I waited for you
When the night stretched his spine,
I left a light burning
Sleepless at your shrine
Are you still mine?
Who am I
If I’m more myself without you?
All I’ve known follows me to bed,
But I’m a stranger to the view
And I’m afraid to pursue.
We don’t slough off our stories
As a snake’s skin is shed,
We are still standing
Wherever we’ve tread
And wherever lies ahead.
The minimalist in me still calls
To trim the fat from every hall
Purging until I scrape the walls
Eliminating the clutter sprawl.
But the mom in me says stay,
A toy in the hall is a toy still in play,
And one by one each toy gives way
To dreadfully quiet days.
I am a Protestant daughter;
My Catholic mother
Birthed me in the water
And I drifted farther
Than she would reach.
I washed up on Neverland.
I read the works of the lost boys
Who also traveled unmanned
Bereft of the pride and poise
That mitigates confession.
An orphan community
A ragamuffin clan,
Who found unity in the impunity
They drank from the hand
Of their Father.
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?
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.
We walked along, side by side,
You, following the path, and I
Leaning to peek in the canyon.
Glancing to see my presumed companion
Has run ahead without me.
You pursued the course,
And I lingered to gaze at remorse
Who is lovely from behind
While blind, while disinclined
To turn on me, to see
What I put myself up to some days.
He is cruel when he returns my gaze.
I wander the fringes of our route,
Do you go on without me, or wander about
To find me again?
I am aimless. I cannot wend
Through these dark woods,
I cannot find my way to good,
Without you as my guide.
Will you walk again, side by side?
Red Sky at Morning
And you were born in the churning storm
Following the warning.
Violence in the wind,
You board up your windows,
In limbo again
While the tempest rages-
Your most-valuables
Barricaded in cages.
Red Sky at Morning
Blink away your warnings.
Red Sky at Mourning
These are your days of turning,
Unfurl your sails, still forming
Warm yourself in the light of day,
Put your face into the tide
Get your strides underway
These howling winds will pass
You are seaworthy, and your hull
Will remain intact
Red Skies never last,
The sun’s fury sets
This too shall pass.
viewingcamelot 