Tristan Keane

Tristan Keane Sep 2012

The sprint of dust is
a chokehold of coiled rope
grappling with bloodstains
and bullet holes, robbed
arteries and cracked ribs
driven into lungs like a
bad crash.

Each death carries a
stop-watch on perma-play
tick tick tick
as the day gets farther
away, and not one has a
claim on me, but I'm a
bookmark on a page they
hope spells their cause
on my death certificate.

Tristan Keane Sep 2012

Empathy Is A Sympathetic Prison

The commissaries run by fate's control
of those who suffer for a show
and those who'd sew
the burden of tempered grow

from intelligence to a soul;
those grasping the concept of
another's woe with wide maws and little know
are quick to imprint the sympathy of sloth,

fast words and little wit, slow mind
with a harrowing heart, and eyes
that freeze with pity at the grind
of youth's mangled cries,

the pains and troubles
are songs for the soul's harp,
decadent misery the rise of rubble
of life's mocking lark,

and given hope of reprieve
in thought at least:
the ones who most receive
the weight in chain-links increase.

Tristan Keane Sep 2012

Shiny Copper Eyes

Shiny copper eyes look up (glazed with a film that people aren't interested in paying for),
(carrion for those who carry-on)             black feathers dancing in slivers on the asphalt,
                              the only hot body the mass of the sun.
             Underneath the flesh curling and writhing
maggots dance, gliding past beads of hemoglobin sweating
through the epidermi like tears
she cries when he walks out,
      the door slamming like the bass upstairs and the pounding
     of the drums in her ears as she tries to leap the first
hurdle of getting over the gate,
knowing his money is on this and God won't
      help him when he loses the debt money that everyday builds up; hiding the letters
                            from his wife has become an art
exhibition that he's wanted to attend since high-school
            and now, laying on the ground, perfectly still and in a pose locked by rigor-mortis
                                           with
Shiny copper eyes.

Tristan Keane Sep 2012

The Rose

The rose sits bedded in her lay
kissed by the sun through the day;
of men she gives no regard or
speech when they confess to adore
her rich velvet pelt lined with silk
of stem and leaf and each morn's milk,
for the rose is wise and knows too soon
the turning of a man's heart in the length of a moon,

that when their fingers grasp to take
against her will her beauty *****,
crushed for the love of another rose
and one who can think and not just pose;

and feel! Feel the return of a beat
in a man's chest and respond to spreading heat-
so she, the rose, always knows
her life is lived and lost by love alone.

Tristan Keane Sep 2012

The Frailty of Human Nature

In God's breath he waits,
the candle dimming as the
clock ticks and hours are slate,
his heart's echoes losing the war

As his hands bridge the abyss
of his fate while his mind
catches faith's miss;
fortune has a length to climb

With the strength of string
and no true grip
or able grasp to ring
the tower bell of Heaven's kinship-

And to his back tied this pail,
of needed pride sinking him
to the depths of Jonah's whale,
unable to release the whim

Of something delegated to sin;
the inability to call to the power
and make true his acceptance of Him,
even as the shadows of his final hour

Creep upon his flesh-worn frame,
burdened with the punnet of age,
no fruit able to let him know youth's flame
nor his frailty an answer to sage

Wisdom that has been boast
to descend upon those of change,
with answers that are host
to those within death's range.

Tristan Keane Sep 2012

A Round-Trip Ticket to Stockholm

I recalled a memory today
that felt like a dream,
so distant from it was I
that I could have been freed,

Yet tied by a string
like a June-bug in May
I was compelled by
my visit to remain in
Stockholm

Kept right by your side
as you were tight in my
heart, but with all your
attention I could've sworn
we'd taken a trip to
Lima Bay-

but what was it you said
the night that you left-
"I'll love you always,"
still I'm the one who chose to stay.

Tristan Keane Sep 2012

The Insomniac's End

I, sleeping like an insomniac,
fell from the arms of a night
that didn't want me, and into
a day of repetitive flaws,
all of my previous mistakes unnoticed;

I had set a fire in my mind,
the likes of which started
by the sparks in my eyes
thrown up from a gale of ashes
of cremated memories and
fostered dreams nurtured from
a thousand nightmares

And so tired was I that I
barely noticed when I caught fire.