This book is available in print from OddBrain Press
Of Aging Angst
Poetry by Albert de Lorenzo
SmashWords Edition One
Published by OddBrain Press on SmashWords
OddBrain Press
PO Box 2045
Leicester, NC 28748
Copyright (C) 2009 by Albert de Lorenzo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles
and reviews.
Of Aging Angst
Poetry by Albert de Lorenzo
Cover Art by Albert de Lorenzo
ISBN 978-0-9762258-1-2
Dedicated to
Sharon Anne McCollum
ContentsPage
And Runs Across the Page
Poetic Alchemists
In Your Honor
Oh My Fearless Muse
Trimmed to Pieces
Eye of the Poem
I Sit Naked
In the Stillness
An Island in Time
Disciple of the Absurd
The Moss of Time
Time Ebbs and Flows
Echoes Off the Wall
Whence We Came
Silence, Blessed Silence
Event Horizon
The Shore of Infinity
Only Memories
Unusual Charm
Jigsaw Heart
Callous Poet
Like a Bottle Thrown to Sea
Of Aging Angst
Disquieting Stranger
Poet Junkie
Why
Innocent Strangers
Revealing Truth
His Sandals Scuff Softly
Preconceived Notions
Long Slender Fingers
The Cats and Dogs are Content
Cat Poems
Thunder Storm
A Lazy Afternoon
Scarecrow’s Lament
What a Day
Footprints
Mental Floss
My Wounded Soul
Legless, Wingless Souls
Garden of Eden
Gates of Hell
Holy Thursday
They Are Calling
The Cat and Grasshopper
Plague of Self-Doubt
Dead End
Truth
Nothing
Suicide Poet
Carry Me Home
Across the Street Watching
Discarded Poetry
Crumpled Ball Poem
Spiffied Up Muse
Poem Sprouts
I’m Ninety Now
Moon Landing
To Be Free
Poetry Sweatshop
Baby Ants
Leery Creatures
Stratified Stanzas
Alpha and Omega
The Abandoned House
In This Heated House
This Ancient Holy Place
Some Nights
With My Passing
Shadow Boxing
And Runs Across the Page
A poet picks up his quill,
dips it into an inkpot,
hovers over the page
and sighs deeply.
Time passes slowly,
its tale told my shadows
flowing cloud like
from dawn till dusk.
Gravity gently pulls
at the quill’s tip
until an ink drop
spills like a tear.
Poetic Alchemist
Writers, Wordsmiths,
bring denotative meanings
you alchemist poets.
Bring connotative meanings,
eccentricities of words,
literary compounds of
concentrated language artfully mixed,
transmitting human perceptions
across space and time.
Poetry is like liquid metal,
in constant flux,
never solid,
always co-evolving,
a living creature,
human expression at its finest.
Pity time flows in only one direction.
I want to read, feel, taste, even smell poetry
written three hundred years in the future.
Poetry is alchemy.
In Your Honor
I have graduated
from your school
of hard knocks
with honors.
As a runaway youth
I slept dirty and cold
in the bushes
beneath your window.
As a young offender
I took your beatings
of ignorance from
inmates and guards alike.
As an uneducated worker
I shoveled your shit
for most of my life
so you wouldn’t have to.
Now, I write your poetry.
Oh My Fearless Muse
Oh my fearless Muse,
slice my psych deeply with
your obsidian edged words,
until my twisted brain bleeds
the essence of my strife
upon this page of life.
Open the arteries and veins
of my subconscious dreams,
flay them on the altar of art,
offering the juiciest bits
to those misguided souls
that relish my work.
I willingly open myself to you,
feast upon me with beak and talon,
tear out my love, rip out my hate,
unravel the tendrils of my fears,
pluck the visions from my mind
and scatter them before the wind.
Cut away the darkness within,
packed dense by years of pain,
loosen the sinews of restraint
that binds my essence tight,
release the happiness and joy
that once were my guiding light.
Trimmed to Pieces
I was just hanging out,
twisting in the breeze
until I lost my grip
and twirled to ground.
I lay in the shade
missing the hot sun,
wondering what
would become of me.
It wasn’t long before
the leaf cutters came,
trimmed me to pieces,
took me underground.
Eye of the Poem
It is calm in the eye of the poem,
words and sentence fragments
whirl around the center of my mind,
depositing half-baked ideas
in stanzas across the page.
Creativity howls like a Banshee.
Medusa like dendrites reach
from a raging subconscious wall,
synapsing electro-chemical images
into complete complex thoughts.
Another blank page filled with
incomprehensible gibberish,
mind spinning like a turbine,
words, whirling sentence fragments,
slinging from the eye of the poem.
I Sit Naked
I sit naked on a rough black rock,
the still-point within my mind
rising from the depths of eternity,
a surface tension interval of time.
An Alpha-Omega state stretching
infinitely inward, infinitely outward,
without thought, without sensation,
knees drawn, mind shut, Soul open.
In the Stillness
Writing from the vantage point of hindsight,
I script a remembrance of age, of retrospection,
aching bittersweet memories of sad mornings,
memories the years have not diminished.
I rub my painful hands, thankful for the spasms,
for the writer’s cramp, thankful indeed
to feel the vibration of my Muse’s calling,
still sharp, still crystal clear.
