I was in jail for a hundred years
Fishing without hooks
Among librarys of pretty girls
And no help from the books
They kept us moving in tight, worried ways
Spirituality whatever else it may
To put these minute parts together
I would sacrifice so many pieces
To give something so private
For anyone to see
Makes me wonder the quiet
Of what is to be
2020 By David Jacobi
Their churches and synagogues were absorbed
By a couple of dozen persons
While seven hundred preachers
Tried to keep them in the fold
A new kind of freedom manifested
Someone changed into someone else
Said a prayer for the reformation of the poet
Attuned to the rhythms of human life
Too busy for a conception of bearing
Like a boat stranded on an island
Causes a muddling cry of a thousand sentinels
The cosmic validity of which was not doubted
Now the walls are stained by anguish
Bitterness hardens, and the troubles go on and on
Premonition asserts its mystic will
A glimpse of a dead world drifts by
2012 By David Jacobi
With energy derived from forbidden impulse
The converts overthrow their inhibitions
Therapeutic intervention delays the madness
Until after the revolution of political consciousness
Face to face in the spiritual supermarket
The fear of aging haunts private experience
In the brief period of dangerous flowering
No effort to conceal the development of illusion
When the fort went to decay we were watchful
Not wanting to stir the silence of death
While under the influence of fear and removal
It contained 3,000 mongrel souls readily sold
Extraordinarily wild and unaccountable
The sadness of the ages and the taste of death
Makes a metallic syncopation of melody
There is some thing dead under the foundation
From the thorny sanctuary of my mothers voice
Streamlined models laced with razor blades
Tail spinning around through a secondhand halo
A tongue hidden while you grandfather tried
2011 By David Jacobi
Some months later
the fires of passion
recalled European music
observed in the night air
in no uncertain terms
Observing the sacrifice of God
As a living spectacle of antiquity
In the infinite blue night
Of a blind nightingale
I began to understand
the attraction that affected me
a chill, you have it or you don’t
the wellspring of exact definition
To be more specific
there are roots dug deep
in the very ancient culture
that no philosopher can explain
2011 By David Jacobi
The ritual slaying of the attraction
Is not easy to explain
Like the spirit of the Earth
In the most ample sense of the word
The intuitive part of consciousness
Jumps to a religious enthusiasm
Assuming, maybe too cavalierly
To understand the poetic magic
But the final ephemeral flicker
Blazed and burnt out
Like a brilliant comet
In his assassination
They are all dead
I have examined the bodies
They never heard the shot
That drained the vials and stood in silence
2011 By David Jacobi
Take home your heroes
That weep in triumph
At this lost battle in the wild wind
We’ll never know the quick rain
The hardship of being human
And tree-sap
On is all, on both sides
Nothing to be despised
Kill the monument
But don’t be fooled
About where these monsters come from
The forecast is an unquiet future
So there is false speculation
Beyond reckoning
To those enslaved and renounced
Laugh!! You humans, false inhabitors
There is a ledge of fine marble that
God carves great images into
Of war and plague and horror and beauty
The signature of His will
2011 By David Jacobi
Your eroticism is expressed
In a heavy agitated style
Demanded by previous generations
With resolve and determination
As I read the lengthy records
Of your spiritual experiences
Like a ship on the sea in full sail
How beautiful they might have been
I gave expression to my appreciation
If only aware of starving dogs
Give nature time and make lewd jokes
And when you go down make a good sunset
Like snakes of rain coiling on a windshield
Slicing the throat of the bully of mediocrity
You might get by in that bracket
Or become part of the ghostly hunt
During the celebration of contemporary decadence
I envision a nostalgic cult of lost innocence
Overwhelmed by an annihilating boredom
Cultivating a vigorous inability to feel
Life proceeds in particles
2011 By David Jacobi
Ethereal waves and flickerings of magic light
Blew over
What dead and dying remnants lingered
Showing to all, the bleached bones of potential
Or is it the beached bones of potential
Everyone can see, anyway
The magic fading away
No matter if bleached or beached
All seems lost, almost
Until the laughter rises floating
And bones click and clatter
Reminding us of the potential
2011 By David Jacobi
descending to the street
fandangos and improbabilities
turn their backs to silence
Synethesia
Ineffable and intuitively
they break the veil of mystery
giving complete references
for a tragic blunder, a vision of art disembodied
a child, left unadressed
Offers striking illustrations
Of unexpected synergy
Seven voices
Speak
2011 By David Jacobi
This is the first of several upcoming “collage poems” I have written and assembled. Noticing different sentence structures and word rhythms in various books I was reading I simply began writing down what I liked and put together what seemed to me to match and flow. These became my free verse collage poems, with some of my own lines scattered about usually acting as connectors or buffers. With a traditional poem I always begin with a subject in mind while with a collage poem I never do, letting the words gather and arrange to tell their own stories.
Off The Back Porch 