Tom McCone

Tom McCone Apr 2013

The star exists.

The rain exists
to fall.

The tree exists
to breathe
and fall.

The bird exists
to breathe,
and sing amongst the trees,
and fall.

The beast exists
to breathe,
and sing amongst the trees;
to wander,
and fall.

The human exists
to breathe,
and sing amongst the trees;
to wander,
and whisper, under starlight,
to love,
in despair;
and, finally,
as all else does,
to fall.

Tom McCone Apr 2013

penguins, at home

Flittering feathers write sonnets
in soaring frequencies;
taking in the ocean at once,
I felt ripples brought to standstill,
damped by second's refrain,
curled back into the
picturesque blue written ahead,
but
no cloud harbours the ceiling,
no late words shown, jotted down
by the
indifferent and
invariably disappearing breeze.

The latterwork of these days took it up,
and hung it out
on lines stretched across skies and time,
betraying tender surfeit, in moments
torn out,
and,
leaving only
vague traces of
woodworn prose,
spilling out my last sentiments:

"we, once,
were alive,
if only for a moment."

In dreams she holds small collections
of sandy flowers,
above the shoreline,
as the dichotomous cluster takes theirs,
behind a fragmentary grain
in the blacksmith's hide;
written, again, are those seasick letters,
wrung out
in the dead heat of the forge,
the demands of strangers,
in stone buildings by the fireplace,
electric heater, off,
the inbetween reeling
of slightened accomplishments,
the scent of oil,
left over, from the husk of noon.

Miss and want, over again,
missing beguilement in afternoon's repose.

"come back...",
but she ain't the one gone.

dedicated to antarctica

Tom McCone Mar 2013

pagaille

l'ombre de l'objet
devint cette chambre,
plein d'hiver et les lueurs,
jaunes et vertes.

où sont les nuits dans lesquelles j'aimais rêver?

un soleil passait,
l'ombre changée en
géométries intarissables;

je ne parle pas
devant les rivières,
elles voient le ciel,
repartir pour toujours,
sans bruit.

j'eus le temps de poser mes yeux
sur l'angle fugitif de l'ombre,
inversée,

et

j'étais sur la terre,
être de verre,
sur ce bord même de l'abîme;
vide, entre glace et sommeil.

the shadow of the object
became this room,
full of winter and the lights,
yellow and green.

where are the nights I once dreamt in?

a sun passed,
the shadow shifted into
inexhaustible geometries;

I do not speak
before the rivers,
they see the sky,
depart forever,
soundlessly.

I had the time to place my eyes
on the fugitive angle of the shadow,
reversed,

and

I was on the ground,
made of glass,
on the very edge of the abyss;
empty, between ice and sleep.

Tom McCone Mar 2013

premier

les étoiles s'allongent dans les champs des chambres noires,
les mers, perdues dans le papier-nuit des temps,
un poisson glisse en aval
et,
le sommeil des pelouses,
vu d'en bas hier soir,
dure encore.

la lune, un orateur dans les bois; elle dire:
"j'oublie le ciel d'azur,
je deviens le nageur à heure du dîner
jusqu'à l'éclipse d'aube,
je crie sous le vide,
sous l'eau d'octobre, se termine,
et
la marée, sur ces mers,
s'affaiblit
en bruit de rêve."

et moi, dévisageant la solution des points claires,
miniscules et faible lueurs,
je m'anime,
encore endormi, toujours,
toujours endormi,
tant que les arbres respirént,
tendres et lents.

the stars lay down in the fields of darkened rooms,
the seas, lost amidst the paper mist of time,
a fish slips its way downstream
and
the lawns,
seen from below, last night,
still doze.

the moon, a speaker amongst the woods; she says:
"I forgot the skies of blue,
I've become the swimmer at dinnertime
through the eclipse of dawn,
I scream beneath the void,
under the waters of october, coming to an end,
and
the tide, upon those seas,
fades,
into the sound of dreams"

and, me, staring into the solution of light points,
miniscule and glimmering,
I become alive,
still sleeping, always,
always sleeping,
whilst the trees breathe,
soft and slow.

