I’ve howled at the moon
Rising and shining and twirling
A pale dancer on a dark stage
I’ve embraced the swoon.
I ingested the bay
Travelling many miles
To drink its Atlantic mother,
To live the crash and sway
I belong in the sand,
In the violence and beauty
And severity of her coiled arms
And crested hands.
Am I dying of drought
The rain weeps
In ocean fragments
They runoff devout
And they’ll make it home before me.
I feel shaky these days.
On the surface, all remains
But underneath the plates are drifting
The fault line is yawning
And stretching awake and shifting
All I know and need, but I
Do not cry out in fearful demands,
I wait in rigor
For His familiar hands
To pull me near
Again.
And when you loved me, what you loved
Existed in your eyes
It was as real as love is real,
Unconstrained by guise
And what you saw as good in me
Bloomed gossamer in your view
I was good and I was yours-
It was true because you were true.
And when you left me vulnerable
Exposed to harsher winds,
The good and true you gave to me
Could no more make amends
With the whip of gale, and bite of cold,
And absence of your devotion
Who I reflected in your eyes
Wept and died as broken
And the woman standing in her place
Who speaks vengeance in her scorn
Is just the dried and dead remains;
The blossomless tangle of thorns.
When your diverted love ran dry
And you no longer looked at me,
All you loved in me the most
Ceased to be.
The engine idles too low,
And you’d better check the fluids.
It’s been a hundred miles since that was done-
I guess I meant to do it.
There’s a wheezing in the exhaust,
And she sputters and she stalls,
Whenever I hit the brake too fast
She screeches shrill bird calls.
Aside from gas and oil,
Well, not much else gets done.
Don’t bother with her outer shell-
I’m just concerned she runs.
Yeah, I’ll schedule another return trip
When I’m paying your receptionist.
Late October? Will I still be alive by then?
The fear that rides upon my back
And chews upon my ear
Holds me still, holds me here
To feed his next attack
And I must act
I know it well, be it a stranger
But all at risk, all in danger
I cling to as intact
Even if it leaves me sterile
And is it the fear I’ve worn
Or the mass that gives it form
That puts me in this peril?
The sky bleeds a violent gray
Like some sidewalk chalk masterpiece
Under the storm’s display
Raining in the depths of me
Rivulets of dread dismay
Is it anger? Or sorrow? Or sin?
Or just a rainy day
Seeping through the cracks of me,
Leaking in to how I pray
Dripping, dripping, each drop whispers,
Eager to join, eager to say,
What if it isn’t going to be okay?
Every voice begs to be heard,
And what have I to provide?
More of the same old absurd
Verses misapplied,
Thank you, sir, I tried.
Every platform speaks aloud
Of the author’s expertise,
But I live under a shroud
Ignorance by degrees
Silence Please
For remembrance of the nearly lost
Are pangs severe to feel,
But there is payment for the cost,
It clatters through the coffer seal
And echoes whence it has been tossed.
How alike we must have been,
Two fraternals in our mother’s womb
Which is the watered earth that spins
‘Til parasites of sin consumed
The features we once shared akin.
We pause on our reflection:
The dam of time.
I flinch at your inflection;
I see you glare at mine.
We pray in different directions
And the sublime quality of similarity
Is strangled with our spacious disparity.
There are things in life
We cannot change,
Cannot bear, cannot
Resist to rearrange.
I throw myself upon hard facts,
But even as I concentrate
On the general consensus view
Hard facts can never compensate
For the fathomless and unfading
Longing of the soul.
Reason has been my closest friend,
But does not leave me whole.
These things I cannot change
I treat as foreign and bizarre,
But they are not so strange:
They are a part of who we are,
These wild souls spinning on a ball-
And hard facts really aren’t quite so hard after all.
Oh the heavy history of man
Who collects his wars
Long after the land is divided again,
With nothing left to explore,
And the plunder has spoiled
In the storehouses.
All these years of ink and page, and
How can these habits come to gain
Reflecting with the written word,
But that brothers in ink still have their names
And some crude caricature of who they were
Ever still remains.
viewingcamelot 