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Poetry in Black and White

~ Life's cares in words and art…

Poetry in Black and White

Author Archives: Michael Ray King

Life. Death. Living…

08 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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Once there was a way to get back home
That way lost itself in perilous joys and heartbreaks
Once there was a way to return to innocence
That way crumbled under the decisions of experience

Once there was a way to get back home
A tattered, littered, obstacle-filled trail
Peppered with pain, delusion,
A perpetual carrot
Always in view, always beyond reach

Once there was a way to get back home
Home being that idyllic landscape which both never existed and forever lives in our hearts
A shiny, dewdrop laden blade of grass on the way to elementary school
Filled with wonder and beauty
A moment in time where the vociferous voices of angry parents ceased to exist
An escape into a continuum only you could enter

Once there was a way to get back home
Never out of our reach
Forever in our wounded hearts and jaded minds
If only we could stop the world and search out that moment
A moving target becomes our sole view
When in truth there exists no target
Only a willingness to grant permission for entry

The way home lies broken and obscured by Life. Death.
Living encapsulates home in a boundless infinity
Stretching not to the ends of universes or galaxies
But to the infinite heart deep within

Once there was a way to get back home
Once every nanosecond
Once every breath
Once every heartbeat
Once every thought

All we need remains our own permission to travel…

My mentor and friend died a few days ago in his recliner in his apartment alone. This likely was how he would have preferred passing on. For me, his loss has shocked my heart just like a few dozen other deaths throughout my life. I cannot imagine he is gone. All I can grasp at this moment is that pieces of him, quite valuable pieces for me, live on within me. My ascent into the writing world, no matter how bumpy, varied, and full of mistakes, owes much to Rikki Ravioli, otherwise known as Rik Feeney. He lifted me, mentored me, was an incredibly good friend to me, for which I will continue to live in gratitude for his kindness toward me.

I have completed my sabbatical from writing. Once again, he has prompted me to action. RIP my friend. Wherever you are now, I’m sure you’re stirring up hornets’ nests…

I cannot write more in this moment.

Thanks to you, Rik, I WILL write more…

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When Life was Worth Living

19 Tuesday Oct 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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Did you ever have a dream that made you scratch your head? One that appeared on the surface phantasmic, but upon further scrutiny, owned a strong bit of Truth? Questions. Questions without answers. The definition of life for us all yet we emphasize the answers. The answers others create appall us. The answers others create resonate. Same for the answers we create ourselves.

Answers do not mean much in the end. Your answers. My answers. Their answers. All exist as a quiet whimper in a maelstrom cacophony of shouting mouths and minds and emotions. Yes, we track paths and resonances with others. Even these words, sounding so much like an answer falls prey to the din of voices in our heads, our media, our entertainments, our arguments, our perspectives.

Therefore, what is truth? What pushes us to strive for the sublime answers? Panic? Desire? A need to be heard? Loneliness? Frustration? Anger? Joy? Love?

In the end, Solomon owned the question. There exist no answers save the gold standard catch-all concept of diety and a plan. A plan laid secret. A plan we cannot fathom. Solomon stated that our lives are a “chasing after the wind.”

At the risk of pretending Solomon’s statement lends an answer, the concept only describes the reality of life. We convince ourselves we possess the wherewithal to divine answers. Answers plucked from the tornadic destruction surrounding us. We know nothing.

When Life was Worth Living

Ignorance.
Carefree moments.
Depths of emotional soothing
Sensory deprivation beyond the beauty we periodically wake long enough to admire before we fall back into analytics and answers

Sunshine
Blank mind open to our internal pencil…no, chalk
Simple observations accepted as a gift
Until the rains sweep clean our slate of answers.

