John Carroll Walls

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Mother

​She's mountain-like in reserved watchfulness,
Other times, as loud as a hurricane trying to set the fine china for
     Christmas dinner.
May she saunter and stomp past a mortal century,
Sharing her extremes with every predictable world.
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A Poem for Tears

Come in out of the cold and cry
We'll find a vase for your tears

Cry in the warmth of my presence
Cry in the calm of my verse, and I'll dry you up with a melody

Taught to me be by the winsome wind
I learned it all the way through just this morning

It's as new and pure as an infant's dream
Held by the Madonna, under a Bethlehem sky​
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The Thunder Never Repeats Itself

​The motherless gusts have long since carried away your indigo sandals.
Unfortunately, a color such as indigo is compasslessness,
And incapable of finding its way back home.
Bare feeling: the rain's brethren will have the final verse about this night's worth,
As I remember held hands; our patented spiraled seashell clasp,
Whilst being read to on a back porch of a gentler time--
The thunder never repeated the same story twice.
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Autumn Couldn't Have Feigned This Shiver

The last straggling scuffle of hope he remembered,
Was the sound of an unfamiliar gravel road
That spoke in the fragmented language of virtuoso traveler,
His broad wool-clad back,
Now a sail searching in the benevolent wind.
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​John Carroll Walls' profile

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August Haiku

Some lone fate impaled,
No August lacks kindled woe:
Luna's crescent tines. 
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Penchant

The last shy tree bare; an updated burden,
Perpetual risk has been the methodology of this season,
Our willful tug-of-flower has mastered the wilted,
‘Tis time to grow and harvest an arcane frost from within,
Something austere and winter-bosomed;
A crystalized motif,
And a rush of skin-veiled blood as its garden.
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Morning Commuters

Manifested:

Lilting pulse;

Incomprehensible folds of wakefulness--

The urges of spheres, spirals and multi-colored effects that court our bristling shadows,

Until an all too common, in unison sigh dismantles the showy falls of mineral light,

And our tasks bend and blur black into one another like a beginner's cursive:

Earnest and lost.

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