Category Archives: RIP

OF CONVERSATIONS, FRIENDS & ANGELS

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OF CONVERSATIONS
FRIENDS & ANGELS

 
Today

I come to you
In the memory
Of old friends

Conversation

Over lost time
And lost years

That have
Mysteriously
Vanished

In both tragedy
And revelation

Grief
And silence

Detached from
This mere
Mortal coil

To remember them;

They who were
Once here and
They who once loved
And who we all
Once were once
Upon a time long
Ago as well
In a love, a friendship

A moment

Meant with soul
So fiercely

Now
Vauge

Idle
In dreaming

For you see
As we go on
Our minds
Have learned to
Play tricks

Deceptions

In a veil of youth
& passing days

Drunken illusions
And insignificant
Slights now
Forgotten

Replaced by
What was once in our
Hearts our true
Appearance

A realization
That to be human
Is to be flawed

But these things
Are small pins
Needles

Inconsequential

Now forgotten

So in coming years
We shall sit down & remember them
And have a conversation
Like old friends
Should have like
All friends living

Until

Into the light &
The brilliance
Of angels
We go

Onto
To the next
Mortal
Dream

Without remorse

 

 

~ R.M. Engelhardt

03.16.2019

 

THE GRIM REAPER NEEDS A HOBBY

C__Data_Users_DefApps_AppData_INTERNETEXPLORER_Temp_Saved Images_tumblr_ogkth5JfR41rssi62o1_1280.jpgThe grim reaper must be lonely
Or perhaps God is, sending him
Fishing for musicians, poets & actors, jesters and the like.
Or maybe the reaper was just bored in a place where it’s always
Dark and never light.

So he decided to play a joke on us
And made our new leader the joke
Itself.

Yes, this year the reaper has been quite busy lining up all his stops

Playing with the chessboard in the
Basement and taking the muse’s pawns

And has left us all to sink or swim
And find new ones to inspire
Generations to fight the dark as well

Or maybe just so he
Can play the game
Again

~ R.M.

We Can Be Heroes… R.M. Engelhardt On David Bowie From Albany Poets

We Can Be Heroes …

It’s another Monday morning. I shower, drink my coffee and get dressed for work. In the background my wife is playing classical music on the radio when suddenly from the kitchen I hear the words. “He’s dead” she says … He’s dead. With the lilt of her voice as knowing shock. I walk into the bedroom and hear the song, one of my all time favorites, Is There Life On Mars playing while the news anchor tells me that one of my heroes, one of my favorite rock stars David Bowie is dead at the age of 69 from cancer.

Like most people my first response is disbelief. How is this possible? Cancer? Ironically, I walk outside and have a smoke. Look on my phone to confirm the truth as if it was all a mistake.

But David Bowie is gone. He’s dead. The man who sold the world. The icon whose music reached me and that left a lasting effect on me musically and artistically as a writer and as a definition of my time and generation. His lyrics defined my teenage years as the quiet, somewhat quirky kid with glasses who stuck to himself. The kid who liked writing poems and song verses that no one knew of. That kid with the shaded lenses who wanted to secretly wanted to be  a rock star himself who instead wound up a poet. Sure, over the years as time went by there were other influences  (Bukowski, Morrison and even Rimbaud to name a few). But there was no one as creative or as talented or even as brave as Bowie who was never afraid of what other people thought or to take chances. To find new ways of expression or to change his style or appearance. Bowie was the man who made me believe that if you want to be whoever or whatever you want, to really be who you are that you can become it. His lyrics were poetry and reached me. Especially the song “Heroes”.

So thanks David. For the music, the words and the style. For being a part of my imagination and of course, for proving to us all that we can be heroes.

Tags:R.M. Engelhardt

 

 

NO MORE

NO MORE
11.14.2015

 

I will be silent

I shall not speak of death
I shall not speak of these things
Anymore

For when I was a young man
I believed in peace

Before towers fell
And soldiers died
And after blood
And the media
Monsters
Vultures

Took the place
Of lives
Of hopes
Of words

Before
The scythe &
The sword
Became mightier
Than love
Or the pen

In the days when
I used to write
Sonnets, songs
Poems

No

I shall remain silent
I shall no longer
Speak of these things
These dreams
Peace

Anymore

No more

The Death Of Shelly

The_Funeral_of_Shelley_by_Louis_Edouard_Fournier

 

All the earth and air                

With thy voice is loud

_________

Death Is Here And Death Is There

I.
Death is here and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death—and we are death.

II.
Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,

…

III.
First our pleasures die—and then
Our hopes, and then our fears—and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust—and we die too.

IV.
All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot–
Love itself would, did they not.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Today, in July 1822, Mary Shelley and Jane Williams awaited with weeping anxiety the return of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, sailing from Livorno in his fragile craft, had come to shore by sudden chance among the silences of the Elysian Isles. – O blessed shores, where Love, Liberty and Dreams have no chains.”This unearthly legend had been built up steadily throughout the 19th century. Shelley’s wife Mary herself launched it, writing immediately after his death: “I was never the Eve of any Paradise, but a human creature blessed by an elemental spirit’s company & love – an angel who imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine & so has flown and left it.”

Shelley drowned in his own sailing boat, the Don Juan, while returning from Livorno to Lerici, in the late afternoon of July 8 1822, during a violent summer storm. He was a month short of his 30th birthday. Like Keats’s death in Rome the year before, or Byron’s death at Missolonghi two years later, this sudden tragedy set a kind of sacred (or profane) seal upon his reputation as a youthful, sacrificial genius. But far more comprehensively than theirs, Shelley’s death was used to define an entire life, to frame a complete biography.

shelly(source:  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview1)