Alternating Currents

Alternating Currents

Edward L.Wier

© 2002 by Edward L. Wier


Cover Art: Zachód slonca by Wojciech Weiss, 1899


Published by The New Formalist Press


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

Love Poem

At the risk of my own embarrassments,
I write this poem. Metaphors come flying
In like old, over-polished ornaments,
On the last, wishing-wings of the dying.
Like a red, red rose or a drop of blood
Against the frozen snow. Oh, I don’t know.
Is it the feel of my feet in slick mud?
Or two faces lit in a pale, orange glow?
I guess so, but my heart, groping for words
With no time for originality,
Is pawing music, art, and singing birds,
In waves of second-hand banality.
As if not enough, muses morn for days;
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Damned if you Do

Upon first meeting, there is always talk,
An exchange of information. Music,
Food, origins, work; the human mating squalk.
Alcohol; why we do or don’t use it.
Computers, cell-phones or love that won’t last,
A wonderful son or wayward daughter.
Reluctantly forming our social caste,
Dipping our words in safe, shallow water.
Our best foot forward, we showcase our souls
Being funny but sincere; strong, yet kind.
While searching for signs of similar goals,
Well on the way to a love that is blind.
Words bring us out to our level landings,
Then turn into our misunderstandings.

Confirmation

Don’t think that I’ll call back. I’ve been alone
So long that I enjoy cold meals like this.
Besides, I don’t like to talk on the phone
Or trade my peace for hopes of future bliss.
Set in my ways, or so they say, I’ll find
My missing piece some other place, in art
Or nature, or male meetings of the mind.
The quest for flesh or female counterpart
Has passed on to the younger, stronger fools
With cruel illusions of eternal days;
To lusty craftsmen with the time and tools
To find their way through each engaging maze.
I’ve ditched that dream like some old broken toy,
For nights of Brandy, fire, friends and joy.

Hell Fire

Hell is private, and personal, at least
Here where a dusty drawer of photographs
Burns my brain like fire. Nothing can reach
Through the night but the sharpened, silver shafts
Of flaming darts, straight through my softest parts.
It’s nothing new. Many fools have been here
Before, in the long parade of pierced hearts.
It’s almost trite, the mood and moping fear,
But I have nothing to say to myself.
I could hope that I’m in Purgatory,
And that seeping sorrow will one day melt
Into the lines of a different story.
The images are keen and beguiling;
I stare and wonder why you were smiling.

Flat Out

These are the years, the flat-out forties of
Open highway. No signs pass. We careen
Carefully; the bright, beating sun above,
Chased by the shadows of what we have been.
Far from the cradle of discovery,
From the first kiss and the close miss. Far from
The music, like a silent symphony
Played for an unexplained continuum.
Between the cities of hope and regret,
With no pressing need to fail or succeed,
To slow down or make speed. Still we abet
Momentum; followers without a lead.
Lost in the lines on an unnumbered page,
The old age of youth; the youth of old age.

Skeleton

Those rose colored words I once chose for you,
During the days of my dearest regret,
Hand picked with pity, then tender and new,
Can never remember, never forget.
Those violet verbs were vivid back then,
Glowing and growing till your page’s turn,
To gaunt, gilded grey in a golden glen,
Now powdery ash for memory’s urn.
Those towering nouns could never fall down,
With roots clutching far too deep to depart;
Bright red I once knew has turned pallid brown,
Time having drained the sweet lifeblood from art.
Without you the words are as pale and thin,
As the hollow husk of a snake’s shed skin.

The Art Collector

I know a woman with fragments of art
She finds in places all over the earth.
Here there’s a shutter or there an odd part
Gathered for reasons of personal worth.
Torn paintings, cracked pots, and pieces of wall
From a chapel, I think, somewhere in Rome.
Nothing’s related. She has quite a haul,
All filling the space of her little home.
Most women would try to make it all match,
Damning distinction to some greater good,
Uncomfortable with an old rusty latch
Next to a carving of new polished wood.
As queer as this woman’s habit may be,
I think she now has a large part of me.

