Around the Acacia Tree
Vertical and pinnate, green leaves
And small flowers of yellow grow
Around the Acacia Tree.
Sun light drapes and the ground receives
The curtain's folding golden glow
Around the Acacia Tree.
The incense scent in the air weaves
The knitted root tangles below
Around the Acacia Tree.
Yet, now, from the bark, cloudy smoke
Lifts like a slumbering ghost awoke
Around the Acacia Tree.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Glass Skin
Another epidermis, a glass skin,
Layers over your body and we are
Separated. You're sheltered deep within
Glass skin.
Your paneled eyes have been drifting thus far
From what I see. When did distance begin
To draw you from me and into that jar,
That crystalline casing? Where have you been?
Why can't I understand your avatar,
Your transparent screen as it holds you in
Glass skin?
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Water Cooler Blues
There is no point getting hysterical,
Thinking you've become a hard-wired machine.
So what if each day is identical?
Numb your nerve endings with the TV screen.
Sing the water cooler blues.
You can reproduce the same, tired phrases,
Enable yourself to enhanced work skills
While imagining such better places
Where you'll always have too much time to kill.
Sing the water cooler blues.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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A Vegetable
Does a veg'table suffer in the dirt,
Or tremble timorously while inert?
Do its leaves soak sunlight with vicious pains?
Does breathing life
Make for burdens so rife
Amongst scabrous terrains?
Does a plant still remain firmly rooted
Knowing its soil is thoroughly polluted?
Do its flowers unfold purposelessly?
Does it condemn
The water in its stem
While screaming soundlessly?
poem by Tim Stensloff
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The Order of Spirals
Though
I
Cannot
Discern what
Reality is,
I can still sense an illusion.
I can still bear witness to the observation that
We are spiraling out of control and into the impending event horizon.
We are forming a decompositional matrix around our failing perceptions,
Spaghettifying this surrounding spectacle of
Ours. For what reason must we choose
To abandon it,
Perverting
Nature
And
Life?
poem by Tim Stensloff
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The Flower Bed of Illness
In the flower bed of illness,
My drowsy midnight disease blooms.
Plucking petals of happiness,
My poisonous pollen consumes.
The venom stemming from my soul,
Pollution rooted in my mind,
Leaves me far lesser to control
The garden of mine I've designed.
The sick spores of my sleepy head
Spread, fertilized in dirty soil
Made of decomposed ink and lead
That preserve sorrows as they spoil.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Ana's Painting, Ephemera
Legs like brush strokes
streak down
over
the wrinkled vista,
sepia crumpled
in its folded ruptures—
feet levitation,
steps left to hover
above where they would sink;
where the imprints lie,
firmly imbedded into the faulty Earth,
a crumbling sheet of petrous land
nestling between what was
before us
and whatever resides
deep in the
[...] Read more
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Revolving Doors
I forget where I've been going
As I enter the tall building
Through the glassy revolving doors.
In circles, I spin, not knowing
What the other side's withholding
Through the glassy revolving doors.
The human traffic keeps flowing
Around frames of glossy gilding
Through the glassy revolving doors.
Yet somehow I end up nowhere.
I'm never close getting there
Through the glassy revolving doors.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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An Old Man Made of Plastic
An old man made of plastic
Crumples in the jaws
Of a great, metallic beast.
His two-direction
Arms bend in unnatural
Ways. His shoulders remain firm
For the tear.
His rotating legs
Curve upward,
Cycling vertical—
His inflexible knees cave
And the socket snaps.
His head then flattens—
Pigments fading in the stretch.
His chest cracks into
Two parts—a hollow chamber
Disappearing without glue.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Mud
Each step I take,
As I trudge forward
Through the muddy landscape,
Collects my feet:
Pulling me deep toward the Earth,
Rooting me where I stand.
I struggle to free my legs.
They sink where I walk
Until I bury myself.
Time passes and the ground grows firm
While I'm underneath
The dusting fossils,
The stone-etched imprints
That suggest which direction I was going,
And where I had been.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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