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Three Poems


Ben_W_Power

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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.

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