Helios Rietberg

Helios Rietberg Oct 2011

Tell me stories
of a honey-coloured love
Time immemorial
and sweetly scented doors

Fine me heartaches
in the absence of the stars
Gazing forever
through the silence of descent

Urge me gently
on the road of reveries
Rising dawns
in the howl of morning bees

Miss me terribly
from the quiver of your lips
Haunted softly
by the touch of kind strangers

Watch me tenderly
of thoughts in dreary days
Fondly forgetting
our many silhouetted ways

Every yuletide it comes the time
under the blanket of nirvana
where I remember you for brief flickers
in the light of better days

Helios Rietberg Oct 2011

Fire

My heartstrings
Stretch in harp-like synchrony
Waiting for the day when
Your fingers pluck them
Stolidly
Steadily
And from a mass at the bottom of the ocean I will
Gather and rise into an entrapped bubble
Burst up into the oxygenated world
Live in my head in ballooned ecstasy
Gradually rising to the ether
While you watch and giggle
In child-like innocence
And smile to melt the world.

Helios Rietberg Oct 2011

Zachariah

Staring for hours into the sea of faces
Waiting for you to turn up
And then seeing you for moments
Smoking in your trench coat
Felt hat shielding the sun from your eyes
Taking your daily break on the bridge

Times like that never fade
Thoughts of someone I could never have
And the resonance of silence in my head

Helios Rietberg Oct 2011

Argon

I wandered the desert wasteland
A pack of burning sun on my back
It tore my eyesight in two

Oases loomed and dissolved
Nothing but blue sky overhead
And circling scavengers

Helium shot to my brain
The taste of tainted blood
And numbing wounds

Helios Rietberg Oct 2011

The Burial

A whisk of alpine pollen
The whisper of the wind
Bowed heads and unheard murmurs
And the songs to cleanse their sins

The casket enters ground
We seal the doors unmade
Grind through the formalities
And shuffle our separate ways

The breath of breezy flowers
The scent of reveries
The many hundred hours
We spent in drudgery

Gone high and low in hunger
Dim tides and hues and aches
The earth shut off forever
and in the death of wake–––

I watched your eyes open in joy
I watched them shut in shame
Time gave you less than all my years
and leaves me crying in vain

Helios Rietberg Oct 2011

Falling

One-time policy

Took me off the heels of summer
Plunged me into the arctic lakes
Made a while in the company of whales
Grasping their goals tight

One-time policy

Graded in time by curving up
Trite in the trepidations of man
Flight in the wires and dire in its soles
Dry up the rivers in my eden

It's just a scratch

Pack up the tyres and grip my heart
Taken in the wings of an ethereal siren
Opulence in the labels and my sight
Greeting my memories

Gorge on life

And in the chasm of eternity I wonder
Seeing the slit of sky and pondering all essence
Shriek like ravens and pour trifles in
Gentle flowing of slopes on the rise–––––

Helios Rietberg Oct 2011

Rite of Fire

Meeting you yesterday
In the bazaar close to the school
where we used to play

You smoked
I smiled through the dust
Trying to ignore the differences

I knew it'd been hard for you
I really tried

The wind was degrading everything
The magnificence of the otherwise hot summer day
The braying of the donkeys at work
The shouting
and all the marble tiles lining the sidewalks
giving home its colour

and in my heightened sensations there was a whisper

"I'll be home for the end," you said

I nodded as always
gripping the hunger in my stomach so tightly
it always bothered me when the months came

"Maybe we can meet up then,"

"Sure."

That was all we ever said
and all I ever needed.