Middle-aged, restless, inchoate poet, Terry Boykie, possesses more than 20 years of experience in fundraising, primarily on behalf of scientific, environmental, and educational institutions. He began writing verse(?) when he turned 50 as a way to assuage the chronic pain of sensory neuropathy and the realization that he would never win a batting title. His niece, Angela Shaw, is a respected poet who serves as his true inspiration.
Terry has provided counsel and guidance by conducting feasibility and planning studies, public relations, major gift solicitations, capital campaigns, foundation and corporate giving, pledge redemption, and grant writing for a number of institutions and organizations.
Terry is active with the American Society of Association Executives and the Association of Fundraising Professionals and lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Barbara, and assorted beasts, famous or otherwise. Significantly, Terry is the inventor of Slashball ( www.slashball.net ), The Game for the Next 100 Years©. Terry welcomes your comments on Slashball and his poetry by writing to him at the address below.
Goose-neck Girl Lives Here
Beyond the road to lovers lane past
bullets and bones long since forgotten
we played the game of growing up
with heaps of clay our platform.
The apple trees upon our stage
held fruit we laughed was rotten
But night reduced the green to black
and their simple sugars kept us warm.
Flanking trails to the first pond festered
ruins of a 19th Century brick factory;
its eroding turrets at forty feet providing
cheap habitat to swifts and brown myotis.
We dared the angular rubble to search
Whippanong's wealth and mystery;
but rats and rattlers bore the blame
for the rawness that it granted us.
Amidst anthracite piles and spread-eagled
Lackawanna rails, sumac and ivy grew,
real and imagined poisons encroaching
non-union warrens whose coal-fed fires
built Broad and Market but in the age of
Camelot provided the joy of hobo stew;
a buzz that Birch Hill boys would never know
because this wasteland snubbed all criers.
In these tombs of missing laborers
Stanley's daughter set up shop.
She baked four-grain bread in the ovens
and skinned mammals for the lard.
She raised sons who went to college
and a daughter who married a cop;
and while others may have lived here
longer she remains the Queen of my Brickyard.
Top of the Page.
Realizing Anna
She kept me alive as I wandered this dismal decade
in search of success where I might lead and others might recall.
My struggles distressed her because she knew I was afraid,
perhaps, even a coward to try anything more to ease my fall.
Yet, she offered quantum leaps to my unbending fate,
with the talent of her own goings-on, the genius I yearned to feel.
Although her scarlet veil will forever elude my far-fetched wait,
her compassion for this average man parallels the affection I reveal.
To the parade of stars that circles by I have become invisible.
Yet, the waxing moon finds me to share memories, good and risible.
She brought me light through the darkness of men's souls
in her honest quest jammed with slugs returning to the well.
While I jostled for the crumbs left behind by trolls
who bragged of their status along the alleyway to hell.
The grunge vanished when I captured her emerald eyes on a starlit sky
where auroras and eclipses beckoned me to gaze one more day
at the splendor of a solar flare imparting an impression of Versailles.
For this, I call her "Ariel" for the magic on display.
Of her way of understanding me with mirth and persuasive terms
once more she has arrested me from the wickedness of germs.
She blends the best elixir for my abject vision.
Beaming smile, sensuous mold, integrity, I see, for certain.
Compellingly mixed upon a stage, 'tis a potion with a mission.
No longer do I fear my life on this side of the curtain.
Her flawless skin glows white-hot, her thoughts are ever torrid.
She radiates in every scene, and for that I have no doubt
that I cannot be Don Quixote, my thoughts are all too lurid.
But she is ever wondrous, "Dulcinea!!" I should shout.
My path has now diverged from this rare performer,
but since I walk in spring all year, I forever will adore her.
Top of the Page.
Forgotten
I traveled up a jersey hill
to steal a glimpse of Circe
I trembled then; I tremble now,
dark eyes, dark hair, no mercy.
