Author Archives: Mikels Skele

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About Mikels Skele

Poet. Explainer. Foreigner-at-large.

Tanka

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Tanka is a Japanese poetry style similar to haiku, but a bit longer.  Its syllabic formula is 5-7-5-7-7, and like haiku, tends toward themes of nature and the seasons.  I find it to be exactly the wrong length, and therefore irresistible.  Here’s one.
I dream of islands
Tomb-spattered and draped with vines
Overpowering
The sweltering summer stench
Along paths of memory

I kept my distance

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I kept my distance
Nursing it like a long-dead sparrow
Frozen in the act of surrender
I thought I could get closer from there
Circling your cosmos, darting in, darting out
Drawn to your flame, but fearing extinction.
I thought I knew too well
The smell of a singed heart
I saw myself scorched clean
Gone without a trace
Through the wild emptiness
Unable to dream, unable to desire
Which kills faster, flame or frost?
In the end is wilderness,
All wilderness

It could be a dream

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It could be a dream, all this wondering,
All these vaporous glimpses, A thin shroud of certainty
Enwrapping nothing.
Or it could be truth,
Something as trivial as truth.
We make symbols of everything,
An ordinary tree becomes life,
Which itself becomes an ancient torment
Of flesh-riven souls.
Even we are mere metaphor,
Encapsulated divinity,
A finger with no moon
To point to.
Know thyself, the oracle says,
But we are all in the box with
Schroedinger’s cat,
And die in the act of knowing.
This is the true meaning of Eve’s gift,
That god, condemned to live forever,
So jealously tries to wring from our souls. 

The meaning of life…

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I read recently that the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.  I was inspired to write a poem, a short one in keeping with the simplicity of the assertion:

It’s the bigness of clouds that gets me,
Great, relentless, unraveling  bolls
Searching the smear of life beneath.
“We call this the Hydrogen Dance;
The clouds are coaxing Carbon from below.
When they find it, they will weep with joy.”
I sit, mouth agape, and wonder when they’ll find me.

In the beginning

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In the beginning was the burden,
Large, glorious, shimmering
Unnamed but for a half breath.
I made stars from it,
And earth, and water,
And the wheel of good and evil.
From the stars grew light and darkness,
And the watery earth gave forth desire,
And will, and death.
Of good and evil came life,
And the love that kills to sustain it.
I threaded time to link these pearls.
If I had shoulders,
They would be riven to the bone.
If I had wings,
They would tatter.
If I had life,
I would die.
If I had a name,
It would be Forgotten.
In the beginning was the end..