Poetry

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Description: +Steven Curtis Lance has been a practicing poet for thirty-five years, and his fiftieth birthday is fast approaching. In observance of this milestone, he now offers himself to you within the pages of this book. Mr. Lance has created well over a thousand "Transcendental Sonnets," the very distillation of his life, and this entire collection, up to the date of this publication, may be found here along with a few hundred additional poems, or “other observations,” as he calls them. +Steven Curtis Lance / Collected Poems contains two complete books as well as new works by this modern master. This is one poet's life, offered with love from his open heart to yours: seven hundred and twenty-eight pages and three pounds of life, of love, and of laughing last. Can you handle the truth? Buy and read and savor this treasury of love, romance, politics, philosophy, and occasionally subversive humor, and live, love, and laugh last with Lance. Enjoy!

Cover art by Dr. Silke Lance

(728 pages)

+Steven Curtis Lance ASCAP+Steven Curtis Lance was born on New Year's Eve, 1954, and is a lifelong resident of Orange, California. He has been a dual member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, as both composer and author, since 1980. He has composed and published 130 choral motets with all the principal music publishers of the United States, and is well-known and respected in the field of choral music. He has also been publishing poetry since he was fifteen years old, and considers himself to be above all, first and last, a poet. He has won many awards and honors along the way, but all he really cares about is doing his best, as exemplified by his lifelong personal motto: "The highest, the purest, the noblest and the best." Steven is profoundly in love with Silke, the great love of his life who embodies everything for which he has striven, who joined him in taking the Lance name at Passover, 2004. Steven has three children, Maria, 21, Steven Jr., 19, and Teddy, 14, from a previous marriage. He lives with his cat, Freddie Noodles, in Studio Lance, a 1908 redwood frame house listed in the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior, which has been his lifelong home, purchased by his grandmother in 1943. He drives the 1965 Chrysler Newport which he picked out for his grandparents back when it was new. Steven serves as Poet in Residence at BrainMeta.com, and loves to encourage and help younger poets and composers in any way possible. He is something of a legend in Old Towne Orange, especially among the young. He never really grew up all the way, and spends his days writing his elegantly-formed and highly-mannered sonnets in a manner which could only be described as obsessive. ***Warning: Lance sonnets have been known to become extremely habit-forming; there is something in their perfectionistic yet easy formal balance which has been shown to be highly addictive in many cases.*** Email: stevelance.earthlink.net Web Site: brainmeta.com/poemdirectory/stevelance/comment.php Telephone: (714) 289-2892 Address: Studio Lance 145 N. Cleveland St. Orange, California 92866-1624 United States              

Excerpt
Transcendental Sonnet #862:
This Book of My Life

This book of my life written page by page
And forming link by link a single chain
From youth through experience into age
Is that by which I rise and live again
Beyond my days into a time unknown
Unto me now as I write here alone

Into my future and out of your past
As I become a present after all
And now you hold me in your hands at last

The only paradise beyond the fall
For sinful mortals and poets like me
Who live but little time and then must die
Is to become a part of destiny
And leave you this to remember me by

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1024:
This Autumnal Equinox of Love

for Silke

This is our equal night autumnal equinox of love
The wheel of karma turns the darkness coupling with the light
The yin and yang in equipoise the sky in balance now
I hear you calling me sweet Silke hear your voice somehow

The wind is blowing to your breath your heartbeat in the sky
I see you shine in every star and I need not ask why
Because I know down here below that this is magic night
This moment is for us my love our future beckons bright

Autumnal equinox my love and it belongs to you
To me to us to lovers all tonight when dreams come true
Tonight I hold you in my arms as your rose blooms for me
If only in my dreams my love from far across the sea

The night is sighing with our lungs pulses the rhythm of
Our throbbing hearts in this autumnal equinox of love

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1026:
The Pay of the Poet

The morning star is burning so intense
No other light can be seen in the sky

This is the moment this is the suspense
Between the dark and light the night and day
The light by which I write by which I live

Day has yet to be born night yet to die
That I am here to see this here to give
Myself completely give myself away
To this contention of the elements
This yin and yang of time to see it turn
Floods me with exclamations with laments

I am this moment! I transform I learn
I turn I burn I earn the recompense
The pay of the poet: intense suspense!

