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About Mikels Skele

Poet. Explainer. Foreigner-at-large.

A tavern, so right

I’ve been feeling like I need to expand my horizons lately. I mostly write autobiographical, not to say confessional, poems. I’m a great admirer of other people’s narrative poems, and I like the idea of the freedom a fictional setting can afford. So, here’s an attempt.

A tavern, so right, so clean, every chair in its place,
every light bulb unflickering bright,
every floor swept relentlessly:

This is where he comes
every day,
tie straight, collar clean,
shoes shined to piercing,

until every crumb has been consumed,
every glass empty,

and he stands, checks his trousers,
and walks, stately,
to the mens room,

slides the lock to,
and dances wildly to the mirror,
his best and only lover.

O Captain My Captain, by Walt Whitman

A poem about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the only poem by Whitman using standard meter and rhyme. Perhaps he thought the occasion required something more formal. Goose bumps.

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up–for you the flag is flung for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Just before the final extinction

Just before the final extinction
There were strange and wonderful creatures
Elusive slabs of silver
Darting through the water
Among shape-shifting bulbs
Trailing fierce limbs
And some barely-there whisps
Still deadly with near visible
Strands of poison

And the stone-clasping tendrils
Living dually beneath and above
The frothing rock wacked about
By unseen surrounds

Miniscule bits buzzing through the air
But strong enough to pierce the
Thick outards of others
To suck their vital fluids
Long bendy tails with no body
Slinking among roots and shoots
A mouth at one end and nothing at the other
Lumbering bellowing lumps
With long tusks
That dazzled white in the pristine sunlight

Oddest of all, a bipartite creature
Split nearly symmetrical
Nearly similar but cruelly not
Moving by alternating stilts
Spindly and unbecoming
The two halves bound in eternal embrace
Clutching each other’s throat
Desperate to let go
But trapped, trapped by fear of succeeding

Snow, a haiku

New snow
Cold and weightless
As yesterday’s ghosts

River

A plane touches down
At Sana airport

Taxis past broken lives,
Dead dreams,
Opens its bay and accepts
A stream of humanity
And departs

It’s an old river
Its drainage is ambition,
Pride, retribution.
It has flowed in torrents
Since all of time

See, here, on this map
The deep gorge it cuts
Through history
Its course so familiar
It is forgotten
By every new generation

Some seek power, wealth
Others, only refuge.