"tailcoats" poems
humming tunes, singing blues, dancing jewels
miss looking for love is dancing all over your leather shoes
over uneven pavement, over failed engagements
i sent your ring back, i couldn't bear to see it, nor sell it
even now, my six-eight time signatures are still bringing
your custom-length tailcoats to a Viennese waltzing
all while your upper-echelon friends keep pretending
like they don't find satisfaction in my subtle mourning
tonight is all humming tunes, singing blues, and dancing jewels
i am still lingering, still humming our tunes, still singing our blues,
i am still feigning ignorance, and my finger is still missing a jewel,
i am still center stage, but someone else dances with you
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023 at 2:05 PM UTC
As runners in a fastened loop
stop often to recount their breath,
and lookers placed around the group
in blocks of twelve and twenty-four
laugh quietly and think of death,
an older man who runs a store,
who's still content without a wife,
flops aimlessly against the floor,
and thirty men in tailcoats swoop
to save an upper-level life.
Mar 5, 2015
Mar 5, 2015 at 12:03 PM UTC
You shall don no silk gloves, tailcoats
or even a tophat, all you'll
have is an assembly
of a scattered and
yet attentive audience,
and you, the performer.
Pleasantly it is not fear
that will make you nearly
light-headed, it is the demand
that you must perform.
a few breaths in, and a smirk on your
face, and voila....
Your act, miserably enchanting
as it has been, is amazing to
those only simpler than yourself.
Much in the same way
as you are taken by something
more grand.
Few tricks here, few tricks
there, is all the magic
we have to get us
by.
Nov 26, 2012
Nov 26, 2012 at 7:46 AM UTC
Eyes heavy now as the day comes to a close
The days tailcoats snagged on the evenings last light
My thoughts random, yet calm as the night invites me
I lye alone no comfort in my bed, save the moments captured in memory or the visions in imagination.
Some vivid, some hazed often slowed as my mimd savours the pleasures of the senses.
The voices of the day spill over into the night
I hear the soft voice, reading to me and picture ruby lips, their folds and creases giving flight to words.
Soothing my passing to sleep whispering now, as if to kiss my consciousness goodnight.
Then the voice fades, memories slip away and I am left alone.
Alone imagining, wondering.
Is that perfume I smell?
Can the mind really do this.
Am I alone? Or held in the arms of another far away. Do they hold me in their bed, alone, yet together.
Do they lye entwined, peaceful, as one yet not.
Are we ever alone with our thoughts
Our emotions seperated from consciousness and dreams
I hope not
Do you?
Feb 23, 2014
Feb 23, 2014 at 9:17 PM UTC
At first, pimply faced and shy to look and touch
you took the stars from the sky and implanted them
into my crisp clean English Essay as if the words
were silhouetted in the embroidery of the night.
I was struck by this teacher who lived in a space
that filled his skull cap with beauty in everything.
Soon the floodgates opened and my own words
mingled with ecstasies and rituals of writing,
danced across the page in rhyme and reason
and spilled over into vast tracts of books and
writings and thousands of printed pages
all with your signature hidden in the prose
and poetry of teaching me to search for meaning
in every single word. What a journey.
Today as I shift some words and visuals
into subtle pictures I remember the first ones you spoke
to a shy little boy, afraid of others seeing his writing:
" Go dance with the delicate, spin magic with
every sentence and dress those pictures in tailcoats
and ties, so others may know that your pen is
dipped in poetic polish of a special kind"
Thank you Bro D'Arcy.
Author Notes
A tribute to Bro D'Arcy, my English Teacher at St Josephs College, Coonoor, who first recognised that my writing was different. The good man never ever made a negative comment and each time he looked at my schoolboy writing, he would delicately carve his calligraphic handwriting suggesting how better I could improve the language.
Sometimes, I would write and re-write a poem dozens of times until it merged into the best poem possible.
"Every word spoken or written with part of you in it makes you a better person"- Bro D'Arcy
I owe Bro D'arcy, a lifetime of learning to write better.
© Marshall Gass. All rights reserved.
Apr 9, 2014
Apr 9, 2014 at 4:53 PM UTC
this will be a year of discovery.
a time of floundering
through seas of uncertainty
until surfacing
somewhere in starry-eyed serenity,
stuttering foreign tongues til they
roll from your lips
like old friends.
this will be a year of courage.
of quivering feet chasing mountaintops
to root themselves in truth
and yell from naked sound booths
what your soul has found you.
of grabbing fear by the *****
and lassoing stars
so you can swing clear
out of this galaxy and
orbit a solar system of dreams.
of climbing the tallest redwood tree
to glimpse all that you can see,
and taste forbidden fruit -
juicy satisfaction, wild and free.
this will be a year of unfettered hope.
though it began in the shroud
of Hades' darkest days,
this year will unfurl golden lotus light
dripping honeysuckle sweetness
onto dried tongues
so they can speak of fearless love.
this will be a year in which
the cruel reality of returning to the dirt
will sprout freedom,
a time of realizing the worth laden
in this impermanent existence.
of plucking the sweetness
from flowering present moment bliss,
fleeting fractals of forever
wrapped in eternally flying seconds.
tick, tock, tick, tripping through times tendrils
and tackling the tendency of tip-toeing
around taboos and tucking tribes into tailcoats.
trapeze through taxidermied truths
until you find a tangoing tune.
breathe in peace,
breathe out light.
this will be a year of moon gazing nights.
of lazy laughter, and daisy dancing.
of miraculous mistakes, and tiger prancing.
so throw doubt out the door,
baby, this year is all yours.
Jan 12, 2015
Jan 12, 2015 at 11:32 PM UTC