To Julie Carlisle

Your leaving leaves me in a stranger’s place,
And now soft light shines oblique. All is hard;
It hangs there empty on my fallen face.
I stare inside. You caught me off my guard.
The air is altered. I must re-adjust,
Try redirecting thoughts some other way;
As gladly wanting turns to moping must,
And like two loosened ships, we drift away.
Friendship? A decoy. Loss of love is cruel,
As nothing fills your darkened silhouette;
A million mile journey with no fuel,
Or searching words without an alphabet.
A course of action? Anything to do?
In better days I would have talked to you.

Before Words

Before the captured words were ever heard,
When fresh, ripe thought hung silently at night;
Before the crystal mind was cracked and blurred,
By conscious blows of self-aware insight.
Before the chant or chatter of a voice,
When song was seed in the first virgin womb;
Before the fruitful garden of her choice,
With stems of green conception yet to bloom.
Before all tenses and semantic tools,
When sound and sense were on new wind and wave;
And graceful poetry moved through the pools,
Too sharp for signs to shadow or enslave.
As if an adjective, yet unemployed,
Was drifting through a living nounless void

Limbic Pentameter

She says we only are what we can think,
And feelings but solutions of the brain.
Cerebral soup is stirred to form a link,
With dendrites in our chemical domain.
There is no soul or spirit to be had,
Beyond the twitching of a wrinkled mass.
And this determines if we’re good or bad,
Creative, gallant, noble, crude, or crass.
All love and hate are alkaline at best,
And fizzle in the fodder of our hulls.
We can not fly beyond the neural nest,
Or penetrate the borders of our skulls.
And if you trust in things you’ve never seen,
It must be that you simply have the gene.

Until Then

When yellow moon is turned to bloody red,
And silver stars fall from the certain sky,
When the planets from their paths have sped,
And all the seas and rivers have run dry;
When darkness claims the kingdom of the sun,
And earth is scattered in the stellar dust,
When every strand of flesh has come undone,
And all the elements have turned to rust;
When pining poets have put down their pens,
And no expression lives on any face,
When history is done with times and trends,
And all is lost to the cold vault of space;
When nothingness is silent in the chill,
That’s when you’ll have my love, but not until.

Claire

She walks in the eye of the hurricane,
Surrounded by the raging and the roar,
Inside the frenzy, on her own terrain,
Quietly, and then, straight up to my shore.
A live oasis hoping back at me,
Across wild wreckage of years and dreams.
Her eyes, calm pools where I can almost see,
The faint reflection of our sister themes.
A soul, too old for this flower of flesh,
A mind, too young for cathedrals of thought.
Now I am a wind of better and best,
Lost in a tempest of would, should and ought.
Years are but numbers and the gods are mean,
They could have, at least, made the girl eighteen.

Jeckyl Island

I can not go back to that sunny beach,
Where we took wind baths, drifting down the shore;
When all the blazing stars were in our reach,
At night, surrounded by the misty roar.
Where crooked, wooden knuckles of old oaks,
Would search for secrets hidden in the dark;
And hazy glows of slow and distant boats,
Would be a dock where dreams could disembark.
Where we would tumble through a glassy sky,
And leave our foolish questions far behind;
No need to ask, believe, or wonder why,
Filled with a strange delight in going blind.
I can not go back to that sunny shore,
But I am there, more than I was before.

Psalm

Credit is my shepherd,
I shall not save.
It makes me lie down in red pastures;
It leads me into the deeper waters.
It restores my bills.
It guides me in the path of work
For my record’s sake.
Even though I walk through the aisle
       of the shadow of poverty,
I will fear no price; My cards are with me.
My Visa and Master, they comfort me.
They prepare a sale table before me
      in the presence of the frugal;
They anoint my head with relief;
My limit overflows.
Surely debt and interest will follow me
      all the days of my life.
And I will dwell in the house of installments forever.

About the author

Born to Polish immigrants in New Jersey, Edward L. Wier makes his base in Atlanta as a professional musician, teacher, and freelance writer with a BA. in theology. He has written music for national television specials and film, and his articles, satire, and poetry appear in various journals such as The Formalist, Orbis, SPSM&H, The Atlanta Review, The Lyric, Troubadour, The Ledge, The Door, Windhover, Acoustic Musician and Guitar Review. He has won the Felix Stefanile Sonnet Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his fiction appears in Sideshow 1997, Fine Print, The Bitter Oleander, and Reader's Break, among others.