as Cain, who was the first to put hand to the plough

look up at the sky and curse it for its lack of rain

I wanted something more than the duties of the farm chore,

I swore, I would travel, experience more

than the vista of a plain Albertan plain.

I wanted to imbibe the foreign sights and sounds of something other than my tribe

Learn the tongue from the young of another place, chase down and face the

Desire to flee my own space, hearth and home

My feet were itchy, you see?

I scratched that itch, and set them free on a plane trip to Germany

I lived in Berlin, away from my kin, in an city so new and fresh

To my eyes, there was no disguise-ing my newfound love and care

For this city of the Bear

It had an atmosphere, you veritably sense it in the air,

In the clothes that my peers would wear, the mohawk hair

Or the red handkerchief slung round the neck

hung like a flag ready at the beck

And call of a protest at the Berlin Wall

Which had its fall not too long ago at all

You could feel the history in this city,

Sketched underneath the skin of the graffiti tag

Feel it as you touched bullet holes in the Reichstag

From a World War where they exchanged

One dictator for years of cold slow conflict that raged

In this city divided between East and West

You can see it echoed in eyes, hear it in the chest

Of a people who are charged with: Lest WE forget

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Arbeit Macht Frei

You can see it echoed in the eyes

The memories of a people who let the Jews die

But there was a willingness to engage, from the people my age,

In questions political, rhetorical, and cultural,

There was a thirst for debate, a desire to create

A dialogue of mind and thought, a language fraught with

The willingness to encompass more than the limits of

of theology, nationality, and blind ideology

They taught me that it was ok to open my mind

to find conversation late at night in a coffee shop

Open far past the hour of closing

and well on the way to first light

I met the Prof, a man with salt and pepper hair,

Grizzled but with a statesman air,

He used to be an Anglican priest, ordained,

But found he was chained to the bedside

Of the old, and sought to find inside a faith that had died

So he came back to teach English to the senior high,

And to me, this English speaking guy,

A irony I saw and met with a grin, wry

He challenged my concepts, the hardened precepts

of a narrow neo-conservatism, airtight faith, trapped in the chasm

Of propaganda, and as he saw it - Indoctrination,

Opening the mind from the culture I lived in

I had to make the point, No... I'm not an American

So you see, it was trip whose taste left me thirsty

For really good coffee and a company that delights

In the verbal spar, the conversation that ranges wide and far

From the plebeian woes of a city that has no personality

as far as personality goes

It was a good trip for this ghetto farm kid

Spring

2008-03-03T03:27:00.000-07:00

Time passes and hope springs eternal
Leaves bud, ready to burst
There's a feeling in this cold, near-spring air
That brings back memories of summer's fragrance
And the promise of verdant warm days
The cusp of change approaches
And summer threatens to spill over
Heralding its journey with the bird's call
And sweet southern winds
That lie around one's neck
Like hearth-warmed mantle

A little something pastoral to change the mood, eh?

Mirage

2008-03-03T03:20:00.000-07:00

Ah Love, I languish at the thought of thee
The ghost of your embrace haunts me
For I have never known your touch
Instead Your spectre follows me
And mocks me
Are you dead?
Or is the whisper I hear
But an echo on the wind,
A moment's idle imagination
Or the distant discourse of lovers
In some hidden glen
The like I have not known or seen
Or felt the soft crush of grass
And Your voice murmuring in my ear
Such like is not mine to have or share

Mix this with two parts angst and one part loneliness. Much inspired by Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther."

Compulsion

2008-03-03T03:13:00.000-07:00

Desire's voice drives nails
Of madness into my head
That yearns only for rest
From this fearful enchanted slumber
To wake from this unholy consciousness
It does not stop, pushing me further
Into the valley of its longing
Like water spilling over the cliff
Of suicidal sickened love
It's empty whispers tell me tales
Of satisfaction and gratified wishes
Of hypnotizing dreams and fantasie
That one can wake to
Desire's mirage leads me
Stumbling to false oasis'
In this desert of my life
Thirsty for the springs of companionship
Its whispers turn to sand and dust
Widening the hollow inside my chest
And withering away the face of reason
Till I turn away from its chapped
And blistered visage
Into the wide maw of the howling gale

Solitaire

2008-03-03T03:12:00.000-07:00

Love is absent
Mere glimmers of a fool's gold
Dreams rail, chained and pent
And my arms have nothing to hold

Flint

2008-03-03T03:09:00.000-07:00

The spark waits to be struck
Of inspiration and blind luck
The mind calls to be lit
By the gift of Perseus, illicit
This hearth is damp, spoiled and spare
And chilled by a lonely wintry air
Throw open the shutters and let in the light!
Too often closed by some imagined night
Stoke the dimly glowing coal
Think phœnix, mind! Soar like a kite