poetry for tuesday

I took down some poems whilst I was sending them out to be rejected by various journals, and cetera. But since that seems to have run its course, I figured I'd re-post. The first is one that hasn't yet seen the light of internet. Cheers.


- - -


N

She,

north-born woman with

eyes pale like sea-sky meeting,

(fleeting through a moment)

says,

"Do not expect."

And he, 

drawn near by face unpainted, pristine,

by Cheshire smiles,

by wiles so potent and so fair that he,

gripped there,

almost believes that

she contains the shore-kissed secrets 

whispered by the waves...

almost hopes that he could meet her where

expectations fade

a place where he could open up his hand -

could hold it out to feel her wafting by,

diaphanous,

refracting in the sun

like sea-spray caught by day's last light.

That place meant only for a moment - 

remembered through the night.

- - -

depression

She is there.
On me.
Her breath warm and moist
billows over and around
and I am wrapped,
drowned.

And then a low-voice grumbling
like the front-end rush of
a rumbling liquid surge
asks: why?

That's it. That's all.
Just... why?
But I finish and fill,
adding:

Why oh why do we persevere?
Is it hope, or is it fear
that makes us shy, when death draws near?
Oh—is it hope, or is it fear?

And why oh why do we persevere?

- - -

poem after a day spent tending a sick child...

And I,

I was never young,
fire-bellied,
snapping at lightning
as I straddled each new instant
bareback
across a storm-wild sky.

Not I.

No, I—I was born bent-backed,
head full of obligation.
Always counting cost
like some long-singed crone
burnt black,
self-clipped,
too afraid to fly.

And I,

I moan, sometimes,
to mount and ride the white-horse
blindness,
ride back across the bend of time and sky
to kiss the ones I once watched fly away.

Kiss them hard:
un-thinking,
un-counting,
in the electric burn
of a storm-whipped rain.

But I was never young,
and evermore will be...

only ever me.

- - -

theology

The black-clad men gather in

their mantled frames

to settle bone-thin onto their gnarled perches

in a ruffling, darkened crowd.

Rustling like crows (a murder, yes),

they half-listen

as the loudest among them caws

his strident proclamation,

his cause,

and the murder, yes,

begins.

“God is this and God is that,”

this Loudest dares,

declaiming into the dark of

his unknowing finitude

the imagined light of this divine spark,

this Reason,

this Murder.

And the other crows rustle and preen,

pine and keen,

sharpening their claws

for the chance to raise their rasping, rending cry,

proclaim their own third eye and 

be the voice that long-last

makes an end of it, and

murders God.