Phonometrician

                                                        

                                                 The brilliance of sound   
                                                 appease in acoustic echoes,
                                                 one glorious reverberate susurrus
                                                 with a rhythmic splash 
                                                 careen through each ear;
                                                 subtle timbres accentuate
                                                 and distinguish each crescendo, 
                                                 nonpareil only to Solomon's chord
                                                 who invoked heavenly splendor;
                                                 yet, Erik Satie gravitates this serene spell
                                                 from the depths of magnanimity,
                                                 his suites play in absolute serenading 
                                                 unison between my mind and his genius. 

                                                   -  John Hardesty 
                                                 

War Hounds

                                                     

                        The empty plasma of overridden bromides
                        colors the milestone in black;
                        fording pass the crumbled maze
                        and compendious restrained impulse
                        comes brutish resentment,
                        where conspiring rivals compete
                        in camisade and strappado;
                        vernal battery from adolescent minds
                        for whom forego canon for entropy--
                        encroached, broken, and tattered hearts
                        the swells of youth,
                        malapert and malaised egoism 
                        contest for love, where 
                        invidious blows soon conquer 
                        the weaker foe, looking back
                        savagery always wins over acumen. 


                       -   John Hardesty 

    

Fugue Of Innocence

                                                   

                                             The drolls of ambivalence
                                             and conditional fear
                                             mackle all self-embattlement;
                                             infinite vacancy and lucid guilt
                                             gloom like marcid memories,
                                             Eros, you marksman of love
                                             that place pennants upon thy prey,
                                             haunt still, in the most peculiar storm
                                             like peregrine thoughts
                                             that visit without welcoming,
                                             they plunge like mercurial keepsakes,
                                             for these endless and justified whists
                                             erode like cancer that enumerate and
                                             emblazon our sacred time together. 


                                             * This beautiful gal I once dated was killed
                                                in a car wreck years ago, and she visits me
                                                from time to time. 

                                                    - John Hardesty  

Silly Puddy

                                                    


      The smug billionaire marched high and almighty to sit in the front pew,
      But, just remember when you're six feet under, you'll be forever out of God's view,
      Doesn't matter if you're in a hut, house, lair, tent, wickiup, mansion, or igloo,
      God will find and make his last judgment on you. 


              - John Hardesty 

Photisms

                                                            

                    When sensorial automatism inflict its wound,
                    the detachment of normality
                    eclipses into an accessible surrealistic trance;
                    where divinity separates from the demonic,
                    and sparing stability of consciousness drifts
                    close to transcendentality, 
                    where prophets, shamans, and seers
                    open this lucid world beyond the present;
                    St Paul, Joan of Arc, and Nostradamus envisioned
                    astounding apparitions of wonder and woe;
                    Constantine's cross appeared in the sky, 
                    and lit the pathway to Christianity, and bloodthirsty 
                    zealots have waged an onslaught of continuing wars 
                    over the past several millennia ever since, and all glorified
                    by some madman's insane manifestations, that now
                    modern medicine, colleagues of science, and 
                    any doctor practicing would have had the seer
                    admitted to an insane asylum. 
                    
                        -   John Hardesty 
                     
                    

Timeline Of A Buck

                                                         Timeline Of A Buck


                                         A buck in his first year is called a fawn,
                                         A buck in his second year is called a pricket,
                                         A buck in his third year is called a sorrel,
                                         A buck in his fourth year is called a sore,
                                         A buck in his fifth year is usually shot dead. 

Hill Of Despair

                                                     

Sojourn into history: Rome...
a hill of misery placed by Roman Law,
now, stands a mound as black as Golgotha's curse,
and splattered with tiny bones;
swathe the disfigured newborn,
away from cuddled arms,
indefensible, bade the young couplet,
bleeding in plashed despair and guilt,
beggars to the Patrician's apathetic heart;
helplessly, they watch with eyes of disclosure,
the hill of tears, this piteous dwelling of
the murderous scene, as an unflinching Centurion
armed with an indomitable sword with no remorse
beheads the deformed innocent infant;
the new master Roman Law
enacts symbolic truth among savages, for
preservation and grace to an inviolable race. 

