Category: Poetry

A brand new one: five stanzas of thirty-eight syllables, nine-nine-nine-seven-four. ♥ EAB

The Great Sieve

If Truth is a universal force,
it is manifest in Gravity:
at its best, it unites heavenly
bodies so they take orbit
’round each other,

their paths set by fascination, by
nuclear attraction creating
chemical bonds not cut by any
quick or easy means. This is
how the world works.

Drive out to the darkest place you know,
point your telescope to the sky and
drink deep. There is Truth within shadow:
of birth, fusion and collapse
with no warning.

It is so, then, that when Truth arrives
it comes with all the dynamics of
force itself, pulling the knees to the
ground, sloughing away what is
inessential.

Force, unyielding by nature, only
cedes to greater force, so Truth gives way
to Change: the greater, unrelenting
force that can strip the need to
live out one’s Truth.

I’d forgotten about this poetic triptych of sevenlings I’d written back in early June. It has a specific layout that’s not html friendly, hence the image that you can enlarge with a click. The image is from the painting Marine by Salomon van Ruysdael, actual brigantines not pictured anywhere therein. The full text sans image is below. ♥ EAB

Brigantines
The surreptitious games start
when his governess leaves to
fetch lunch. He’s now admiral
of the only vessel to
sail the Seven Seas for the
sheer sake of his capricious
spirit. Adventures await.

Bottlenecks
The old seadog considers
the unbound sails, the damage
left by the cannons’ pulses.
Sulphur stings his nose, and the
artillery’s smoky paths
in air match the wizened lines
‘round his eyes, portending doom.

Bruises
Shilling between forefinger
and thumb, the Queen’s profile is
the deciding factor. Cork
smashed, he drops the coin into
the bottle’s mouth, and shaking,
the brigantine’s sails bow to
his merciless impulses.

A syllabic poem: nine and nine and nine and, on occasion, two. ♥ EAB

Nine Days from Now

He’s you with a cubist hand applied
to your features, someone I’d only
notice because of the split nature
of this unintended moment. I’d
expected to greet your laughter at
the boundaries of my right side, but
I met my distracted reflection
in the intermittent blackness of
the train window as it screamed through the
pathways that would never lead me home.
I’m transfixed by this resculpted you.
He brings me comfort in this lonely
moment. I curse the occasional
obstructions of tired passengers
and all the heavy mementos of
their day.

               It’s all wrong:
the smell of the ripening lime trees,
the sparkling, misshapen crown of the
Pleiades—the intuition of
lonely moments seizes under the
unfortunate subjectivity
of our calendars in a conflict.
I stand

            at the precipice of decision
with the sharp blade of my good judgment
blunted by the collision of the
unknown striking against the starker
limitations of this circumstance.
My suppositions are fixated
upon a wishful overlap of
time that cannot occur here, where I’m
consoled by a copy’s copy with
opaque facets that vanish when his
eyes meet mine. See, I find his triple-
dimensionality as unreal
as the nine days that separated
the fraying need of your decisions
from mine.

When I drafted and posted “May (82nd & 5th)” a few months ago, I’d wanted to illustrate part of what I had hoped to accomplish with the staggered syllabic count: the lines were meant to look ragged, so that when the poem was turned on its side, it’d resemble a skyline.

I finally got around to creating something that looks like it. Here’s “May (82nd & 5th)” in another incarnation. Click on the image to embiggen. ♥ EAB

It’s National Poetry Day in the UK, the country that adopted me for three years. That means it’s time to post something.

I haven’t won anything since I won a digital game watch from a Chips Ahoy! box back in the first grade, so I wrote this dodecasyllabic 22-line terza rima ditty back in July for a contest in the hopes of turning that streak around.

Ah well. Their loss is my site’s burgeoning trove of verse’s gain. ☺ EAB

Pas de deux

Toe to toe, we stand with our feet in parallel
preparation for the band to play. Everything
is unfamiliar here, and a tremulous swell

of anticipation runs up the spine, lightning
pulse of nerves that offsets the taste of my own teeth
against my tongue. En garde: the music’s insisting

rhythms press into the joints of my hips and wreathe
around my knees. I follow you, bending, and dip
beneath the surface of your will, and where you breathe,

I mark it seven in the count. You smile and slip
below the lead, and I guide us through the next phrase,
until the key shifts and we switch again, the lip

of the chorus easing, turning one dancer’s phase
into the next, to crepuscular and full and
waning. You spin me, and your hands stop to appraise

the space between my shoulder blades, where there’s a strand
of secret text that you alone can decode. Our
feet converge on that limelit spot where we began,

where sound has tactile sensibility, where hours,
minutes, and seconds are infused with colors, where
words acquire the fragrance of summer flowers,
and a new song presents us a similar dare.

