"vesper" poems
meet me by the sunset tree
meet me at the lonely sea
meet me now and meet me then
meet me soon and yet again
meet me while the music plays
meet me through the brightest days
meet me with a broken rose
meet me where the water flows
meet me neath a weeping moon
meet me past a tarnished noon
meet me on my lowest tide
meet me even if I lied
meet me when the tale is told
meet me as the wind grows cold
meet me in the sullen chill
meet me if you love me still
Mar 20, 2022
Mar 20, 2022 at 1:01 AM UTC
*
*
I watch you from afar
my greatest love in argent-kissed armour
He who dreamed of being greater than
a mere fighter, stronger that a solider,
wiser than the Kings who pass and come
He who is born with an angel's allure,
he who unites all from all walks of life
I feel your vesper gaze upon me,
ambitious, charming, wise and poignant
With a charisma, a light that outshines the
very sun, a heart warmer than gold
and softer than cotton.
I pray you will succeed
That you will find your way
For no matter how far you wonder,
and how I think of you in yonder
I know in my heart,
You will return to me once more...
*
*
Aug 15, 2018
Aug 15, 2018 at 5:04 PM UTC
Wicked nether-land. Nether world, white, askance. Capitulating mangroves, verdant trees spliced with hyperbole, onomatopoeia, and manilla envelopes; her world is stuffed with secrets, she listens to gorillas cracking mussels a kilometer away, near a rill. Never she thought. Nothing that could provide....providence. Mangled heliographs sprayed all over the everywhereworld.
"Don't be S.A.F.E.," she whispered. A bouquet of gorse, cistus, and pimpernels squished in her small fingers. She climbed her way through the pedimented stairway, then collapsing on the porch. Legs spent, and spread out upon the desiccate grayed four by four planks of the portico.
And as time elapses, the shuttering shake of the hemlock, which writhes through her skinny nimble dactyls, upwards straining the heart as its toxic bends appendages- crisp cerise lumens bend on the Titanium White walls, where only shadows bend time. The hour, still nine. Every adornment, furnished with red and its hues. Not purple, periwinkle, or any masked enhancement.
These are the symbols that reticulate splines, that curve temperatures, perverse hemispheres and debunk worlds. Upped antes, verbs that terns flirt worth, birth words. Ooh. Aah. Camera. The forest wraps her in its verdant pasture, where at last the moribund tamarisks disperse.
While at the plateau she is quiet and longing. Arms astride, dangling. Vaunt with highs and bliss- a kiss of withstanding pleasure serves her the cure for a lifetime of whining. This, yesterday where her body rattled through crooked vines. Square ships toasting her vocal melancholy in the sweet-waters of Time. So that all of her ripened limbs could grow, no more sheepishly than the magic she knew as a child. Stress free. First among the Earth-words, verbed-up and made jealous by pronouns that encompassed her joy-brimming hide. Closing down her voice and hugging her from behind.
Apr 26, 2014
Apr 26, 2014 at 4:44 AM UTC
Bugle call in cadence be
spread your deep sincerity
Reverberate its call
within our minds
of good deeds done
for better times
Heroes of every walk of life
remembered by bugle sounds
into vesper night
It's sounding love of mankind
and sacrifice
About everyday people
like you and me
About brass sounds that triumph liberty
It's sounding our land, not laid bare,
by the right to speak
It's sounding about lives laid down
that freedoms seek
And through that bugle call we see
in taps that sound great dignity
We must fight
not to relinquish
our hard earned truth
in bugle calls of our youth
Now i lay my bugle
down to sleep
And still i hear that
sound
that haunting sound
forever be
that ushers forth
our dignity
Jul 4, 2015
Jul 4, 2015 at 4:17 PM UTC
Verse, a breeze ’mid blossoms straying,
Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee—
Both were mine! Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young!
When I was young?—Ah, woeful When!
Ah! for the change ‘twixt Now and Then!
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O’er aery cliffs and glittering sands
How lightly then it flashed along,
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Nought cared this body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in’t together.
Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
O the joys! that came down shower-like,
Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,
Ere I was old!
Ere I was old? Ah woeful Ere,
Which tells me, Youth’s no longer here!
O Youth! for years so many and sweet
’Tis known that Thou and I were one,
I’ll think it but a fond conceit—
It cannot be that Thou art gone!
Thy vesper-bell hath not yet tolled—
And thou wert aye a masker bold!
What strange disguise hast now put on,
To make believe that thou art gone?
I see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this altered size:
But Springtide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes:
Life is but Thought: so think I will
That Youth and I are housemates still.
Dew-drops are the gems of morning,
But the tears of mournful eve!
Where no hope is, life’s a warning
That only serves to make us grieve
When we are old:
That only serves to make us grieve
With oft and tedious taking-leave,
Like some poor nigh-related guest
That may not rudely be dismist;
Yet hath out-stayed his welcome while,
And tells the jest without the smile.
2.9k
We shall launch our shallop on waters blue from some dim primrose shore,
We shall sail with the magic of dusk behind and enchanted coasts before,
Over oceans that stretch to the sunset land where lost Atlantis lies,
And our pilot shall be the vesper star that shines in the amber skies.
The sirens will call to us again, all sweet and demon-fair,
And a pale mermaiden will beckon us, with mist on her night-black hair;
We shall see the flash of her ivory arms, her mocking and luring face,
And her guiling laughter will echo through the great, wind-winnowed space.
But we shall not linger for woven spell, or sea-nymph's sorceries,
It is ours to seek for the fount of youth, and the gold of Hesperides,
Till the harp of the waves in its rhythmic beat keeps time to our pulses' swing,
And the orient welkin is smit to flame with auroral crimsoning.
And at last, on some white and wondrous dawn, we shall reach the fairy isle
Where our hope and our dream are waiting us, and the to-morrows smile;
With song on our lips and faith in our hearts we sail on our ancient quest,
And each man shall find, at the end of the voyage, the thing he loves the best.
2.7k
night is precious
prey and
predator.
night is
whisper and
auscultation
of worried men.
night is blonde
bone removed from
the body.
night is stiletto
killer elite.
night is
my brightest
friend.
night,
leave
and take your
bell with
you.
Jun 27, 2017
Jun 27, 2017 at 8:50 PM UTC
This feast-day of the sun, his altar there
In the broad west has blazed for vesper-song;
And I have loitered in the vale too long
And gaze now a belated worshipper.
Yet may I not forget that I was ‘ware,
So journeying, of his face at intervals
Transfigured where the fringed horizon falls,—
A fiery bush with coruscating hair.
And now that I have climbed and won this height,
I must tread downward through the sloping shade
And travel the bewildered tracks till night.
Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed
And see the gold air and the silver fade
And the last bird fly into the last light.
2k
***you are leathered with residue
decaying the rust off your skin
with our initials crawling into
alabaster sheets that all I have really
felt while staring out at the streets
we're people fading by egotistical
lack of self confidence
even though I admit using
seducing strategies
possibly disgusted by my own
emotions
that I am placing ******
thrills on my own configuration
because it's humid and blatant
unkowling breathing ruthless sentiments
of our holy communion
I am splitting into a holy sin
drenched in blissful wartime rations
of water or passion
your cotton skin and these sheets
bold statements between white teeth
it’s all a fading mystery
you said I’m something childlike
your hands are stained cherry
and even if they were around my neck
I’d whisper your name like a vesper
simply waiting
for the day to come where it all fades
because you refuse to be a
young god
no matter how it seems to be
to me in all of my naivety***
Mar 11, 2017
Mar 11, 2017 at 7:44 PM UTC
As cavemen with half-yard sticks
smudging soot on open rock
they hunch
over carcasses of donut boxes
(the wax paper skin folded,
use all parts of the animal)
and grunt in chorus.
stocks are down this quarter,
(anger of the Gods)
sacrifice to the sun,
perform the ancient gymnastic of
rain dancing while kissing up
let the blood ink river run
smooth and whole
pray our intake outgrows
our categorized expenses
let there be profit
(the vesper smoke stings
with the haunting of paygrades
and budget cuts)
Jun 1, 2013
Jun 1, 2013 at 7:43 PM UTC
What should I be but a prophet and a liar,
Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar?
Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,
What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter?
And who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog,
That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog?
And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar,
But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of the Psalter?
You will see such webs on the wet grass, maybe,
As a pixie-mother weaves for her baby,
You will find such flame at the wave’s weedy ebb
As flashes in the meshes of a mer-mother’s web,
But there comes to birth no common spawn
From the love of a priest for a leprechaun,
And you never have seen and you never will see
Such things as the things that swaddled me!
After all’s said and after all’s done,
What should I be but a harlot and a nun?
In through the bushes, on any foggy day,
My Da would come a-swishing of the drops away,
With a prayer for my death and a groan for my birth,
A-mumbling of his beads for all that he was worth.
And there sit my Ma, her knees beneath her chin,
A-looking in his face and a-drinking of it in,
And a-marking in the moss some funny little saying
That would mean just the opposite of all that he was praying!
He taught me the holy-talk of Vesper and of Matin,
He heard me my Greek and he heard me my Latin,
He blessed me and crossed me to keep my soul from evil,
And we watched him out of sight, and we conjured up the devil!
Oh, the things I haven’t seen and the things I haven’t known,
What with hedges and ditches till after I was grown,
And yanked both ways by my mother and my father,
With a “Which would you better?” and a “Which would you rather?”
With him for a sire and her for a dam,
What should I be but just what I am?
1.7k
I sit besides Aunt Edna and being 10,
fingers gently
scratch my back.
A steady hum of engine,
reflecting horses under hood.
Swishing trees and poles fly by.
An added whistling auto breeze
wrapped in summer
warmth,
symphony on the run.
Olfactory treat of country
lilac cradled in country air.
Days surrender to simpler times.
Away we roll-somewhat inclined- into a vesper-fiery
sunset and ice cream
at KOCHES
Aug 28, 2014
Aug 28, 2014 at 2:34 AM UTC
Take me up. Let the devil take me up, like the morning when we left ourselves. The ides are upon our lives, maybe backstabbing partners really won't pay the bills. The irreverent god, the irrelevant clause that speaks too soon, comes upon the midnight waning sky. Like the moonful of ham in the stock of the flesh, second helpings because I could not resist.
Pick me up. Pick me up. Like a devil born again in the flesh. Your womb is a rotten tomb of forced reclusion, I'm wide awake before I can even sleep. The Time, our heaven is pyre, we're in it now like you thought it had been. But the flesh never whispers when I tried to break it in, it only clung to me like pre-used clothing.
Write it up, tomorrow we make Japan. Tomorrow, the island is our vesper. Your nine lives have come, and you'd decided to trade all of your needs to please me. We intertwined into an elusive butterfly, you're dead inside my beak, chewy, squishy, crunchy meat. You're eleven but you've never tasted better.
Your lies are so stupid, I had to have you in supine. I had to lie to myself to placate me. I survived by being a witness to a life. A dusky, grayish shadow four feet yonder.
Mar 7, 2015
Mar 7, 2015 at 2:29 AM UTC
I can hear you. You whisper to me.
Like a midnight vesper with your voice
cloaked in darkness, aching to be seen.
You are intangible. I reach and yearn
but you are lost.
I imagine you sometimes in the eyes
of the Lladro figure on my bookcase
the last thing you left to me
because no one else ever loved it the way you did.
She still feeds her swans, you know
that Lladro with her bright gaze
and tiny archaic smile.
She reminds me of you.
Sometimes I wonder if you’re there
and that’s why I hear your little voice
or smell your sweet perfume,
the twirl of her porcelain umbrella
wafting it through my bedroom’s stagnant air.