Tom McCone Mar 2013

listlessness

it is no hidden truth:
writing about those teeth
and twisting schemes of
sadness in my dreams is somehow my dependent everything,
but patterned lists of the same words
in permutation
becomes tedium in waiting;
there's that illustrious want for novelty, no matter how safe the same may be,
and I still just write
about that exact ******* love
and ******* everybody else wants: so, am I this predictable? am I this formulaic?

probably.

so, how does one take some respite?
how does one choke back their routine penstrokes and fabricate
experiences they haven't yet or ever will gather,
when all they've held was in the ritual letting of ladders down ductile tunnel foundations,
the vestigial fathoms that remain floating around in
your eyes, your eyes! your eyes I
tear open and crawl in and curl up inside,
the feigned lust I set out to fake and then finally, silently, made
and now it's all the mistake of concrete stained with
letters heart letters on a date that lasts forever,
but your letters are tiny lies
and mine are misery
held in contemptible disguise and
how I slip just that **** easily into this lackluster story about
I, you,
people I never knew and
never know anybody.

and

how the grass would have grown and grown if the lawn hadn't been cut down, and the patch of death in concentric center where outside, under the stars, I lay curled, foetal, and drained of bile; for now, in ascension of sterility I am feral once more, I am, at last, just a tremulous, pathetic and miniscule animal waiting to pass through the dirt. That moment hit me, like all stones in august. So I stood. So I ******* stood, threw off my dripping eyes, screaming at the moon 'til I spat blood and cursed life and I swore, I swore down to the skin of my teeth, I would conquer it until it conquered me, for, as far as the wild was concerned, my casualty was a drop of rain in an ocean. So I become the ocean. So I dig my palm into the earth and let dust ground the stray electricity. I no longer lie, I no longer bide time until it's too late.

But I lied
and I do lie.
I waste abhorrent amounts of time.
I still just hang my head and leave things up to fate. It's always too late.

It's always too late.

Tom McCone Mar 2013

ascent/descent

I had dreams of Utah or Minnesota, though
I've never been anywhere close to either.

I dreamt of the endless fields and their
waving grains and the tendrils of tree limbs
aching outward, towards the sun, when it
bothers slipping by.

I dreamt of women
in black shirts tending bars, and escaping
from the seventy-dollar buses hiding
behind green blocks all corrugated and spry,
when she'd take strangers to bed in
abhorrence of the quiet of sleeping to the
sound of no other's breath. For all
her strength she still lay meekly, wondering
when completion would creep by and slip
between the bedsheets with her; he did,
and she smiled.

Her own heart, swollen,
still questions, however, if she should have
taken the lover who'd found light the
first second he met her. But she's no
clue of the words in his head, 'cept
hazy glimmers in late-night rendezvous when
they once were lonely, out on the driveway where
life stirs once per millenium, where love
lies sleeping under the clarity of stars
some nights when I wish I'd not gone
and left your island, your
pocket of silent faith
waiting to happen,
but I held the seeds under ground
within the winter of my heart.

My toepads glide along crushed glass
in mysteries as the dawn breaks upon
the horizonline, the twisting of orange-lit
pale gold salmonflesh torn cirrus,
sprayed across the sky and
over the sea's edge
I yearn for
so late in the distance.

And it all just keeps coming back to
this:

When we lay in breath harmonics as
humanforged dust found its way through
your eyelids, I was screaming of words, never
even muttered, in mine; the straight gaze and
your slipping eyelashes made morse signals that
I would never decode. Downstairs in the kitchen
in a haze
you said tiny words;
the ones I could never champion,
and for once I believed it
and so left
for your sweet smile's sake.

I'm sorry.

Tom McCone Mar 2013

petrichor/soak

The rain came down.

I sat on the doorstep,
eating tinned peaches,
and the rain fell.

Walking out, into the city,
life falls in one-two beats;
being nothing and comfortable,
the architecture stows straight lips,
moves on, the rain falls.

Freight rolls, wet tracks northbound,
over-bridges exuding fine china,
two fishermen idle away remaining hours;
concrete bunches the rain into shallows.

How hollow the sea, that home,
the crooked lines of the inland peninsula;
how strange, this routine, in
how so very full of emptiness I have become,
like the rain, having fallen upon ebbing tides.

The rain no longer falls.