Collections

 

 

Loonies Only

Prized stallion,
Where is your Lancelot?
Kick your shiny heels to
The old dollar tune.

Where is your Zorro
Or cowboy with lasso
To coax back your song,
Your stolen whinny?

Would you rather caper
Off into the sunset? Raise a haze of auric sand?
Carry a young slinger, who, with rapier in hand,
Charges across the plains of war?

Proud motion, all illusion!
Cold sleekness, locked as my knees---
No wind, just air---
Dead between your hooves and grave.

Ride we shall.
A chink of gold will satisfy---
Child, shimmy off!
Loonies only.

 

Gooseberry

Shall I be a drip of dew
Gliding off a leaf unseen,
Or shall I stew in stickiness
In my lumpy, jealous mess?

Slip through the cracks. No one shall know
The trickle of this gooseberry jam.
No one shall taste this
Tart and viscous ulcerous flesh.

 

The Voice of Fire

Rage should leap out in phosphorescence
Like the bellow of the grizzled prophet
That split the marrow of flushed Poseidon,
Spilled forth the bowels of the sea,
Sent shrieks shuddering through the ages---

The ends of the earth hold still in these angled frames.
Ravaged madness, in psychosis? None but the straight,
Tame columns in colours prime.
This is the voice of fire? It is the voice of
A fire that died.

 

Pliable Memory

Here it is, do you remember this?
The stones that rise do not bely
The momentous leap, the invisible fall
The split-second fury:
Swish of a switch,
And I flickered from untouched to touched.

Hazy, pliable memory---
It was here at this tower,
It was here
I read Keats in your eyes
And Wordsworth in your flimsy verse.
I said nothing --- I was touched.

I was touched, I said nothing?

Since when did the profound need words?
You understood, you must.

Did you?
I said nothing,
I read hope; you heard
The chorus of an endless space,
A symphony of the wintering,
Formidable silence.

 

© 2005 Copyright held by the author.

 

 

Back to Novel Idea