An Island in Time
Its been a long road,
full of dead ends,
spiraling cul-de-sacs,
straight horizon runs.
Either bare feet
or too tight shoes
on painful rocks,
or slicing glass.
Crowded with billions
all jostling for position,
jangled, mangled bodies,
road kill with each step.
Passing centuries only add to
the road of life, overflowing
like a raging river, crushing
over the cliff of oblivion.
Each an island in time,
swept ever faster,
Souls like lemmings
leaping into the unknown.
Disciple of the Absurd
I relish life’s contradictions,
pointlessness,
alienation, and
endless cycles of futility.
A Disciple of the Absurd,
my soul is steeped in a wicked brew
of separation, and alienation,
in a blast furnace of inhumanity.
I am unafraid to expose lies
of moral superiority,
of hatred and revenge,
my voice both absurd and relevant.
My philosophy of the Absurd is
armed only with thought and word
against this harsh world.
I relish life’s contradictions.
The Moss of Time
From beyond the final oppressive winter,
as the moss of time covers her crypt,
immortal words slant their way across
the shadow landscape of our modern world.
From a forest of eccentric seclusion,
distillations of mind escape the grasp of Death,
on odd and end pieces of paper aged words
continue to echo from eternity.
Time Ebbs and Flows
Lost in revelries of a lifetime
seconds drag by as centuries,
minutes flow like passing years,
hours follow as endless days.
I can no longer remember
yesterday, what was said,
thoughts of an hour ago gone,
this poem slipping away.
Time ebbs and flows
in such strange ways,
short spans an eternity,
an eternity long gone.
The ink on this parchment
barely dry, evaporating still,
like my chiseled name
wearing away on this tomb.
Echoes Off the Wall
Organic echoes whisper
off undulating placental walls,
filling freshly formed ears
with ghostly vibrations.
Echoing synapse to synapse
this whisper of Beginning.
Cacophonous echoes kaleidoscope
off curving brainpan walls,
creating carbon consciousness
with billions of neural transmissions.
Echoing human to human
this psychobabble of Living.
Black-body echoes at 3 degrees Kelvin
off walls of the infinite universe,
reflecting from microwave antennas
with Cosmic Background Radiation.
Echoing galaxy to galaxy
this Big Bang’s Ending.
Whence We Came
Sitting at the end of the world
watching icebergs calve off glaciers,
like the years of my youth
splitting from the totality of my life.
Falling into the sea, they float,
dissolving into the waters,
like my existence melding away
into the ocean of oblivion.
For both the glacier and I
it is only a matter of time
before we become one,
returning whence we came.
Silence, Blessed Silence
A winter wind howls, shrieks
in one ear and out the other,
tear blurry eyes freeze shut,
mustache like a frozen forest.
Muscles hardening over
softening bones, bloodsicle lungs
last gasping, heart flubbing
its end, brain draining away.
Ice mountains split, cracking,
shattering thin eardrums into crystals,
bringing silence, blessed silence,
then darkness, blessed darkness.
Twenty thousand years pass before
the sun warms the glacier enough,
tourists are astonished, fascinated
by a hand sticking out of the ice.
Event Horizon
Infinite oblivion envelops
spasms of consciousness
lifting eye stalks above
the event horizon of Birth.
Infinite reality envelops
consciousness, spasming
bulging eye stalks of disbelief
at light’s vibration of Life.
Infinite oblivion envelops
spasms of consciousness,
dim eyestalks swirling beyond
the event horizon of Death.
The Shore of Infinity
How does one turn the ship of life around,
trapped in currents of years gone by,
buffeted by screaming gales of reality,
narrowly missing hidden shoals below?
There are no charts to guide the way,
no instruments of position or drift,
often no crew but a lonely Captain
peering dejectedly into thickening fog.
Thousands of ports stretch into the past,
all missed opportunities to disembark,
sad memories of a life blindly misspent
following a foregone conclusion.
The sages with their wise advice
long ago abandoned ship, leaving
each Captain alone at tiller,
steaming circles on the endless sea.
Staring into misty wheelhouse windows
at old, tired, and dim reflections,
barely illuminated by a drowning sun
sinking below the distant horizon.
The enormity of this infinite ocean
yields not to the spinning wheel,
useless rudders fishtailing behind,
wallowing between two crests of life.
How does one turn the ship of life around
before the current of Time runs out,
leaving a rusting hulk, or broken timbers
strewn along the shore of Infinity?
Only Memories
The body aches and moves slowly,
a sense of weariness has set in,
youth but a memory of times past,
the future ever shorter day by day.
Death begins to visit in earnest,
not a stranger taking strangers
to their final rest, but more intimate,
touching friends, family, ever closer.
Gardens of stones abound
down every road, around every curve,
on every hilltop, in every valley,
depositories of the rotting dead.
Walking the well manicured paths,
pushing through the overgrown
and forgotten, new stones sparkle,
moss grown tablets nameless.
For each the ache is gone,
weariness ceased, death forgotten,
the future ever longer day by day,
only memories for the living.
Unusual Charm
A sky so deep I can almost believe,
almost believe in the imminence
of Rapture, it seems to draw me up,
draw me up into the heavens.
So deep this brilliant blue sky,