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1118:
The Death-Cry of the Madwoman Organist

a scene from my childhood

The madwoman organist when I was a child
Fascinated and terrified me
With hair like Medusa flaming eyes rolling wild
Purely insane she clarified me

Ancient of days bane of the young blood on her breath
Present always her song was sung only in death
Like a black swan and then she was gone

We children watched through her front parlor window there
Those gnarled and twisted fingers clawing at the keys
That mask of death that white flame of her matted hair
We could hear no sound but we could feel her disease

Then at the end when she opened her mouth to sing
Out of that abyss her dark offering was heard
The death cry of a lonely misbegotten bird

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1119:
My Mother Took Me to the Mausoleum

a scene from my childhood

Instead of taking me to the museum
My mother took me to the mausoleum
Where the dead of the past lined the marble walls
And our Sunday church shoes echoed down the halls
Scaring me but bearing me into her mind
She had loved them and would not leave them behind

She held my hand she talked and thus was begun
The resurrection of the dead one by one
She wanted me to know them all as she had
Funny stories made me laugh no longer sad

For they had been as we were then full of life
Brother sister father mother husband wife
She taught me that our loved ones never really die
But leave behind their lives to be remembered by

NON MORIAR SED VIVAM

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1121:
Look Away

Look away look away Dixieland
Red states as far as the eye can see
Got what you wanted and ain't it grand?

Gays can't marry in the Promised Land

Dubya Dick and Karl Rove stooges three
Pulled that election out of their hat
What? You don't want to talk about that?

Look away look away turn your back
Keep on driving those big SUVs
Until the next terrorist attack
When you'll be just as smug as you please
And rally round your smirking president

Can you not see? It is self-evident:
You are dying of a social disease

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1122:
1950 Chevy

farewell to the America I loved

Big and round and extremely heavy
The creamy color of clam chowder
It was a 1950 Chevy

The paint of which had turned to powder
In the sun of Arizona where
My Grandpa drove it everyday there
To his office at the base and back

A dependable old workhorse which
While definitely no Cadillac
Could not have been bettered by the rich
And it even had a trailer hitch

Now in a new moon of a grim November
Grown dark and deep I surprise myself and weep
To dream of that old Chevy... and remember

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1124:
Breath of the Desert

for Silke

The Santa Ana wind has blown back
And listening to it moan I hear
It sigh the breath of the desert here
Breathing these bone-flutes the warmth they lack
Clearing the stars of the clouds of pain

Breath of the desert I welcome back
Your sighing song as you come again
November is when I need you most

Your warmth embraces lest I fall ill
Inoculating against the chill
Warming the bones of your willing host

Breath of the desert breath of my life
Beyond and above breath of my love
Blow me across the world to my wife

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1131:
At Midnight in the Moonlight

Reclusive poet full of self-loathing
Yet with a certain twinkle in his eye
Crazy like a fox in artist's clothing
Whose sense of humor saves him freeze or fry

A lucky little bastard only son
At least of a good mother such a one
As never seen who might have been and is
The wiliest little one-of-a-kind
Well-organized in verse if not in mind
This is the heir the Baron left behind

He knows your name and knows that you know his
Elusive and cunning and hard to find
At midnight in the moonlight see him dance
Upon his foeman's grave? Beware the Lance!

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1134:
Sfogava Con Le Stelle

Patricia Lance + 23 November

The sky is velvet blue I see the moon
Relaxing on its back and it will soon
Rise higher in the night in lazy flight

The stars seem comfortable comforting
And tease me now of how I used to sing
Sfogava con le stelle and of all
The folly of the world's decline and fall

Sfogava con le stelle falls the west
I cease to strive but thrive and do my best
As I embrace the stars the moon the sky
Just as they are accept them now nor try
To grasp and gain to gasp in pain again

I think my mother's childlike faith is what
Will save me when all else has come to nought

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1137:
Something Silly for Silke's Sake

Why need one ever hesitate
Should one feel one could levitate?
Why contemplate why cogitate
Why not let go and ululate?

I shall let down my defenses
Now and take leave of my senses
Since defense and sense in past-tense are so sad
Now intensely present-tense I shall go mad

I shall write a silly sonnet
Lavish lots of skill upon it
And make a certain someone smile
If only for a little while

Therefore I undertake to make
Something silly for Silke's sake

POST NUBILA PHOEBUS

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1138:
Folly at Fifty

What in hell am I doing here?

If I have done my very best
And it turns out to be in vain
Do I then fail or pass the test
Get extra credit for the pain
Of following an illusion?

