Ben_W_Power Posted August 17, 2014 Report Share Posted August 17, 2014 I'm new here. I thought I'd start with these. Two linked poems and a third written for someone. Quite personal. But okay to be shared in this form I hope. I'd be curious to see what people thought. The first, a sonnet. That's not an 'L' for love. More of a right-angle, or a bladed machine at the edge of memory. I often consider consciousness. The second elaborates. L There is nothing like this pain, it is bare In our mouths, tracked through the red reaches to The sound of night's swelling. It reels in air But is still only itself. We construe A thing that rips the ripe stars out of their Sockets, packages our laughter in rain And places its pitch. And so we declare It known, as if, knowing, one could contain Their corpse. The devouring wall, daubed with chipped Day, pushes our angles in and out. Now Is not fresh, the pelt of new meaning stripped Of structure. All creeps under the cold plough As vital rhymes fail into falling snow. There is nothing like this pain - that we know. Close And this we know: the long sun will fall And fall still and the windless clouds still Roll in night, and that will be the all Of it. There is no space for the stars In our chopped sky, only the one shrill Voice, the skin-sound ripped out by brown teeth. It is not pity we hear, relief Is not its part, and the sense it sends Breathes a certain blue onto our scars And names us just as we bend to name Each nameless thing. Down go our words, framed In sucking fear. Down and lessened, dry. Fed to forever in the cold sky's Scream. Sad, and little, at their own ends. *** Erysichthon By Dusk I loved you to the colour of the rain, I loved you for the shedding of my blame, I loved you for the person I was not, Unviolated words; my coil unwrought. I loved you for the speech I could not find; The thick, incessant dronings of a mind, The sharpest reaches of my shivered crawl; That shore of nothing, where your sense held all. Before the cracking of a garish soul, Together where my lips spoke less for coal, Together in the tongues that held that blaze Along the splinters of uncertain days. I loved for the loves I have not known; Devalued memories stretching back alone. You layered soft kindling as sick fires died And steel thoughts gashed the light and ground inside. The conscious breath that bore some brighter place Far, deep beyond my blunted gutter's waste, I loved you for the beacon you clasped safe Against the writhings of a ruptured space. I loved you for the lines I will not write As entropy wrenched skin across the night, An utterance of glass, a carnal scream, The blind cadenza of senescent dreams. I loved you to the boundaries of my taste, The gnawing rites that ratify disgrace, Chained silence in those woods of outer stone, The hours seeping past through stapled bone. I loved you for all love without played words, Those machinations felt; those keenings heard, Vibrations dimmed, the slow, strange longing true, One river bitten from ungarnished blue. I loved you for the sanctity of friends, An only kindness poured on colder ends, I loved you past all sigils and shaped forms - That primal cleaving and the void re-torn. My expiation drained, I hold no grace; No largess dripping cleansed day on your face, My meanings scourged, my motion stripped of choice, A scraped-out self, oblivion in voice. I miss you in the numbed hues of that rain, The edges of each second spliced with pain. I miss you for the wisdom, lost at will. I miss you for all sight, and miss you still. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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