You’ve tucked your burning hands
Underneath my shoulder blades,
Inhaling fire in piercing waves
Exhaling when it fades,
And what is your name?
And where was your home
Before you made one
In the wheeze and the moan?
Are you growing, or going away,
With every pang I ignore,
Are your flaming hands holding me down,
Or are they pushing me forward?
Tag Archives: rhyming poems
A Breath Away
Only the Lonely
Nothing to offer,
So little to give,
Overextended by every
Last day I have lived
And would you forgive me
If I sank in deep?
Latching on secure
Where there is no clasp,
Belittling the future
To exploit the past
And I cannot grasp the reason
I remain another season
I wait for a beacon to guide me.
Playmates
These verses were never written
To impress, to stand on display
On their own two legs,
Nor extend their limbs, nor stay.
They were born as companions
To drink my imaginary tea,
Or brush my hair, or whisper secrets
In the dark, to sing to me.
They were never meant for fancy dress
For beards to appraise their structure
They were never woven
To resist such puncture,
But just to keep me company
Just to tell the truth,
When honesty became something
More than I could do.
Ill-prepared for such critique,
Such stringent demands,
But they have fulfilled their calling;
We have grown together, hand in hand.
All Washed Up
How blessed I’ve been to live this life,
Constant as the ocean swells,
And churns, and ebbs as well
Eroding the sands of time.
What happy collisions I’ve had
Inside these currents
With propellants and deterrents
Who swim alongside.
In these frothy waters,
This soup-bowl of brine,
I’ve breathed the divine
And swallowed the rest.
When these mighty waves of salt
Wash me upon the great white shore,
When I can eat the sands no more,
I will leave behind my shell,
And, oh, the stories it could tell.
Rain Torn
Hope is the flower that never blooms
Relentless rain drenches the roots,
Thick stalks reach the heavens
While leaves unfurl and flute
The petals wait in a fetal cocoon.
Pluck it, or tend it, anticipate
In a breathless storm
Defending the defenseless
Awaiting the vivid and worn
To bloom, to justify the eternal wait.
Drizzles
Velvet downpour
In minor strains, and percussion rain
Is the heartbeat under the floor.
Nonsensical words
But her soul is bare, her notes declare
A love invested and interred.
Sorrow no longer weeps
It whistles low, and coos, and flows
In the rich, deep tones from whence it steeps.
Her voice swirls like eddies
Down her chin, spilling free when
She is most unsteady.
Revolving Around the Sun
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.
Histories
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.
Lunarcy
Oh pale moon, swimming
In the inky black, spinning
Always around, and again around
Your gravity’s weight strikes my ground
Forming tides to push and pull
This twirling sphere, swirling full
Of water, earth, wind and flame
While you cower sterile, tamed
Dust and rock and voicelessly
Pace and fret so noiselessly
Mostly covered in shadow, undetected
But only known by light reflected.
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