Apr 25, 2015
Apr 25, 2015 at 11:21 PM UTC
The body of a woman's neutral fineness embraces the chords of my steel guitar; laughing about all the points that I've been chasing after. Or just running away- no more for today. Christ, you slipped but lied too many times before, and while you plunge your wrists into your knives, I thought we had a second chance. But that was before, you throw sticks and stones and store your anger in the three fingers of the drink that clinks against our first date when I bought you a 25¢ ring. It was a children's vending machine, that brought me three years of happy things.
I don't want to be fake with you anymore. So go and find your Milky Way. I'm staying dumb, Britni I'm in trouble. All the stakes are different when you are chasing yesterday's killing.
And even the sound of the gunshots don't overcome the voice of the human tongue, in violence and war and all that's abhorred, even the smallest vesper or prayer a whisper of three little words can always be heard, even the faintest whisper can always be heard, as long as the voice that says it is honest and pure.
I was too tight to drive with your hands over my eyes, even in Inverness valley and South Santa Cruz, the wheelbarrow of berries I brought home for supper, ingested in each little bite we cut in half, was the best of the worst time that we ever had. And always we were. In love. In parking lots, playgrounds, at concerts, on airplanes, in bedrooms, custodian closets, laundry mats, and carrying our nap sacks, while we attempted to sleep and hide all night in the Shedd Aquarium. I just should have known better, it'd wouldn't be easy, with you I'm always wrestling sharks with a mirror, your pink sugar perfume from the chains on my wrists tied up across the room. While you didn't trust me I was always at home. Trust isn't love unless it's enough, unless it's enough to quit drugs. It's symptoms are the same as that of great madnesses.
Nov 18, 2015
Nov 18, 2015 at 8:05 PM UTC
come escape these pictures with me, these photographs
sinuous and sinful, tenuous and tendrils creeping
i feel you slipping slow away
i wish i remembered the taste of your lips,
the crackle of sparks between us that first time
like the crunch of dried leaves underfoot that september
losing time
losing my summer spent
under telephone poles
and high voltage wires
loving you
losing light
daybreak won’t come tonight
and if i shout out loud
nobody will be listening
missing you
and if in our short embrace
we find hearts of gold enmeshed as one
we take the time and celebrate
sweaty, entangled in your bed
your mother in the room upstairs
try to be quiet, we cannot shout
this magic we’re creating
could not hold itself together
losing time,
losing my summer spent under
telephone poles, high voltage wires
loving you
losing light,
daybreak won’t come tonight
and if i shout out loud
no one will and no one can
be listening,
please be listening…
we’re comparing what we could have
to a dream that we have lost
frosted over outside like
dead
dead water in your swimming pool
in the dead of winter
dead and buried, dead and gone,
dead so long the worms have taken you
home
like the leaves that embraced you
the night it was all stolen away.
…
losing time,
losing my summer spent under
telephone poles
high voltage wires
loving you
losing light,
daybreak won’t come tonight,
no it won’t
and if i shout out loud
it won’t bring it back
…whatever we may
come to find
let it be right
Aug 16, 2015
Aug 16, 2015 at 5:30 PM UTC
night comes with waves of perfume
the trance of flowers is quiet and only
the winds can touch the secret of trees, still
sleeping under the apple trees gives one deeper dreams
when darkness hunts me I remember
your empty hands against the form of light
how you struggle to find the archaic tune
the chronicles of the invisible unfolding
my mind recycles thought from sprout to seed
the vesper bell plunges the crickets,
the roundness of the heart deeper
into the hour of the dark
Jun 23, 2023
Jun 23, 2023 at 3:10 PM UTC
Go on,
shout your sorrows
and fury to the midnight sky!
With all the respect due
the stars shall live on to whisper
and the moon shall glisten
through with the vesper
You are but a celestial body
Inert to your orbit
The First law is true
but the axiom is all you
And, there exists only presence or absence
Jul 14, 2015
Jul 14, 2015 at 10:14 PM UTC
“but you are too old for apprehension.” her
voice had sounded so, and of this one’s voice,
‘you are never too old for wariness of
an unknown.’ responded astute, drunk
on logic. returned was breathless thought
to the void, filling emptiness with irony.
