Earth Day & the storyteller.
by Joe Geidel
Two poems on nature, time, and perception.
Earth Day.
By Joseph L. Geidel | 27 April 2022
Earth for a Day.
A chance to take a break from the mirror of delicious delusion
and stroll down the city sidewalk to notice a dandelion peeking out of the concrete pavement.
Our beginnings can be so difficult.
Some struggle to stay a float & others drown… who can blame them?
In this world you MUST conform
and if you can’t, sayonara baby.
“Why aren’t you doing this? Why aren’t you doing that?”
The world of prying eyes! Judgment & the snarl of misguided vengeance…
that’s all they want
that’s all THEY ever wanted.
It makes you wonder who’s really pulling the strings, you know?
I am not of this so-called world — thank god!
I don’t know who would want to be.
I have elected another path.
The dust & dirt. The mud & grime.
I am of the Earth.
A mother’s son.
A man.
My eyes look beyond the endless horizon from atop Mount Olympus, the Empire State.
Down below, people navigate the sweat soaked urban topography.
Microscopic colored ants. One blond, one brunette, one redhead.
All baking in the unrelenting summer sun.
I yearn for that summer sun.
Everyone is equal beneath the radiance.
The rich with their blood soaked ties, hung like a noose.
The poor with their American dreams and maxed out credit cards.
The young with their pompous attitudes fueled by egoic mental breakdown.
The old with their blind convictions to alternative facts.
I recline on a small patch of holy land in Central Park
and wonder how long this can all go on for…
JLG 22
the storyteller.
By Joseph L. Geidel | 1 June 2022
how to write a love letter to myself?
not for me now but for me then.
i remember those days in middletown
as a child, practically an infant,
further back down the twisting and turning
whipping and winding stream of time.
the leaves outside the dining room windows
were a kind of living green
shimmering in from the rays of the sun
reflecting the light upon me — a baby.
a son myself.
look at that, me and the sun as friends.
how did i end up so lucky?
my father would leave this video camera in the living room.
the cassette tapes were tools of tremendous power.
like zeus and his thunderbolt, i wielded the camera like it gave me meaning
like it gave me a purpose.
my dharma is to tell stories.
not brown dirt dead tall tales
but reality and the glistening spectrum
of the vibrance of experience.
words. words as art. words as translation.
we translate every language, even our mother tongue.
sentence structure pouring throughout mediums.
from cave etching to nano-chip and beyond!
i use words to be carelessly full of care.
words as jazz. bop! de de bop!
how shall i recall the happenings of old?
are memories written in stone
or are they forever in flux?
these are the thoughts of a child
who grew up and is still growing!
all stories are one story.
all storytellers the same.
JLG 22