When life was worth living
I stole a moment for myself
A concept to dream
Roll over my internal mental and emotional tongues
Revel in the experience of everything
of one thing
of focus and clarity
of foolhardy, delicious ecstasy

I remember many of the days or moments worth living
Despite the growl and vitriol of competing answers from countless trillions of sources
All demanding their place in space and time
At times recognizing my own folly of tossing more into the endless black hole abyss drawing us near
Each pretentious answer another shard-dagger to my perception of knowledge
When life was worth living

I know nothing
I must reach that point of recognition
From nothing, I create my next moment when life was worth living
Fringe thoughts allowed to fly off into the blackness
A central thought which defines me vanishes
I feel the life worth living become something tangible
Something attainable
Something beautiful
Despite the blithering idiot within and those without

Quiet
Calm
Peace
Alcove in the aforementioned storm
Swept away by the frailest of voices
Whispering the concept of answers

When life was worth living
My life did not care about answers or questions or concepts or rightness or wrongness or any other -ness
Life Is, Was, and Shall be the absence of questions and answers
A place of me, a moment, an experience, and a lack of qualification

when life WAS worth living
when life IS worth living
when life SHALL BE worth living
Owes nothing to anyone
Including myself

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Strolling through the Brightness of Joy

17 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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Strolling through the Brightness of Joy

Evil doesn’t stab me because I embrace my joy

I rest in the beauty this world quietly offers – meadows and brooks and mountains and seas

I’m reborn each morning as my eyes open to the possibilities inherent in another day

I stroll through a chorus of sunrays and glinting water, and I enjoy joy itself, for nothing is more fulfilling or important

Dark winds and gray clouds mean nothing more than a good sleep, my heart singing, my life exploding in rose petal rain showers, and sparkling snow dreams

Without doubt, the evils of this world fall away from my contentment achieved when I embrace the beauty in my heart burgeoning with all the joy one soul may possess.

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Where We Live

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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Where We Live

Time is not a river
Nor a blessing or a curse
Time is this moment.
This breath.
This thought.
This truth

Past and Future exist as fictions
Fictions we create often in our minds
Excuses for this moment’s ill-use
While time continues to simply be now…

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How Do I Love Thee?

03 Saturday Jul 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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How Do I Love Thee?    IMG_1867 (2)

The slight meandering of your crooked smile
Dancing-spider-palm-tree-shadows on evening walks
Laughter free, full of life
Eyes vivacious-sparkled with secret mirth

Hands intertwined in communicative connection
Joy embedded in simple activity
Patience held in high regard
Sacred night a stroll through nature’s peace

A breath
A life
A love
A moment

All existence reduced to important tasks
Like sighs
Like smiles
Like wonderment
Like snuggles
Like snowflakes
Like raindrops
Like sunshine in the heart

Flow
Words
Concepts
Realities

Fingertips recognize the impossibility of this task
Understanding all this author asks
Find your love in all which surrounds you
Step out of stress, you will find this true

Creativity and the core of your heart

Writing. The craziest, most beneficial exercises of my life. Struck this morning by my withdrawals due to a self-inflicted sabbatical from writing, I’ve felt the floodgates bursting to create. Any topic. Anything. I simply must write.

The pressures of people weigh upon me far too much. I take on their pain, their criticisms, their harshness, their bitterness. Don’t tell me to stop. The effort conflicts with my nature, my definition of who I am and who I desire to
be.

I truly, to this day, feel alone surrounded by people. Even though I enjoy emceeing events, especially my Inspired Mic where creatives enjoy a platform for their own definitions of who THEY are, I still feel the dark loneliness
which only abates in close connection with love or, most often, with a blank page and the freedom to spew.

My writing champion, whom I miss dearly, Ray Bradbury, once wrote, “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” The past two years may be somewhat of a hangover triggered by my sabbatical, yet contained within these past two years are a number of writing successes like the third-place achievement of one of my short stories, (found here – A Matter of Time by Michael Ray King – 3RD PLACE), and other pieces I feel effused through a higher quality of writing.

This day the poem preceded the post. I am thankful for my creative resurgence. Regardless of whether anyone reads this but me, I am content and drunk on my creative writing. Another of Mr. Bradbury’s quotes goes on to say so much more about writing. This quote has been paraphrased many times, but I feel the entirety of his observation stands stronger than the sum of its parts:

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let
them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

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Fatal Push

20 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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Fatal Push

Decisions.
Life.
Breath.
Heartbeats.

I fled the news today, oh boy!
Two hundred people claiming life for themselves
One tainted judge to strike them down

Truth.
Bruised.
Battered.
Unrecognizable.

Media drives division
Blatant manipulations to set people apart
Ask the question why? Why?

