Poems to Complain About Crags

When your life only revolves around one thing,

It's Send-Time, or time to complain,

So don't come around at the end of the day,

If all you have to contribute is spray!

Brown rocks, Brown cloud

Route sucks, Gumby crowd

Slick holds, short cracks

North table in the winter, I’ll be back.

Slabby Carderock

Climbing the bathroom tile

Builds better footwork

Wiping sand, repeat

How old’s this baby angle?

Not .10c no more 

Endless cliffs, Endless cracks

Endless creek 50 backpacks

Lots of people, Running laps

Happy euros, Rude guides

Welcome to Wingate paradise

Where’s A V when you need ‘em?

Chapel pond slab, spiders web,

Moss cliff better yet. 

Adirondack granite

Too bad it's wet. 

Say a prayer, for me and my belayer

They are gym certified

Still, I nearly died

They’re few boulders on the hill

So we walk through tired grass 

It's soft on shoeless feet 

Though its prime is fully past

Its lackluster complexion seems pre-colorcast

An  everlasting absence of much-needed chloroplast

My time here is well spent for these boulders will not last

They may become new victims of some uncondoned blast 

So I savor my short time like each meal that I eat

The presents of these rocks in itself is a treat

The trees are in my ears and eyes not unlike penny lane

There's dark clouds edging bright blue sky a minor risk of rain

I study hulking rocks above they shimmer like to glass

Like the sharp broken shards on the road in a crash.

Speckled with granite and small grains of sand

Small stains of chalk from a small fingered hand

The suns is in the sky and there’s birds in each ear

But they’re quite far away

There are no trees here

The squirrels are all chirping 

But in muffled cries 

Progress moves on,

Counterclockwise.

And even though the sun still rises every single day 

Our feud lives on from dusk till dawn

a slow steadfast decay.

A fight fought not to win but to postpone inexorable loss

So we savor our short time and sit apon the moss

The sky then starts to darken and much to our dismay 

our time window is closing our bare feet must touch clay

And so we walk solemnly across the tired grass 

Down the mellow slope we love for we must leave at last.

The grass all changes color

From hay to dollar bill

Please dont break our rocks 

There's few boulders on the hill.

Huff

Puff

Chuff

Pebble wrestling on the bluff

Wednesday night gym hero

Outside, sends vee zero

This place sucks

Tourists everywhere 

Sweat pooling inside my socks 

But Cobras are cheap 

From the depths of the chimney The Spell,

Came a scream and a god-awful smell,

Said the second “Good Gracious,

You’ve bombed me with shit,”

Said the leader “You’d better not tell.”

Everything is soaked

Long pitch of steeps should be dry

Welp. There's always beer.

Wet wet wet

A couple lines from the Mike Law intro poem in the classic Carrigan Guide to Araps from 30 something years gone

"the routes are pumpy, the boys are bumpy

the DSS will pay"

There, kitty litter -

Or bomber rock. Either way

it's goodbye hand skin.

Slick white holds

A winter gym reprieve

'Uh, that hold's off bro'

Kids lay on my pad

I think I'm going to fall

Oh well not my kids

Awesome backwoods crags

They only climb at The Ranch

It's raining again

Where are all the bolts?

Look at all of those bison

Lost Dome, here I come