Sometimes...
I cannot hear your thoughts
Your mind to me
Is like smooth jagged glass
Beneath a pool of liquid winter
A lake of crystallized silence.
It hurts.

Sometimes...
I cannot feel your emotions
Your face is like an empty mask
A hollow shell
Your eyes are depthless glass
Living ice.
I can feel your heartbeat
I can hear you breathe
Tears flow down my cheeks,
Freezing in your frigid warmth.
They sound like antipathy.

Sometimes...
We kiss
Mental screams against silence
Passion against nothingness
Motion against stillness
You don't lie
You don't speak
You do nothing at all.
There're no roses amongst the thorns.

Sometimes...
I hear you speak
Flowers blooming in winter
Blood burning through snow
Your voice is a sirenic thing
Filling me
Maddening me
Tearing my heart apart.
A captivating inferno.
A glacial wind.
A numbing kiss.
Your voice is poison.
I crave its touch.

Sometimes...
I wonder if you're a corpse
I wonder if you're hollow
I wonder if you forget to feel.
Your smile
Is an existential thing.
Your laugh
Is a detached melody.
Your stare
Is an empty dream.
Arctic indifference.
Words fading into the wind.

Sometimes...
I can only see you
An aloof statue
A pitiless observer.
Tears flow down my cheeks,
Freezing in your frigid warmth.
I no longer understand you
Perhaps,
I never did.
Flowers blooming in winter
Blood burning through snow
My devotion
To a narcissistic fascination
Your voice is a sirenic thing
There're no roses amongst the thorns.
It hurts.
I wish to **** you.
You don't lie
You don't speak
You do nothing at all.

Your face remains an empty mask
Mental screams against silence
Arctic indifference
Decayed insanity
Inert image upon darkened glass.
What do I do with all these feelings?
You will not die.


It hurts.

"Memory is more indelible than ink."
—Anita Loos

~
Europe, after the rain,
the sun lending warmth and comfort.
fringes come into focus.
shadow journal,
fiscal dreams,
becoming ****** lines on a page;
procession bells
for young brides,
veiled in lace.
a touch from her
outstretched hands,
this honeymoon phase
running up the thigh,
the holding quite still until
she smiles for pendulum.
at first light, breakfast in bed,
granting pastel wishes on
boxing night,
then a letting go of the kite string.

new fingers in the medicine bottle,
tiny geometries
inside a house of reciprocal numbers.
paradise in mnemonic children:
cartwheels and handstands,
coloring books of
neglected spaces,
future ruins.
one hundred violins
play to isles of ignorance,
stray embers settle
along the solemn Chemin De Fer (railway).
a catalogue of afternoons
on the bike path
thru propeller seeds and dragonflies.

arriving in the haloed flesh:
skin dive,
the place of couloir descent;
**** beach,
the place of odd glances;
gun chamber,
the room of secondary light;
all horizon variations.
an algebra of darkness,
this dense Roman twilight,
their exiles unreflected
in blind lanterns.
our brightness will become
refracting silhouettes,
a broken yolk in the incendiary sky.
~

In life,i dithered,pussyfooting,
Cringed,thought,delaying,
waited,holding ****** on,
feared you, all and sundry
argued futile,to myself!
philosophized idly, like hell!
reacted sensitive! norms as per,
mouthed bull, pitied empty!
gave little,grabbed in shovels,
didn't even hate properly!
thus loving only timidly!
fought causes unworthy,
sat bang mid on the fence,
foot each in pastures green,
mind,ever weighing the soul,
civilized,polite and gutless,
to even say,****,***** you!
you evil sob, to hell you go!
polite to kids,dogs, folks old,
lovely ****** and dumb bores,
swallowed angers,conceded points,
knowingly with a mind sharper,
died some death everyday small,
got lost so, mirroring ****** all,
unheeding ever, a decided heart!

Truth hit,mirror shattering!
Fully clothed,stood I naked,
unreflected in things any,
staring at nothing,blank
here, in this place and time.
feeling all the garbage pent-up,
priming to manure, catalyzing,
some part of being, unvisited.
knowing somehow, all I did,
or not,mattered,was worthy,
leading me here,to this  place,
Beware,of Existence Point Blank!

You can witness something
miraculous. You can witness

me

unreflected.



Let me explain.


You can witness something
miraculous. You can witness

me

unreflected.


I  cannot.

It is the tipping point
the harvest well begun
its end in sight
an early morning
retreated to past
five on the clock

mist lay on
the meadowed fields
observed the pond
held tight to the trees

walking the empty road
camera in hand
to catch the chill earliness
in the far fields then back
through the uncared-for orchard
past the forked-fingered ash
still quite still -
the night air collapsing
as the sun rose

Darjeeling
in the white bone-china cup
a kiss of milk
comforting this delicate tea

and light everywhere
between three windows
our table her gifts
from the shoreline
shadowed hard-edged
whilst the back-lit screen
blinks and waits for words

my story blended from fact
pestled into fiction
itself a background
to a further fiction
from a past in ancient time
where each image described
takes aim at the resonant heart
of every exquisite moment


Eight Sketches in a Notebook

I

into a western sky
the sun finds cloudspace
to enter and set
well above the sea’s horizon
and for a while its rays
glimmer upward onto shards
holding remnants of the day’s
unreflected light