United people cannot be feared into subjugation.
Beware the fatal push.
Beware the fruitions of control.

Waking up too late will never serve your life
Unless you mean to lose the sight you own
Unless you care to live the tyrants’ dreams

Wake up, people of the world
See that fear screams and TRUTH walks silent in your path
Resist the final push toward the losses of your freedoms

Force.
Force employed which robs you of the basics of life
Force with fear as its staff and sword
The fatal push toward humanity’s downfall

Unfortunately (for me) I DID read the news today…oh boy!

And so it begins, the final, fatal push to the loss of all freedoms of mankind. If a human has no right to determine what goes into their body, if life itself becomes restricted because of passive-aggressive marshal law type edicts, wielded through fear, what freedom does a human truly possess?

A federal judge ruled against nearly 200 health workers who refused the vaccine for COVID 19. The judge stated they were not being “forced” to have something injected into their bodies. He stated, “the workers simply need to work elsewhere” if they do not vaccinate.

Simply? What the hell? The track record for deaths and complications from the vaccines are not exactly great. Of course, our media, our medical community, and certainly our governments are not willing to report such things as congestive heart failure, heart attacks and other side-effects from the vaccines.

When COVID first came on the scene, it was over 6 months before I knew anyone who contracted the flu. Once my friends began getting vaccinated, I immediately know people who’ve had serious side-effects from the injection(s). With a nearly 99% survival rate, which is only a small percentage less than survival of the now-no-longer-reported flu, taking away people’s livelihood by Draconian means certainly does at the very least whisper Naziism, which is a claim these health workers made.

The judge repudiated the comparison, but the day is fast approaching where, if you do not have the proper numerical coding, you will be relegated to far less than a second-class citizen. When did we give up the simplest of freedoms? The freedom to our very bodies? Really? Other people now control what happens to our bodies. And we, the people, lay down for the propaganda, bullying, and derision because of fear?

Not all of us tremble in our boots, beds, or anyplace else from the rhetoric raining like negative verbal daggers threatening to pierce anyone who does not lie down and comply. This is nothing new. Entire countries have done this with evil dictators and leaders who promised incredible lives they possessed no hope of providing.

This evil is the most nefarious. This evil is a not-so-passive-aggressive entity. Fear is mongered everywhere you turn. Even though the very paperwork you sign when you get the vaccine clearly states they are experimental, and none have been vetted and passed by the FDA in the US, the mere fact the the FDA said, “Okay” to an emergency use of experimental vaccines, this judge blows that off.

People no longer think for themselves. Few are willing to stand against such a basic loss of freedom because the backlash and the crushing negativity is more than they could handle. I am saddened, not just in this country, but the entire world, falling so quickly and easily to the pressure of those who would control our very bodies.

When did life become an “extend-at-all-costs” experience? When did societies fall into the blatant and most dangerous trap there could ever be, of governments controlling what goes into your body? How can the lemming-masses flee to this? When governments obtain such totalitarian control, nothing good ever comes to the people.

The other issues at play here are the powerful wealthy. Tracking money to Wuhan was quite the reveal. Once upon a time, the media would have jumped all over that. Crickets.

The media of this world does not serve people other than to create havoc, fear, and set up control factors, such as placing experimental drugs into your body, not voluntarily, but forcibly. That day has arrived, and it will only get more Draconian, more pervasive, and more deadly.

You have the right to what you put into your body. You make that choice. Allow me the same right. A life lived in fear is not a life. A life lived and controlled by fear is nothing more than a manipulated existence. Sadness befalls me that powerful entities will soon control our bodies. What fear will they create when the argument is made that those who live in fear are now vaccinated, so they are safe?

This has been preset for some time. This amazing flu that came out of nowhere(?) has many “mutations” occuring which will mean that people will need to constantly have things injected into them. Very convenient. Has anyone studied mutations and how they may happen so quickly from something that came out of nowhere?

It does not take a research scientist to come to the conclusion that these mutations are occurring from a created product. There is no other conclusion. The only question left is will those who fall in step with global government edicts persecute those who see things differently. In WWII Germany, the Schindlers were massively outnumbered by those who kowtowed to the yoke the Nazi’s threw around them, at first through promises of a better life, then through edicts of control through fear.

