"cerement" poems
Sometimes it is, poor Sylvia,
that we cannot find the answers. They're
not to be found clinking about in the stars,
blowing about in the August wind,
or blooming among the tea flowers, no matter
how scented. No charlatan soothsayer discerns.
No pull of the cards deciphers. If answers come
at all they'll be found deep within yourself, only.
Don't we all prove that countless, wretched
times? But know this, dear Sylvia, even though it's too
late for your sanity and your life, your daddy didn't
die because of you, for you, by you. Death simply
drew the line and pulled him across.
What were you to do when life puzzled you
to the limit, when all poems disappointed,
when the ink failed to flow smoothly,
the pen tore at the paper and the paper
turned to ash before a line could be written down?
What to do when your child's smile failed to ignite
motherhood, when Daddy's image floated in and out, when
emotional pain dragged you terrified under its
black cerement, that cold, wet, smothering grave cloth?
Fear, oh my God, fear, and the doubt that you had,
the whirling about of a shattered mind, bouncing
from this trap to the other - your muted, stifled inner
screams unheard, or worse, unexpressed. Yes,
you found a solution, poor Sylvia, but suicide
doesn't always equate with an answer. You found a
sad poem, a dirge to be exact, something that moves
us, but there is no rhyme to it and the ending is an
enigma, a great puzzle yet to be invoked, understood.
----
Dec 8, 2011
Dec 8, 2011 at 4:51 PM UTC
swift inset of love's Sanskrit,
a thorn of contestations.
make cadence this sensorial music.
centrifugally waiting bodies
to cross Earths.
a plethora of annulments.
lion-telling Sun singes through intersections of infinities:
we cannot wait to quash
the morning, the scent of guava leaves
and the cerement of flour on chicken.
earth-hewn mounds of meat pressed
against beholden kitchen clangor.
declension of memory past wood
and pillars of home. lattices of light
forerunning fingers, let down the curtain.
wind swings with maddened turbine,
afternoons high with deadlock.
of all that is not here, the force
reawakens a long-stumped ******
beating us back to edges ruthless
with angels entirely curved, singled-out,
wings clipped, dancing at the tip
of the candleflame.
Dec 5, 2015
Dec 5, 2015 at 10:16 PM UTC
i.
on such frigid atmosphere lay,
a serene fugitive.
do not look at me with such lithe eyes:
the sepulcher is only starting
to begin.
your sleep's regimen twice-folds
origamied on the quiet cloister,
hang there, puts to test the unblinking
certainty of we who bear no retrieval.
ii.
remember when
all the fish you gut and all the *****
you cleave were all but meaningless
fill?
a mutiny of stench is released,
as men continually purged you of
your poisons — us mortised to this
vague mandate.
i have wished for them to miss the mark.
i have longed for them to mime only
but your placid face.
they have ransacked the quarry of flesh
flashed bare against mirrors riveted
to split-seconds of hours.
iii.
when i was young,
much sleep was needed — a noonday travail to all fretting but a dream of dogs.
now this thump of quietness
may mean no recovery.
the speculations to gnaw for sleep are
lost in a blink of an eye:
the blanket that once smelt of camphor
now engulfs in a single blast of cerement.
— this scrap of a thing that we
almost have no use for.
iv.
a furious consideration of roomfuls
disallowed by a heady ruling of
emotion's precision.
that, of the most difficult choices—
knowing where to fecundate rest.
your body heeds
no metaphysical reckoning.
the preordained space for you to occupy, this unwanted silence that keeps
on renaming things we cease to forget.
a sentence seized by a clause of wood.
all too soon to wave as a single beat
is thrown a hundred ripples into my
eyes, dragged along and trundling there,
left lengthening to leave, never to wait.
not with time, nor with a touch we choose
to contest — but an eyeing space,
a moment to attract transience.
v.
i will only look at you once — lacquered
with solace.
no ellipsis of breath could continue you.
no paragraphs would forgo of your
punctuations. i deny my defeat
against one who brooks with victory.
no hint of other chroma.
a chiaroscuro of beating petals,
left only to thrive and not swing
with verdurous display.
how to tell if this is true?
i touch myself as words gyrate
in the room that received your body
like the lighthouse that feeds the sea.
— or maybe sheathed with the untruth.
this enigma yields no revelations.
too late to ring yet still continuing on,
an early drop of dew.
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015 at 11:07 PM UTC
Secrets we share, unspoken, understood,
Our souls are intermingled bit by bit
Letters stuck in cerement for livelihood,
Pushing more boundaries than you'd care admit.
Our acceptance transcends all others here,
You are the quintessence of my being,
Our intimacy may even seem queer,
Tender moments of love are freeing.
Any time together makes us cohere,
As one idiosyncrasy.
Natural feelings always reappear,
My hear belongs to you, take care of me.
You and I mother are one in the same,
We share the same oenomel Bates last name.
Sep 17, 2017
Sep 17, 2017 at 9:15 PM UTC