A Moment's Peace

I look for just a moment's peace
Because that is all I need
To pump out what is drowning me
From inside from down deep
What I feel is flooding
From inside from some source
Is nothing more than changes
Some which I am not versed
The irony is balanced
For what I usually seek
Is o're the next horizon
Beyond where I now sleep
To reach the next horizon
Of changes that I want
I must first survive drowning
In changes from beyond.

-Kelly Voelker

Iris = One

I contemplate the I AM
Without true meaning known
The explanations hollow
The scriptures won't bestow
A deep and integrating
Knowing from inside
But all along it's been here
Growing every spring
In my hometown gardens
In artist's favorite things
It is the Living Iris
So common that it's void
Of meaning or enlightenment
A fleeting burst of joy
I've always had a reverence
For these unique flowers
As exotic as the orchid
The Midwest's own endowed
It's time to seek them out now
The season is at hand
Examine with full focus
Their exquisite high design
Unfolding in unlikely
Unattended scenes
Displaying truth that beauty
Cannot be so erased
By neglect or abandonment
By drought or hottest sun
The iris comes back always
It's I R ... I is . . . ONE

-Kelly Voelker

Lifespan of the River

Lifetimes are like rivers
Meandering through time
Some seem never ending
Others end entwined
Giving all their life force
To another stream
Who will carry
What it can as far as
Where we cannot dream

The ultimate destination
Is the source or larger plan
We have never been there
Until our sudden end

The deltas are these places
Calm and not as fast
Whether reached in old age
If we haven't diminished
Or run out of our banks
Dispersing all we held as
Silt and sand and slough*

Life is a collection of
What we travel through
What we're still attached to
Sinks before we're done
Servicing another
Or becoming part of mud.

-Kelly Voelker

Slough -

1. 1.

   a swamp.

   • NORTH AMERICAN

     a side channel or inlet, or a natural channel that is only sporadically filled with water.
2. 2.

   a situation characterized by lack of progress or activity.

Delta - "When a river reaches a lake or the sea the water slows down and loses the power to carry sediment . The sediment is dropped at the mouth of the river. Some rivers drop so much sediment that waves and tides can't carry it all away. It builds up in layers forming a delta."

NOTE:  As I think about this, civilization can be thought of as a delta.  The layers and remains of so many lifetimes of effort and best attempts.  A city or a library can even be thought of as a delta.

Oh Magnolia

Oh Magnolia
I've known you through all time
Peeking through as softly
As a rabbit in the vine

If there were a symbol
Fragrance or a touch
Which is all I'd ever
Think or feel or want

It's you who are this
Breathless fresh and dearest
To my oldest heart depth
To my hand so neareth.

-Kelly Voelker

There is No Purpose

Lately a concept has visited me which suggests there is no purpose, and to stop looking for one could be the ace of swords to free the soul and mind.  When I really understand this concept in moments of higher clarity it brings up laughter in me!  Like the joke was on me to think there's purpose, and the whole time there wasn't!

We all eventually accumulate a few things we hold as true, and live by them.  For example, I like to be motivated and inspired by the beauty of nature.  Yet, yesterday while gardening, I realized that nature is disgusting sometimes.  This also brought up laughter from deep within me!

Maybe we simply lock and unlock beliefs when it suits us as a tool to navigate where our secret will is trying to go.  Since our will is secret even to ourselves, it has to trick or train us into doing its bidding.

Another moment I felt laughter well up in me was thinking about cemeteries being a waste of time and effort when put into perspective against reincarnation or even resurrection.  The overwhelming majority of people are forgotten in two generations or less.  Their personalities not known, their habits, their thoughts, their accumulated wisdom gone with them to be recycled into the land and ether.  What is passed on is far from what those who knew them remembered, and so it is all false information which others attempt to keep "alive" for others, when it is dead and lost to the living.

The highest laughter came to me when I was explaining this concept to some friends.  A phrase came out rather by accident that I find hilarious.  It was "our existence doesn't matter".  Meaning our existence or multiple existences on this planet do not matter.  The struggles and triumphs are known only to us and even if written down, they will not be read.  With information streaming faster and faster, no one has the time to care, because they are thinking about their own pointless existence.

I will end this by saying that I have even more laughter rising up from within me about these thoughts and my attempts to bring them to a few people for a few minutes in eternity, only for them to disappear thereafter.  Every person will try a lifetime to find purpose and most won't find the truth that I have found, so I was lucky for a moment, but it doesn't matter.

-Kelly Voelker

I've Become an Equation

Kaleidoscope changes of the familiar
Projecting themselves to the perimeter
Of what one believes to be fake
Beholden then later as a beautiful mosaic
With light shown through images
All different I think
Unimaginable changes I lived like a champ
Now indivisible through fog and now damp
Breaking connections then up from the deep
An intelligence finds me from the bottom of the heap
How did it make it from the cutting room floor?
Why the connection? To settle a score?
I've changed and I've tumbled
Now different in scope
Others remain as they bob in the sea
As if time shifts around them and
They could not change
If Heaven and Earth can't
Then who the hell can?
To maintain identity all of that time
Would exhaust me to boredom
More quickly I'd climb
To get out of, get rid of routine
I've become an equation
Not a prime number same.

-Kelly Voelker

equation - A written representation of a chemical reaction, in which the symbols and amounts of the reactants are separated from those of the products by an equal sign, arrow, or a set of opposing arrows. 

prime number - A prime number is a whole number greater than 1 whose only factors are 1 and itself.

Spring in the Ashes

I was burning papers outside in a burn pile.  I noticed all that remained from the last fire was a metal spring.  I wondered what archaeologists would think if they found this simple element, which really says nothing about the notebook or calendar it bound or what was in the notebook or calendar.  Even at this short time expanse, I cannot say for sure if it means anything at all about the civilization we live in.

Later, I heard on the radio, that nature has very specific proteins to create life, and they look like a spring, and some like a Slinky.  They fold up and will tolerate no imperfections.  At certain points in the life creating process, with their specific perfections in tact, they descend into utter chaos only to emerge with the process more advanced than it was before.

From our limited vantage point, we cannot see or understand most of what is going on to perpetuate our natural world as well as what is living out its existence demolishing what is created.

Our sciences are short sighted without physics, and we lack much of the information to even understand ethics.

Ethics are understood best by allowing a broad breathe of intention to guide us towards higher forms of civilization.  Within this, the strong, targeted will of some will have an effect on the trajectory of ethics, but they are thankfully blind to the coarse of nature's final intended destination.

This destination, is only temporary and will branch out towards other specific directions in the sphere of this dimension, and as a particle of insignificance for the Universe to assimilate.

-Kelly Voelker

Destroying the data of
Irrelevant gain
Leaving the outcome
To wind and then rain

No meaning no order
Just everything same
Reverting to elements
The spring still remains.

-Kelly Voelker

The Grasses' Promenade

Brown winter grasses
Forced down to the ground
Forced to behave like the
Frantic water flowing over it
Towards ever lower places
Ever larger lakes
Never large enough 'til
It formed the grand consciousness
Of all water

The grasses hurried as the water
To protect the ground and remain
There after in the disguise of water
Brown dry currents of grass
Protecting what it could
All else yielded and released
Leaving tree roots suspended in air
Over raw river banks ensnared

After having no choice but to serve
Land and acquiescing to the flood
The grasses regained power and rose
Upright off the ground through
Their horizontal remains
Towards the sun refrained
Grasses . . . the proud
Waving mane of the plains
Allowed to brush the belly of deer
Offering to hide one insect from the next
Green renewal and healing
To regions and fields
Creek banks and meadows
Proudly a-wave
The grasses' promenade*.

-Kelly Voelker

*promenade -  a public walk, typically one along a waterfront at a resort
- a leisurely walk, or sometimes a ride or drive, taken in a public place so as to meet or be seen by others.
- (in country dancing) a movement in which couples follow one another in a given direction, each couple having both hands joined

Uncomfortable Lanyards

Time changes avenues
To sure and known things
Travelers and families
All changing with age
Relationships, friendships
Acquaintances too
Can become islands
In view but not touched
Awakening truths about
Routine and myths
Change seems appropriate
Yet cruel in its methods
I wonder why memories
Are a feature still standard
When often they picture
Uncomfortable lanyards*
To maintain or seek out
Or keep within range
When horizons hold
Sunshine and not so much rain.

-Kelly Voelker

*lanyard - late Middle English lanyer, in the general sense ‘a short length of rope for securing something’, from Old French laniere . 

Cry Out the Despair

I don't want to be here
A day or a year
I don't want to stay here
Oh dear oh dear
I want my old landscape
I want my old friends
Some day I will return there
To the open high desert
Alone in the wind
To cry out the despair of
This region, this climate
The disappearance of joy
I want to break out of this
Jail of my own restoring.

-Kelly Voelker

Frontier Angels

Like frontier angels
We floated with few words
Down the stairs
Through the doorways
Stepping silently
On socked feet
In the farmhouse
Of the Great Plains
Nestled next to the creek
For guidance and play

Like frontier angels
Our flannel nightgowns
Billowed with the heat
Of the giant oil furnace
Heating our bones
Directly and deep
During the dark
Of bedtime hours and
Before the dawns bright
We connected together
As children of Light.

-Kelly Voelker

NOTE: I wrote this about my Mom and I, in our flannel nightgowns, taking a moment to enjoy the comfort of hearth and home amid harsh winters in the Midwest.  During these moments, we weren't Mother and Daughter, we were just two souls connecting in silence, twice a day, in the same spot to recharge for the next 12 hours.

My Cloverleaf

Three days watching from my room on the third floor, I look at the cloverleaf's revolving pace. Each truck ticking by, engine's compression breaking in the sub-zero temperatures. Every driver of these ever-revolving trucks is a master driver. Each driver is more capable than most people at navigating weather and hypnotic, repetitive sequencing along the linear route. Each driver is driven as he drives, to meet the next tick on the click of larger ticks on the clock of commerce. How many of these master drivers exist, when so prevalent as this just on my cloverleaf?

Three days watching from my room on the third floor, I look at the Wendy's across the street on one petal of my cloverleaf. Is it just another modern roach motel poisoning time-crunched, value-conscious travelers? I realized after going there myself, that it is managed by a wonderful and capable person; responsible day in, day out, for staffing as well as making sure the food is hot and satisfying. This person is responsible for the facility itself functioning perfectly for restrooms and seating. It's an indoor travel park for the pausing traveler.

Three days watching from my room on the third floor, I see countless semi-trucks parked as their drivers sleep, and yet others are chatting with the 24 hour night manager of my hotel. Is she happy for the company? It matters not, for as a bartender, it is her job to entertain and accommodate those who need a place to rest, or someone who just wants to stand and visit awhile after sitting and being alone for hours on end.

This is just my cloverleaf. How many others as you replicate each across the United States? I will not think of fast food restaurants as roach motels but now, but as efficient ships with their own captains and crews, serving the public at all hours, sleeping, eating, and then doing it again and again. They meet the public's needs on a daily basis without fail, and if they fail, someone else must meet the need. Are their needs being met on this timeless extent?

-Kelly Voelker

cloverleaf - a junction of roads intersecting at different levels with connecting sections forming the pattern of a four-leaf clover. (North American)

extent - the degree to which something has spread; the size or scale of something.