Humanity stands at its most vulnerable crossroad in history now. Right now. Will you join the forces who would control the very fluids and workings in your body, or will you allow choice? The basic freedom of choice. Once you sell that away, you no longer live your own life.

Many have chosen to take the vaccines. That is their choice. Will you allow others to make their own? Or will you condemn them, berate them, bully them, and separate them from society as less than second-class citizens? This has happened time and time again throughout the history of the world. Will you participate in the next evil regime to dominate people? I hope you will allow dissenting views, studies, and decisions on life the opportunity to live as they desire.

The forces at work today in our despicable media are beyond disgusting. The media propaganda falls in step with those taking control, not of a country or countries, but the entire world. How the masses can be so easily duped is a shock to me. All governments lie. Politicians, on the whole, are professional liars. They lend ear candy to the masses like a corporate Pied Pipers, then, once they wrench enough control, leave the people wallowing in the wake of their true agendas.

I’ve lived long enough to understand, observed sadly enough to comprehend, the underbellies of government, corporations, and religions do not stand positively under the light of honest scrutiny. The COVID lies have been apparent from the beginning, yet the masses give those hungry for power carte blanche with their edicts. The CDC has reported completely ridiculous and untrue “facts” since the beginning, which fed into the “fear-factor” they needed. Remember sanitizing shipments because the virus could be transmitted through touching something and someone else touching it?

Incredibly irresponsible “facts” which brewed fear on blatant day-to-day levels and on subliminal psychological levels. Masks, which have been proven time and again to be ineffective, INEFFECTIVE, to stemming the tide of this created virus, are one of the most effective tools being used by those who would deflect people from TRUTH. If the CDC and media and governments and corporations can keep strife between people who crumble to fear and those who stand against it, they can keep the spotlights and microscopes away from the ugly intentions behind their agendas.

When a judge rules against people fighting for their jobs simply by saying, “If you don’t get the injection, simply work someplace else.” there becomes exposed a serious problem with even our courts. What a farce and miscarriage of justice. Changing jobs is not simple, and, once the corporate evil gets one toe-hold, soon there will be no place to work, no ballgame to go to, no cruise to be able to enjoy, simply because those in control wish to exert their dominance so they may then enforce their background agendas.

The day will come when humanity regrets turning over their very lives to people, who throughout history, have horribly abused similar but far less daunting power over its people.

Never.

Never has it been in the best interest of people, of humanity, to lay down for the wealthy, the government, and their propaganda. Poisoned candy still tastes sweet. Please do not participate in fear control. You possess the ability to not join the ranks of those who would strip all humans of their right to choose what happens to their bodies. I’m telling you, this is not something to give away.

Make your choice as to what you do.

Allow me and others the same choice.

Please do not help perpetuate the fatal push through fear and coercion to strip humanity of that choice. Whether you wish to believe or not, there are forces who are using this manufactured virus for power and control on a level this world has never experienced.

Time to write my poem. I will place it at the beginning of this post.

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Dainty Demons

17 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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Soft, lush memories scream to life
Sleep a mellow cradle to their rebirth
Scars of joy so deep few would understand
Beauty and love and freedom and sentiment as pain.

Looking glass recollections delivered to the heart’s front door
Never reminded of what we were looking for
Joys and smiles and camaraderie bare
Life’s story splayed naked, diamond needle of playback deep in the soul’s grooves…

Wanton dreams of emotions and women
Traversing the white-water thrills from imagination’s core
Ghosts now. Undefined. General. Wisps of recollections.
Faded as the sun-stained remnants of decades passed into oblivion

Of games and thrills and timeless joy
No times ever recapture the life of the boy
Baseballs, hoops and rivers to swim
Age never dreamt to chase and catch him…

He lived in our house
He walked in my fears
He ruined too much of my manhood
With his follies and fears…

Last of days
Last of life
Disenfranchised children and wife
We strolled the day
We slinked the night
We stand unable to distinguish wrong from right

IRippled blue pool coddling many swimmers
No one racing, everyone winners
Summer days pass like the most pleasnt breeze
No one to worry you, no one to please

