The Rapscallion

Misericords

of champagne

vessels

Pungent echoes

from monaural

stutters

That rapscallion

cared not for virtue

nor the rules he must obey

To him, they were 

merely hobbies

Games he chose to play

Dutiful Bones

Manicdaily is hosting Poetics tonight over at D'Verse.  Tonights prompt is to write about duty, obligations etc.. Head there to see the great poetry linked up tonight, and while you're there, how about taking a stab at the prompt yourself.  Cheers.

Distancing the gap created
by lost vestiges and saltine
goodbyes, I must say, are
words that I simply allowed
slip from tongue to page.

Transient digressions into
dark and tattered ventricles,
I feel as if I deny this
journey more often than
naught.  For fear, perhaps
I allow the sinew to entangle
and to clot.

Saracens and poets, salesmen
and thieves.  Liars and bigots,
parrots and queens.  Lower-cased
opinions, divided amongst
grandiose ideas that will never
pass the eyeball test….yet
time fades quickly, and we stare
and stare, for ways…

Approaching the chambers of
wind and steel.  Dancing with
zealots and laughing with fools.
Caricatures aren't we all, of not our-
selves than tell me whom?

Chagrined impressions done
with pen in hand.  Sincerity
lost in terrain we've no business
upon.  Or do we?

Isn't the air free to breathe?
Last time I checked it certainly
was….there I checked again,
and perhaps you were right,
there's something in the wind.

A line of prosperity is often not a line at all
An area of magnitude is often very small
Sailboats and augers both
set for the unknown
in spite of what may be
buried
deep
within
the stains we
see

Dutiful bones, unearthed, to dust...

They say to write for twenty minutes
they say not to lift the pen, er. fingers,

They say not to filter
they say not to punctuate
or to worry about spelling.

But if, I chose to do as they instruct me to,
there would be so many dissected sentences,
so many foreign words scattered about the
page.

If I chose to obey their wisdom, surreal
architecture of a journey would not be all
that unwinds…for when I dream, which of
course, I'm a poet, so I do it all the time…

You'd find love, freely anointing most the page…
not that there's anything wrong with love
not saying that at all
but last thing
anyone wants to read
is advice from
one who
never takes
any himself.

So now I'll sing the songs I hear
as they scrawl about the air..
right now, it's Nine Inch Nails
slowly speaking of elaborate
dreams…in a song called right
where it belongs, which, now
as I reflect…is as perfect as a song can get...

darn it all to someplace hot, the
stopwatch chimes it's note, but done I'm not

Okay, I'll cheat, just don't tell anybody…you promise…
ok, I'll quietly finish
by saying, in regards to duty…

I do this for you but
mainly I do this all for me…

The 325 Rules you thought you never knew you didn't need to ever know

The first rule inherent to a properly working windmill

Two rules inherent to organizing chop-sticks

Three rules inherent to gardening scarabs from underneath molehills

Four rules inherent to disguising your dog as a tadpole on the thirty-second hour of the thirty-second day

Five rules inherent to indefensible paranoia

Seven rules inherent to those seeking a higher

Eight rules inherent to Stab-In-The-Back Wisdom

Nine rules inherent to Shark-Tank Sympathy

Ten rules inherent to remaining invisible while caught in a deluge of acid rain

Eleven rules inherent to universal clarity

Twelve rules inherent to bleeding fire from the coldest heart

Thirteen rules inherent to becoming a hitman in an organization so infamous that card sharks commiserate with clerics, pedophiles with politicians and where administrators of higher education facilitate just as much energy, on what’s possibly included in the ice cream truck salesman’s secret recipe for fudge freezy#3, as they do when one of their most promising pupils declares openly on her facebook account that she’s decided to drop out of school due to the fact that her twelve year old neighbor just made a billion dollars selling cigarette butts on e-bay.

Fourteen rules inherent to making contact with whomever answers the call

Fifteen rules inherent to watching the men who stare at goats without asking yourself what’s the point

Sixteen rules inherent to apologizing to the fine actors within the previously written rule while holding a wearing a piñata suit in the backyard of a rather large Christmas celebration composed of an uncountable number of Chihuahuan children.

Seventeen rules inherent to breaking up with your pet rock

Eighteen rules inherent to seeing phenomenon in every and all circumstances related to telekinetic memory loss and big stuffed yellow birds won fairly at the not-so-local amusement park

Nineteen rules inherent to disassembling an already disassembled automaton that got overheated during an unwinnable debate with a forklift over the value of accepting a million crates of oil in lieu of the million dollars that could be had by winning the then current lottery jackpot

Twenty rules inherent to standard deviation when the squares just cannot, under any circumstances, find it in them to be mean

Twenty-one rules inherent to eating three Quadruple cheeseburgers with bacon stuffed buns, without ever having to move your lips

Twenty-two rules inherent to becoming a bookie that specializes in giving odds on the National Paint Drying League championships

 Twenty-three rules inherent to losing one’s mind and then finding it, only to lose it once more

Twenty-four rules inherent to documenting the fallacies of gossips years after the rumors had been forgotten

Twenty-five rules inherent to thinking up some really stupid ideas, making rules out of them and getting people to read them

Destiny

Destiny is desperate for attention

It likes to rub our noses in the predictions, the failures we are all too familiar with,

Those we recognize, much too effortlessly, as the consequence of our limitations

It appreciates the wind and breeze,

The aural quality to a storm filled summers’ night,

The sounds comfort spells to children stirred in fright

Beyond designation, sexless and inherently correct, destiny is a classification unto itself,

It loves the delicate nature of creation,

How a simple greeting planted in one’s ear

Can steer a conversation

Dictate a lifetime to follow

For good or worse

The experiments it plays on us,

Are always unrehearsed,

It is neither from darkness nor from light

Just a figure ever present, burning bright,

Guiding, leading, beginning, ending,

All creatures, great and small, are pawns and pieces

In the never ending game it plays, awake or sleep,

Wrong or right, it changes the rules of the fight,

Altering the strategies, adding and removing, integrating the challenges,

That test the will of man, obstacles he must overcome, in order to survive,

It endlessly monitors, every thought, every action, in this confusion each of us play