Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Liam C Calhoun Sep 2015
“One’s” ok, but “two’s” illegal come a night whispered,

“Run,”
Or so the grass spoke –

     Run like the wind.
     Run,
          But always look back.
     Run,
          So to liberate all you’ve loved.
          So too, awaits a home, only dreamt.

And she ran,
From village to village –

     Blankets wrought pollen.
     Carrots,
          For another’s eyes.
     Our baby,
          The outlaw prior even born;
          Hot on heal, the “department.”

And we ran,
Hopping continents –

     I, so to support.
     Our son,
          So to survive.
     My wife in wait,
          Our second miracle burrowed,
          Just beyond the world I’d promised,

A land, so help me, and shore we’d arrive one day.
The Department of Birth Control's hot on our heals. I've gotten my son away from where we were; but two remain and so help me, four will be reunited soon. So yes, that's where I've been and that's what I've been doing.
Liam C Calhoun Aug 2015
Fireworks thunder like
Stars long gone,
And I’d remembered
Something Grandpa once said –

“The world’s a wonder,
But home will always be
Home.”

And the fireworks still thunder,
But I’m the star long gone,
As I’d remembered
Something my son once said –

Innocent and earlier mirror’d,
His eyes were all that’d speak,
“Please.”

So now, I knock, atop the “thunder”
Calloused oak ‘fore, “father,”
As I discover, come echo’d only answer –

Whispers brought the cold, and the scent
Orchids wrought, “tell him to hurry;”
Once and an only gasp I’d hear too late.
I hated my father; but do I now? You tell me, please?
  Aug 2015 Liam C Calhoun
Vamika Sinha
You send me a song every Wednesday,

a soul offering; a slice of the strange radioactive
lunatic madness -
love-
growing inside your wonderland.
(It is not a cancerous tumour, please stop calling it that.)
You say it is dark, the Arctic's lover;
I say it is dark, like
velvet punk music and
stained checked shirts and
almost-blood wine (in shared glasses); like
the colour of your skin.

Come on.
We've both been more fascinated by the depths of the ocean
than the blue glass surfaces.
Isn't that why we fell into bottomless black holes and called it
love?
Isn't that why we branded ourselves poets,
seared the red hot poker labels onto our backs,
so that we wouldn't have to say we're just
sad...?

Yes, we are carefully disintegrating;
the world already gave us a head-start
by curling our spines into the snakelike 'S'
It was preparing us
for our careful meandering
into a river mess:
living.

No doubt, in the pool depths of African evenings,
you drink,
*****-tinged cereal or tea,  
the glass Roobios surface reflecting
a lover's face and the boredom of sadness.
No doubt, I drink to you,
coffee or warm milk,
to try and wake myself into
dying without a purpose.
No doubt, we both drink
the night itself.
And let it fester in our veins,
to curdle our blood into that same wine-shade of
darkness.
We drink.

Virginia Woolf had courage,
Sylvia Plath had courage,
Ernest Hemingway had courage,
you and I don't.
We are too fearless to live.
So we drink
and clutch at each other desperately
without reaching out a single finger.
We form shotguns with our hands, make pacts, go
home again.
And drink.

We are helping each other to die
and live
at the same time.
We are helping each other to try fit the day
too
into our arteries.

You send me a song every Wednesday;
this song will save our existence.
I have a friend who sends me a song every Wednesday.
Liam C Calhoun Aug 2015
She had the moon atop palm,
and “righty” in her pocket,
leaving me to wonder which
heavenly body she’d present
next.

This goddess, “gravity,” if
she’d a name, played physics
with my parts, and persuaded
thrice an orbit, circles wherein
the same hopes quantized –

“We’re we born of the same
star? Please? And when again,
can we burn brightly?  Soon?”
She’d reply, and echo come
frigid a comet’s tail, leaving.

So you’d know tonight as
you’d twice before; I’d sip my
beer before you. I’d cry before
you. And a’parallel, tease your
moon atop my very own palm.
I never knew that my one of my best friends from high school was in love with me; all apologies, my dear Karelia.
Liam C Calhoun Aug 2015
Under starless and sincerity, he’s missing
The Sun.
He’s learned to lick. He’s learned to kick.
He’s learned and leaned a little left, *****,
If only to obsess, ‘neath the neon.

Congruent pools of ***** and an empty
Arm, or two,
He taste time’s tick, but a lick atop arm,
And though his tongue’s somewhere south,
If only, he obsesses over neon.

Sure, the doors never close nor the sky’d ever
Know blue,
And ‘morrow’d be back. ‘Morrow’d relent.
‘Morrow’d release, ‘morrow’d excuse –
Smiling, he’d ‘ever obsess,

So quelled the neon.
I've an obsession with neon; and the bars wrought it's smile. Particularly a dive near "Admiralty" in Hong Kong.
Liam C Calhoun Aug 2015
She purrs on my couch,
     But she’s not my cat.
     She’s simply –
         Waiting; and
          a’Happy barbed anxious,
          Come the , “tap-tap-tap,”
          Of this something-sort-of
          “Poetry.”

She scratches her ankle,
     For even the mosquitos admire her.
     She’s entirely –
          And perfect;
          Ivory a’constellation freckles,
          Come the, “tap-tap-tap,”
          Persistent, patient in the face of
          this something-sort-of “Poetry.”

She smiles seconds and seconds again later,
     For the music, the words and I.
     She’s the one –
          The One;
          That makes me whole,
          That mothers our son,
          And is the sun, the star atop my
          “tap-tap-tap;”

She’s Poetry.
Cliche title; maybe even a cliche poem. That said, I had to leave for work again - trains, planes, and automobiles, anything so long as it'd get me back to her.
Next page