Wonder touches our hearts and our minds
Each though each sight, each touch each smell, each sound
Wait patient four our attention to slow and relax
Yet we go, go go go go go go

Your breath
Just now
Special
Another moment of life
Another chance
Speak its name
Acknowledge its power
Allow it to roll through your softened hear
Live
Now

What follows is writing inspiring poetry and vis versa. The poem above was contrived from the text below. Why? Why does any writer write anything? The simple answer is “because.” Because a dream woke me one night. Because the compulsion to write gnaws at me day and night. I love writing. Writing is my peace. My refuge. My joy. My sorrow. I copied each stanza from the paragraphs below and combined them into one unit. I hope there is something in this for you…

Awakened at five o’clock in the morning, ten hours past London midnight (for those who may be interested) my emotional throat lay bare and constricted by memory’s powerful, demanding hands, both of which felt destined to wring all the tears from my preteen and early teen experiences at the “police pool” as we called it. Long chiseled into my psyche that incredible experiences deliver pain as well as the evil happenings in life, I chose not to breathe and allowed the hands to focus my attention on those incredible summer days.

Looking glass recollections delivered to the heart’s front door
Never reminded of what we were looking for
Joys and smiles and camaraderie bare
Life’s story splayed naked, diamond needle of playback deep in the soul’s grooves…

JB. Me. The “police pool” named so because it was funded by the FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) of which my father was a member, he being a police officer. The pool itself was nothing too spectacular. I learned to swim there as a young boy. There was the “deep end” with the two diving boards – one a spring loaded “low board” that regardless of its name, intimidated me with its height over the water. The “high dive” stood as diving’s Everest in my eyes, just as fearful and loaded with potential death as the mountain itself.

There was the concession stand, a magical place for a kid if he had some money. No eating in the pool area, but picnic tables and “The Deck” were surreal slices of escape for the tongue and eyes. Chocolate Black Cows or stringy taffy, Milk Duds and other childhood delights slipped hand in glove with preteen, ravenous eyes scouring girls in bikinis.

The Deck was located on the roof of the concession stand/changing rooms, a long, rectangular flat area peppered with young women working their tans. Most lay face down with the straps of their bikini tops tantalizingly draped careless by their sides. We filled our eyes with what squished underneath them, imaginations wild and begging in silence. Even the music, which was current to the times, fell in step with this favorite focus of our day. “I’m a Girl Watcher” played from the speakers strategically placed around the pool and deck area at a volume easily able to overcome the noise of children squealing and people talking.

Wanton dreams of emotions and women
Traversing the white-water thrills from imagination’s core
Ghosts now. Undefined. General. Wisps of recollections.
Faded as the sun-stained remnants of decades passed into oblivion

“What are you doing?” I queried JB as he sat on a bench staring underneath the high dive.
“I’m checking out a BT.”
“BT?”
“Yeah. Big Titties. She’s right over there,” he pointed, “and when she bends over, you can see nipple!”

Yes, call it base. Call it many things. But this was a time of growing and learning and exploring and many other young experiences. We created different code names from that point on. BT always got attention when one of us uttered the magic letters.

Of games and thrills and timeless joy
No times ever recapture the life of the boy
Baseballs, hoops and rivers to swim
Age never dreamt to chase and catch him…

The pool felt great, with its lure of water, girls (we did not think of them as women or even young women) and challenges as to who could seim further, faster, longer under water. Yet, there were other thrills like the ever dangerous, life and limb-threatening merry-go-round. We would whirl that sucker to near the speed of light. I’m amazed no one died or suffered life-altering injuries. We knew we were on the edge. The edge of life and death. This did not matter. We lived to be young. The thrill ran our veins like electricity through high conductive metal. No stopping us. No parental pleading for our safety could slow our brushes with fate.

He lived in our house
He walked in my fears
He ruined too much of my manhood
With his follies and fears…

In later years, they built an indoor basketball court. I discovered it one day at the Policeman’s Annual Picnic. No one was there. Just me, a basketball and a nice, fresh court. As I shot, my father walked in. My first reaction was that he would chase me out. I was in seventh grade and had made the junior varsity basketball team. To my surprise, he grabbed on of my rebounds and actually shot the ball.