I walked beyond the brickyard pond
to catch the scent of Jasmine
and felt a surge of summer's warmth,
green eyes, gray hair, no askin'.
We hit and pitched and caught and ran
For hometown glorification
then took a bribe for fun one time,
We're evil's incarnation.
I rambled on to pompton plains
to kneel before the Scarlet
and lingered there for far too long,
blue eyes, blue blood, some harlot.
She dashed past farms of marmalade
where bad boys yearn for Glory
and urged her limbs to battle back,
black eyes, black hearts, no story.
He roamed west 42nd street
in search of Vicks and Vixen
and reaped the wage of false advice,
poor skin, spent sense, nose missin'.
I flew through dust that hides the earth
where easter lacks a Bunny
and jumped aboard the cross of gold,
tall dreams, short means, no money.
You flailed your way through Ohio
to confront you water, Lou
and swam between the ship and shore,
red eyes, green gills, no kin do.
I scrambled up the tantamount
to sway the souls of Bella
and left them lying there on top,
wet leaves, dry heaves, no fella.
We spent the years with blades of grass
and skirts from way Down Under
who overdosed on jimsonweed,
their shame, their graves, our plunder.
You swerved to hit the pinnacles
as white owls cruised the Dinah
and preached the word of god-knows-what,
big deal, small wheel, no spina.
I lurched back up that jersey hill
to rant and rave with Fury,
I've lasted fifty years and more,
all lost, all gone, hung jury.
Top of the Page.
Giving Up
Admiration propels me once more
to a spring guarded by the restless sands
of a primal time; sheltered, I implore
my mind to resist the waters in my hands.
Provoked by a taste so rare that I dare
not sample anew, I sing instead of sorrow,
and sleep. . . stirred by the stillness of spare
illusions which portend no tomorrow.
Impatient, I depart my oasis to endure
teeming sensations which decrease my stride.
Elegant sounds, however, distant and vague, inure
the agony of knowing how well I have tried
to hold and cherish you so willingly;
if only the fates could entice you to me.
Top of the Page.
Morning View at My Place
Rocher Percé awakens to a summer sky,
where trilobites yield to an emergent gulf.
In Goteberg, a Mute Swan eclipses
exiled clams and ripple marks.
Beyond a murky abyss unfamiliar to me
frosty bison nibble lodgepole pines.
Near Bridal Falls with its permanent prism
a northern pluton climbs a mile.
Shrouded haystacks on a very gray day
and lighthearted children wait on Marx.
Mofongo waste abuts coconut palms
and waxing breakers - 20 feet high.
Blind man's blue converts to dust bowl red
Where animal clouds wait in line;
Marbled woman with a bare left breast;
Azure walls and flaxen arch,
Masculine shadow, source unknown;
Anasazi stairway leads straight to Mars.
Travertine cliffs near Colter's Hell;
Tory graves on the Irish Lott;
Sea lions bless the Oregon coast,
mammoth trees and welcome springs.
Ancestral crosses lean with the wind -
in my whitewashed screening room.
Top of the Page.
Taking Stock
Are you an insurgent?
Someone cool, ready
to ignite the next solar flare.
Grounded with passion,
do you reach beyond your
childlike, earth-born animism,
safely away from
the mercurial orbit of Zeno,
aloof to the umbra of Plato,
resistant to Diogenes's
steady-state cynicism,
unsated by Epicure's
equinoctial feast,
free from the
antimatter of sophists,
protected from the universal
ghosts of duality,
indifferent to the setting sun
of enlightenment,
clear of the partial eclipse
of determinism,
far from the
black hole of materialism,
remote to the mathematical
Ort of quantum mechanics,
cold to the dark force
in Pluto's theory of strings
and serene to the galactic
decay of white
and brown dwarfs?
I am an insurgent,
belligerent to tides,
precursor to the revolution,
pagan of the Big Bang.
Are you?
Letter to the Author: Terry Scott Boykie