IN POPPY FIELDS WHERE SUNLIGHT BEAMS

IN POPPY FIELDS WHERE SUNLIGHT BEAMS

My eyes are blurry, glassy even,
Starry-eyed with the vaunted promise of hope.

For nightmares melt to happy dreams,
In poppy fields where sunlight beams,
My life seen through the microscope.

The scope it catches everything, the fearless highs,
The loathsome ugly lows.
Each fiber and each tissue.
The epithelial, the adipose.

The worm of hate and jealousy,
It focuses its beam on those
And then just lets them go.
Into a land of hazy silence,
Of dearly remembered peace and quiet,
Far from the streets of violence,
My inner child takes his kite and flies it.

And maybe it indeed is God I see,
While levitating quietly.
It could be heaven’s nectar that I sip.
Perhaps it’s just the morphine drip.

But I am flying past the judges in their solemn black robes,
Swirling in a land past judgment, past politics and prose.
I am lost to happy, soon to be realized schemes,
And not my usual bucket list of strange and impossible dreams.
Lost in this lovely forest, where the woodsman hums
And his companion bluebird sings.
A psychedelic land of strange, shifting sands,
Where the hot and hazy sunlight beams.

Someone whose face I cannot see, throws his or her arms around me.
Perhaps my father, perhaps my mother, perhaps the Holy Trinity.
Yet everyone is kind to me, no one’s behind me honking at a red light,
Everything’s serenely green and uniformly bright.

My eyes are blurry, glassy even,
Yet I have to trust what they are telling me.
I cannot pretend to have witnessed heaven.
Or to have walked on the water of the stormy seas.

But something lives and must remain,
Once we slip this earthly frame.
I am telling you I know it’s peaceful,
I have held it in the corner of my mind’s eye.
I’m not afraid to slip away into that feathery, velvety sky.

And nightmares turn to happy dreams,
Starry-eyed with the promise of hope,
In poppy fields where sunlight beams.
My life seen through the microscope.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

IMPONDERABLE

IMPONDERABLE

Sometimes life is imponderable,
Skirting the edges of righteous rage.
Sometimes we wait in the afternoon shadows,
Pens without ink on a blank, empty page.

Sometimes our lives are slippery slopes,
Built on false, inflated hopes.
We ski before we take the course,
We take a tumble from the horse.

We rise to ride the rodeo,
Unprepared for the errant bow,
That flies from the quiver of reckless men,
We rise up just to fall again.

We do our best to pay our debts,
The doctors eat our souls alive,
We play the game and hedge our bets,
While their bill collectors thrive.

Imponderable is the oath they take,
First do no harm, the hypocrites.
Then bleed their sucker patients dry,
The cost is less if you quickly die.
But then they throw a holy fit,
Who‘s going to pay for all of this?

Sometimes life is imponderable,
With water rising every day.
And sometimes in our haste to try.
To rise above and touch the sky,
We drown alone in the rushing bay.
Covered with the stench of existent debris,
Flowing from the rebel factories.
And washing up on the distant shore,
Or killing fish on the ocean floor.

Sometimes life is imponderable,
No one cracks its ancient code,
There’s no safe harbor from the storm,
No harmless, warm abode.

Sometimes life is a renegade biker,
Shooting through the stop signs.
While those content to play by the rules,
Get lost or left behind.

Sometimes life is a prep school prick.
Posting Internet close ups of his dick.
A wild, malevolent Halloween trick.
A bully with a big iron fist,
A candle burning to the wick.

Sometimes life is imponderable.
The weight of the years unimaginable.
We are left feeling worried, lonesome, and scared,
Our tempers lost, our nostrils flared,
Flirting with the notion of righteous rage.
Pens without ink on a blank and empty page.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
All RIGHTS RESERVED

BE STILL AND LISTEN

BE STILL AND LISTEN

Be still and listen, a word to the wise,
You are nearer than you think to the pull of the prize,
The pot of gold where the rainbow sings,
The grand hallelujahs, the bells that softly ring.

Nearer each day, to laying down this tired sack of clay,
Nearer to the land where harps of angels play.
Nearer to the final intoxicating wine,
The final bacchanalia, the land of endless time.

The end game where there is mercy and nothing left to judge,
Goodbye to the bitterness, farewell to the grudge.
Nearer to a life well lived that parades before my eyes,
Eternity or nothingness, the final surprise.

Nearer to my dear mother who loved me evermore,
Nearer to the mysteries of what this life was for.
Nearer to redemption, sweet as the scent of the rose,
Be still and listen, where holy water flows,

Be still and listen to a night and day both filled with love,
A pillow as soft as a snow white dove,
A place to lay my head and dream sweet dreams forevermore,
Free from the spell of earthly hell,
And the agony of keeping score.

Nearer to the sound of the melodious horn,
Another day nearer for the lost and forlorn.
To lay their sharp and jagged burdens,
Down by the riverside.
To pick up their bed and to know for certain
The healing there in the Savior’s eyes.

Be still and listen to the penny tossed in the wishing well,
A miracle in the making, a truth yet to tell,
When the flag is unfurled to the end of the world,
The end of the lure of the mighty spell.

Be still and listen, for Arab and Muslim and Christian and Jew,
Are forgiven the hatred and violence they do.
Be still and listen, one to the other,
Formerly the enemy, now the cherished brother.

Be still and listen, for the glow of health glistens,
No more Parkinson’s, no more MS, no more the scourge of cancer,
There are no souls with bullet holes, there is peace and a final Answer.
Be still and listen, restored to the vigor of health,
Where rich and poor, they are no more, and at long last share the wealth.

Be still and listen, a word to the wise,
Be still and gravitate to the pull of the prize,
The rainbow of heaven where the pot of gold sings,
The grand hallelujahs where angels earn their wings.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED