here
14 January 2021 by 4 Comments
I followed a path
thinking that it led somewhere
but it’s ended here—
*
It isn’t the road
not taken so much as the
untakeable road—
*
Follow my advice:
don’t follow a path—choose the
made up, pathless ways.
*
**
*
freddie omm
january 2021
*
with apologies to robert frost’s road not taken
– the poem is based on a meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice
Shall I Compare You
1 January 2021 by 5 Comments
This new sonnet riffs off Shakespeare’s 18th:
…for all those whose love is so fresh and strong it can seem unreal, here’s a sonnet for each and every one of us – Happy New Year!
Shall I compare thee you to a summer’s day… something you’re not?—
To me, you are living poetry
(Not some wordy simulation that can’t be)
And you’re the very essence of what’s hot—
Though similes like darling buds may grow
The sense of us, approximating us,
You’re as unique, incomparable
As our love will always be—deep, unfathomable:
And aren’t all of us much more than sensually defined
Both as couples, and as twinned lone souls (sometimes of one mind)?
Then, in the lives to come, more darling buds shall grow
To blossom free, just like the two of us:
Our loves as indescribable as real
(Although this near perfection sometimes seems unreal).
*
**
*
Freddie Omm
January 2021
ventura beach revisited
25 September 2019 by 10 Comments
Freddie in Ventura
*
those amber sunsets
never set but hung in mind
resplendent always
*
many years before
this beach and all that’s on it
were now, were mine
*
time was not what it
now is nor is becoming
each moment stayed whole
*
the waves held me fast
while the wind blew permanence
over solid sand
*
gulls sat in the sky
as if transfixed or painted
by a maker’s hand
*
*
a kid on a beach
– in the timeless space of life –
that kid’s always now
*
**
*
freddie omm
ventura, september 2019
*
The first of my haiku chains about Ventura beach was published here in December 2014: on ventura beach. I wrote this new one and took the photo while revisiting the beach last week.
surf
21 June 2019 by 5 Comments
Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I’m editing and transforming into haiku, will be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations offer insights into spiritual growth. I’ll be posting a few in advance here, interspersed with other work.
The second is surf:
our loves are dolphins
weaving wild unwinding waves
in and out of sight
*
our sentiments are seals
on rocks submerged in ocean
slicked in ceaseless tides
*
our thoughts’ sea lions
flap and flip on cold bare shores
to breed in rookeries
*
our lives’ deep mysteries
will swim and sink and drift through
phosphorescing seas
*
like drops in quick waters
loves, thoughts, lives are liquid
flowing surfing beings
*
**
*
freddie omm
june 2019
text by freddie omm, header pic by pagie page, footer pic by daniel h. tong
space in our mind
9 February 2018 by 2 Comments
there is a space in our mind
where thoughts are formed
which we do not express
when let’s say you catch a glance of someone
in the street
who smiles and you smile back but pass by
and forget about them
although you’ve never known them to start with
until days later you wake
in the night
from the darkness of a vanished dream
about some other person and their smile
that passing instant returns like a flash
to you vivid as lightning and fades as quickly
in bleached black
yet has left its impression
as if imprinted on your brain
so when you look away a shadow
of it still is there smudged
in faded pigments
like the glimpse of a ghost
of something you don’t quite believe
in
or a déja-vu of such familiar oddity
that it’s unsettling and draws you close
in
as a lover lost from long ago
who seems suddenly close and wants to hug
you back from your absence to feel
the sort of things that you cannot describe
*
Omm
8 february 2018
shoredays, yoredays: seven haiku on a beach
30 January 2014 by 6 Comments
now, then, soon – shoredays,
wave-lapped hours, wind-spun and warm
like summer kisses
*
blown in midwinter
distillated on our lips
blissed out, oh! timeless
*
yoredays – flown, but here
with you forever, come spring
and the buds and birds –
*
skies drunk on light, blue
till blacked-out, then flopping blank
on a spinning globe
*
summerled like myth,
tripping out on dewy toes –
yoredays, yours, mine, theirs,
*
the only sure thing
left is love in all our lives,
strewn along the dunes
*
days of sun, shoredays –
all transilluminated,
hewn in memory
endings & beginnings
31 December 2013 by 5 Comments
my new year’s message this year is this quaint little ditty. i was writing out the fair copy this morning when i was interrupted not by a man from porlock but a mother-in-law from neuss bearing presents. so i had to finish it on a fresh sheet of paper which i then stuck together so you can see that the interruption came at a pertinent point:
for those who cannot decipher my writing:
endings & beginnings
(in a winter’s garden)
BEGIN with the word that comes first, like light
from a twilit winter’s garden, when soft rainfalls
drop on dewy, leaf-pocked grass, showering bright
like a sudden flow of MOMENTS through the calls
of a goosequilled V tooting past, this starry night…
*
I sometimes try to freeze TIME, so it stops
and in an INSTANT feel and think all blend
and merge within MOMENTS—consciousness drops
like heaven’s rainfall in a winter garden—
inconsummate, unbegun, word without END,
*
but now SOMETIMES I forget such somethings,
and in your love I’ve found SEASONS to care
about the here, NOW, not some perfected place where
there are no more ENDINGS and BEGINNINGS.
freddie o
viersen, 29-31 december 2013
love became a lonely land: autumnal haiku chain
12 September 2013 by 12 Comments
leaves like love let go
spiral down to snoozing earth,
dark, russet-brown loam.
*
when fall took those leaves
love became a lonely land—
warmth withdrawn, wan sun’s
*
waning light bled slow
blind trails of mud and sodden
footsteps veined with ice
*
where ghosts shadowed past,
skulked all through that leafless land
to haunt our autumns…
*
stark, unfelled, strange-boughed—
love’s remains in lonely land:
bare old beeches, clumped,
*
storm-ridden and gaunt,
sheltering our homeless hearts,
winterblown—like us,
*
love’s a vagabond
wandering to a nameless place
of endless leaving—
*
on tracks untravelled
from fall to spring, we will see
leaves, let go, return.
leaves, let go, return
___________________________________________________________________________________
– I originally wrote this haiku chain on Twitter — a bad habit of mine — poetry on Twitter being so hit and miss, nobody’s looking for it — but I find it a good place maybe for knocking out a first draft.
– When I’d written it I thought Love is a lonely land was a new phrase but then I checked and I saw I had actually lifted it (subconsciously…) from an old, sweet song.
– This was Billie Holiday’s beautiful, mournful Deep Song (by Cory and Cross), which includes the line:
Love lives in a lonely land
and ends:
Love is a barren land, a lonely land/A lonely land.
– That’s a song I must have listened to more than a couple dozen times since childhood (my parents also loved Billie Holiday).
– At any rate, my haiku chain has ended up as a sort of retort — a positive echo if you like — to the somewhat bleak sentiments of Deep Song…
– So thanks to Billie, Cory and Cross!
– And here’s their song in all its glory:
earthgrazing haiku
9 September 2013 by 10 Comments
moon and bay
In Dorset last month one evening after tea – and till well after midnight – there were some excellent meteor showers.
Spread out on our backs, on a tumulus on the clifftops above Higher Eype, we watched them.
I wrote this haiku chain about it:
earthgrazers
(meteor showers over the dorset coast)
peckish at tea-time:
pot warmed, kettle on the boil
as the light draws in
around the cottage –
fog furling up from the sea
all this moist evening
our minds soaked, softened
in warm cups of reflection,
dunked choccy biscuits –
scones with clotted cream
and jam, gentleman’s relish
on hot buttered toast.
we climb up the hill
to the clifftop tumulus,
sheep and cows around –
the sky inking in
those unscrolled constellations
crawling with time’s myths,
scanning heaven for
asteroids and meteorites,
bright trails clustered in
radiating lights,
mirrored waves, blank deep waters
where night takes a breath,
and then we look out
– wide-eyed, longing no longer –
appetites replete,
scattered meteor showers
sketch the intermittent sky
with points of parting:
radiant perseids,
earthgrazers, cosmic debris –
while we watch, starstruck,
and only the dog
is still on the hunt for more,
chasing her own tail…
dorset, august 2013
coco looking for her own tail
(“earthgrazers”, by the way, are meteors which fly close to the horizon, slowly, in the early evening… i like the way it could just as well describe us humans – and animals, too – grazers all upon this earth)
she lifts her veil: a vision – three rondelets
24 May 2012 by Leave a Comment
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I was in the Musée d’Orsay last week and took this picture of a striking sculpture by Barrias (Nature Revealing Herself to Science).
(From this angle her limpid marble eyes have a disconcertingly full, yet vacant look, brimming compassion yet somehow indifferent – although that may be a fanciful not to say pretentious notion…)
Coincidentally, I have been working on a poem called She Lifts Her Veil.
It consists of three rondelets – a charming medieval French lyric form.
The subject of the poem isn’t medieval exactly nor is it really about the grand Victorian personification of Nature Unveiling Herself to Science. It’s more about modern men and women and how they see each other:
she lifts her veil –
a vision: blank, dilating eyes,
she lifts her veil.
you breathe, the smell of her inhale,
flushed lips mouth fire – as flames chastise
brazen flashing immodesties –
she lifts her veil:
*
they see her face –
fragrant and nude, beyond the pale:
they see her face
itching to put her in her place –
frustration makes them bluster, flail,
so helpless – lewd and sexed and frail –
they see her face:
*
she drops her veil
lets it float, fall, fade where it lies…
she drops her veil
to speak her peace – a piece of tale
embodies what she prophesies,
when in the mirror of our eyes
she drops her veil.
freddie omm, spring 2012
verbosphere
27 January 2011 by 4 Comments
(this is the first poem i wrote on my bebook)
verbosphere
can’t feel – no sound, no birds
here in the verbosphere
there are no stars
(except as four-letter words)
nothing rough nor nothing blue
no knives to hack you scars
no coldnesses of words untrue
uncut the story clear
(we are all a missing clue).
but what could be more dear
when we is me and me is you
than this silent verbosphere?
past lost lies
5 December 2010 by 3 Comments
 |
| past lost lies, by f.k.omm |
it’s an old poem i wrote back in the day.
it is an octet and goes like this:
. . . i have spent my day procrastinating
each hour postponing the next, so sad
to be without the love i want so bad
as my past lost lies, insinuating
each one into my soul, driving me mad
with lust to be once again without lust
to lose you, let you go with timeless trust,
the best i had, or ever dreamed i had . . .