Bidding Adieu And Starting Anew: Revolutionary ConTEXTing Free Verse

How do I bid adieu
To a life
And a lifestyle
I’ve lived
For years?

It was never comfortable.
Too Often
it was not pure,
nor holy,
nor of good report.
Rarely was it
praiseworthy.

It was not
Where I needed
Or wanted
To be.

At last,
here I am,
at the edge
of potential new paths,
rising out of the muck
and mire of the past.

New vistas,
new visions,
new opportunities
are spread out before me,
inviting me,
filling me with hope
and belief:

I CAN do this!

And yet…
I don’t know how
to step away.
I’m afraid I’ll lose
my shoe,
Stuck
In the past’s muck.

Then I recall Him.
He asks me to change.
He will lift me
up
and out;
Place my unshod feet
On paths He has traveled,
to places He has gone.

I believe
that when I’ve walked
His paths,
barefoot,
long enough to have worn
all the muck from my feet,
they will be shod
through His Grace
and Mercy
with righteousness,
And I will be purified
and able
to be
in the vistas
I can now only
dimly
see.

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Goo To Muck: Romantic IMprov Haiku Lament

What should have been a/
goo moment was turned into/
muck by poor word choice.

After The Utah Storm: Revolutionary ConTEXTing Haiku and Poetic Lament

My dark, hot sports car,/
now covered with road salt muck,/
is no longer cool.

On Being “Grounded” In Love: Romantic IMprov Poem

A woman, for whom I’d written the previous poem, read it to her daughter over the phone, almost as it was created. Her daughter laughed. The woman said: “She keeps me grounded”. This was my IMprov response:

She keeps you grounded?
Stuck
in what?
The muck
and the mire?
The dirt that’s the death
of romance’s fire?

The young think they know
what it means to feel passion’s glow.
But they don’t.
It’s only youthful lust.
As age comes, so arrives patience
and trust.

And the romance that fuels
our aged desire
is the very thing which pulls
us out of the mire
and sends our passionate flames
soaring ever higher.

So when we fall, exhausted,
in each other’s arms again,
we’ll arise, phoenix-like,
from where youth has never been.