Cycle: Poems of Longing and Goning

The Way

I like your hair

And your smile when it’s there

And your laughter in the air…

 

The green fur of the earth rose up to my knees

The blue hand of the sky slipped down between the trees

And I sat and I thought about the way she left me.

 

‘Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell’

• Emily Dickinson

Hour

An hour doesn’t last forever,

Even inside a dream,

The dawn will still come knocking,

To close up all the seams.

Treasure

Upon a starlit mountain path

I found a hole and laid my stash

When strangely came the shadowed dawn

I saw my jewel was utterly gone.

 

Into the cave I went to venture

Through the cold and gloom I crept

To seek my stolen, lonely treasure,

The very silence I stipped and stepped.

 

And so this way I stroll once more

To ponder things from long before

The feeling is that when I die

My diamond waits up in the sky.

World Traveler

I soar above the clouds,

where starpricks hold at bay the hanging abyss.

 

The weight it presses down,

Dissolving my heart to nothingness.

 

But, searching, it cannot find it,

For it is not with me.

No, it stays always in one place.

It is bound and ever with she.

In Memoriam EP

Every corner of the house

is somehow stabbing in, not out.

 

Each morn I wake and he comes in

I hear his voice and see his grin

 

They are only phantom things

They tell me what I’ve so far seen

 

I’ll meet him ‘gain when crossed the veil

But I’m not far through this life’s trail

 

In fifty years we’ll break the curse

It’s the wanting, but canting that’s the worst

Year 1 (2012)

One year down

forty nine or so to go

Then I’ll see you again

Out of the bitter snow

Year 13 (2024)

…go into the mountains…

 

where you will find:

another kind of thing to be:

go up there: climb on the stairs:

the sky won’t reach down:

 

now you are ‘yond the very lights.

…where there is no when…

 

that monstrous hand will grab the sun and pull it up:

renting a hole in the sky: black forever:

then in YOU must go:

into the black hole:

 

to meet the man whose head bulges:

red and watering eyes:

the skin is melting:

the body collapses outward:

the pulse of death glulbs waxing:

the shake and rattle which grows the swallowing of the air:

behold a fire

a heat

a light

a glow behind the awful blight:

crackles the spaces, the doom to a doom:

the freedom to wander through infinite room:

the dead which yet live:

and the living disease:

a cancerous wound that spreads to itself:

to plead for a map showing never and nowhere:

to slip to eternal un-motions un-through:

the ever of ever reposes in you.

…tyranny…

 

the universe is hollow:

here and there are stars:

anatomy non-motion:

abyss is all:

…disburden…

 

the ineloquent man once said: I am dead:

but I’m not asleep, for I ponder:

and in the fields of thought I wander:

if I speak before I die:

let none but myself reply:

 

we choose the wormy feature:

we say the words, not the ‘ums’

 

until the brain of the fittest creature:

is universally a crumb.