New Order

it’s the pull in the gut, the lurching forward,
and the limbs lift
from sleep—and you were so sure
they’d never wake again—
nevermind, it’s here:
everything you’ve ever wanted but
nothing you were prepared for, smile and choose: left or right

always is insincerity at its best,
and never’s false
promises are exposed by
impetus and instinct,
but you know there’s a
decision to be made: you must rise
above stagnation and despair, so choose: right or left

slippery indecision: left or right, rote
or leave this place,
you decide and then you stop:
fear strangles you when love
is overcome, and
love emancipates you when fear is
overcome by everything you’re still not prepared for

never means nothing if its syllables spill
from the lips of
fear, always means everything
if its arms close around
someone to hold dear,
so know this: decision will come when
you know that the unknown is the only known there is

I’ve had a lot on my mind, see, and the preceding was a gigantic internal dialogue between my sense and my intuition that’s been pared down into a four-stanza opus with a regular syllabic pattern.

…and then lather, rinse, repeat. ♥ EAB

I wrote this one when I was in grad school and had embarked upon a rather nomadic pattern after a long period of stasis about eight or nine years ago. It’s got rotating rhyme and regular syllabic patterns. It came to mind today, so I decided to post it. ♥ EAB

“Ana didn’t have her shit together.”

Packing’s the worst part of abandonment.
There’s no vise to compress my memories,
no photographs, no choice of sundries,
no reflection in the panes
of fireworks from the Fourth
seen from the spot we found on the pavement.

This building knows me far too well. It sees
my light and my dark, dressed up and plain.
It’s where I store my favorite refrain.
But now (and ever henceforth)
it is not mine. I meant
for it to be my shell. It’s not some prize

to stuff inside a plushy bear and pray
it will make the trip ok. I’ve worn
it out, tattered, useless, a drab horde
of metal bits and bobs rent
beyond hope. I can’t raise
my past from the grave. If it’s just the same

to you, when we sit on the roof, ignore
my asides that I’m ready and spent,
through with my life of disenchantment.
Pretend I’m ready to leave.
Pander my heart again.
Remind me that I’ve done all this before.

I put down this 13 x 13 after coming to terms with some of my social conditioning last night. I’ve included an audio file of me reading it. ♥ EAB

pavlovian

Pavlovian

Pessimism visits me with lightning flashes, and
I’m immediately convinced the storm’s on its way,
so much so, I hear raindrops’ pittering-pat against
the window. I can’t help it, I brace for the worst’s worst.
The rain knocks out a familiar percussive pattern,
therefore I await the shift: the roof will soon fly off,
and I’ll be carried away by the mercilessness
of wind. I can already sense the lift in the gut,
where I’m propelled far beyond the deep of hopelessness.
I stand there, in the center of the room, with muscles
tensed for the impact, where I muse why I must throw a
threadbarren projection of a two-dimensional
past over the laughing, breathing child of the present.

I was in New York last week, and I threw down a freewrite while sitting on the steps of the Met. I’ve reshaped that aimless prose into a seven-stanza poem in which I limited the syllabic count of each line to seven different possibilities based upon the relative and transposed spacetime coordinates that applied to that particular freewrite: 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14.

May (82nd & 5th)

in this city of exponents
where the mathematics are visible in everything
men of the twentieth century vowed to touch the sky
for economy
the economy of spacetime that everyone knows here
where time is the unifier
of breadth and length and depth

nature finds her way
to express biology among all this artifice
through the constant music of movement: choral, orchestral
the regulation of involuntary processes
through veins in marble
capillaries in cracks in the pavement
platelets in asphalt
white blood cells in granite
the nervous system
where there is still so much more below than above
and the electrical currents
of internal regulation
boast of immortality and collapse
over the ether of dashed dreams

the paradox of impermanent permanence
and vice versa, of course
encoded in the double helix within the
intersection of concrete seams
expanded through the scaffolding
that has been used time and time and again
to construct, to rebuild and to reimagine
that which has already been through
the same process of rethinking
at least a dozen times
generation after generation
of dreams and aspirations that
tangle in the rearrangement
of everything and
dizzily collapse at the feet
of the god of all things temporary
the god of all things

but the temporary and the tiny find ways
to open up, to hold big, significant things
through the blessings of
economy and
mathematics and
biology and
impermanence so
that all of the world’s timeless principles
are reduced into a thimble
a lifetime within
a few elongated, gossamer moments that
stretch out over the synapses to snap
at the cold and recall
beauty
and a mark on the hip that gets explained away
when the aches of autumn
drive the sun deeper and deeper into the horizon

the economic blessing of
a shared moment is recounted
so that the insignificant
becomes part of your memory
of you

and what seemed so small
is now much larger than originally thought

there’s a whisper inside traded glances
(you were there, too, weren’t you?)

♥ EAB