Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Caroline Shank Oct 2022
Death exits the vomitorium
on
     the left.
The chalice rattles.
     The king is dead.

(It  slammed into my head
     one night,
         when you were sick )

Before the circle it was said
   you
       were handsome and guileless.

(You attend again, your father, locked in
     in the sleep that has only one hand.
Tomorrow will solicit your stillness.)
        

My legs, old, are stumble, are
     shaken. I wobble

like a child.

(Watch the hands that hold
     yesterday.  Grip the rope. )

Wrench away.  Struggle.  I'm

tears,
     are bricks,
       I  tear my face.

You, beloved,
     gone in the morning.

Flowers, to the sun,

          turn

into your celestial orbit,


          burn.



Caroline Shank
10.16.2022



RIP Jim Shank
5.10.1938 to
5.03.2022
Caroline Shank Oct 2022
Base Camp

Unseen from here, the
summit, in a cloud, anchors
the landscape.

It is said there are corpses littered
among the crakes and crevices along
the pilgrim's path to atonement.

Let me walk among the thoughts, the
footsteps, the crawling supplicant's
prayers to reach the place where
climbers found the unimagined,
the windblown, the face of God
that insists on another

chance.

Let me be where you are, the
subside of a mythic mountain,
among the survivors who
recovered

love in the scree of

yesterday.


Caroline Shank
Caroline Shank Oct 2022
When men love they move slower
than dawn rolls onto day. Arms
turn toward each other as if to
grasp their beloved as raindrops
grasp the stalk of a flower,
melting around tender shoots
like silk wrapping. They whose
feet have always left sound
behind them, their prints
evaporate in whispers.

Men gather in bundles the
persons they have been, select
the best, the finest moments,
to plant by the porch of the
adored. They go through the
weather of their passion focused,
translated into a language as
sharp, as clear, as cries in
blue sea-gulled air when
nothing but nothing stands
between nature and desire.
The goal of movement is charged
across a world lost to all
desire for choice.

Men love with a kinetic so deep,
so intimate, it is movement inscribed
on every breath.

If then the moment should
come of the crack in the bell of
the heart, when daylight rips
the landscape, they fall, as a
rock falls, to crash along a
beach utterly void of life, to
become trilobite in noiseless
water, moved by the purposeless
shift of time and stone.

Caroline Shank


(This is the best I could glean about men in love. Being female may not have helped.)
Caroline Shank Oct 2022
(Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Carl Sandburg)


Wet leaves leave traces
on the stony path to
Dreamland.  I Have
slippery intentions.

Tomorrow will decay these
thoughts.  Mind's tricks
pretend that the wet
leaves slip

up.

The dream ends.

Nothing
happens.


Caroline Shank
10.11.2022
Caroline Shank Oct 2022
I am not a kind person.

At times
I trickle interest in what
you are saying.

Mostly
I wait for
noon on a hot
day.

The breath of a
thousand words
cannot reach

the craters of
stones dug
without care.

I am not a kind person.

Where you were,
dying,
it was
the nurses who
compassioned you.

My reflection was
hidden in the
still pool of your

leaving brown eyes.

I reek with sadness,
with the
penance of being

a ;ń/. alone.



Caroline Shank
Caroline Shank Sep 2022
Boredom opens the door to walk-ins.
Floats, like spoors in July, little
umbrellas of disaffection.

Tomorrow is the tattered breath
of the day before I met you.
It is the same.  The film is
crinkled on the closet shelf.

I clean around the thought
of giving the lash to tonight.
It is the last resort to
things unable to disseminate.

The hero shrinks of yesterday
are gone for soldiers everyone.
It's the hymn that keeps them awake.

(My mother shrieked through the
night.  In Summer the frogs in
the back shrank.)

You left with the rain.  I have
said this before.  Late afternoons
dredge.  Not yet suppertime
the waiting for night's numbing
power is interminable.

Sit there where I remember you
so I can lapse into stillness

that will bring the words sliding
songs.  

I

linger

Into drugged

dreams.



Caroline Shank
Caroline Shank Sep 2022
Panic spins.
I am a dervish without
a prayer.

Air pounds in my chest.
Sound is a slap.  
Thought is scrambled.

Breathless is a **** in my
stomach.  Flight is the
option.  Feathers fly.

The air is sand, filled,
unbreathable.
A storm screaming.

A rope
chokes me
into another
space from which
I fall disgraced.
.
Recovery is a movement
of clarity I receive from
your

lips on my

hands.

Caroline Shank
Next page