Some Poems by Doug Cloud... (07/21/98)

Eyes invested, irreplaceable
Float in dreaming air
Eyes wanting delicate place
Dreambed
The hills of homeland
The ponds, the beauty

Eyes held thanks, drank
Eyes
The real this
Love, honest want
Tide's release

Nothing
Nothing and bright everything
Bright everything
Free, becoming
Dreaming deeper into the sweetness of the dream

Sunlight dissolving dreamlawn
Dawn house lay trying
Waiting
Morning, I'm alive
Opened eyes taste the sun-blown day
A million bees singing
Windowless naked birds
Silent obvious things
Ancestors walking home

Textures
The world assured
Palette of Earth
Remembered milk of mother
Quietly telling warmth
Seed song strong
And everywhere sweetness
Goodness
Pungent drifting sweetness

Close to the birds
Remember this feeling
Wind
Forever show the way
An end to deep blues
My body, glad
Joins the morning
Curious

The car ads tried to give me something to live for
But I was gone
Remote literacy of grace
The tunnel of babble
The very ground a-tremble
Bombs and machinery drumming telegraphs
Proof that we are cultured

So you take some time away
Crawling slipshod
Grassless
Beyond the wires, roads, and trucks
The hills all waxed electric
You know it
Looking out away
No telephone to jar you
We're visiting this clock of days
We're visiting this clock

My mind a-twist
Fighting
Fighting
And under
But kept a bird inside me
A watcher from the tree

Other ethics
Higher poets
Spinning
And from spin event howl
And flying the moon

Now beyond the dance
Change turns colors
Everything to me flashing
Final
But calm

Bottled word
Final notice
Read by these broken eyes
Love, love
You have never gone
Never known what fences are supposed to mean
Disturbed dream
Long waking
Like birth
Voice familiar forever

Weapon's mask smiling
Guarding guns with guns
Bomb garden growing hopelessness
Cold narrow thought
Despair's toneless song

Our damaged bird
Sacred animal insane
Weapons shamelessly manufactured
War sanctifies war

Bad thunder
Terrible killing dance
Thrown into gunfire pits
To sweat and return fire
With war-baked hair
Now-headed
Heart pounding
Rushed hands, metal thought
Fear's bitter liquid

Orders from beyond
Naive bombs jettisoned
Thundering instant
Mothers badly wounded
With beds nowhere near
The airless moaning damp
Unburied dead forlorn in outsized air

Children scared beyond measure
Crucified enough to shake in bed
Now walked
Afraid of what they'd find
Death's dripping curtain
Hands denied bread
Thirst the chorus of a thousand throats
This cracked and dry city
The defeating fear
The torment
Husk of the very shell

Drive, man!
Chew the music!
Bar codes in every prayer mat
The writhing computer
Upon debt continuous climbs madness
Opportunity is the sense to know

Music
Central glowing indigo
Carried by harmonic earth
Silent overtones
True and running loose
You taste it
Cry
The feel of wanted heaven

Heart warrior
Accept yourself
Meet the flash of you
Tired bird spoke, flew
The day shrugged, agreed
The air knelt and drank
Wandering bold and naked

The wind through fences
Broke the one shadow in the manner of dawn
Now truth's jewel clears the eye
Know the young leaves
Flow sweet music
Shine in gleaming moment
Escape that plastic death
Shimmer
Sing of delight in coat of soils
Sing
Let cry your wounded heart
Flow past tears
Sing there
Where rise the green exalted bowers

Silence?
Silence, yeah
Kidding the road
Some understanding
We become a world there
Amazing
Together

Energy
Energy, yeah
Happen
Build
Children at the gate
Lotus world
The new swirling innocence
Asks the sky, "Share?"

Streets
Streets, yeah
Telling me names motorly
The tread song
Refreshed by rare mythology
Fantastic river dollar now my route to live
Near water
Yeah

Strange water
Toxic inheritance
Death's teacup
The soil, earth's cradle eroding
Washed from fields of chemical wrong

Iron womb of factory
Toxic molten blood
Turned time hollow, hopeless
Doom's argument sounding right
Refugees of diseased corporations
In regions undesirable
Flat survival
The choice no choice at all

Death of so many
But love survive
Kept alive
Sanctified by its own sacred nature
Healed, touched together
With hands born to be
Beloved star turning the clock of dawn

Moon rising
Whispered, "Don't destroy that beauty."
In whispering moonlight
We dance a healing change
Kindness
Broken envy
Something
Another form of money
And upon cold iron ground lay war, dead

Aggressions released in drumming, dancing
Flesh accepting its past
Guns now out of style
Love
Light
Powerful protection
A peaceful power
Agreed in spirit
Agreed in song
Spurning rumors of war