King of Beggars

[JohnFeddeler]

Heart of iron
Cross of gold
Raging heaven
Wings unfold

Beating war drum
Sundered stone
Cross the desert
All alone

Tears of fire
Burning bell
Godless heaven
Mortal hell

Dying forest
Mountain stream
Crying for a
Broken dream

Distant thunder
Scarlet sky
Ancient stars can
Hear you cry

Ragged beggar
Wealth untold
Cross of iron
Heart of gold

[riversidepoet]

I really like this, had a great beat to it, if you know what I mean, thanks for sharing, may God bless

[AnIdeasman]

Absolutely stunning my friend. The imagery alone was capitvating...beautiful infact...but of course it was metaphorical..the phsyical representation of your sadness expressed literally. This is a really steller piece of poetry sir.

[JASON]

EXALT! This one is going straight to the spotlight nomination section
The contrasts here are spectacular - the reversal of the iron and gold at the end
particularly good...
There is just so much one can read into this...

[dwells]

Disillusionment and the fragility of youthful beliefs perhaps eh JF? Wonderful closing that only comes with growth and wisdom, cheers and well done! The title speaks to me most of all... - Dan

[sidzreclaimed]

Money isnt everything.. its just one of the things in life... i loved your piece and was further joyed to find something in a similar style to something i posted on this forum...

"Tears of fire
Burning bell
Godless heaven
Mortal hell"

I loved this para the most of all... beautiful!!

[Lonnie]

Good flow, Nice imagery, and interesting theme all combine to make this a winner!

[karrie]

This is such a great write! Congrats on the well deserved spotlight!

[sparky21737]

Congrats on the spotlight and with this piece it's easy to see why. I loved the rhyme and the flow and the images and everything about it.

Sparky

[jsol]

Oh man. Yeah. This one really puts itself to work and in the aching of its muscles and the grooves time- weathered like seams through its skin runs a litany of life broken into the barren basics of its struggle and the nameless wisdom therein. Wisdom knowable only by the way it orders everything around it into beautiful patterns of synchronicity and amazing possibilities. Suddenly anything is within reach, all people are friends, words come easily and walls fall down as that which was apart comes together in unification. Contrastingly by way of so many ancient habits, passed down through the long ages of time from which slowly life formed, there exists always the scream of impossibility, its wail causes unification to break apart, patterns to turn into confusing messes, life to seem lonely, nothing to fit and senseless greed, predation and violence to become commonplace.
I read in this poem the undoing of prejudices and superstitions and all wrong ideas. I read again and the words become visions and I see images of the correct use of the enormous power in us to make our thoughts realities, the untapped force of humility as it passes through us and we understand ourselves and our purposes much more clearly. I see so much in this poem: the purposeful ways in which the rationality of thought, that for centuries has been toyed about like a curiosity by most humankind, can be used to turn all the world's terrors into allies. See problems that stem from misguided thoughts vanish as the errors of our thinking are viewed rationally and no longer lead us astray.
But most of all I glimpse the crumbling of self-importance in its haggard formation of one versus everything that it is not. See the exposure as a falsehood of the idea that we exist in a life or death struggle for a finite number of needs against the other people that will take these needs from us and so take our lives as well. I see the whole range of experience condensed into the wandering silence, that you as author for a moment broke, and so told.
So I read again, feel the way the words bypass my thinking mind and rest in my body like medicines. I see more, I see the utter impossibility of struggle against what is. I see the ways in which all the evolution of our shared life into a unified experience of abundance, peace and acceptance mean nothing and will break again in the passing of time into yet other systems of beingness. Waves of time seethe over life, no life, blackness, unimaginable color. I see endlessness, there are horizons and once reached, these horizons yield only more horizons. I see the inadequacy of all idea to encapsulate truth. Home, I see in this a home. But that is just a word and while it is enough for now, the vision I have is not really an idea, it is not in my head, I do not have blueprints or material in this form of home. The word is in my throat, it passes to my heart. My head throws in some meaningless ideas of comfort and security, which are the simple ways I have known them, they are illusions built of vibrating sound and light, resting on a make believe array of feelings that I have convinced myself are real. I don't know what another person may see and to be honest, it really can't be truthfully said that "I" have interpreted this poem in this way. The interpretation happened, sentences formed, all partially dependent on choices that I have made through the use of what I decide and prefer, but mostly this interpretation came from the way everything, every single thing, is, wants, does, believes, etc. I only exist because of a commonality of thought about individuality, personal property, personal desires, personal decisions that pervades our system of life's continuance. In fact none of these things can be wholly, or even mostly, attributed to what I was taught that I am and what I can observe is the collective belief of most humans. These "personal" acts, acquisitions and preferences are dependent on a similar unified experience of living life and belong to me as well as all else, can be attributed to me as much as to anything.
Individualization, as cool as it can seem, is not what is really going on. When the habits from which we have learned what life is are set aside for those that more closely resemble the utter closeness, the merging of individualized points of experience and as impossibilities become possibilities, reality, by way of collective understanding, becomes more malleable and the bodies that we exist in can be sustained far easier through the immediate sharing of resources. I cannot explain the technique of such an operation. The poem didn't get to that, it seems. ;) Of course, I, me, just wrote some s----- that is beyond where I am in my life journey because I was and am inspired by the poem, among other experiences, and so am able to transfer these, uh, sensations, (I guess like how I described "home" earlier), into language.
So yeah, if you made it this far you probably think I'm insane, which in the shifting of paradigms, as "King of Beggars," so interpreted, describes, is really not far from a correct statement. The author of this poem, as a part of our collective, is seemingly having similar experiences to me and everyone else, though at different intensities and levels of insight. I believe "King of Beggars" to be an encoded message of sorts, which I just clumsily and with rather high levels of enjoyment and serenity, attempted to decode as I saw fit to. So be it.

"The wisest man I know made no claim other than that he knew nothing" -Plato

[BarryC]

simply awesome-deserves the spotlight

[seraph1420]

A well deserved spotlight, I guess the ironies in it were what made it stand out.

MORTAL HELL..!!

Lovely. Seraph