Poem: For my Best Friend on her Wedding Day

A poem for a friend's wedding day long past but well remembered. Both of them are the sort who will joyfully and consciously grow old together, falling deeper in love every day.  Such a life blessing exists for those who truly value it and themselves, therefore hope springs eternal.

For My Best Friend On Her Wedding Day

There is no shame in luxury,

or laziness,

or sloth,

when time to practise them is wise,

and benefits you both.

We work and slave and struggle

so to keep our basic things,

for we deserve everything,

all riches owned by kings.

Yet we don’t deserve a scrap of bread,

nor the right for it to sing.

We will eat when others starve,

and live, while others die.

The honest are sent to the chopping block

while we escape, and lie.

There is no earning,

no reward,

no deserving what we make.

There’s no difference between what we give,

and what we really take.

Struggle has no meaning

other than that to survive.

And in the act of struggling,

I forget just how to live.

Struggle is for status,

and status is for fools.

In my life’s Swiss Army knife,

it’s the stupidest of tools.

So every action that you take

make conscious,

and with love.

Evil is not in the vice,

but intemperance thereof.

New Poem: Growing Up

Growing Up
by A.R. Carter

When my demons fall

I weep with relief,

excised of the gangrene

of youthful bad permission,

my conscience leaden with deep-six freedom

from the lonely, poisonous things

that I summoned long ago

out of curiosity, and a strong constitution,
thinking myself immortal.

Now, death has swept by too often,
I have felt her wings too close;
then she takes another,
and I count in thankfulness
my hard and merciless virtues.

The moral stanch of silence 

stops my heart’s bleeding.

Silence here is warm and full of sun-dust,

rippled only by the trains' insistent schedule.

My silence is like the smell of bread,

simple and richer than Solomon.

Incensed by peace, 

the beasts of boredom

shriek at my nothing affluence

pleading for a fresh finite vein

to bite into and suckle.

But for sanity’s sake,

my bitter cold breastplate has no time

for whines and bipolar tears.

And my own smug nothing cries, 

empty within

trading compassion for sanity,

a profit-loss deal negating all sin

which my badly glued heart 

cannot fathom.

Without compassion,

and new emptiness,

the creations of youth are gone.

The child of my music can’t return

though it must,

with my heart in hand;

ears set against the buzz

of the fens of mediocrity,

stubbornly punting

across the Styx of my tears

to shores 

of transcendent change.

Glencoe, Western Highlands

Introspection

Solitude, music, writing, art, reason, and nature are joys which are undervalued by the unwise.  These virtues and pleasures of the intellect do not inflict upon me the insufferable patriarchy of civilization, with the worthless proving ground of its roles, its idiotic superstitions, its power plays, and its inevitable soul-killing violence. 

Every time I lie alone with a heart and a body aching for the short-lived pleasures of love, I remember the price I had to pay for it as a woman, and when my reason returns, am glad for the hours upon hours of pleasure I derive from interests and hobbies that only I, exclusively, am present to judge.  When I lie upon my favorite chair in hours of contemplation, nobody judges me, and when I sing off-key, nobody judges me; when I choose to compose lines of poetry which are ridiculous, nobody is there to scoff, and when I draw silly things, only the paper knows how deliciously I have wasted my time. 

The one and only redemption of all that suffering I carry with me is a beautiful child I can raise to be her own woman, and if there is anything on this earth that can redeem the burden, judgment, and secondary motives of men, that would be a child whose presence and spirit are a joy.

As for all other suffering, I drop that burden with more willingness than the worst and most selfish woman you can imagine.  No man is worth sacrifice, and nobody will dare to require me to prove myself ever again.  It is a profound waste of time far better spent on meaningless joys and creative pleasures that madden the halls of power and their worshipful followers.  If any man steps within my boundaries to extricate a pound of flesh and to tax my happiness again for his own sake, he will find his hook slung into a pond of leeches and serpents, and his fate upon crawling out and unwisely pressing the matter will be of his own making.  Now, it is not about what I can give, but what I can be given.  Since I do not have a face that can launch the war of Troy, or a shower of gifts and infinite expressions of generosity, I am accepting of my solitude as a permanent situation.

With the perspective of age and observation, I find that solitude is a greater pleasure than any desire for inclusion, for all inclusion brings me into a game, and I have no time for games when I could be creating worlds of beauty in my joyously idle mind.  

I could be asked why I have not spent time in better service to humanity, but I ask humanity, what better way to show the world that none of us are obligated to be anything other than happy.  This example is my service to humanity, and I am satisfied with it.