With disdain,
he turns
from the mirror,
leaving
himself
behind
like a cicada’s husk
caught
on a tree’s bark.
(July 29, 2021)
After Image
Author: subtextures
I am write and work in central Texas. I attended The University of Texas at Austin, and Middlebury College's Breadloaf School of English.
The Fire Consumes Us All
Yes, poetry burns in feral anger—
a knife flash fast at the shadowed church door
cuts through a dank cassock’s folded black cloth,
twisting quickly below the priest’s fat rib.
Yet, the mundane’s slow-etched eddy of truth
leaves its testament in the margins
of the more violent rush and tumble
relevance churning in the crowed streets.
My life is easily enough dismissed
with the trivialities of the day
dropping their dead petals across my path
like roses in ecstatic agony.
Yes, poetry burns in feral anger—
and burns and burns throughout the dullest day.
(July 26, 2021)
Night Terror (a reading)
Night Terror
“When are we not in a dream?
…when are we not skeletons?”
—Sy. Hoahwah
I don’t remember
the dream before,
I cracked my head hard
against the wooden night stand;
the fine grained ephemera,
which held the dream together,
burned like flash paper into the air.
A lightning ball exploded
my darker vision, as the dream,
too agile to cradle, threw me
deftly from sleep onto the floor.
Not existing fully in the fluidity
of sleep, nor the concrete warmth
of the morning window’s light,
I held my head in my hands,
eyes shut, as the lightning flash
faded, leaving only the muscles
in my neck to burn like trees
broken during the night’s storm.
(July 16, 2021)
Metaphor’s Comfort
Flying free
through the blind night,
bats,
with their high lyric cries,
justify
the walls around them.
(July 19, 2021)
No One Sees Us as We Are
She said
I can’t imagine you young
in school
a time when you didn’t know
everything—
*
I know less and less each year
he thought
so much confidence and verve
years ago
now only anxiety and doubt
(December 18, 2019)
Night Terror
“When are we not in a dream?
…when are we not skeletons?”
—Sy. Hoahwah
I don’t remember
the dream before
I cracked my head hard
against the wooden night stand;
the fine grained ephemera,
which held the dream together,
burned like flash paper into the air.
A lightning ball exploded
my darker vision, as the dream,
too agile to cradle, threw me
deftly from sleep onto the floor.
Not existing fully in the fluidity
of sleep, nor the concrete warmth
of the morning window’s light,
I held my head in my hands,
eyes shut, as the lightning flash
faded, leaving only the muscles
in my neck to burn like trees
broken during the night’s storm.
(July 16, 2021)
Extant Only in Memory
I bend to pick up a small bit of trash,
and I think of him crossing the room
to pick up a random piece of paper.
For decades now that one small gesture,
a moment of casual insignificance,
is all that remains of an old man’s life.
(July 12, 2021)
Acceptance
(after J. Ruth Gendler)
Acceptance makes hot tea
for you on cold blustery days.
Acceptance waits for you
to decide who you are—
She makes no judgement
based on arbitrary rules.
Acceptance knows she is stronger,
because she knows the difference
between herself and Acquiescence,
who is too afraid to be different.
Acceptance sits near an open chair
knowing you will find a way home.
She likes to listen to your voice
as you take delight in new ideas.
She does not care they are not hers.
With the gentle reassurance of love,
Acceptance takes your hands
as if they were fresh cut flowers.
(July 1, 2021)
A Space Opened Into Absence Like the Sea
Where words we would have said
were swallowed, like sailors sacrificed
to the waves, possibility slipped shut.
If only we could have heard the words
we sang in secret to each other;
if only we had not died there,
feeding like fabled monsters
upon our embittered flesh;
if only we had relented
to the siren’s cold seductions,
then the screams in the waves
which smashed upon the sea wall
would not be lost to the blind pulse
of froth and spume across the wreck.
(June 30, 2021)
then, an ever present now (a reading)
then, an ever present now
The shuttlecock flits nimbly across the loom with a soft clacking beat. “For every time I’ve told this tale, I’ve told it twice again,” she implies with a sigh as she begins. She speaks of patience and home, and slow unsolicited seductions, as time unravels across the floor like red pools of forgetfulness at her feet.
He watches her hands shift the threads as if playing upon a lyre. He thinks, “There are so many ways through the woods; so many rivers and creeks to cross; so many hollows and caves to wander lost, always different, always the same as the ones crossed before.”
For years and years as he wandered, he watched the waves pulse repetitive hallucinations and horrors towards a horizon he could no longer see. Unearthly monsters churned the waters feeding one upon the other; the past devoured the past with a ceaseless hunger for more. While elsewhere late at night, she walked the halls without a light, leaned against a shuttered door, and listened to the incessant voices muttering their plots and plans for a life she abhorred.
As the story faltered to its close, there was no soft landfall upon the strand, no wreck scattered upon a beach; no violence in their reunion, nor familial embrace. What had grown between them, tangled like olive tree roots upon a cliff, could not be troubled enough to be called love, if it could be called anything at all.
