Scott Michael Potter

Scott Michael Potter
I found life again in my mother’s womb and breathed air on February 18, 1966, for the first time in some time. It was an experience, which view has not dulled throughout a life of many blessings. Grand Rapids, Michigan, a Plaster Creek, Peach Orchard, running and collecting bugs and stamps, coins and music became my passions. Mud sculptures, creekside, moved with the weather, and it was not until well after cloud-shape imaginings became routine that I began to see art as removed from nature and in a studio confined by walls, floor and ceiling as normal. Poetry continues to flow, as Plaster Creek offered itself a prior mentor, and I owe many thanks to family and friends who have provided sustenance to joy throughout changes. A recent coupling with the love of my life, Lisé, has engendered many ramblings on love, while a new home in Crescent City, California, that is a place more home than any other, elevates writing, gardening and homemaking to new levels.
http://www.thebetween.org/ http://mythologicalmeanderings.blogspot.com/

“Tolkienku”

Green-topped red wood walls
Quickbeam sequesters lightbeam
Silence drapes each sound

“Heart-Filled Waves”

Vibratory morning story
Uncoiling in hearts foiling where
All feeling, all feeling
Not one more or less for kneeling
Ba-bumping hearts tha-thumping there
Moving through the hoary
Great mythical oratory
Inwardly meaning more
Than what we thought in store

“Waiting Blues”

Please join me
Think back to your last wait
Challenging, to imagine when late
However, that is just what I did in this:
Humming under the heavy breathing dragon
Crinkling and rustling disturb the gray noise
A rumble erupts beside and off roars another
Long silver dragon, temporary victims showing
In the lit up iridescently sparkling swollen belly
Elongated snakes in pairs wind away
Sun sneaks a thick sliver embedded in an iron tree
Sedentary silvery dragons sleep nearby
Plumes curl over their coffin-like bodies
Motionless and poisonous these ancient creatures
Manifest in screams and midnight terrors
When then off shoots an albino dragon
Covering other terrain further south
Shoots by one more puzzled pallid dragon
In search of something to the north
As pear-shaped time drags on
Racing further and faster
Past dragons of olde
Into new horrors
Unmentionable
Delayed
Still

“A Mythic Land”

This land, rich with history,
colored red, speaks stories
on a mythographic level that differs greatly
from the lands of trees, desert, or everglades.
We, the travelers, the momentary passersby,
need openness and willingness to listen to this and all other lands talk—
to hear the myths of the mountains,
fables of the foothills,
stories of the swamps,
tall tales of the tundra,
dialogue of the desert,
fairy-tales of the forest,
sketches of the scrub and
narration of the neverlands.
In-between and among all of these lands roamed nomads long ago,
without teams of horses, combustion engines or
winding rails to power them there or wherever.
These wanderers found currents in the air or
on the water provided plenty of locomotion
and not unlike gigantic birds of old and pewter planes, huge whales and shiny ships,
they glided to and fro effortlessly.

Once in a great while,
travelers encounter their shadowy formless shapes forlornly drifting,
ceaselessly roving,
searching for the one place called home
that altered so much by the new beasts of burden smells foreign.
When such a happenstance, noticeable by shrill shrieks and piercing screams, happens,
the rest that happens predicts the results:
white hair, sunken eyes, pallid-gray skin,
mumbling in tongues unfamiliar and an urge to move evermore
that manifests often as homelessness or asylum stays.
None blame these unfortunates and some see them as a necessary sacrifice,
for the insurance of progress, to ensure futures for others who matter….

No, the fat cats in their cushy cushions and their fanciful collars,
lounging about in their posh palaces,
do not see the value in one more or less person—
as long as it is not them.
Just across town,
the dumpy dogs in their dapper doghouses and their groovy engraved collars,
lollygagging around their lush lawns,
do not deviate far from this thought either—
only wishing for an occasional bone to chew now and then.

When the hot white sun stands nearly upright,
stirring cream atop the mounds on the prairie, it illuminates all the same,
except for the stray amorphous shade.

Medicine men chanting in the hills,
their voices cascading over the land,
keep vigilance to welcome and ward off the dark side
of the black wraiths.
Here fear has struck for new white-hairs mosey into town each day,
burbling and muttering,
some of them family, others strangers from some other place.
One could say that the songs of the old medicine men do wonders,
perhaps the vibrations soothe the agony of the encounter,
but never does the temporary fix last long.
These wraiths,
ghosts from another time—
serious dimensional shifts the only explanation—
challenge conceptions of conventional defense.

