Awoken

Unjust thoughts
Lying prostrate
Stretching thin like
The toes of a cat

A dreamlike state
(No – just like a dream)
Basking and waiting
Like willows unadorned

Seeping, seething
Just below conscious weight
Catechisms gone mad as
I watch and behold instinct

Compare and wonder
What of those who imagined
The First Thoughts of man
When becoming aware for the first time

Their Being now becomes
Undone to the wherewithal of Light
Unmasked – a treasure of his own tomb
Casting to dawn the knowledge of Self as one.

 

© K. James Ribble


“Awoken” first appeared on this blog in August of 2016. It was since published in Figroot PressIssue Three December 2016, a wonderful collection of poetry, prose, art & photography, found here.  Check it out!  >KJR<

Summer



Concomitant without parallel, we walk again,
Dance well behind the continental shelf of utterance,

That which we know to be true.

A wedding of reticent decisions made knowing
Full well a sweat on my brow was forming, just her
Look brings cool on a hot summer day.

Her rainstorms purge all the Gulf air into
My New York, while a burning sun hides under concrete clouds,
Gray stellar beings tearing at the thought of air.

But, like her, those same drops of water give life to me,
Becoming vapor long enough to know that
Hidden clouds don’t cry.


© K. James Ribble

Morning’s Love Asunder

Morning’s daylight breaks above the roof
Sun’s gold liquid fills drops of grassy dew
Enchanted trees create dreamlike shadows
Enables all light to speak of you

The cicadas with all creation sing a
Clarion call to morning’s slumber
As birds dance unadorned by human cares
Their freedom speaks my voice of wonder

For who I am in this world that calls
In this time of truth and wonder
Life embraces all my senses filled
Captures me in deepest love asunder

Enveloped now by the sun’s true grace
And humbled by birds that fly above
With Cascade of Light before me now
It is your face of daylight’s love.

© K. James Ribble

Impromptu


Unknown.  Unforeseen.
She came to me unlike any other.

A wisp of origin blown apart by her eyes like
The golden brown of sunlight in late afternoon.

Completely and utterly caught
Within a millisecond of her smile.

Her face, framed by long black hair,
Instantly projected all of her: genuine and genuflected

Straight through to my Honesty –
So I began to speak with vulnerability of truth

As though the world stopped all around us,
And we were the only two people alive.

At Fourth & Broadway by the foot of palm trees
My life changed forever,

Where her smile is still carved
At the root of my soul.



© K. James Ribble

Reflect



If I could tell you I am not afraid
I would –

If I could tell you from the bottom of my heart
I would –

Cloisters vanish forth from an
Unknown source.

Confirming my presence to the
Dismay of my own reflection so I am

Dubious, at first, yet remain open
To the remedies of my time.

And before the song is over
I reveal among the stars

My own Self revelation
Succumbing to no one thing

Yet no longer chide my own
Discovery of who I am

As if my memory of these things
Became sacred to the Truth that they are real.

Cloisters of my own self
Healed and repaired by my own hands

As sacred as these halls are hallowed.



© K. James Ribble

Set Up

I’m being set up:
Gravity has lost its meaning-
The cat, amused by nothing,
Now takes real interest in me.

My neighbors emit cordiality
On the off-chance I may say hello
Where, beyond my window, aches the
Pequannock sighing an urban breath;

Exhaling its sorrow for the day,
Winding a lazy path to calm waters
Like my own voice as it transports
The upwinds of my collective breathing

To a voicing of What Is -in this moment-
Rather than What Was. . .
As the cat, defying gravity, leaps into my lap,
An effortless motion like the sparrows now
Outside my window
Singing resolute melodies of warmer days.

© K. James Ribble

Emerge


I’d lost all my strength
The natural urge to create
My apartment became a mess
Even the ants left.
The spark to create was lost
The art that reignites my heart
Giving birth to what I believed
Had died and felt abandoned
On the stage of my masculine agency
LIFE became optional
LIVING was perfunctory
I GAVE nothing in return
FOR the kindness of others
REAPING emptiness and
SADNESS . . . 
Finally awoken from this dream a
Dream of a sad, burrowed fog that
Lifted as my line-of-sight
Opened towards a doorway
Where I see all of you, your visage like 
Comrades-in-arms gathering
At dawn, like sunlight-as-water 
Spilling across the field of a new day.
 
© K. James Ribble

Dreaming Again

It’s just like a ladyship knowing they’ll never die
Awoken by dreams scattered across her bed
The filtered excess of thought-in-motion revealing
All that remains of memory long faded by waking

Even now I cannot divulge what’s left to write
In that I may substantiate that lost vision just
For you so that it may reveal a conscious moment
Too lingering for it to become lost along the day

This urge this uncommon urge to want to know
Seeking deep access to what I cannot see inside
A realm all too real for interpretation of words
Yet catching all cataclysm of doubts lingering

Longer than my mind can unhide before they’re
Gone into the fray of a day’s motions in art form
Those unknown, unfettered bastions of grace
Lifting me up propping me against the wall of dreams

Returning me to you

Again.
© K. James Ribble

Let’s Start From the Top

The dinner table has been set
All the guests have arrived on time
All gathering in the anteroom
In a minute we’ll hear the chimes

Before this night is over
And the glistening caste is die
A magnificent truth shall be revealed
In the conceptual blink of an eye

We dine by the banks of a river
Caught surrounded by the wind
Fully embraced like an innocent child’s
Mother whose womb is next of kin

The Evening hosts the land of the river
It’s beckoning makes no doubt
All the guests surfeit without an answer
Understanding what we cannot mount

We smell the city river water
Sweet aroma of the stream
The sunlight dances all around me
And I hear summer wind in the leaves

© K. James Ribble

Unthawing

I’ve become my own sole course catalyst

Setting larger-than-life diversions
Into play – a clandestine motion
We both knew was life changing

From the smallest seed came

The Light of a look beyond my view
Inside my own soul of mission above a life
Catastrophic geography cannot bear

Between capsized mountains of my progeny

The newborn symbols of my years on earth
All standing on the sands of a time I cannot change
Nor grasp, just out of reach – to each man

His own adroitness his own pouring into the

Children of their own generations through time
As decades of lost words escape the edge of winter
A season inside me so cold yet memory survives its grip

Memories of an unthawing of sorts on

A slow and uneven pace like a stream
That starts and stops as the days get
Longer then rushes to its ocean

Like the downstream recognition of

Where I’ve been alongside people who
Matter to me assembled in the breadth and
Depth of my hearts ache to tell their

Stories from my perspective –

Spring is here now in the North:
A vast and limitless world of possibility
Unfolds like the cherry tree outside my window

© K. James Ribble