Category Archives: Poems

Thunder snow

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It seemed an appropriate time to repost this, from 3 years ago.

Mikels Skele's avatarexiles child

The clouds thickened and cracked the planks of heaven
Heaved overboard their burden
And crushed the green and brown spring in pale dunes

Robins puffed to pigeon size
Buds disappeared beneath white-laced wings
Of earth-shackled trees

No one about but Cossack girls
With speckled jeans and high boots
Pulled along on bright orange leashes

Their dogs resolute and patient
Sniffing remnants of bygone colleagues
And sprinkling messages in the snow

Long ago such snow shrouded mysteries
What was it I imagined?
All of life and death I suppose

All of longing all of waiting
All smothered ambivalence
All new and green erupting from stagnation

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Psalm

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The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want

I shall not want for tribulation
For the flock is scattered
Their bleating goes unheard
Wolves nibble at the corners
With no fear of hindrance
I shall not want for tribulation
For the armies of God surround me
They have raised up the banners
Of loathing in every direction
And lo the sheep crawl
In slavish obeisance
I shall not want for tribulation
Even the dogs have abandoned us
As the shepherd sleeps off His cosmic binge
I shall walk through the valley
Of the shadow of death
Eyes closed
Fingers in my ears

The hammer of your eyes

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The hammer of your eyes
Shapes everything you see
Until reality collapses
From the weight of persistence

The thingness of things is such
That it mutates to meet expectation,
Owes allegiance to the naming ritual
Rolls from the tongue with lilting guile
And slips from the grasp as easily
As money or grace

These things carry meaning:
Sky, sea, mountain and plain
Whose rivers tie the bounds
Of Earth together

These things rip meaning from the heart:
Ash, coal, and smoke,
Zippered into a theory of sky
Beyond the bezelled horizon.

We ignore destiny,
Hoping to write our own stories,
Like Oedipus, like God,
Unaware that fate has no will
But is bound by the sacred law
Of irony.

My country ’tis of thee

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Empty, empty, of good or bad,
all equal before the sea-spattered
horizon, the pastures relentlessly
split open undone forever

I gaze on these at last remorse
the withering vine, the trodden soil
all witness to vanity, to regression

since times untold and form unbidden
horses fraught, thin bones straining
against what flesh remains.

As an infant, I was told how this
was my legacy, my inheritance,
all from the wrong ledger, it seems

The one beneath, the one unsmothered
despite the efforts of a cruel century,
the murder of compassion for fear of pain
the sacrifice of love for the comfort of predictability

Fools’ gold, dross, dust.

Fall falling

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The autumn sun sweeps
clean the street, forlorn no more.
Even the litter-born history,
so recently past, cannot withstand it.

We think we’re the true organisms,
that to us belong the spoils
of living, and yet,

such marionettes of weather,
our strings showing
in spite of all our efforts,

the sky like water,
our hearts like wind.