Some Days

Some Days
By Brian Ernest Brown

Some days
Are better than others

Some days
You just want to hide under the covers

Some days
Surprise you with possibility

Some days
Just slap you into sensibility

Some days
Offer the promise of a new love

Some days
You'll make peace with loneliness in leiu of

Some days
You'll feast on a banquet of delight

Some days
You'll make do with what's in sight

Some days
Everything turns up roses

Some days
Everyone is turning up their noses

Some days
You'll feel happy and secure

Some days
You'll just simply have to demure

Some days
That's just life

Some days
Either harmony or maybe strife

5 Days of Eros Writing Challenge Day 1: Hunger

I've taken up a writing challenge with Fleassy Malay entitled:

#5DaysOfEros

Day 1
Hunger

"Eating Glass"

By Brian Ernest Brown

Sometimes I find myself eating glass in my dreams.

I feel an odd compulsion to take a bite and then another.

I watch horrified and yet transfixed at the very sight.

Wondering what the outcome might be.

My hunger for you is much the same as my dream of eating glass.

Deliciously alluring but most assuredly deadly.

And I intuitively know the outcome.

You would shred me from the inside out.

Even still, I ache with an insatiable craving for you.

Broken

"Broken"
By Brian Ernest Brown

You broke everything you touched
You broke everyone you touched
You had even broken yourself
Only I didn't yet know how badly

You broke cars
You broke glass
You broke dishes
You broke phones
You broke momentos
You broke furniture
You broke promises
You broke decency
You broke sobriety
You broke me for the first time

As time went by you broke others
You broke relationships
You broke hearts
You broke them
You broke trust
You broke jobs
You broke life
You broke her
You broke us

I should have known
You'd break me again
I should have known
You'd break me again

In my hubris
I thought I could
Unbreak you

In our breakup
You left me so broken
That I've lost my pieces
And I'm left less than whole

In your brokenness
You break anything and anyone
But it is you who is broken most
And I wonder if you can ever be whole

The real heartbreak is that
I'd risk breaking again
Just to help you
Put your pieces
Back together
If I could

The Indispensable Man or Splash All You Wish

The Indispensable Man
By Saxon White Kessinger

Sometime when you're feeling important;
Sometime when your ego's in bloom;
Sometime when you take it for granted,
You're the best qualified in the room:
Sometime when you feel that your going,
Would leave an unfillable hole,
Just follow these simple instructions, And see how they humble your soul.

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining,
Is a measure of how much you'll be missed.
You can splash all you wish when you enter,
You may stir up the water galore,
But stop, and you'll find that in no time, It looks quite the same as before.

The moral of this quaint example,
Is to do just the best that you can,
Be proud of yourself but remember, There's no indispensable man.

The Scribe in the Woods

The Scribe in the Woods

A hedge of trees surrounds me, a blackbird’s lay sings to me, praise I shall not conceal.

Above my lined book the trilling of the birds sings to me.

A clear-voiced cuckoo sings to me in a grey cloak from the tops of the bushes.

May the Lord save me from judgement; well do I write under the greenwood.

-Ninth Century, Old Irish

Writing Rock Talk

Writing Rock Talk

By Brian Ernest Brown
6 June 1991

The wind rocks
the trees to talk
as I sit on the rock
colored with chalk
of loves crock
now we talk...

She offers,
“let us write
of our plight
of what’s wrong and right
in a poets sight tonight.”

I think,
I can’t write
on command
putting together words that band
like pearls in a strand
that rhyme and make sense!

The Not Quite Dead Yet Poet’s Society
will eventually come to notoriety
some may call this piety
I call it Writing Rock Talk!

After the Dinner Party

After the Dinner Party
By Robert Penn Warren

You two sit at the table late, each, now and then,
Twirling a near-empty wine glass to watch the last red
Liquid climb up the crystalline spin to the last moment when
Centrifugality fails: with nothing now said.

What is left to say when the last logs sag and wink?
The dark outside is streaked with the casual snowflake
Of winter's demise, all guests long gone home, and you think
Of others who never again can come to partake

Of food, wine, laughter, and philosophy --
Though tonight one guest has quoted a killing phrase we owe
To a lost one whose grin, in eternal atrophy,
Now in dark celebrates some last unworded jest none can know.

Now a chair scrapes, sudden, on tiles, and one of you
Moves soundless, as in hypnotic certainty,
The length of table. Stands there a moment or two,
Then sits, reaches out a hand, open and empty.

How long it seems till a hand finds that hand there laid,
While ash, still glowing, crumbles, and silence is such
That the crumbling of ash is audible. Now naught's left unsaid
Of the old heart-concerns, the last, tonight, which

Had been of the absent children, whose bright gaze
Over-arches the future's horizon, in the mist of your prayers.
The last log is black, while ash beneath displays
No last glow. You snuff candles. Soon the old stairs

Will creak with your grave and synchronized tread as each mounts
To a briefness of light, then true weight of darkness, and then
That heart-dimness in which neither joy nor sorrow counts.
Even so, one hand gropes out for another, again.