Ron, age 5, in Germany.
Here is a sample of the poetry of Reinhard Palovcik from his latest release:
Better Days I often think of better days when clean sun warmed the breeze as we lay among the petals between vast groves of trees Freshness dripped with crystal blue from sky into our laps Your whispers in my ear brought dew to fragrant evening naps The road was straight and narrow then it's destination clear Our love had nurtured poetry the words were most sincere We drank from oceans of the heart as surf on belly lapped while rhyme and meter danced from tongues until the pen was capped Love So Rare (with homage to Ian Curtis) And so I rise to another sad day my room in its tired old way its contents strewn with painful care through these moments of life unfair Caring acts of love denied I swallowed my desperate pride shaking my bones deep inside again there is no place to hide As rasping jaws eat at my heart with you I never know where to start the first steps are always so hard this love has me falling apart The awful truth an ax in my mind I wish I were dumb and blind through the fear, we will never find this love so rare, it's one of a kind Clouds Clouds of visions tumble in myriad cascades under sleek wings of her passionate embrace Avalanches rumbling down cragged rock faces sweeping climbers from slopes to frozen graves Glaciers shoving mountains, crushing forests carving deep canyons filled with sap and blood Fish and seaweed spiraling skyward from oceans of foam stirred by typhoon madness Rains of hail under corona of an eclipsed sun pelting holes through leaves and thin-tiled roofs Volcanoes spurting umbrellas of white lava charring our bed and cities to rubble and ash The Earth exploding to massive asteroid choirs Islands and meteors hurtling away from gravity lost until I again saw her vast landscapes of textured grain rocking gently to the rhythm of my soft breath Creation Through filters of fiction we never forget the raw its bite and sting exsanguinating us onto a microarchitecture of fabric. Fibers fill the air from distant chimneys, spewing red green, blue with walls as lungs, wheezing through windows. Massive trucks haul coal to blackened mills, where molten iron belches white ash from encapsulated liquid flames. The Yeti bounds a crevasse on furry feet trickling snow over the ledge into an avalanche of hexagons, each a crystal caught among lemmings as they tumble over the edge into a festering pool of bacteria floating in a sea of blood and pus oozing from white-crusted scabs, peeled by green-enameled nails on long fingers, elegant in black satin, an aroma of eternity drips from shoulders bare of blemish, the submarine is drawn into violet, vulval void, an infinite cavity into which can crawl any manner of beast or tool, moving tightly between the sheets posturing, plunging, rocking into an explosion among clouds in a confetti of taggets staining mist with mire, falling slowly, coalescing as haze covers sun, pulsing neon along carefully confined tubular accents to chrome-trim chairs, table, lamp, while the smoke of a single cigarette drifts straight then twists, worming its way into loops and lilacs among daisies in a rose garden beneath fresh, fragrant blossoms with buzzing of bees and hummingbirds wafting wistfully through trees rattling nests of squirrels and birds their soft, feathered fur coated with an oily dew of sharply glistening globes each reflecting a universe full of quasars blazing through gravitational lenses, seen twice, though not like Gemini, boy embracing boy in tangled, incestuous perversion yet above self-flagellation, where space curves in on itself and much less than that very secret place where the navel becomes a bulls eye once you're inside Still Life With Room The austere stillness of this room its volume enclosed in four walls The pressure of my presence within leaden limbs fills but a fragment of its space While a near silence hangs in the air through walls pass faint echoes of cars, children at play a high-pitched gusting of wind My mind, connected from above with perception of moment upon moment like a brush is dragged through viscous paint stroking grey tones on my image of this room Embedded in the ceiling a ring of light from the room's only lamp beneath which furniture sits quietly in fossilized crevices amidst the absence of her breath Expectation I wandered through endless alleys searching for bittersweet fragments of others' discarded lives Browsed through spiraling libraries mazes of words and feelings crowned with thorns of barbed wire the slow passage of time festering the wounds corroding the metal bent nails in planks through hands and feet The blood of my desire ran along grain and knot I lingered too long by your side hoping for a sign of salvation and now face the penance this lost expectation exacts on my flesh Face As I looked into the mirror I saw the lines on my face the pimples, the scars the eyes, filled with mind staring into mind I wanted to remold the features to shave the nose, fill the chin stretch the skin to remove evidence of age I longed to destroy the image enucleate the globes of my torture rip the mask from my brain to reveal the bleached bone indistinguishable from so many others who squirmed in the salt sea of my lust Failure My consistent failure generates this ever present depression injected into my soul by a syringe of my making wielded by my hand I revel in the misery project it outward to gather all those flowers of pity from which I fashion a garden of black blooms a place for me to languish as I wallow through waves of self-loathing Then, lazing in my garden of doom I reject the need