Monday, August 29, 2016

Pall


I won't talk about faces
I've had quite enough of them.
This is my providence.
So here, I do what I want.

I'll write of a landscape.
The color of dried mud.
It goes on forever, this vista.
That's what makes it barren.
That's what makes it heavy to carry.

Or maybe it's an abstract.
Crafted by clumsy hands.
Wielding churlish colors straight from the tube.
Too lazy and sullen to mix them.
Or maybe they like that ugly purple.
Bruised and stiff, if sore were a shade.
They would, wouldn't they?

Believe me, I remember that coverlet.
Laid upon me, such as it is.
A cheap, thin blanket, lousy with thistle
Smelling of mildew and blood.

It's brutal silence
Tight lipped and cool
It's fixed in stone.
Anything else got buried long ago,
With the dead birds and the goldfish.

The backstage of the carnival is always worse to bear.
Than even the part we see, dizzy and swirling.
Why do they come day after hot day?
Year after year?

I said that I wouldn't.
But it seeps around the edges of things.
Wounds festered through the bandage.
Faces aren't welcome here.
But look, I talked about them anyway.




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Wednesday, August 10, 2016

The very second you lost me


A wisp of a time
An inkling
Fragile, yet.

For those 15 minutes
I sat in the palm of your hand
Nested there.
Among the flotsam and clutter.

You took that other turn.
I watched you, I watched it happen.
Prism-crisp, I see it still.

Misstep, misspoke, carried off by wind and hurl.
Breeze being too light a word for what you lost.

Turns out I have a shelf life.
Breathe in I'm there, breathe out I'm gone.

Here are the liberties I took
With the liberties you didn't.

I got up from my chair
I raised your window wider
Fresh air! I said.
My lie, white and oft bleached.
Blinded I am, by my own fiction.

What really happened.
Is I let you blow away.
Along with the hope, bunting soft as it was.

And when that took too long
I fanned what was left.

Is it hard? Does it smart?
Sure.
But I'll be damned
If you get to make all the plans.



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