Elegy to the past

38/100
100 poems/52 weeks challenge’ 2018

Beyond Magritte’s Door by Mark A. Garlick 

I put on a black coat
But the rain wouldn’t fall,
What is buried doesn’t stay buried
And sometimes, cannot be buried at all.
                      
The time has ceased as it used to be,
And now it ticks like a knock
upon my door,
I pick up its objects
But I do not mourn the past,
I only insist upon the question
Of, will I be what I am now
Tomorrow?
 
Now shoot the time
let it bleed without reward,
Mourn the flux
But do not mourn the past.

Advertisements

Mistletoe

37/100
100 poems/52 weeks challenge’ 2018

Art by 
Florian Gohlke

I made a mistake,
I slipped
lisped
the name I had pushed out,
left under a tree
for the ground to take underneath.

The twigs
trapped like bones inside me
rustle with winter
and oh I have lisped the present
into the past.

Now there is a Dido wreck
the bar creaks like a sinking ship
and there is a spirit
that burns blood in my mouth
with an agony
I have to wrap up and send away;
it is December.

The traveler

36/100
100 poems/52 weeks challenge’ 2018

Railway Tracks in Desert, Wami Rum, Jordan by 
Jochen Schlenker

I miss a man
when the noon colors the windshield
and the motion of the train
becomes him.

It is undoubtedly him;
there is no trespass in the crossing engines
humming away to the pebble-parted solitary tracks,
bird wires
in a camel colored city,
songs of you to songs of me,
when the sun cools down like Mars
and fans upon the faces on commute,
like a desert snaked away in silence upon the train
and then
the woman’s pearls slip and break upon the floor
when your music plays;
there is absolute serenity in the world.

The Savior

35/100
100 poems/52 weeks challenge’ 2018

{Alternatively titled: Bedtime stories}

It will be not death, but a dream by 
Victoriia Kharchenko

You have been full of dread,
it has been your primal function;
“dormant” it is, they tell you,
now, why don’t you excuse their civilized lies.

Fear is a drive to sleep,
an urge to close your eyes,
it is a leaving
when the cat catches you a death
and you deem no way to survive
in the fumes of a future
where the poems must die
and the man must churn out numbers for the rich.

But you’re not dead 
and sometimes you wish to wake
a masculine fantasy of breaking at your own coffin 
and yet you sleep,
so you might as well leave it to someone else.

Messiahs, Prime Ministers, Presidents
Fascists, Lieutenants, Gurus,
Nymphs, Princes, Lovers,
Parents;
Often just people who carry you 
while you sleep.

What is the mind made of?

34/100
100 poems/52 weeks challenge’ 2018

Art by 
Gediminas Pranckevičius

There are a lot of people on the net
and they imagine a web
that maybe our minds,
sometimes they hear voices that belittle them,
sometimes it is merely a stuck up rhyme.

I have never heard any voices
but my heart is as rough as theirs,
I cut it upon the same tropes
parents-teachers-lovers
and begin to wonder
as to where does my narrative begins,
and their’s may end.

I have no answers
I only have pictures that come to me
in the aftermath,
and then I realize
I too have my voices,
but like a silent tree,
they are just a collage of pixels–
and this is my mind.

The Indian Railway Station

33/100
100 poems/52 weeks challenge’ 2018

Steve McCurry’s 
Train Station Platform, Old Delhi, India 1983

The blue collared trolley car stands
in a premonition
of people leaving their villages
with brightly colored pink-capped babies
marked with the kohl in the eyes–
premonition of the old mining cities
and now the Delhi soot.

Have you ever noticed how the
mustard sky
stands with a finality
above the faces peering from the window
at the leaving.

The inside corridor
lolls out from a newspaper tongue,
dog-dry
caught in an anxiety
as if the sleeping coach,
an irony,
had people sleeping like hostel students
before an exam
and then the warden prolapses the morning
comes with a cutting tea
for travelers nestled in their own paper cups.


And they rise like some early hatch-lings
in the creaking hour
when there is neither happiness nor sadness,
And you see the repressed terror/thrill inside the men,
manifest,
as they leave behind the old world and enter the new.

The order

32/100
100 poems/52 weeks challenge’ 2018

Grip of fate by Chris Agnew

Words like some sing-song
from the caverns of
the brain, however imagined,
perhaps like the trickling out of the housemaids
from residence complexes at a singled hour
when the dawn light begins to break
as if slanting off all the sharp objects in the universe,
and then my writing blunt,
edged with the effort of language.

It is the rule of history,
order must bleed out of chaos
for intrinsically, order is chaos held momentarily in a grip
till the poem is finished.

Everything about everything

31/100
100 poems/52 weeks challenge’ 2018

By  René Magritte

Imagine a cotton-yarn sun
–all before the six days–
as it sat in absolution
like an apple in a still life painting

until the yarn spelled out
the threads became different
and people like words
had to be understood as different,
and in this uttered fission,
the woman without language
always remembered the fruit
which she could only bear
in more and more difference.

In the webs of the yarn
happened a day,
today
when the wires tangled so,
started moving backward into a fusion.

In this, the people who walked like words
fussed with a lack of voice,
with their right hands
they burnt all the new dictionaries
that had said
everything is everything.