II

not a hut of straw and rushes
on a far mountain fastness
this a walled stockade all but moated
gardened inside its bounds
a miniature railway said to surround
a six-cornered house facing seaward
and towards a lagoon on whose banks
little terns nest from April to June
a mirror of light upon which
the solitary soul might dwell


III

rock guardian
standing
mid-beach

its debris
spilled
to water’s edge

still as still as
no wind or wave
pools dark depths

further out
the sea shimmers
ablaze with reflections


IV

hiding an anxiety of hair
a headscarf blue
and spotted white
reveals an ear
and below a sturdy neck
on round shoulders
her bare arms fall to quiet hands
next to thighs trousered  
knee-length to gentle calves
falling further onto bare feet
stood standing on course sand
at the sea’s murmuring edge


V

here the rock opens
its lips to a kiss of light
but deep inside remains
a dark sheltering secret
blackness impenetrable
wide enough for a storm’s
intrusion of water and wind
but beyond such darkness
possibly nothing
- a closed door
of rock?


VI

from my canvas chair
on the flags outside
the white French doors
this drawing – from where
the garden gate once was
a gap between
the honey-suckled hedge
and the long low cottage
above an ash tree waving
its fingered branches
in the afternoon breeze
fresh over the hill
from the sea’s shore
hardly a mile away


VII

the land points seaward
to an island light
a mile off-shore

on a shingled beach
sliced by the sea’s knife
cattle wandered yesterday

in the mist-driven rain we
sleeked wet as dogs approached
on the headland’s path


VIII

littered the land lies
with interruptions
interventions of the built

past beside present
ends amongst beginnings

complex histories
to delve deeper into
on this northern shore

Here I lie in wake, alone to my thoughts--centered attention on nothingness for so long that it emerges with a startling gasp that stirs the calm waters, that breaks the crippling silence, that disarms my presumptions, that startles the birds from their peace in wing and gives movement to flight in the cold dark out beyond my shortsightedness of the here and now.

A ripple--that's all it was--that prompted my upward condition and seized my focus.

Subtle enough, yet I could not mistake it as London could not pass through a single sweet cool night without a shaky blast off in the distance that likewise stirred the children from their innocent dreams as I have strayed from my ever present seams and still now...

My meaningless nothing may faulter at the so vastly more important  everythingness around me; yet only my perception of these little ripple kisses that stir my soul and give rise to new movement and dance upon this elliptical routine that puzzles me in brick by bricked and stone by ****** can surely pave the path to tomorrow's promise of the again and the trials of what if in such again.

Perhaps no other than I could decipher the value of these thoughts; the merit they hold on my person; and the uselessness they possess on yours.

But that's fine with me...for expression left unexpressed, thoughts left unthought, refractive pulses left unreflected...these play things forgotten in a misspent youth dwindling in the pool of memory and the pull of forgotten woe, surely are worse than the best nightmare on the darkest, most desolate night of lonely sailing in those powerful little ripples that crash on my seawalls and smooth out my wayward projections.

I may push back. I may fight the waves, as futilely as an effort I know it to be. Or I may just accept this future as sure of a past it will ever already be...let that undertow carry me out to sea and swim with the birds and fly with the fish as the Sun whispered he intended for me.

But I may just come right back up again, as breathless and weak as I did before and surely shall again (remaining). For with every breath I surface to obtain, the effort for relief stirs new pains of concentration that only a breathless living may disarm to my liking.

I may not think clearly then and than so more, but my effort to keep my thoughts straight spills attempts out across the floor, and with each further step I further my chances of a clear tower of perceptive accomplishment to stand atop and gaze. Mind my incongruitous follies and shame my liking the name. Am I, I am, the confused and forebane.

Perhaps now, I've infected you? Confused, aren't we? And confused we shall remain. For nothing is so utterly disarming as the mixing of thoughts with no filter to gain. As this ground falls out from under you, just remember the rule for walking: one foot in front of the other for too long and you find yourself right back where you began.

Pick a new direction to gone...I'll meet you there some day, maybe.

The mirror said things I'd never dare
I knelt before its connoting stare
I stiffened my spine and smoothed my hair
In deference to its malverse glare
But, with no choice in what to share
All I face is a weak despair
And an unreflected world to compare
Unaware and unfair
A scared affair
When it's me, in disrepair,  who kneels
Neither here nor there

Writing about life…
  he was powerless over death,
  life was what he was good at

Death, a combination
  of all he would never understand
  and all he would never accept

It was a major failing,
  never to bring closure or a period
  to the end of his sentence

Along a road predestined,
   mirrored by the face of denial,
   redemption unreflected—beyond his view

(Villanova Pennsylvania: September, 2016)

I have pages of prayers.
assimilated.  I saw them
yesterday.
I've
Clipped them together
with a
yellow butterfly.

Some
I wrote myself.

On nights I would
sit reading, lonely.
Days there,
were~~ sounds

remembered,~~
of music
coming always
from a farther room.

I meditate.  I fly off
to places where we
made love long ago.

You were love's young
dream.  I, a reflection.
always,the Other
side, a mirror's
back.
~~
Unreflected.

Incomprehensible.

A dichotomy
interrupted.


Caroline Shank
January 25, 2025