Not just any lame, clumsy sort of shot, but one which spoke of knowledge and experience on the court. Up until this point, he had not paid much attention to my basketball exploits, nor had he acknowledged my passion for the game. But this one day stands as a pinnacle or a deep dark well, depending upon my ability to focus on the positive or negative. It would be the only time he would show interest in my love of sports.

I don’t mean talking sports, I mean actively participating. I do cherish that short period of time that day, but mostly, I am saddened by the father who could not bond with his only son. Many years of sadness and separation followed us like ominous storm clouds that would not veer away.

Last of days
Last of life
Disenfranchised children and wife
We strolled the day
We slinked the night
We stand unable to distinguish wrong from right

The Police Pool, despite the close association with my father, is a joy I count in my life. I am glad he shared this with us. I am glad he shared that one day with me. I suppose, in the sparsity of days, this one day has become incredibly memorable and etched into my heart.

Rippled blue pool coddling many swimmers
No one racing, everyone winners
Summer days pass like the most pleasant breeze
No one to worry you, no one to please

Wonder touches our hearts and our minds
Each though each sight, each touch each smell, each sound
Wait patient four our attention to slow and relax
Yet we go, go go go go go go

Your breath
Just now
Special
Another moment of life
Another chance
Speak its name
Acknowledge its power
Allow it to roll through your softened hear
Live
Now

Epilogue

Now that I’m at the end of this lengthy post, my original thought was to call attention to the pains of joy and happiness and glee. Make no mistake. All of these positive, wonderful experiences possess levels of pain. Sweet pain. Dainty Demons.

Memory calls them to the fore at time. I miss and long for the joys and happinesses and glees of days gone by. That kiss with Vicky where I felt, at a minimum, the entire galaxy coalesce into ecstatic wonder. The thrill of one dance, one song, with Dawna in 7th grade. Incredible smells and sights of youth like hot dogs on a campfire or dew glistening on morning grasses.

The pangs of loss, not of memory, but the loss of feeling that original intensity. Not so much the loss, but the TRUTH that Vicky’s kiss will never ride my lips and entire nervous system through the universe again. While dew remains pretty and a minor joy, back then the water droplets barely restrained magic bursting from their precarious and bulbous grasp of a blade of grass.

Stephen King said, “All you need to be a writer is the ability to remember every scar.” I would add that those scars may be positive as well as negative. Beautiful scars pepper my life. Each one a treasured memory. Many of them I rediscover when something triggers a long-lost beautiful experience. Writing about negativity is easy. I do this all the time. Writing about the positive scars, those incredible memories which breathe life into words like melancholy, reverie, and hopeless romantic, should become part of every writer’s repertoire.

Or not. I hope my writing captures the good and the bad. The grays and the yellows as well as the black and whites. Some darkness is good. Healing. Like midnight moons and love through heart-revealing words. Some light is damaging like sunburns and mistake revelations to the world. All deserve our attention. All comprise their space in life.

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The Self-Masturbating Poet

17 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Uncategorized

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It’s a shame some of my posts still hang out in “Draft” land. I stumbled across this one today. The story behind this post is as follows. I received a text one day (while leading a large writer’s group meeting) from a clergyman I’d decided to part ways with, along with the church he led. I’d been writing for a while under the freeing concept that writing one’s personal truth owns far more power than writing what others say one SHOULD write. Censorship comes in many forms. I’d grown weary of the portending avalanche of backlash and criticism if I chose to write my truth, the way in which I see, hear, taste, smell, and feel this world.

I’d also confided in a number of writer confidants my perception that if I wrote my personal truths, I would suffer the backlash of people who may observe this world differently. As I proceeded with the “writing from the heart” style, I noted that what I received rather than backlash, were ‘thank you’s’ for mustering the courage to write my truth.

Then, this fateful day at my writer’s group, the following “backlash” stormed my way. In the end, the attack was nothing more than a “tempest in a teacup” full of sound and fury, truly signifying nothing other than an end to holding back on my views of life. What follows is the original post written in July, 2012:

July, 2012

Isn’t it interesting what writing straight from your heart can elicit from others. A reader of my blog messaged me that, among other observations, he sees my writing on this site as “Your self serving, self glorifying and self masturbating (personal note: this ridiculous phrase is redundant…) word games are nothing more than clear evidence that you are moving farther and further into the darkness of a terribly self and family destroying solitude that is little different from merely wasting away again in your own tawdry version of Margaritaville.” 

