poetry

SOMETIMES IT TOUCHES

They all write of love.

But true adventure lay between a
frozen boundary of stony words;
between a synchronism
of dishonest friendship
and the cowardice of being alone.

Poetry is animal without tongue or limb
and it bellows wildly in dormant pursuit.
It flowers only to write of
hand grenades that fall like alphabet stars;
pollen, like acid rain.
It flourishes in drama of silent depth
as wound commits to scar.

Sometimes it touches
and perhaps we might call it rape
but all it ever seeks is our forgiveness,
an atoned pardon for not arriving
– for not stampeding us –
any sooner than it had.

THIS POETRY LAY

My poetry lay hungry,
over-indulged on missing vocals
and absent sound,
under-fed from swallowed emotion
and buried tears –
throat-lumping in the name of opinion
better kept to shadowy under-jaws
and burbling stomach acid;
cocooning noisily with butterflies
of rage whose lead-heavy wings
and straight jacket veins
pin themselves to freedom
with only my dry throat
a means to escape.

My poetry lay hungry
while I feed on its promise
to blanket my attempt
at making it known.

THE JAILED FREEDOM OF WRITING

Sour, my attempt to write –
the flavour lost in every bite.
Undecided words, unheard,
but seeping out, expelled,
disturbed: a self-invaded,
cornered bird, un-winged
and clipped from flight,
while

I rumble with poetic temper,
my bleeding soul,
in part, dismembered,
blank, un-whole, alone,
distended –
my belly full of passion,
yet, my appetite untended,
and

expression jailed and flawed,
dissolving quicker than it pours –
a vat of garbled, bubbling
troubled thought
that rivals typed impression sought
to pillage mind and spill from core.

Scored, the days it takes between,
in floor and wall,
to key the lock that binds
this isolation door,
ancient finds arising
in my lust for seeking more
and more –
buried words upended
with surprise, and unintended,
for,

from I, the Jailor,
baseless accusations rise,
lashing, fast, acidic wind
that primes the rhymes I tongue within,
and
never one to coat my words
too thin/too dry/too weak it seems
(by definition) I resist
to drown (at best)
or leak,
while anchored here, existing,
with unflinching frozen speech,
but

the accidental draining of my
purpose-tended bed of prose,
is waiting hand on foot
with sweetened
suicidal pensive throes,
as I,
with mocking rows
and rows of written doubt,
release, in lines,
my stomach
churning through and out
demands to hasten
one true last and final shout,
so,

this filtered care
that stains my lungs with ghostly stare
and soaks my throat
as vomitus
as stinging air
that leaves me rendered,
flailed and flared and wounded,
brooding, undeclared –

through THIS
the words escape,
an icing on the freedom cake
all cherry-topped, and cut, and baked:
a timeless meal to share
without the food to waste,
the friend to taste,
the key to exit,
smitten,
from this solitary mind-induced
persisting empty prison space.