No Regrets issue #11 Winter 2014

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No Regrets Journal

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Winter and Words 2014 Issue 11

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No Regrets, a journal of poetry, prose and images about the twists and turns in the search for love, meaning and community.

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Clayton Medeiros, Editor, Poet, Photographer, Collage Artist.

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Neil McKay (Johnny Trash), Webmaster.

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Submissions are by invitation of the Editor.

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claymedeiros@aol.com Epublishing site with all issues

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http://issuu.com/claymedeiros/docs

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Facebook fan page With No Regrets issues, haikus, poems and photographs

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http://www.facebook.com/NoRegretsJournal

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Snowfall

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This is the way It ought to be Snow

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The float and fall That piles and quiets The world’s best efforts

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The slow and whorl That dazzles eyes For solitude

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The whitest white That sinks all sins At least until spring

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This is the way It ought to be Snow

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Snow Shower Snow speckled Parking lot A gray man Wobbles in Unbuttoned Perseverance

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Blizzard

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Headlights cringe Wind wound snow Quietly descends!!

Curls over the earth All at once white

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Snowy Day

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Dark roofs angled white today Here and there ink blot crows Cross the misty bay Caught in this moment Just like the rest of us Wondering what’s next As snow fall quiets Such concerns

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Olympic Mountains Etched in shadowed horizon Fragile winter light

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Ospreys this morning Wings over the bay White snow everywhere

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Snow geese in the fields Trees bow to quiet eagles Winter settles in

Haikus!

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Haikus!

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Morning sky gray clouds Waves bloom on the windy bay Gulls curve in the air

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Crisp cloudless blue sky Snow sleeps among the shadows Quick wings in branches

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Night time's moony clouds Silver and black windblown shapes Somewhere snowy owls

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Books Reading

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In a used book store’s dusty corners Hard bounds and paper backs Read to each other in Crisp mellifluous metaphors An iambic pentameter of Comedies dramas tragedies Literary essays pontificate Philosophical treatises mumble Mathematics posits certainty About everything worth knowing The books quietly commiserate

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Said and Unsaid

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Is there something unsaid We should say now before Day’s end and night falls again Something new something old A combination of the two A composer to add music As the repartee resonates Among words we’ve shared Over the years celebrated Or simply left alone to Fulfill or dissipate among Passing hours and days Lost in unwritten pages To express what was lost

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Past Tense

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Search the present for the past An etymology of who we are Perhaps a hint of why In what was said how To whom to what end Those words versus these words Carefully chosen in the mind Wantonly thrown into the air Conversation to conversation Held with others held in solitude Perhaps easier before words When all the time we knew Was the sun across the sky

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Past Present

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The past carries into the present Unfinished business of love and loss Familial quarrels twist and turn Foolish feints and sleights of heart Forever elusive forgiveness Among conditioned expectations Tart tongues’ regretful words Dissuade good intentions moving pawns On a game board with no squares Just random kings and queens in search Of monarchy clearly marked on a map Carefully hidden in the fatuous field of play

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Mortality: An Active Verb

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Words scratch Mortality’s Surface with Prose and poems Soon lost to indifferent time Among burned books’ Unsavory hidden truths Our shared inhumanity Crushes heretical insights That could undermine Privileged mandates From Calvin’s God From Hindu castes Monarchical utterances As if they could save the day Nothing saves the day Carpe Diem

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Certainty

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In an existential certitude Despair doesn’t sustain us In some corner joy fails To accept dire predictions Marred misdemeanors Strewn across efforts To figure out maturity Where it might be found What it’s supposed to be Indispensably direct unlike Traffic signals so often Ignored by crowded cars In dense city centers Everyone busily on Their way to something Desperately important

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