- John Hardesty 

Suicide's Black

                                                         

Youth's spring of enlightened green,
accompanied by the twins, callow yellow
and disrespectable red, running blindly 
into the golden dawn of promise,
heads emptied as their leather wallets,
expressionless as white on a blank sheet of
paper and eloquently versed as a spitting cobra;
often egregiously in wanting, yet getting nothing,
oh, the dagger of discontentment cuts you down
without leaving a mark, mentally stabbing
you for life, now beryl-skies are raining again,
so you run to the nearest bottle of pills and whiskey
hiding away the age of failure, thwarted dreams,
blackest of all holes and you and you alone are the 
servant of this misery, subdued by disappointment,
for it was so easy to pluck the forbidden fruit upon
the sacred ground, though far too much an effort to
reach the unattainable fruit, so you take the clemency
and godforsaken route, the sanctimonious and 
prohibitive narrow exit and kill the Godhead.

- John Hardesty 

For all the suicide victims and families.

Alms

                                                                  Alms


     One who gives to charity without hesitation serves humanity incessantly but, one who donates to be reconciled for reward only serves himself. 

                                                                                           

                                                                                      - John Hardesty 

Lust(Cinquain)

                                                              Lust(Cinquain)
                                                      
                                                                 Love in 
                                                             the afternoon
                                                makes women blush with shame
                                              where virtue's temperance oft fails
                                                              men rise.

                                                            - John Hardesty 

The Golden Ram

                                                  

   

When winter hibernates through the solstice of time,
stalled in the stacked depression of ice and snow,
the wise ram climbs deeper up the frozen jokul 
awaiting in the hidden windblast,
white covers the stormy backdrop
while never flinching or startled by the mass
of uncertainty, the marvel breed clings to the 
jagged cliff as an artful cragsman,
repelling with mercurial hooves,
snorting and evasive as Silenus,
the bearded sage renders in dead isolation 
tucked upon the crown of the world;
warmed only by the toga of evolution 
his fleece trademarks his identity,
for he is the golden ram. 

by John Hardesty 

Not A Poem(Obsolete Note to thyself)

     The Oscar-winning director Clint Eastwood stole all his early cowboy moves from Italian and American actor Terence Hill in Hill's movie Django, Prepare A Coffin(1968), he stole Hill's genre, image, et al. Addendum: in the movie Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood even stole the gun trick of the barrel flipping from Hill, and Hill's trademark cigar in mouth and Terence Hill was an Italian star long before Eastwood became famous; Hill personalized the Spaghetti Western, not Eastwood. 

Harmonia Mundi

                                               

          A lucky number, a date, an hour,
          A log, a figure, and all that shall transpire;
          Luckiest number of all numbers, seven,
          Possibly God on the seventh day created Heaven;
          Yet, four is the number of evil,
          Lest we forget, six-six-six marks the devil;
          Number eight, the sign of infinity, 
          Whereas three, the mystery of Trinity;
          Of all the numbers in between, 
          There's no unluckier number than thirteen;
          Number one is the sign of a hero,
          Though nothing's ever gained by zero;
          Ten deserves two digits to make even,
          While adding a digit makes eleven; 
          The number five counts the hands and toes,
          The number nine makes a baseball team whole;
          The greatest number is one-hundred, you see,
          Times a thousand, you have plenty.   

              - John Hardesty 

To Life And Death

                                                      

                                                Ode to summer's past
                                                And her magical sunlit days
                                                That warmed all creatures 
                                                And wrought life to all plants,
                                                Our true God will always be the Sun,
                                                The caregiver of our existence, 
                                                And nurturer of all that is good;
                                                Remembering and loathing shades of gray,
                                                The burnt decaying leaf,
                                                A page from a tree,
                                                Ripped from an aging oak,
                                                To waft unto the air one last time,
                                                And eternally bed and sacrifice itself
                                                Upon the burial grounds, 
                                                For we all are rotting matter
                                                Abiding our allotted time
                                                To help fertilize another seed,
                                                Out of dystrophy comes entropy. 

                                                     - John Hardesty 
                                                
                                                
                                        
                                                

Space Force Huh?

