Butterflies before an acceptance speech

 Butterflies before an acceptance speech

If madness strikes me

Seizes my senses right on the dais

Shakes me out of my habitual lies;

If I spoke the truth just once

dropped this calculated elegance

Straight Tool and Miss Last Nail

 Straight Tool and Miss Last Nail

 

Was once a tool

Real sleek steel,

fine for new nails, or fixing a few rails

or just about anything the crew wills-

a fresh prince for the price of fish-

free!

Death, thou art loosed!

 Death, thou art loosed!

My head is full

Of sounds of a shovel

Of sands shoved

Of rocks moved

Of ground punched

To sink a necessary grave-

Unnecessarily too often

Too close to the last

In too dry a ceremony.

 

The people I’ve buried

Graves I have filled

In song-less haste

In war’s pointless waste

Death is born.

 

I grope in the past

And my past is lonely and vast

Furnished with misery

Well washed with tears and worry

Ventilated by gusts of terror –

my past is packed to the ceiling with

memory upon memory

loss upon loss

too often in this war-

Stacked atop each as if

they were trophies.

 

My past is a place

famished then abandoned

By friends and the sun and the wind.

 

My past is this place I can’t leave

This home I return to

This prison that shadows me

No matter the borders I cross,

This windowless trap

This smothering grip,

This past so vast

Acres and acres of evil in my mind

Poisoning where I walk

What I think, who I meet-

poisoning.

 

My past is a memory

the smell of blood of kin

stinging pain of singed skin

the sound of a flaring flame

of a flame crack

the harrowing fall of my life.

 With my hands I remember

burying

people I had encountered

bodies I had entered

The hearts I had warmed

In the season of love bloomed,

Lips I’d tasted; the bonds now tested

By death broken, I buried.

 

I remember

That I have lost to soulless sands

To silent earth

To rocks that clatter,

then roll and settle

to graves that cover

my friends whose fatal

End is an endless bother

 that I couldn’t shrug at all -

this memory so lonely and vast

Is a grave that covers me

For since then, I've been dead

Though I walk-

Thought I walk.

Rickety Riot

 

Rickety Riot

The theatres come to town

at corners and turnings and straights

pavement and kerbside and where else

you’d care to look-

is a dead show

of bones- rackety rickety riot

in streets

A Hunter’s dilemma

 All these dear darlings of

Fat rounded sides

Skins of golden shades

Basking in the splendour

Of the western sun,

crowd his vision.

Heaven and earth

I need to find love, to catch it and hoard,

To check-mate it like a king on a chessboard;

I need to fly blind like an arrow,

To free-fall for someone, like...oh,

Like the sun needs to rise tomorrow

 

I need to run crazy, look straight stupid.

Yet in that abandon find favour in cupid.

And I want, oh so much, to be found

Like a falling leaf needs the ground.

 

I want too to succeed, to lift my head above

Like the boldest bull in the herd;

In my time I want to have conquered

Popular opinion, fame and political love;

I crave to pause where I leave my mark

And like Ozymandias say, “Look on my work!”

 

I hope that in the cycle of time I have risen

From wherever my soul's been a denizen,

Through gleaming gold, dirty iron, forsaken earth;

That the past is punishment and this, my final birth.

I wish in time to run free- a spirit

Unbound in form and loving it,

I want to be with the best spirits I can find-

The high, the gentle, the forever kind.

 

But then stronger grows my hunger for money

I cheat and play low tricks on you daily, honey,

I kiss you with my lips and my hands pick your pocket;

I swindle and sell friendship for a one-way ticket!

 

Oh but I want it all- fame and fortune, peace and quiet,

To escape without a scrape and be the hero yet!

And like a camel's love for pasture here and heaven there

This relentless wanting wears my soul bare!

Devine company

 Devine company

Homeward I walk in the night

On a path by fire flies lit,

underbrush licks my ankles,

castor seeds feel my under-feet