to change As others would say it is an illness and therefore easily depersonalized something I have caught that drugs can cure While stronger minds with bounding confidence emerge to trod me underfoot Their bars of prison blown by unjust optimism they claw at those treasures of flesh for which I so painfully longed and which to me now are forever denied At the Barrier At the barrier of dimension I claw at viscous webs that stick to the fingers of my mind searching for a hole that would free me to the other side unleash legs of thought to run through lime green meadows under streaming rays of suns wading through beds of blossoms heading toward an alien architecture where stretched webs support smooth columns with bulbed rooms lit from within by a pale blue glow Having reached the base I am pulled up by millions of tiny arms that protrude from the surface until, engulfed by the bulb I float in the pale blue peering out at myriad spirits shrunken by the concavity of its inner surface their long wispy tendrils ethereal in the filtered light My mind is suddenly permeated with the realization of a celestial presence not God, nor wafer-eating wine-drinking madness but complexity, unfolding from inside out in convoluted whorls of imagination the fabric of the universe leaking into a wealth of life eating a path through dark to savor moments of desire, passion, lust Then there is darkness the stench of decay eternity of death the languid boredom of endless hours with no direction or goal A vibration starts and spreads from hands and feet up arms and legs rocking my torso to the rhythm of chaos and when all seems ready to break I am sitting in a chair writing words to paper my mind a twisted shell of love, frustrated churning gears spewing oil on long lost memories destroying each page after it is written Weathered planks of wood fall from my untended abode where long overgrown brush has invaded the deep reaches of my armpits the skin receding in wrinkle around pores, now holes magnified by age Pondering death at the end of time my suns set sequentially on the horizon and I realize I am no longer human Finesse I distanced myself from friends and lovers a grain of sand at the beach a speck of dust on the furniture a drop of water in an ocean of life a mineral crystal buried deep within a mountain a meteor fragment circling endlessly between Jupiter and Mars a fossil of long-petrified algae embedded in stromatolite a strand of DNA stuck in amber mass, energy, and time conspired to thwart my desire catching me in a trajectory of precisely calculated drive to death but with richness replete in my small space of experience I writhed with beasts of burdened torture hoping for some last sign of salvation Doom I am the instrument of my doom hatchet that chops livers and hearts wrenching blood from tissue tearing pages from books I open the evil eye staring inward to my brain to see a sea of lust writhing on a river of sand the formless crystalline waves drowning me in ocean of night B to D I said I loved Her but I never knew what that really meant. at some point I was dropped from the sky my spirit, that is. I took the shape of this body and from birth to death followed a chaotic line traced mostly in jagged circles. there was no ultimate goal predictable from my place of birth. like so many others I would die some distance from where I was born and didn't see the logic of moving from point B to point D. where was I rushing to every day of all these years going in circles leaving for work ending up at home? after I met Her I continued to run in circles but they were no longer mine. i'd run to the store to get Her some delicacy She craved at the moment. i'd rush to pay a parking ticket the convenience of which saved Her from getting wet once. running in smaller circles i'd wash Her days of dirty dishes launder Her delicates and soiled sheets take out Her garbage trim Her hedges and mow Her lawn. and the circles I ran in my mind forgiving Her for everything shoplifting, unfaithfulness witholding sex, derisive criticism Her nails digging into my arms She also had circles they would intersect mine nearly every day. sometimes we would twist together sometimes we'd drift apart. after a while the intersections grew sparse. jealousy began to deviate my lines I mean at odd times my suspicions got ridiculous looking behind this tree to see if She was caressing that squirrel behind that fence to see if She was fondling some dog under each rock to see if She was fornicating with ants. where was She all this time? I really didn't know. one thing I was sure of She was running along Her own jagged lines. And so, I began searching for my goal that point D where I would ultimately rest but where was that? could I predict it from the starting point B? somehow solving the pattern of these chaotic scribbles? was there some logic to the riddle of these lines? not that I could see and Her lines were equally confusing at least what I knew of them. one thing was certain She was also headed for some point D. and my love for Her? I still don't know what it means. Frozen As hoary white doves raise their heads to bleat a song of ice Cold bites the edges of my eyes splintering the lashes Architecture of spike-splayed frost coats glass and steel The hardened crystal glints dry sun into beams of laser light In this absolute still solidity of frozen shapes with clenched fingers of corpses Where sandpaper grates their touch our eyes cannot see the depth The solid core gleaming, with molten platinum sheen its density etched through layers of cortex Ice Take the head torn off a dove toss it over a cliff Watch the deer struggle