"chivalric" poems
I can remember the first time I laid
My eyes upon the love of my life, Lucia.
Her skin was so fair, like flaxen;
Like a shade of summer sunlight.
Her eyes were like blue sapphires.
Her cheekbones were high
And very delicately drawn.
Her chin pointed her mouth
Accented with two deep dimples.
Hers was a delicate, fragile beauty.
She had the elegance of the Queen;
And the purity of the Holy Madonna.
At first I never looked upon her with lust.
I just gazed in the depths of her bottomless
Blue eyes and discovered chivalric impulses
I never knew I had. Protective instincts
I thought had long since died in my childhood.
I esteemed Lucia with such fervor that
Is bestowed on the blessed ****** Mary.
But be warned . . .
For this might happen to you too.
One day your fine the next day
You are sighing at the sound of Lucia's name;
And writing verses of bad poetry in her honor!
Feb 20, 2021
Feb 20, 2021 at 1:32 PM UTC
About Those Purple Socks
Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote
The world had no more use for any of them:
An old Communist, an old priest, an old car
All of them well into their horsemeat days
And so they fled, and crashed into the truth
On a chivalric quest for purple socks
Wandering on the road to Golgotha
Their Stations of the Cross a cinema,
A pair of Guardia, a brothel, wine
And so they fled, and fell into the Truth
There at the foot of the Altar of God
Dec 16, 2016
Dec 16, 2016 at 8:53 PM UTC
Each flaming curl winks life at me, as they dangle and flicker,
Their owner, like sleeping serenity, defies the reality.
Icy cold, to the touch, to the eye but there is a stillness that haunts me,
A divine silence as if I have peered into the casket of an angel.
I am a stranger here and yet I am drawn to the dainty hands, ink-stained,
And so capable of trembling. A ring on his finger speaks not of unions and
Bonds of love but of his unsatisfied defiance.
His skin reminds me of a river, in its sparkling green shadows.
Pale lips, so articulately formed, decaying as if they have remained unkissed.
So thin is he, but in some elfin way; he could grow wings any moment and take me
To the fae. No one would know that he dined on unhappiness and little else.
This is still-life. The world around him is slow but still breathing,
And a coat clinging pathetically to a chair says “There was once life here”
Life or half-life, eyes can’t help but notice thousands of jagged papers,
Scattered like a cluster of dimly twinkling stars.
Half-written sentences, gasping about some impregnable Camelot,
Where hennins reach out up to heaven and their wearer
Giggles at chivalric glory.
Verses only half formed. A glance at my dead friend,
And I wonder what unfinished treasures are locked and lost within him.
The room grows stale, although colour still fights for a voice,
In the same way that he took up his pen, under the influence of some
Unbridled angst, and screamed against his betters, from heart to paper.
A potted flower, precariously fading on the window sill,
Looks out to London and the dying August day.
I see him in the petals. This flower, easy enough on the eye, but
With secrets in every root. She saw him grasping at hope,
At happiness, but like some sick joke, only finding despair.
She speaks of muses and misery and I listen,
“My love is dead” she says “Gone to his death bed”
The culprit rolls towards me and I survey it.
Its emptiness only beautifies the glass but its inky label throws me.
I can hardly read it but I know it is the tipple of the truly profound,
Of disillusioned souls. A beast that snarls
“You will never be 21”
Mar 16, 2015
Mar 16, 2015 at 9:31 PM UTC
mumbles, rumbles, grumbles & groans
*permeate the bedroom still,
woman tosses, turns and exclaims
mumbles, groans, all twisted into
a single minutes-long rumbling*
*torn I am, let it pass, or stroke the hair,
caress the shoulder, or risk awakening her
to continue her alert discontent, or salve her,
thereby saving her from herself, for me, us*
*do you know forever?
do you know perpetuity!
this diurnal/nocturnal border line battling
dilemma, comes early morn, ever faithfully*
and I dreading her dreaming:
court the new day’s chance-ry,^
plead my case, make new laws to protect
the infants, lunatics and the restless
and those would be their Knight Errant Protectors!
<>
^ The Court of Chancery was a court of equity in England and Wales that followed a set of loose rules to avoid a slow pace of change and possible harshness (or "inequity") of the common law. The Chancery had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including trusts, land law, the estates of lunatics and the guardianship of infants.
A knight-errant is a figure of medieval chivalric romance literature. The adjective errant (meaning "wandering, roving") indicates how the knight-errant would wander the land in search of adventures to prove his chivalric virtues, either in knightly duels (pas d'armes) or in some other pursuit of courtly love.
Jun 4, 2023
Jun 4, 2023 at 7:23 AM UTC
I glimpsed the Grail
Removed her mail:
And there beheld an epic tale:
Chivalric odes
With knightly codes
And brave Arthurian episodes . . .
Revealing there
Her essence bare
I touched on divers themes most fair.
The gauntlet flung,
My canto sung,
I read her poem—with my tongue.
My lady-squire
Upon her sire
Now reaped her harvest of desire.
My milk-white steed
Traversed her mead
And she dismounted, free indeed.
Fresh love consumed,
Our quest resumed;
Ideals of chivalry entombed.
Aug 30, 2019
Aug 30, 2019 at 4:54 PM UTC
i'm bad luck. struck sad and oblate
weary, dedicated to the swearing ground.
chivalric pulp, my pages
don't bind like they used to.
rhyme me sad. adder fluent, sistines
vaunt these heads of mine. but wise
enough to feel these molecules murmer
and mouth the corvid in the wellwater.
annihilated profiles in my coming wake.
i am bad luck and prose. slipped
my shadow, i walk a bare life.
not broken anymore. not here all the way.
don't canter.
never could.
haven't loved. will
of a ghost. hell, i see ancestors
trailing behind me
in a mass of quadruped brutes
black as the day i was born
and sounding a great horn
made of gold and unprophecy,
babblings of a river older than talk.
Jan 10, 2019
Jan 10, 2019 at 11:08 AM UTC
Whenever I allow myself to think of love, my mind runs
To the chambers where secret memories are stored,
In sealed chests, on high unreachable shelves, deterring me
From opening, dreaded Pandora boxes, stripped of hope.
Yet sometimes the endeavour to reminisce overwhelming
Feelings I struggle to repress, commands me to climb the stairs,
Unclose the safes of the unspoken, as I forbid tears
From pouring, out of clouded eyes, still loving.
You are there, with your roguish smile, chivalric deportment,
Statuesque poise, Michelangelo’s David, I compared, giddily
Gazing at your tragic features as if you were, the one
And only whom I could ever love, desire, crave, forgive.
Suddenly though not unexpectedly, intrudes the scolding guardian
Of remembrances, treating me as an impostor in my own mind,
A thief of frames concealed, yelling at me as you used to, reminding me
Of reality, your swinging lunatic humours, mercilessly lashing me with words.
Scars time will never heal, they lie when they say it will,
It has no power over what we were, nor can it erase even the slightest
Faintest flare of what we felt. Whenever I allow myself to think of love,
I still think of you, but that’s the maximum I consent to do.
Jul 31, 2017
Jul 31, 2017 at 4:46 AM UTC
He had been a philosopher
A bard of sorts
Debonair in his quietude
And the sweetest rogue
When maidens aplenty were near
As they were wont to do
They swooned
When pressed he was chivalric
Yet, not a dragon-slaughter
O he kept them in his dungeon
To limit their harm
Along with his other guests
Aug 3, 2023
Aug 3, 2023 at 10:33 AM UTC