Wednesday 17 December 2014

1 New Poem

Regression Lines

A return of sorts:
to warmth and checkered-line patterns,
to flickering flashes of cathode ray,
to pre-packed bread and wick
burning of candy cigarettes;

the kind I trust in half-step.

Faces too stern to attempt a static,
weakness besets the bravery notion:
the luxury of defeat proffered to
scholars and men of careful tithe.

Far tempting is reflection: on
and on the whistled tune of many
more manuscripts for dissection's eye.

And I give in easy,
lanky as untouched rag doll,
and bordering the calm collapse

of solitude tears.

Thursday 11 December 2014

1 New Poem

Trinities

She was born as sea's seventh daughter,
carpentry's flash-fluttering fingers
gave a springtime's animation to corded bone.

She was a past's great grace about her,
not ours but one woven in mist-riddled
novella, more shaped than life could be.

And future's good fortune, too,
wraps a stranded first band of
set carousel finish gilding upon her.

In the open door porch planks,
soaking rain wet in penny-cinema style,
I ran up to confess in knowing

this becomes all history in the end,
the filling pulp of mite-bitten shelves,
selective pages rare to meet fingerprint stain.

But so too does fortune, the stopped spinning
of hobby horses on the pine to show
it is only now that is worth the living.

Wednesday 10 December 2014

1 New Poem

Stage Faces

Light and heavy-roped curtain,
wear of painted plaster cast
construction, the roughly dots of
makeup spinning weave tales in
past-dawn dreary mindsets,

cups of arak and a few suit jacket buttons
from divine possession.

It is then you make those kind
eyes with your mouth;
it is then you make those whispering
cries out to forever's embrace.

And the morning retouching comes:
the fix stitches grandmotherly, imprecise
knots hook-hanging there in
ticker-tape typing as 21st century
ink ribbon.

You think they must have been
so lucky at Berkeley back then:
Jimi & Janis on the hi-fi,
slogans and snifter of placard paint
on the breeze.

While you merely mimic the moves:
balletic, refined.

Monday 8 December 2014

1 New Poem

Other Suns

There is a warmth heard in these late breeze nights,
kindle-crackling of Lutheran church pamphlets,
of New Republic back issues; the radical kind
of hope that flowers in threadbare stitching.

Up from ashen concrete, up from bloodied faces,
up from craven tempests of time
in their steel shackle indifference:

the kind that is more than hope,
more than mere caviar dreams,
the kind tempered in masonry making,
and made to glance centuries of refute.

It holds no mirrored repose of Urals' beyond beckoning,
stands on no Espejo hillside
for opportunist stock ticker suit-tie clatter:

it holds out only, in the bitter jaws of our winter's half-calm,
for chance of favoured weather

“and, perhaps, to bloom.”