What is forgotten
Is easily replaced
All else remains, divine
quiet rings of ripples last
long after the Beloved’s pebble cast
to vanish beneath the water line.

From the still axis
a deeper message heard
in the silence,
between the echo,
rising in the azure
on the thermal rise
where prayers go.

A deluge of words
wails the ears
and not a drop
to quench the drought
or bathe away
salt-powdered tears.

Soundless
is the river drift
That carries us
through parted lips
Home to harvest
the black fruit orchards
dotting the red walled fields
where the divine rain falls
and the fertile heart yields.

Where it’s buried
cracks the seed
to grow and ripen on the vine
then plucked and pressed,
and poured in cup,
ripens in the drunkards mind.

I followed a writer
up a prodigious tree
Every leaf I brushed,
his poem.

From the crown
I scanned the pastoral
a poetic landscape in repose,
A resplendent chorus of
Glistening verdant wisdom.

O’ vast vibrato of sibilance
slipping the breaths of
Thalia and Melpomene!
Alight by dusk, I lingered.

Comes the long wind of winter
to undress each tree!
So from my aerie,
through gaunt branches,
I could see…

The low-slung place
where each poem fell
I thought, “here so many,
clothed in so much comedy
and tragedy…
recite their odes
of heaven and hell.”

And down I climbed
and away I walked
Over quiescent leaves
while red and russet
ran from their dendritic veins
Moldering into the palette
of dormant memories.

O’ even now
The sweet scent of decay
Reminds me of Spring
when I will climb again.
From the rot of the roost
to the dust below boots,
by the pen of the winter writer
Spring will come again.

“Such tiny hands,” he said
shoving elephantine thoughts
Into them
wielding such power –
knife clutching,
caressing, pen.

He took his eyes off the screen
for a moment,
to watch them go. He pondered,
“Long is the journey along nerves
from heart to paper,
nothing can be squandered.”

One day his hands will die
having bled for God and country
having spit and wept
along the path
tapping time
from the tip of his fingered infancy.

To the top of his wrist,
where youth dons hero’s cloak
stirring ***** in angst
fire carriers of thrumming tribes
whose eye’s purl water
from the smoke.

Then up arm and shoulder
shuffles age, a road
along his neck, that forks
where one goes south
where memories start,
the other towards the forgotten north.

Fateful, the besieged tellurian
Seeking whence his end began,
A northern throne for
a southern heart
thereupon ascends, proclaims
“I’ve come to free this writing hand.”

Love - takes life,
pain - respite,
Death – life’s poetry,
When troubled
it's you I see -
a heart in a lighthouse
for a poem lost at sea.

Heart becomes a blood dense sun
Consuming all of anyone
come to take a seat beside
or to sacrifice their burdens.

Goes the ghosts into the pyre
soften, silent from the ire
consuming even their own ashes
magnesium memories in the fire.

Till love fumes spheres of aural stars
hums distant in the cradling dark
cuddled, lost, yet guiding lights
Who remembers where you are...
       Even where has forgotten
       who you are.