Posts tagged ‘poetry from voices’
for missy
for missy
at the shore once
i watched your hair fly
in the surf’s windy spray
i had not touched you
all that day: was it
anger or a game? (honestly, i can’t
remember…)
we had been becalmed
by strange coilings of mist
that seemed to echo
inner, unspoken fancies
(a rat ran through the surf:
you didn’t shriek, but merely
looked, and wouldn’t let me
kill it)
…it was our last day, alone
in the fog’s-sphere of sight…
the next day you disappeared.
if you were ever there, that is:
perhaps, conceivably, you
were only a fantasy, born
of the wind, the fog, the spray.
.
for S. Delany
for S. Delany
tormented and wounded
in her words’ tearing lurch, he
be-sandalled and be-spectacled
had wandered the tired
the metalled street
and tasted the stale fog/perhaps-smog
of three o’clock of a weekday
three o’clock in a greyed City morning
considering various
heroes, villains, and other fools,
having
run from the worded woman
who skewers him at times
with her merest glance
but has birthed these various
worlds, these unlikely
(and moving) protagonists; when
i stiffen in my last breath,
surely,
i shall see Kid Death
story
STORY
that quiet
desperation fills you, for
a moment
as you listen to his story (the old
drunk’s story)…
you realize
he is as you, save
for face, name, a few
vagaries…
but he is old, and you
are horny, and
a whore on the corner
beckons. If not
love, lust, and the quick’ning
of the blood
(you can understand the ones
who regard
sex as exercise, though knowing
them blind)
that bespells you…
so you leave him, you
stagger away.
It is odd that
all that of meaning
in that day’s passing
remains
is his story, and
(his incongruous, his beguiling)
his smile.
______________________________________________________________
The line between truth and fiction is quite narrow (if existent) at times.
shadows
shadows
i have addressed you
too often, unable
to not recall, scribbling
line upon line to
page upon page, knowing
they couldn’t be sent:
we parted some years
and miles away. you’ve
wintered, i suppose (i
don’t really know, haven’t
asked or cared to know)
with that same lover
successfully. But really,
it hardly matters:
though now and again
i must pen lines in your
name, to be discarded
or perched in some
dusty file: one grows
or one dies slowly. and
i have grown to know
all the shadows of
my self in the reflection
of the image i knew as you.
_________________________________________________
Yet another example of how I’ve openly hated myself since Vietnam. And, it seems, every time I’ve ever ‘opened up’ [okay, so there are things that would ‘just have to be repeated’ and which you don’t say, aside from the fact there’s only one possible source and which galls like flesh worn raw in the summer and then burning from the sweat]–every time I have talked more than usual, there’s been immediate reason to regret it.
I don’t remember what her name was. Perhaps it was [name redacted; she’s a devout Christian Reformed [Calvinist] matron who was merely a convenient excuse. I found other people progressively more boring since second year of kindergarten except ones who were mainly non-academic. It looks now like I should just have had more patience or even went to the wrong school. But then I had the bad taste to acquire PTSD as well.
prisms
prisms
in deep-murmuring forest once
we touched, in shadowed
near-silence: i remember
your quiet laughter.
but the sun fell
and night came: we must
have lost our way.
certainly, in any case,
dawn found us strangers.
_______________________________________________________________________
More a comment on society and fragmenting relationships than any ‘real’ event. (“Do you ever hear voices in your head?” “Well, yeah…” The psychiatrist or counselor or…relaxes and settles down. Gee, a psychotic. “Well tell me about them.” “Every time someone speaks to me it happens. Can you give me a hint of how to stop that?”)
—They run out of the door screaming.
Reality in many cases is sheerly a matter of perspective, and society most certainly isn’t capable of distinguishing it from the babble that modern society depends upon for its very existence. I remember living in the country. It’s so silent there (I remember being far out at sea…)
meanings (x)
meanings (x)*
meanings and sixpence.
the latter fill the palm:
the former bring headaches.
you can’t sell the meanings,
though that’s all the pence are.
you prate of salvation, nirvana, freedom…
i ponder my empty palm.
__________________________________________________________
There! my essay on money, although I should do the prose form fairly shortly. I wrote this just after coming ‘home’ after the Vietnam war. So say….oh, just a ‘rough’ estimate…November 6, 1976. I’d been reading Proust, Kafka and Zelazny. Oh, and Lem. What a likely mix. Delany’s Dahlgren was in the background, although there are some massive problems with that; glance
*This means in this case that I had a series and then threw away half of them. Which seems oddly apposite.
