Things Are Not What They Seem

THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM

Things are not what they seem
Appearances are fabricated just as easily as poor
Mummers costume & make-up as queens and kings.

Things are not what they seem
An old deceit is on the make, the all too human default
too much likes to climb the cock's dunghill and sing.

Things are not what they seem
The mirror displays only reversals, the opposite is true
as a barbed lure glitters, as a baited fishhook swings.

Things are not what they seem
The seeming is the very trap set for green and naïve hunters
as the mother duck wrong-flies on her broken wing.

Things are not what they seem
Seeming is not the thing. Seeming is all too often
only seeming. Seeming is the sport of living things.

Things are not what they seem.


* * *
6th February 2015 - WDK

In the watches of the night

IN THE WATCHES OF LAST NIGHT

In the watches of that very last night
small thumps came from the rooftops
as small furry animals, still or hurried for
their own reasons and in their creaturely
right took over the place like an occupation.

It is just as if all our dire concerns that night
were as nothing at all, fourlegs sat and took
their own mean time, or scurried in the quick
of the aged moonlight as if their spectacles
were glazed with light fully needless of news.

-4th Feb 2015 WDK

The road is pause

THE ROAD IS PAUSE

A road gone mute is a pause as traffic
ceases far out beyond where icons of it go;
a common road now most empty as folks hurry
to stay near to where love or habit answers,
and back! as a road is pause in the traffic rattling
by like death, like hungry death on the make, on the take
as if it has a go away clause in its contract, its mission
to crash the bright lights, to flash on and off for code, gone;
gone, gone then binary stars give back their old look-out
in light shot out like cars on an astral highway
that keeps a going on and on, off, off forever
where final love or rote childhood will answer.


5th Feb 2015 - WDK

What's new in Kiev?

WHAT"S NEW IN KIEV ?


As they do
as if it was yesterday,
a Greek writes today:

"Basil II purposed
to give his sister
Princess Anna Porphyrogenita
as a bride
to the king of the Rus
Vladimir because
he wanted his help
to face the two usurpers
of the throne, Vardas Fokas
and Vardas Skliros.

From Kiev,
Vladimir sent
the Varangian guard of about 6,000
to Byzantium,
and Basil II
won the civil war.

After that time
the Varangians
took pride
of place as
the personal guard
of the emperor."

* * *

5th Feb 2015 WDK

Princess Anna Porphyrogenita. Daughter of Emperor Romanos II and the Empress Theophano. She was also the sister of Emperor Basil II and Grand Princess of Kievan Rus (989–1011)

THE NEXT TEXT

The text truth

Your next text
might lose you your licence,
as you lose your life.

THE NEXT TEXT

The next text
might lose you your licence,
as you lose your life.

REST NOT IN PEACE

REST NOT IN PEACE

Offspring, word: hatch here, take flight, grow devote
Rise of ashes in sackclothed backbone from the mud
For freedom's sake in goodness reject all that's base.

Let me not like father Abel be so casually Cain-smote
Nor see this decried word diluted in any moment's flood
But let abiding light shine out in its every true trace

As the patriarch, our father Job of holy legend wrote*
O earth, cover not thou this pain, this hope, my blood,
And let my cry have no resting place.


* * *
28 Jan 2015 WDK - (* Book of Job 16: 18)