BRUCE LEVINE - POEMS

Bruce Levine has spent his life as a writer of fiction and poetry and as a music and theatre professional. A 2019 Pushcart Prize Poetry nominee, a 2021 Spillwords Press Awards winner, the Featured Writer in WestWard Quarterly Summer 2021 and his bio is featured in “Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2020.” Bruce has over three hundred works published on over twenty-five on-line journals including Ariel Chart, Spillwords, The Drabble; in over seventy print books including Poetry Quarterly, Haiku Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal; Halcyon Days and Founder’s Favourites (on-line and print) and his shows have been produced in New York and around the country. His work is dedicated to the loving memory of his late wife, Lydia Franklin. A native Manhattanite, Bruce now lives and writes in Maine. Visit him at www.brucelevine.com

​Another Empty Page

​Standing atop a stairway
Five flights up
Figurative images
Revealing nothing
A dearth of language
Parsimoniously sifting
Like flour through a strainer
Paradoxical entries
Oxymorons
Fugitive from reality
Breathing life into cadavers
Frankenstein’s monster
Awakened
Yet not alive
Fledgling ideas
Devoid of an essence
Fighting for something tangible
Shadows of fruition
Fading like mist
Another empty page

​Moving

​Moving
Packing
Leaving behind
Adventures ahead
Exploring
New places
New sights
New sounds
Old friends
New friends
Sharing
A new vision
A new life
A new beginning
Strange
Exciting
A new home
A forever home
Moving
Going forward
Moving
Together

​Pathways Leading Home

​

Virgin territory
Soaking up a new environment
A new life in a new land
Free to roam
Free to explore
Free to make a new beginning
Roads not taken left far behind
And wrong turns forgotten
A journey to the future
Held in the palm of your hand
Time in a bottle floating on the tide
Of a never-ending ocean
Snatched up and held to the light
Prisms bending rays
Illuminating
Golden sunsets over forests
Filled with pathways
Leading home

​Perfect Synchronicity

​Perfect synchronicity
The over-lapping of time
Pursuing reality in a vortex
A microcosm of days reshuffled
In a stream of holidays
Out of sync and unfulfilled
Solely based on retail sales
Christmas before Halloween
Santa Claus before candy corn
Easter eggs before turkey
Thanksgiving Day turned into Black Friday
Rushing refusal on high octane speed
Dedicated to the devotion of greed
No longer the goal post
From New Year to December
Rushing through life
Without stopping to breathe

​Shadows of Mountains

Shadows of mountains
parade over valleys within.
Streams resemble arteries,
sustaining life,
as trout evading anglers
reveal cascading thoughts
of life and death
that society proclaims
meaningless in movies:
Hollywood’s refrain.
 
Cheaper by the dozen.
A cartoon fantasy
where bodies once dismembered
return in the next scene.
 
Children believing pictures;
a thousand words forgotten.
 
Time standing still
in a bas-relief of life
carved in plaster panels,
a faux façade
over doorways;
an entry in a fun house
at an arcade.
 
Paragons of virtue.
Derision enforced
with narcissistic selfies
taken on the precipice of mountains
at the edge of a cliff
overhanging the valley.
A swan-dive into the unknown.
A bungie-cord off a highway
or the bridge over the River Kwai.
The new reality forsaken
in a technological haze.
 
Passage through the looking glass;
Mushrooms in a bottle;
revealing the future of society
to those indoctrinated
and inculcated,
yet reduced to texting hyperbole
as syntax disappears
and the lexicon dismembers.
Devout believers in the new world order.
Refrains of disenchantment;
disenfranchising;
by groups of devotes
of the hyper-sensitive
who perceive only their own vision
in a world of their own making.
 
Questions never-ending.
A virtual canvass of destiny
held in a moment of tranquility,
yet unable to sustain.