Three Poems – R.M. Engelhardt

R.M. Engelhardt is a veteran poet and writer whose work over the years has appeared in many journals & magazines both in print and on the net including in Rusty Truck, ​Lummox, Thunder Sandwich, The ​Georgia Review, Full of Crow, ​Up The River, 2nd Avenue Poetry, The Outlaw Poetry Network, and many others.

Jesus Saves

Still waitin’ on the resurrection
The bartender pours me
Another drink

A guy who looks
Like Jesus walks
Into the bar

The punch line
Gets lost in translation
He calls me a cab
And then mysteriously

Disappears

The Archaeology of Her Smile

[su_quote cite=”The Beatles, Dear Prudence”]The sun is up, the sky is blue. It’s beautiful and so are you. [/su_quote]

” I love you”
These words that he said
A thousand lifetimes ago.
A thousand women weeping
A thousand flowers burned.
The poem,
Just written for someone, somewhere
Once.
Beloved
A wife
A daughter
A love.
About the archaeology of her smile,
About her hidden voice,
The joyful noise of her child
Or just the way she laughed,
Poised, in the mirror
Or running thru the grass
Or thru the fields
Of forever.
For these words
Were said, were written
A thousand lifetimes ago,
A thousand women weeping
A thousand flowers burned.
The poem,
Just written for someone, somewhere
Once.
About the archaeology of her smile,
About the way she loved
About the life she lived with you
About the world she touched
For this is her true story
Written in the voices of each life.
Civilization, man or woman
And of their rise or fall.
For without her or her
Beauty, her eyes, or her smile?
Why there would be
No “his-story”
At all

Forget The Dust

An old man
Upon an old bed
I now breathe slowly
And remember
All of it

Every moment
Every dream
And I still believe
Still hold all these
Beliefs that
Everything is
Still everything
Love
Is still
Everything
That the words are
The all or
The nothing
So (Forget the dust)
Because
One day
I shall
Become young
Again
I shall
Become truth
I shall
See all beauty
And like the lotus
Basho wrote of
Each morning shall
Blossom forth

Into words

After four years since his book The Resurrection Waltz, R.M. Engelhardt‘s new book The Bones of Our Existence, A Journal 2046 was published on March 15, 2016 online and is an entirely new concept in regards to the way a book is to be released as well as presented.

The book is absolutely free to the public and is one man’s journal of poems set in the aftermath of the post-apocalyptic future of 2046 written by an unknown survivor who in the forms of prose and poetry looks back and reflects upon his life, loves and battles (within and without) over the last some 40 years.

The book is part science fiction, part humanity and even part Thoreau, but mostly it is the memoir of a man, who like the future we all thought would get better, has lost his way but who still believes that the words, our souls and our voices, poetry still … and will always matter.