Fell for the lie to try again
Burned-out son setting with the west
In the grip of a delusion

Nearsighted but I hear it clear
Fall in and forward march we sing
"Well I don't know but I've been told"
Dead voices through the dead streets ring
"There ain't no fool like one who's old"

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1139:
The Elements in Sympathy

for Silke

We were never expecting rain
And certainly nothing like this
The night is weeping as in pain
Tears which sting like a farewell kiss
While deep from the night's heart under
Sighing wind the dirge of thunder

Yet somehow it is only right
The elements in sympathy
Sing chaos now for you and me
To join two broken hearts tonight

Alone it is not only I
Who weep as painted in my sky
A portrait of my love broken
Speaks that which cannot be spoken

- - -

Midnight Song for Silke:
Dark Bright

Silver shadows of moonlight
Dappling the leaves
Under the eaves

Midnight

My nights and my days
Since you have been mine
Have all come to seem
To sparkle to shine

My brightest my best
Most beautiful dream
Here and now comes true
Shining above me

The fire in your breast
Consumes me my love
Eaten up by you
Burning you love me

I am one with you tonight
As on those eves
Under the leaves

Dark bright

Stars in chorus
Singing for us
At the witching hour

I can feel the power
Of your silken love
Your night-blooming flower

I can feel you blooming now
Our dream is coming true
Magic never tells us how
Only feel only do

In the midnight
In the dark bright
Midnight dark bright dream of you

AMOR EST VITAE ESSENTIA

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1143:
Magical Door

for Silke

Embracing the night the moon rises bright
Waxing in waning light I come to write
Taking up my pencil as wand again

Now I shall undertake to make you smile
Creating castles of flame in the air
Singing of passion of power and of pain

Showing you wonders and taking you where
It will not hurt you to live anymore
Come darling come and dream with me awhile

I draw with my wand a magical door
Open it Silke and come with me there
Where the clouds shall part for a loving heart

And where the moon shines brighter than the sun
To those for whom this web of love is spun

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1146:
Cutting My Son's Umbilical Cord

for Teddy

I cut your umbilical cord Teddy
They handed me scissors and told me to
Just do it although I was unsteady

My hand shook as I asked would it hurt you
Or your mother your sister and brother
Were there in that moment so big so small
Macrocosmic microcosmic to be
Witnesses present at the creation
Of you as a separate entity
Your advent complete your liberation
Into independent reality

Of all my experiences of all
My passages rites and ceremonies
Nothing can compare to moments like these

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1150:
With Fragile Hands

for Silke

The hands so many times around the clock
The moon so many times around the earth
The earth so many times around the sun

The calendar completed and begun
Again through pain as two hearts knock unlock
To one another in this second birth
Of ours as hours bloom into months the years
Prove our love and move above as below

As I have heard your silver laughter ring
And I have heard you weeping iron tears
The good the bad the mad the sad the flow
Of life for two survivors of this place

The clock embarrassed brushes from its face
The flying sands of time with fragile hands

- - -

Transcendental Sonnet #1168:
New! Improved! Now 100% Snout and Anus Free!

I used to eat hot dogs but I don't anymore
I'm not quite sure why I ever ate them before
Had a book project called "Existential Hot Dogs"
Named after ground-up snouts and anuses of hogs
But then my publisher went completely insane
Existential hot dogs had affected her brain

I guess I'm at least a vegetarian now
It's been a long time since I've gnawed a pig or cow
To tell you the truth now I mostly eat brown rice
I'm sure the condemned ones at the fair think that's nice
Of me but see it's just my eccentricity
In any case my doctor is quite pleased with me

"Collected Poems" sounds so very much more dignified
And in the making of this book no animals have died

- - -

New Year's Eve Birthday Resolution at Fifty

To those who have suffered bitterness can
Prove to be the stone by which we stumble
Undoing all we work for taking all
We have loved and built however humble
The rock by which we ultimately fall
It has destroyed many a stronger man
Than me to see it suck the life away
From those whom I have loved the light of day
Gone out from their eyes the sun from their skies
Bitterness their undoing in the end
Has spoken to me that this must not be
The ruin of the rising of our dreams

There must be hope in sorrow though it seems
These wings are broken now yet we must rise

Suicide has taken many a friend
This horror would not have happened unless
We had been overpowered in the dark
Alone at the crossroads of bitterness
Where shadows of grief are so sharp so stark
Burning alone in the crucible of
Suffering with no light no hope no love
Turning to stone there with no one to care
Where it is always night and never day
Alone on the telephone it has been there
Waiting in the silence to bear us away
At the existential moment of despair

Therefore now as I mark a half a century
I resolve I must leave bitterness behind
I dare not let it hollow out my trust
I care not for corrosion nor for rust
By which bitterness would eat away my mind
To rot out from the inside is no destiny

- - -

+Steven Curtis Lance

Copyright MMIV Silke LLC