Poems: 100313 - March 10th, 2013

[Robert Morpheal]

100313A
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First indications
are the pale swords
of new life,
piercing the crusty soil.

Flowers appear later,
unfurling battle flags
flying shouts of color,
on long thin stems.

Everything advances,
when the ice retreats.
The sun touches a hillside
with a cloudy caress.

A wild restlessness
starts to take root,
in the dark soil
furrows of the mind.

Trying to plough aside,
whatever seems in the way,
turning it around,
to clear away the emptiness.

I see your pretty face
and I would drag you down
right into the mud
if it would make any difference.

We could surrender
our feet, fins and wings,
so I could be the worm
that you feel inside your flesh.

We were angels
until the banishment,
and now we are the brambles
and the thorns.

You always wound me,
as though trying to tear me open,
to make me bleed,
as we sacrifice each other.

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100313B
-----------

Eventually it always fails
to stand up
to all the cross examination,
forgetting too many details,
becoming confused
as to some of the facts,
ending gripped in uncertainty.
The hopeless task
of assigning faces to names.

Life tightens its strangle hold
and something snaps,
the way a hanged man snaps
at the neck,
everything gone too rigid,
turned to dead weight,
over top of the open trap.
Down into the wine press,
crushed under bare feet.

Trying to run away,
through a midnight swamp,
barely ahead of the hounds,
hearing night mares and horns,
coming up close behind.
Knowing what it feels like
to be a run away slave,
that no one really sets free,
but everyone keeps letting go.

The sun plays with the mind,
luring it away from gunmetal grey,
to stray thoughts racing in any direction,
making acutely aware
of being a frozen paralysis
in a morgue of impersonal whispers,

haunted by the rustling of forms to fill out,
terrified by the empty blanks,
having no idea who or what to fill in.

Various debris piles up,
pushed up the shore along the beach.
Indications of wreckage
and implications of drownings.
A shattered hourglass
trickle of sand streaming
from the mouth.
The eyes staring into the sky,
looking for everything that is lost.

It is what it is all about,
being abandoned.
A ransacked derelict,
left broken wide open,
after being emptied out.
The abyss swallows everything,
and all you can do is watch
as one thing after another falls in
and disappears from sight.

Eventually you know
there was nothing to hope for,
and no one to wait for.
It was all a failure to attack,
and advance fast enough.
Surrendering the field,
vastly outnumbered,
you take your infected wounds,
bartering them into blossoms.

May is more cruel than April,
tied as it always is
to a maypole of torments.
A St. Vitus dance,
of spasm tangled in the ropes,
haunted so absolutely,
by too many kinds of beauty,
watching a lonesome reflection
slowly drift away and drown.

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100313C
------------

Making the fingers
lose their touch.
Leaving them
to what is cold
and what is hard.

They hesitate
on the smudges
of keyboard,
hammering out
a symbolic protest.

They have worn out
the alphabet,
erasing it
with finger prints,
polishing away the faces.

Perhaps no one heard
anything that they mimed,
misunderstanding
the gestures
and the syllables.

The invitations sent
received no replies.
Messages in bottles
lost at sea,
between here and the stars.

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