Author Archives: Mikels Skele

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About Mikels Skele

Poet. Explainer. Foreigner-at-large.

A flock of haiku

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Who would like to be

The man who mistook his life
For reality?

A blinding snowy owl

Winged its way into darkness
Like a memory

Let the flames die down

Turn off the lights, kill the sound
Fling wide the windows

Golden rays

Of laughing children
Unscolded

Early December
Winter struggling to emerge

A difficult birth

Sun recedes, air cools.

Some days, though worth repeating,
Fly with the wild geese

For Dave Brubeck:

The stage is quiet

Shadows lurk in the wings
Dave is taking five

Sailing

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“Let’s go sailing,” you say,
“The winds are favorable,
And the pounding surf
Yearns for us.”
So we sail away on our blind voyage
Deftly navigating a precise nowhere.
O sky, be kind; our compass, rusted,
Spins dubiously
Yet we sail,
Our wild dreams
Nailed firmly
To the deck
The sound of crashing waves
Covering their own retreat.

A toast

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Here’s to the sheer, perverse joy of living,
Slogging or dancing, singing or weeping.
Let breath follow breath
While it can.
Green, weatherbound, hunched
In the midst of dust and bluster
The blowhard sky sputtering
A bravado of mist, a bluff of froth.
There is self, and there is truth.
One is a speck, a mote, a droplet
The other is the ocean.
Choose.

Archaeology

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All hopes and dreams fill barrows
Lie chucked into graveyards
Cast aside like so many gifts
Grown wearisome
Long dead, long forgotten pain and passion
All dust, all echoes and stains in the soil
The great swath of history
Unbroken and unremembered
Even the grandest monuments lie
Cracked and rubbed smooth by sheer forgetfulness
From these crude shadows we make stories
And drift further and further away
Until whispers alone remain
Impossible to say from where

We’re no grains

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We’re no grains of sand
On the vast shores of time
Dumb, irresolute, unable to anger
Or submit
We’re not mute glaciers
Unparticipating,  unrelenting
Uninterested, wasting or waxing
All the same
We are not like a moon
In unblissful unawareness
Of its unserene
Bondage
No planets or pebbles
No turbulent magma,
Or unmoving nothingness
No human can aspire to that.