(oxymoron) and weened the way thru,
concision turned derision with repetitious
definitions that found no actual meaning.
all thought without justification and no
thought with classification. words,
actions, wailing:
empty, empty, empty
then existed less and less from want
of purpose. less and less from interest of
the known; this once forged fear of life. and
with impressive derangement, grabbing at the
only sober keychain. they, with twitching vesper eyes,
their hands jit’ for a false-meeting fix. to nix
the nihilism. and:
‘People can go **** themselves.’
words of this one’s voice. of her’s, “thank
god you’re alive.” from those days, when rains
ranted down, and the trains tripped us out.
those days of our wood’s reclaimed trailer. and
each syllable was never thought to be anything
until aged eyes ached for review those epochs
of breath. but:
‘People can go **** themselves.’
voiced in response to a romanticized thought. and
all epochs lingered upon are no more than a
journal of the winds that blew while we were present.
some diary of listless lust left undated. of the woods, of
a reiterate span in once anonymized transience. and falling
back, thumbing pages for proof of experiences passed into
skewered memory. left are three lines, ill-verbed, to represent
an entirety of past lives. of time once present in yellow-lit
motel room, of apocalyphic musings, and veering prophets
of doom. they, turned sincere apocalyphites. their prayers
writ boldfaced, platitudinous, in concern of endless words
restating – in constant rephrasing:
‘People can go **** themselves.’
but they just kept goin’ on without concern for the dawn.
Feb 1, 2014
Feb 1, 2014 at 5:26 AM UTC
Body brimming with sensations.
inhabited by aches built up from ages.
You are only twentytwo.
But you're ancient soul,
And I hurt like you.
You've seen much
And known much beyond what you can speak.
You're bent double in the dirt,
But no pained sounds scratch dry across your lips.
Instead, this drumbeat.
Permeating the air with your presence.
Your ancient cadence and effervescence.
Its ever present
And it lingers
Tingles tinged with nectars sweeter
Converge at your coming,
At your going
They scatter to the four corners of the earth.
At Vesper's whisper, one evening far,
You'll find your star-singed edges
Returning to where you are.
You shall know yourself.
May 6, 2016
May 6, 2016 at 10:07 PM UTC
We all know time passes
Just blink and it is gone
But, you can bring it back a little
Just by listening to a song
A video, an mp3
You can travel through the years
It might bring you a sweet smile
Or may accentuate your tears
Time is such a fickle beast
It's a vesper you can't hold
One day you are young and fair
And the next day you are old
There never is enough of
And it vanishes so fast
You look into your future
And start remembering your past
Time cannot be captured
You can't trap it, make it yours
You can't keep it in a bottle
It won't help you open doors
But, just where does the time go?
Does it disappear for good?
If you knew you could just save it
Would you do it if you could?
I think I have an answer
Now that time has passed me by
I have less time in my mirror
That's the truth and not a lie
I think that time's immortal
It will never go away
It just hangs around and lingers
But, it's forever here to stay
So, back to our first question
Where exactly does time go ?
Time ...goes into your memories
Time goes into your mind's show
It feeds you little snippets
From the past, when you were young
It comes out from a scent you smell
Or you a hear a song that's sung
Time...it never leaves you
Though you don't know where it went
The memories stay with you
And will show how time was spent.
May 10, 2012
May 10, 2012 at 5:49 PM UTC
I gaze into the lapis lazuli embedded behind your eyes
And I read the words that are engraved on its pristine surface
“I hide in the dust of diamonds and bathe in Luna’s glow”
Inscriptions of a fiery passion from the heart of Aphrodite
What deities were praised to conjure such an immaculate apparition?
A vesper turned mortal by the north wind
Gilded in the feathers of seraphs-on-high
And garbed in the fineries of the seventh son of a seventh son
Aug 29, 2013
Aug 29, 2013 at 1:59 PM UTC