stuck in steel trap teeth Hear bleak wind of winter sleet whip limbs with twisting fury See icicles, breaking to shards, fall to pierce crusted snow Taste the cold clear sweat that drips from brow-beaten branches hanging heavy with frozen fruit Let your teeth bite through the ice to savor the sap beneath As the spreading crystal etches frost through chambers of your heart and pale fingers close the lids of your eyes Burning the animated corpse rests in anguish shortly after death stiff with muscle-tension madness its lips still bleed when cut with a razor exposing the flesh beneath blood stagnates in pools from which vultures feed dipping their heads beneath the surface the soul hovers over fields of flaming grain mesmerized by the glow gravestones erode slowly with the sand swirling in gray clouds After flesh and bone are ground to dust and breath is drawn to hell spirit convulsing in the flames will still burn for her Through Dark Through twisting shells of dark a cold black flow claws slowly along muscle and bone Paralysis creeps along spine burrowing into arms and legs While teetering on the edge of life I lingered too long on joyous moments her eyes her lips her soft breathing her sighs turbulent eddies glistening white foam in a whirlpool of incessant circular sucking spiraling inward to the gloom that now gluts my soul where speeding thoughts are crammed moments of anguish that sail before my eyes under funeral flags high atop poles that spike a starless sky No tears can wash the tar that sticks to these memories An avalanche of coal each crystal a charred clot pours from my heart in a stream of black blood as hope fades with each glint of evaporating light Poems I stacked skyscrapers on books breaking bricks to form these poems and in the process outlined my feelings with nouns, verbs, adjectives animated with indents honored cliches used images as props cramped the rhyme mangled the meter but fell short of my mark you weren't impressed so I began to drink, heavily until the words came bounding out on lips and tongue numb with fun and alcohol flowing from my soul infatuation a kiss moments spent in twilight tracing love on elbow and knee then, as you looked away and held your ears my poems became the shapes and feelings of beasts screaming for control of the word and your soul Friends I imagine them in various sexual postures Grunting and groaning to achieve their moment of release Thin thoughts of intimacy splayed through flesh On a graph of many dimensions The familiarity eats at my soul shuffling feelings in a deck of desire Where I am the joker dealt with every hand Approaching ejaculation with each card as it is played Onishi Only she can be the engine that drives my verse Streaks my sky with amber rays of sun Sends my eyes past horizons of rain drenched meadows Blossoms petals on boughs of long dead brush Sprouts seeds of pines from parched desert dunes Hatches butterflies from hibernating cocoons buried deep in thorned bushes Gives birth to billions of ants and bees who worship their fertile queen Only she is that celestial spear that pierces heart and brain Schism Breeze wafts through willows petals fall from the moon Swimmer's elbow cracks knee of runner snaps Dark green leaves glimmer under starlight of radiant suns Gas of nebulas doesn't hiss black holes never miss Angled limbs entwined savor pleasures divine Men with suits and weapons bullets fly in all directions Curtains of aurora borealis unfold to a cosmic dance of constellations Corpses rot with time brother can you spare a dime Mounds of cherry blossoms hide lovers' love embraced Casual money for sex who now can escape the hex The oyster has unfurled its purple cloak in swollen ecstasy On stage a stripper bares her femininity to glazed stares Newly conceived soul breathes its first breath and cries Corpses rot with time brother can you spare a dime Bleeding At seven thirty in the morning I see them standing outside the blood bank in ragged clothes their souls and shoes worn through waiting to bleed about fifteen dollars worth that's all Enough to buy food to make more blood only to bleed again Does fifteen dollars buy enough to live for one week more? And where does the blood go? Blood is expensive these days at least eight hundred dollars a pint Few can afford this and those that can are not waiting at blood banks One pint is rarely enough to buy a life back Mouse He always did that with his beer every time he took a sip, lifted the bottle to his eye and peered in, checking to make sure You see he still remembered the time when he was warm with drink and silly and taken with the blonde sitting next to him her eyes in sultry shadow her lips soft and pink her delicate fingers stroking her cigarette He wasn't looking when they put a dead mouse in his bottle and he drank and didn't know until the fur and stench were in his mouth and he retched and they all laughed The blonde walked away and never came back and he didn't even know her name and he swore and swore that it would never happen again You Write You write and write hoping that someday the madness will end but it never does It drives your pen through lonely hours with no one to read the words, no one to hear the soft rain that falls in your heart the lightning streaking through your brain striking each memory in a flash of anguish no one to smell the smoke of your cigarette as the embers smolder slowly to ash The ink fades and the paper crumbles buried in someone's attic among lost dolls with missing arms among blown stereos and clothes no longer in style words they thought were worth saving but that no one ever felt
Wabi-Sabi and Wabi-Sabi Street.