(My father was an alcoholic. I’ve hardly ever touched the stuff, and I’ve never been drunk a day in my life. No matter the stretch, I do understand his poor attempt at analogy…)

I find even more interesting a later statement that “Your words reveal you. I have been reading them. They reveal a self- absorbed, angry, bitter man who is choosing every way and word except the words and ways of the one he professes to be his Savior to advance the issues of your life.”

The fact that the words I write so aptly “reveal” what is happening in my heart and my life IS the point. The understated accusation is that I am unaware that I’ve exposed these things to the world like some crouching, sneaky child trying to cover over his missteps.

I committed, some time ago, to write this blog real. It comes to you, the reader, unedited and straight off my views and emotional experiences. That I have a good bit of strife in my life and I have been surrounded by toxicity for decades AND the fact I write about it, is not self-serving, self-glorifying, or even self-masturbating (despite the ridiculous redundancy in this last adjective attack), but more a bold step into the world with the possibility to help others in the same state or similar issues.

Oh yes, I do not go shoving religious paradigms and belief systems off on my readers. I don’t ‘toe the company line’ on religion at all. The Sin Police are everywhere in organized religion. Last I saw, the only being capable of judging my faith, or lack thereof, is somewhat above the human plane.

Ultimately, the attempt at scathing criticism of my writing here validates the underbelly I’d been observing in the church for years. Truth, outside their blinders-laden doctrine, is not something they care to address. They flee an intelligent and deep observation of life like someone working to convince a mathematician that 1 + 1 = 3. If the pains and sorrows of this life do not meet their doctrine-driven criteria, there is nothing but scurrilous rhetoric pushing forth from their control-oriented mouthpiece. Give me a world where I possess the ability to observe and feel life as it is rather than tunneling underground to avoid backlash for thinking outside their closeted box. 

Today

As is my custom on this site, since this remains a poetry site, I now am required to conjure a poem. I must admit, this one is a bit difficult.

So Many Voices

They whisper fear
Fear the air
Fear the water
Fear your food
Fear what matters

They scream fear
Fear the weather
Fear your health
Fear your mind
Fear your wealth

Passive aggressive control in every broadcast
Manipulation of emotion and mind in every broadcast
Blatant restriction of basic freedoms in every edict
Ridiculous destruction of history and that which would condemn them…

…TRUTH

So many voices clamor for your ears
So many voices throughout the years
So many voices assault everything you once knew was right
So many voices block your life’s path and sight

So many voices with no ears to listen
So many voices need no ears to listen
So many voices desire only one action
So many voices demand capitulation

Truth will never be the dominate voice in this world
When the “world” speaks a “truth” BEWARE
TRUTH lies outside the people/entities/governments in control
TRUTH makes itself known to those who see through the rhetoric

So many voices but the one needed most.

Your own.

TRUTH will never TRULY ride the propaganda machines

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Moments of Now

28 Wednesday Apr 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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Fleeting moments in hallowed hills
Breakfast under the sun on a rotting picnic table
Dogwood blossoms flying spring breezes
Fresh air surging through awakening lives
The glint of sunshine off her hair

Happiness now a daily experience
Every little nuance of life a joy
No dream approaches the connections
Right time. Right purpose. Right person
Love given and received without fetters or fears

Beauty which all the senses breathe in
Peace
Comfort
Friend
Lover

The whole of life to surround us
We own the moments of now.

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Giver of Life

07 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Michael Ray King in Poetry

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Giver of Life

Full moon shadows dance in dark delight
Serene morning smiles feel so good that they hurt
Soft kisses crafted in earth’s heaven
Far less gentle and full of passion than in the heart

Midnight stars grin universal happiness
Rustled leaves giggle with glee
Laughter timbered in the voice free and frivolous
Far less hearty and relaxed than in the soul

Peaceful strolls through mutual minds
Hopeful sighs for glorious tomorrows
A future on the horizon
Far less amazing than the mind’s knowledge of the reality…

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