"coates" poems
There was always an odour of sin around
The nave of that ancient church,
I knew of it as a choirboy,
I didn’t have far to search,
The smell welled up in the vestry,
A sulphur and brimstone tang,
It leached on into our cassocks
When the bell for the matins rang.
The priest, he was old and doddering
And didn’t look ripe for sin,
Old Father Coates may have sowed his oats
With nobody looking in,
But sin was there for a century,
It wasn’t of recent time,
The stories told of a Father Golde
I heard from a friend of mine.
Back in the days when the church was strong
And it ruled the lives of all,
A Father Golde was the priest of old
And preached of the devil’s fall,
When women came to confess their sins
And spoke of their evil deeds,
The priest took them at the altar there
In sin, and down on their knees.
The Nuns attached to the convent were
Obedient to his whim,
And many a cold and frosty night
He would call a sister in,
Her place, he said, was to warm his bed
To deter his chills, and ague,
And many a child was born in dread
To the parish, since the plague.
But one day after confessional
He had ***** a Colonel’s wife,
Who came to him with her petty sin
And described what it was like,
The priest, inflamed by her words and deeds
Had her pressed by the vestry door,
And who could know what she had to show
But the flagstones on the floor.
A troop of soldiers had marched on in
To assuage the Colonel’s rage,
The moment the wife had gone back home
And told of the priest’s outrage,
They seized the priest and they ran him through
With a sword right to the hilt,
Then tied him onto the cross outside
Where a sign outlined his guilt.
And every year on the first of June
You can hear the feet outside,
Marching up to the old church door,
The day that the father died.
A sense of sin that is coming in
As the church doors swing apart,
And blood appears on the altar in
The shape of an evil heart.
David Lewis Paget
Jun 9, 2015
Jun 9, 2015 at 5:28 PM UTC
Momma was a bleeder
***** on the stairs outside the complex
Mainstays all unraveled
mildewed and rotting on the concrete decks
Her ceaseless curtain calls
belied the prescriptions for falling down
She was a butterfly hurricane comin’ from the coast
makin’ eddies swirl sanguine pools
Even Kruger wasn’t dumb enough to jump in her grey-outs
the guy simply walked away
Feb 10, 2010
Feb 10, 2010 at 7:01 PM UTC
Always
Manifest
Everywhere
Your love
Always
Understanding
Beauty
Radiates
Your love
Radiates
Always
Your love
Alexandra Coates
7 May 2019
May 10, 2019
May 10, 2019 at 1:13 PM UTC
What is it of us
that attaches to
things
to furniture?
Smiling at me, they know.
How does the medium
in a candlestick
holder
read the message
see
its absent owner?
Powerful memories
feelings
immaterially
imprinted
Mere description
of such objects
conjures
closure
Alexandra Coates
May 17, 2019
May 17, 2019 at 12:11 PM UTC
Ashes
love's sacrifice
remnants of a message
fertility
Air's gift to Earth
Alexandra Coates
13 May 2019
May 13, 2019
May 13, 2019 at 6:48 AM UTC
The painter in Me
By Otuogbodor, Okeibunor
I paint not with brush strokes
On weary canvas
Nor with mesh colors
Darkening my concepts.
I paint using no tattered Coates
Expressing my pains
Nor with mute abstracting mixtures
Contradicting my designs.
I paint with words straighten in lines
Juxtaposing my world in humournic gospel.
I paint with lyrics n rhymes
Soothing the souls of my clime
Positing joy n laughter.
I paint with literally candor
Subjecting pains n sorrows
Mirroring my world in truth
My rhythms of love n peace
The only colors I know.
My language is succinct
Rendering sounds of blue n bliss
Greasing humanity crave to live.
I plaint not with staled oil Coates
Staining the muse of creation.
I orchestrate my colours in word vibes
Thrusting my Visual syncs to heal
For I cream my onions with ease
Printing my ego on black n white.
--------------------------------------------
Oh God bless this painter in me!
Jan 7, 2016
Jan 7, 2016 at 4:47 AM UTC
It is not
the imperfections
of an old bed
or night stand
I would miss
but the memories
or feelings
I shared with it,
that it shares
with me.
Alexandra Coates
May 17, 2019
May 17, 2019 at 12:17 PM UTC
Paint chatted
with Dream
about Hands
What colours, shades
strokes--
The rainbow
that lives in feathers?
House answered: Yes!
Dream agreed.
Hands waited,
patiently helped.
Alexandra Coates
May 17, 2019
May 17, 2019 at 12:04 PM UTC
Edwin Longsden Long RA was an English genre, history, and portrait painter.
**
there are many pictures at this house, two dimensional and more. how can I love one
child above another?
I had only one, so that was easy, then questioned if I loved the late arrival more, I said no just different.
so I talk out loud instead of writing .
a new prose. I talk of formative years, the safe place.
russell coates museum. have you been there? it was free on thursdays a haven from the rain,
the
pain.
indoor fish pond, quiet on the stairs, to the edwin long gallery. the flight to egypt. looking
back now, I never thought of it religious. immense it covered the wall.
I use the past tense, yet it is still in place.
on googling I see the topic is biblical, I remember the procession, the faces, the space as
if his meaning was hidden to me.
now by choice it is.
do I make such pictures? no.
weird stuff as if installed in a museum.
crying.
sbm.
Aug 13, 2017
Aug 13, 2017 at 1:34 AM UTC
~
“My reasons for writing had to be my own, divorced from expectation.
There would be no reward.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “We Were Eight Years in Power”
<>
*certain words, hers, previous unknown, or, better,
not yet your own,
acquire your devotion, all the my oh my of possessed tenses,
words ironic, for they are the shoving of contrary adhesive separators,
AC/DC currents running together, a single physical electric stabbing,
owning you, but gulfing away those customized,
prized illusions yet kept,
freeing finally by focusing on the single commandment that matters:*
Expect nothing, but write, knowing the only reward,
is the satisfying of self-imposed goals and conditions,
that are will always be,
always,
one more step and edit away from attainable, maybe.
My reasons, my illogical reasonings, admixture of anguished highs and loving lowlights,
a porridge of seeds that need burying to be borne,
in soil of a soiled soul, write to breathe, write to see, write to taste,
write to smell, write to hear my voice say,
not good enough,
even when it might be, just, barely, though that bar is a
moving target,
always
a perpetual notch too high.
My reward for acknowledging, accepting, no denying, freeing, finally,
There would be no reward
11:02 Sabbath
February 22, 2020
from deep in the internal confessional
Mar 20, 2020
Mar 20, 2020 at 11:16 AM UTC