alright, here are the poems i'm including in my portfolio (feedback & criticism SVP
):
Networked
We exchange song lyrics
like postcards
received encoded with words like
"love"
and "faith"
that we can no longer decipher;
and we sit connected by
silver wire and thought,
throwing strings of music
at each other
in hopes of being heard,
and knowledge that somehow
we are not.
The days turn into miles
and the light scarring my eyes
is like a drug
using me,
saving me
from self-destruction,
to deliver me into
a cold bed and
a snakeskin existence
praying that this
tangle of wires
and loose ends
still somehow
connects to you.
_________
Vertigo
Cumulative pressure
like
clouds squeezed over mountaintops,
squished between beyond
and stone.
Birds,
following the message of time,
one gets dizzy
and falls.
The ebb and flow of
people through
a bright late night hallway,
their drunken crashing
like waves
curl forward
and tipple back.
I get dizzy
and fall.
____________
Prairie Dusk
Happiness moves on the breeze in wisps
like white pollen on a blue spring day;
an open-winged hawk
looks always forwards and
never down.
Down is the direction
of folded brown grass,
prairie style romance
ever old fashioned on the flatlands.
In the hills
short skirt, long boots,
paved paths and
park benches preface the dawn.
You lose the sense of
long dresses and sunbonnets
forever on the flatlands,
where young girls linger
with beaming hair
the colour of sun-stroked grain;
Golden gift
granted to mortal beauty
a heirloom of generations on the flatlands.
And in the hills
the houses grow up
and out, and over,
and a hawk flies into a window,
falling down,
escaped from cement hell
that has encased the foothills
and slinks
ever outwards
threatening,
implying,
that one day it will reach and rejoin
a solid expanse of grey humanity
and a sky charcoal black,
from mountains
to shield
through flatlands.
___________
The Boy Who Can’t Sleep
Awake, she subsists
on moonlight
and shallow dreams
of the boy who can't sleep.
Saturated with luminary
anticipation
the creeping
wake of lies catches up
and carries her along.
Taken to a place where she
is swept up in the
chaos of rolling,
churning,
gulping oceanic
tumult
distant from the
conventions of land.
And she never fights the tide;
awaiting liquid death
still consumed by
thoughts of
unbridled fatigue.
Boy who can't sleep,
meet the girl who can't swim.
____________
Glance again.
You tell me:
face the world.
Can you not see
that by facing the ground
no one will see me falling down?
I hear:
this is the year we lose hope.
Broken down and dreary
I have not the strength to
question that convention.
Outside,
pristine and crisp
sparkling white
contrasts the flat dull
white walls
in here.
Everywhere I look
colour evades us.
Vision fading,
soften the edges for me,
darling,
don't tell me why
I wake up squeaking
instead of screaming
these days.
________
TranscenDance
God squirms on stage
and without saying I can see
he Says
All I Know is Pain
The incoherent light
and sound
fail to form
more than a tangible barrage.
I spend all my time
wishing I could have
been there,
known Him,
done that.
They ebb and flow
with the Shaman’s magic
the sound of spell
an enticing power,
a hedonistic, heathen power.
With him we chant:
death death death death death death death!
Singing, he screams
in the clutches of agony
overload, overload
please stop this.
I am naked.
I am nothing.
Enthralled He keeps conjuring
communing with
only He knows,
and I reach out,
senseless,
struck dumb by His presence.
Integrated with
the freaks, the strangers,
trapped in a mass
of sensuality,
as God seeks death
knowing nothing else.
Beauty in the rich red
and still brown
caked upon His face,
bodily writhing
snakelike, poisonous.
Enraptured, the fangs sink in
and we scream.
Floating above transcendence,
His motives unquestioned,
detachedly I wonder
Is it my requiem He sings,
or a lullaby?