Somewhere, in a secret government lab,
some say in Area 51 or Area 99,
or out on the space shuttle, scientists work on a horrible invention—
the kind whose very name instills shivers
in most who truly hear the ramifications behind the syllables uttered.
Dare we speak it,
we name it and then maybe entice it into existence,
sort of like the terrible wraiths
whose legend was so recently and tragically discovered in cave drawings
in New Mexico by the nutty white-haired professor,
now seriously deranged.
Changing cave guards came and went,
and after centuries of thankless service,
eventually the family lost interest—
much to their and our chagrin.

After Dr. Doomsday,
as good a name as any for the man who destroyed most of the Southwest
with one archeological swipe at age-old notions of common sense,
revealed his discovery to the asylum it was too late.
The black wraiths had flown the coop—
or cave in this case—
and busily and steadfastly hovered about
wreaking havoc and destruction wherever they went,
without intent,
for they paid no heed to ants like us,
flailing arms beneath them;
this they had seen countless times.
Since no remedy,
other than quick and even quicker in disappearing fixes,
loomed apparent,
the American government,
under the esteemed leadership of another politician
whose life was more familiar to the black wraiths than he knew,
hatched their ridiculous plan.

The idea was that if the point—
now all of the Southwest—
where these dratted wraiths wandered about
were struck with a high intensity beam of unmentionable properties,
which theorists assured the panel convened for such emergencies
would work right,
then the wraiths would be transported
back to their home realm.
Thus, alleviating the nation of a relatively useless and unpopulated area,
while the rest of the nation survives.
The only setback,
was that this action also would drastically change the whole of the Southwest,
turning it into a new ocean and claiming also one-third of Mexico,
thereby causing severe traveling nightmares—
albeit with regrettable collateral damage.

The assumption was that related tremors would also speed up the California barge effect,
most likely making an island immediately—
which fact bothered no one in the government for they were tired
of making speeches in Spanish just to win that state and the election.
In reality, they felt this would be the best for the country,
because the Hispanic population, dealt such a severe decimation,
might take a few centuries to regain their previous foothold.
So, despite the hush-hush manner in which these leaders decided the fates
of so many Americans,
many of us knew and halted our travel plans
until the destruction and apocalypse cooled down,
contacted family members to warn them—
but who in California or the Southwest would have listened to such gibberish—
none!

The party drove recklessly on and ignited
Shiva the Destroyer—
the world’s most ludicrously powerful weapon ever conceived or built—
from the space shuttle,
commonly referred to as Area 99, so several were right.
The ensuing explosion and tidal wave that passed in the round,
damaged the entire earth,
from the remotest parts of the world—
where tsunamis of unheard proportion washed clean entire continents,
to the surrounding Americas where only five percent of the population survived.
All of New York toppled
and the city abandoned for the stench killed as surely as the diseases would,
especially after a week or two.
One lonely bunker remained comparatively unscathed,
and as the morons stepped out onto a scene of destruction no war—
not even the horrific Atomic War of 2005—
could ever approximate,
they waved stupidly at the shuttle,
showing thumbs up,
since obliterating communications systems made conversing hoary.
Within five minutes of exiting their safe clime,
these fearless leaders sat dumbly down;
one muttering constantly, Regrettable, acceptable, collateral, visceral, horrible, horrible!

One might speculate that the black wraiths did them a tremendous favor,
except one then had never met such horror,
the kind of terror that cooks the marrow,
by swooping overhead,
simple minutes later,
more horrific than ever,
shrieking; “Shiva has come! Shiva has come!”
Yet, to know one has nearly extincted the planet,
at least most of what one could see,
one’s home and friends all gone in a blink of a blur of a button pressing,
and then to live on still would do less than to feel the full fury—
the wrath of the wraiths!
Oh, it would be great to say that everyone lived happily after,
but the problem was that no one was,
nor will they ever be,
not after Shiva,
well immediately afterwards,
anyway.

The truth of the matter,
for those who insist on happy endings,
is that thousands of years later,
humanity started again building civilizations and
senseless warring and conflict,
always leaning to the unsuccessful patriarchical societies that ask for extinction,
begging for annihilation—
if only they could but annihilate the ‘others’ first.
Some cycles conclude with huge Atomic Wars,
others great floods from unbalance,
and some from droughts the like no one has witnessed
as oceans dry up and no water can be found,
for clouds had to be eliminated to protect the air space correctly.
Somewhere though,
in the midst of all this warring,
a myth about happiness and living attunedly toils.
Perforce it is up to the happy-enders
to become the positive messaged mythmakers….