     Trump wants to be the first and last president to plant a 'swastika flag on the moon.'

Melancholy's Chain

                                              


When the crash of morning wrecks into the day,
and the sun forgets to shine, heaps of sadness
headlines the fraught of misery,
contentment's desertion cleaves what's
left of the day, for nature's nihil debet 
to an explanation why she forgot to 
squander her sparing sunlight through 
your inconsolable window;
there's no admonition for sorrow's knock,
she enters always without a warrant, 
barges in your psyche like some burrowing
nefarious worm and there she finds refuge in your
discontentment, though one sunlight of
a gleaming beam will render reprieve from 
her bonds and you run into the light
honoring this radiance that subdues this
sufferance for another day. 

by John Hardesty 

Exiled

                                                              

To be banished from one's union
And disgraced from communion,
To be consigned to desolation
Forever confined to isolation.

Poor Napoleon was expelled to an isle,
Chaperoned in complete denial,
There on Elba, he reached anarchy,
Constrained in a silent hierarchy. 

Upon an atoll in isolation,
An epic named, Revelation,
Written in brilliant pathos,
By the great seer, John of Patmos.

Dante was reputed as the greatest to clasp a pen,
His Divine Comedy lives again,
During his last twenty years, fifty moons shone in exile,
Before his death, his masterpiece was compiled.

O Aristotle who deceived philosophy, 
Mocked Socrates and marveled at Plato's hypocrisy, 
Tutored the Great Alexander as pillars clocked,
The fable fell upon Chalcis but chose instead hemlock.

To be banished from one's union,
And disgraced from communion, 
To be consigned to desolation,
Forever confined to isolation.

By John Hardesty 

Brain Rot(Alzheimer's)

                                               

She sits alone in her wheelchair
staring out the window
in her lonely conclave;
her dysfunction concealed beneath
a dispiriting impenetrable trance,
as she shares this small denizen
with her imaginary friends of endless prattle,
her rambling brays and dissociative fugue
amuse the scattering ghosts;
for her once calculative mind
could compute in an instant what now
is a tottering chore,
her encomium of memories float
upon a fogged pane of glass,
forever wiped from her conscience, now
she calls me Frank each visit that's 
not even close to my baptismal name, but we
laugh together like it's an inside joke shared between
two old friends, and as I depart from this psych ward each day
I leave her to extricate her private soliloquies. 
- John Hardesty

Random Political Thought

If America doesn't find another Teddy Roosevelt very soon, America will become an annexation of Russian Oligarchy! 

Crazy True Facts

Crazy Facts: Cats were once tried to deliver mail by the Belgian city of Liege, but they proved to be unreliable-so typical of cats. In the 19th century, German towns used cows to haul mail wagons. In Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in the USA, camels were used. In Russia and Scandinavia, reindeer pulled mail sleighs. 

          Fact Corner: Fluorine(F) with an Element Electronegativity of 4.0,
                                 Oxygen(O) of 4.0, and Helium(He) of 4.0, all 
                                  in the Pauling scale, the "largest." Caesium(Cs) is

                                  the lowest with an Element Electronegativity of 0.79. 

Immortality Through A Dead Shell

                                       

                              Science many times overwhelm the oppressed fool,

                              he reads and extols upon one book, The Holy Bible

                              and there's where his sophistry ends;

                              he perceives one notion of artlessness and that man's

                              born into immortality from a godless shell is one

                              preposterous and imbecilic thought of ambiguous hyperbole,

                              for man's hierarchy of endless devotion to an ancient

                              paganistic equinox has evolved into some man-to-god

                              contract for an everlasting life is laughable if not one

                              divine interminable joke, and yes, life's filled with 

                              complexity beyond our compliant minds, but until 

                              mankind escapes from our own galaxy and confirm

                              we are all alone, and no other blueprint for life exists,

                              is just ruthless misanthropy; 

                              yet, religion expand their constraint of austerity,

                              chaining man to an affixed sorcery and man will kill

                              for them for that lifeless lie, there's no poetry in dying

                              for a fictional fable. 

                                                         -John Hardesty