The Alien

By Timothy D. Forsyth

The Alien

Timothy D. Forsyth

In an epic spiritual journey of poems, the reader is guided through a myriad of emotions and reflections. It is posited that alienation is the driving force behind most of the worlds contemporary maladies, so the reader sojourns through the darkness of the Alien, into the realm of war and peace (the endless remembering), onward to the power of love and its loss
to settle in the celestial promise of the hoping.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463442811

Timothy D. Forsyth

Timothy D. Forsyth Timothy D. Forsyth is a semi-retired college professor. He is a graduate of the State University of New York, College of Arts and Science, Plattsburgh, NY, and the State University College, Potsdam, NY. He currently lives with his companion in Vermont. Mr. Forsyth is also the author of the anti-war novel, The Promise of the Seed.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Alien

Entrée: In cold and unrelenting loneliness, I cried out for friend,

but alas it was the Alien that came instead.

The Alien

Walking down the streets of home,

I was alone among the many.

I spoke, and they heard me not.

Nearing, they touched me without feeling,

For to see the alien is to be the alien.

The alien appeared, and he felt cold.

With fear in his heart, he was so old,

And of community he was not.

His lot was an estranged and empty need,

For to see the alien is to be the alien.

Within the corridors of fearful times,

People wail and cry for a lack of communing minds.

Broken dreams and inward thoughts

Obscure us from knowing the strange prescience, overwrought!

For to see the alien is to be the alien.

The acrid and cold winds of loneliness and fear, whence started,

Engulf the earth, leaving us apart, me alone.

The frozen heat of unloving hearts is cold and unrelenting,

Venting the worst of things to be of progeny to come,

For to see the alien is to be him alone.

Alienation, loneliness and fear—must it be this way?

Are we to be of living death in paranoid shadows of darkness—

Without warmth or the laughter of mirth, always afraid?

In this onliness, will you hold out your hand?

Or will you walk in the burnt ice of the cold?

If you see the alien, will you be her, be him?

Love, compassion, justice, a world without enemies is the answer so near.

If we could but see it, we would hear in the chorus before the ages!

And should we light the light and illuminate the darkness,

We would allow the Bluebird of Peace to be harkened to,

For then we might see the alien and love the alien!

The Perfect Storm

A Perfect Storm of the alone loomed,

And it wove into the furrowed thoughts of doom.

When I sat high on a dreary ridge, estranged and alone,

The Alien, the Inquisitor He, pulled me into the abyss of cold stone.

Oh, how I held to the commemoration of the future.

Scowling whims, cadences from somewhere, ravaged my heart in afflicted torture.

Scalding ice crept in the veins of the Angels of Avingnon—the lost little ones from a Great War from anywhere.

The fiery fields of the Marne and Flanders gave foreshadowed nuances of the poppies of nowhere.

A cataclysm of insipid fears scorned,

Wandered among the insane of a frightful night’s loom,

And they blinded me as I slept, impaled upon nails of ice, among the many, yet so alone.

So the Alien, the Excruciator She, told me of the skulls of a darkened noon.

Oh, how I cried upon the Altars of the Dead.

Inarful witch’s brew, sorcery of a male fool from anywhere,

Led me to the blackened snow—in the deadened camps.

The foul smoke of the dead lurched forward as the war machine ne’er relented.

An apparition of Armageddon sounded the blackened bell,

Tearing the endless rages of the machinery of death.

And as I sat peering into the burning caldron,

The Alien, the Interrogator Me, seethed into my eyes, and screamed:

IT IS YOU! IT IS YOU, FOOL, YOU!

The Strange

In estranged and strange streets,

Those that should be known to me,

I ambulate before weeping trees,

Into a place that cannot be.

The sky darkens in sea of torpor,

As the Alien Me is here, before, in me,

Tearing all I have known and loved into obliteration.

It is the cessation of all I have hoped for.

And so the seeds of strangeness are sewn,

And they gesture in ghoulish obviation and flip backward in time,

Whilst the impish nymph is accelerated forward—within—me—

indeed with me—the Alien—me.

And so I am inebriated in a cold Sargasso of despair-

Into nowhere—eternal darkness—the STRANGE!

Poverty

People need a purpose in life.

For some it must be a wife; others simply a spouse.

I have known those who espouse

constructive work

While I have known yet others who perish in strife.

In due time too much of nothing leaves people broken in half.

And soon the bottle or the joint are all that is left to soothe the festering wound.

Each of us in poverty loses sight of reality.

Soon a paralysis of the soul is known,

And the being of affluence is gone.

Posterity will look at today’s accursed poor and wonder,

See them as somber and agonized lives without symbiosis,

As lives broken in illusions of psychosis.

Without meaningful livelihood, there is no purpose.

Reclusive madness is the result,

For too much for too few

Leads to too little for too many.

Rumbling through through the ages,

There emerges the specter of the alien of poverty.

With uncanny ignorance,

Why is it allowed to be?

Today there is enough to go around,

But I fear greed knows no bounds,

And greed is just another sounder of the ALIEN!

DANCE MACABRE

From the cold Crimea, it arrived in warm Sicily.

It was the autumn of the Middle Ages,

An age soon to quaver before the Black Death.

A discouraging rage of contagion spread from Italy,

Ravaging to the dead lands—more of Europa than to count.

A skeleton Dance Macabre ensues,

And the bones crank, rattle and creak.

Children, women, men, All FALL DOWN.

The drones of forever lost ambulate into eternal shadows,

Into the endless query of the unknown.

From Germany, the ugly horde expelled them in dishramony.

It was an eclipse of civilization, manmade,

An age to quiver before the fires of the murdered.

A frightening specter, before humanity, it was the inhumanity of the crooked