Tag: poem

The Song

Posted on by RDP

You can’t live on it — the feeling.
The contraction of a guitar string,
Such anticipation.
The tankard’s dark, swirling abyss,
Pulse softening.

You can’t live on it —
The flowering of the voice,
Mighty introduction.
The kaleidoscope of colors,
Primal attraction.

You can’t live on it —
The pained pleading chorus,
Lingering mourning.
The ear’s consumption,
Desirous firing.

You can’t live on it —
The final note’s breaking,
Grappling desperation.
The ghostly vibrations of silence,
Deafening denial.

You can’t, you can’t —
Not but for those moments of song,
Pitch pointed, perfect and pure,
Magnetic and hypnotizing in its way.

In those moments you can, you can.
You can live on it.

Stay

Posted on by RDP

Stiffen your arm and raise the sword.
When the monster of weariness grabs hold,
When life’s demons fire your heart,
Scuff your heel and take stance.
When chaos bawls and the winds of loneliness roar,
When the dark endures and battle blood flows,
Grit your teeth and persist.

Forever the dawn breaks as night’s child.
Hope spills sunlight on your spirit,
Warmth in your eyes,
Flashing silver on your chest,
So, stay.
No matter the trial or beast.
Stay.

The Illusionist

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Black strands and white hands.
Moments drip, raindrops in time,
and stars glimmer for orphans, charting a course for home.

Exhalations in the drab and lonely night,
frosted breath, solitary, such secrets,
revealing cold mists, admissions, from summer to fall to winter again.

So long.
The truth as it ticks and burns and waits,
and is withheld.
Such a fleeting thing,
devoured by the maelstrom.

So sad.
A lined brow, a river’s etching by the eyes,
but blue, blue, blue — lamenting lost light.
Something revealed, seen, known and cherished.

He is me,
even in this heat with cold lips,
the delicate tendrils of my heart stuccoed to the illusion.
Black strands and white hands.

The Tattoo

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Blood and flame,
quiet sparks, this wooden bed.
Gods know the quickening —
the eye, the hand, the wrist, wrapped in fine skin.

Flesh marks tracing bled pattern,
soft heathen.
Horns and raven’s wings — cut me in silver.

Earth.

Spread me with axes and shields,
all that fair and fierce longing.

Over and under, over and under,
weave braids and veins
and cut the heart, fighter.
A shield born of ash and mist.
Touch me again.

The Wanderer

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Oh, Red, I found you again,
in the night’s tale.
Warm palms, wool gloves,
magnetic magical lure of the throat;
imagined memory.
An interception of the pressing dark, unconscious haze.
The flashing pearl revealed by upturned petal and sapphire gaze.
My gods, the panting;
heaving chest, anxious beat,
a tearless, tired eye.
You, please.
Wanderer, discoverer, wanting change conjurer.
Promise on our song and wait again for the sun’s bed.
I swear with wringing hands,
despite the sky’s expanse and endless, agonizing time.

Brooklyn

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There’s a fearful beat that persists in my chest.
Squealing agony of the railway brakes,
unyielding stone and aging towers penetrate a pensive sky thick with weeping clouds.
All is drab, distended, dripping, and gray.
Mists draw from concrete pads and breath suspends tensely in the humid negative space.
Strangers pass, each with a downcast gaze, masked face.
Amid this and all,
the unseen sensation of a conjured aesthetic — a memory of something long completed.
There is a sound here that you made.
Your resonance tattooed like a perpetual autumnal bearing despite winter’s biting snows and summer’s cruel sun.
Don’t despair —
I can hear you, and your eyes look cold like mine.

The Memory

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Aye, lover, it’s been long.
Minutes piled beyond counting.
The revolving nights work waves —
crash against nets, pots, and so much rust.
Tanned hands turn silken gray loops;
sweating brow,
but such bright auroras upturned at the sun,
and carven lines, rooted in ancestral deserts.
A soft call of morning stirs memory,
and the air’s easy caress touches high,
like fallen feathers and snow.

Touchless

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Packed away in my mind’s space,
he waits, ever-present,
wrapped in cords and sheets —
in whispering curtains and dancing morning dust.
The midnight moon conjures that invisible stranger,
outlined in pointed shapes, blue and heat,
glossy gray, and soft, wintered loops.
My guts, my skin, hopeless in the throat’s sound,
audible only in the sponge twist electricity of thought.
Sighs and a pounding pulse against the touchless hands — ethereal ecstasy beyond the dirt of the earth, oceans, and time.
Daylight banishes him to sweetened vapors, whispers, and sun streams,
and I am left physical — changed.

The Freedom Fighter

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Rain pearls touch and slough off leaves,
damp fog languishes and rolls.
The sodden tread nears, and breath;
crisp, fresh, upswept, and sharp.
Shining shapes upon flesh —
flashing, brilliant;
eyes like a breaking dawn, cresting sun.
Brush near the throat, the manic beating,
and sign to me of sands and terrors.
Open-lipped and torrid, seasoned by galaxies and dust, we resist.
This, in our secret silence,

dark star,

vibrating daydream.

The Scientist

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Late summer’s long shadows hide a sparkling shimmer of dying warmth.
Notions swept up in cool breezes,
and fermented dreams linger in the strange science of failed connections.
There, the sounds of a stranger’s voice,
an exhale, and a kiss that’s never been,
drowning in the lustful, coated swirl of a drained cup.