Tag Archives: illusion

A tavern, so right

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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.

Journey

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Through the train window
Flashing eternity
Rolling, rolling, rolling
The hillsides by.

Later, I’ll say
I’ve been there,
Traveled through that place
Convinced and mystified.

Later still, I’ll return
And say
That’s not how it was

All skewed and modified
By isolation from memory
Disappointed
By lack of congruity
Deflated
By the irrefutable

Diptych for a late Spring

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I

You are meaningless, it is said,
without those who went before
in whose long shadows you strive,
in whose helix you twine
inextricably.

Ghosts, you call them,
wraiths with no claim to substance,
until, in a mirror,
you see them bounding through
your fate,
great feet tramping up the path
you thought was yours alone.

How can you be so like them?
How can it have gone unnoticed
so long?
Is nothing left to separate you?

II

Fine, let’s have it, then.
I’ll be the last witness
to poll the seasons.

But you’ve lost your will
to power, haven’t you?

Would you think your
reflection grotesque, off-putting,
if you saw me now?
Would you see an empty mask,
devoid of all you held dear?

As you wish.
We are both powerless
to divine our true meaning.

Another look at time

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The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates

So, I’m waiting for this horseman,
Windows barred, doors flung shut
In a vast pretense
Of indifference.

Only, I see roaches,
Resigned, driven by doom
Under cracks, seared by dim
Flashes of light, some blue,
Some red, not just unaware,
But irrelevant

Like distant quaking nuclei
Star struck long, long ago.

This means little,
For now not only exists,
But does not exist.

A man, blind from birth

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A parable

A man, blind from birth,
Is given the gift of sight.
The bandages come off.
He hears the voice of his beloved wife,
And sees…

An incomprehensible blather of light,
A tide of something he has never experienced,
Like water poured on the back
Of a desert beetle,
Or love in the heart
Of a man who has known only
Survival.

A week later,
He is blind again,
Rejecting the meaningless confusion
He has lived without his whole life.

His wife, devastated,
Leaves him,
Thinking she has seen him as he really is,
Ungrateful, mean.

He thinks he knows her at last
For the first time,
A creature wholly devoid of empathy.

Meanwhile, the sun rises over the desert,
And light falls on a beetle,
Scuttling under gathering clouds.