Sea Trash

Sea Trash

You've never known you carried

that force

which breaks the idea's skin

with no time for

an aftertaste

neither regret

nor understanding;

that you made love

 a leaf lightly spinning

already dead but flying

laughing to be

no longer itself

only something falling

into the old gods' wide arms;

that the moment they were born

your words were

my  million separate siblings

fluttering, full from eating light

then put to fire's smoking

neither regret

nor understanding

for something changed and burning:

a life you never saw

that broke the brown wren's shell.

And now

sweet noise and dust-light sparkles

sea trash in the soft salt tide

of heartsblood oceans,

bobbing from here

to gone.

 April 2019

for my dear friend Shay's final Fireblossom Friday, where she asks us to "write about love for someone who does not know you love them."

at real toads

Images: both Untitled, by Zladislav Beksinksi via internet. Fair Use.

Phantasm

Phantasm

In the days of my delirium

I stroked your phantom hair

gently back where it brushed

the deep ore seams of your brow,

crown of a life’s hard mining

for a fool and spirit king over

the boundless land of no dominions.

I traced the lines and lies of your jaw

as sharp, insinuative, as much a vehicle for
drugged response as any needle

and drifted flying on that wave, in

a megacosm beyond any freight

the day had brought me, 
loaded in her barrow of

dirt and dearth.

Even now your star shines high

soft and inarticulate as fur, its light a web

of hairthin silver spun over the bald world,

far above this quicklime field where ants and I

grunt out the elaborate cosmic prank
of one more day. When vision doubles,

my fever fixes on its irrational display, 
sailing insubstantial across a dark
temporal ocean, empyreal and seductive

as that resolution I can

never know, wavering with intermittent
incongruous compassion, a

wayward balloon blown high to pop 
on your tall stonehearted wall. 

Falling in a losing wind, I take

a last sip of dream,  just one;

tooled as an orchid’s convolution

rare as a black diamond,

sweeter than any drug.

May~June 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Images: Evening Star, by Camille Corot

Orchid, by Mikhail Vrubel

Public domain, via Wikipaintings.org