Month: June 2016

It is to be lived in, and loved– or abandoned.
But lived neither loved nor abandoned?

The parked car windows, with the same effect,
of all things apart-together, connected

without suffocation. In the bus-stop
glass my frame, in the blue garment

I chose to match my eyes; a reflection
of tired feet resting in the shallows

of island vacations, white supremacy
and fish as bright as butterflies. It has been

joked all children arrive at school
Butterflies and leave as Caterpillars.

Monotony of leaf-devour, the straight lines,
the lines which guide the flow, the traffic,

the wires, and the holes, lived in
and loved, or filled in, and left

to the refractory thrill of the soul
at its hour of physical death,

death: in the polls, Death of racist markers
in pretended functions, software’s emulsion,

server malfunctions, of what was there before
04 about myself, who never cares to listen:

the darkness is coming from the centre of the light.
The president isn’t the pope has never been

the queen forget it, all : it is to be lived
being eaten by the distances between the

steady oh we all go on the downhill in the end,
captured as a cartoon by the Artist His imagination.

These are His people, in the rain,
because that’s the only time we have

available, the Mower’s catcher off,
messy, but quicker.

The man is singing and dancing,

slides a black forefinger around the rim

of a drawn-down hat – a step out, a step to the left –

and lowers and raises his eyes.

He is watching us watch him; watching him glide

and writhe in his jumpsuit – and the music

rolls and he adds breath and timbre and the slow song

slips and slides and dances and it is then –

eyes lowered for you, darling – we know he is

singing to us: we know, and we step back

and close our own eyes and look up, to imagine

that note, that beautiful thing, aloft forever

   so believed*

no child
this gentle man
yet don’t they say
it’s the children
who see angels
who hear god’s
voice above their
own
he had not written
to his best love*
for a year
yet sick now
unto death
his body ripped
through with pain
he begged his doctor
to write her
and ask of that
which truly ailed him
since only she could
know who knew of
his angels and the
gilded hours he touched
his fingers on those
of his god he sought
to free from man’s walls
into immensity
this child filled in heart
still with her love hers
for his his for hers
believed only she
could undo the knot
that crushed him
hard within
the metaphysical.

*if merely ‘sick’
this petulant
child would
not hear
of any cause
in name
lest in hearing
it be that.

19 december 2015

*inspired by the passage on page 82 Stephanie Dowrick’s ‘In the company of Rilke’, where she writes:

‘Having written to Lou 2 works before his death, for the first time in a year, describing pain that ‘loosens me.  Day and night,’ he ‘implored his doctors to “ask Lou what is wrong with me.  She is the only one who knows.”

*Lou Andreas-Salome

*based on his doctor’s comments where Rilke wishes not to discuss his illness under any name or conventional circumstance (as drawn from J. R von Salis’s work ‘Rainer Maria Rilke: The years in Switzerland’).

    apple kiss
                   for Keikei

so i dream
in the cold
of the year
the doors
creaking open
so wanting i
to surprise you
into happiness
trick you
into love
catch you in
the flow of the
hand like an
apple fallen
from the
emerald
sun

june 2016

Sand along the walls.

Flamingo, sunning,
vestige

Took these scraper
strolls
to where a cat looks
silently
on.

Chin up, hurry down.

Everything is good –
because.

© A2Kdavis 2015 – 2016

Bristled waving heads folded and cut,

chaff flung in a dusty trail,

a man in a hat over the wheel;

face painted in dust and sweat;

summer’s strain, summer’s grain –

turning in ever-smaller circles –

tea in an enamel billy, red seeded

jam spilling off scones.

A boy in shorts running, open hands

thudding over stalks, dreaming

when he can wear a green felt hat

with a red feather in its band,

tip it down as the hot wind rolls off the hills,

little river of sweat cutting a trail.

A crop rocking in its bed.

[A re-written version of an older poem posted here]

So, the juice flowed

from the peach

as you bit

into it,

did it?

Sweet,

you sucked

it up,

tart,

your lips

rolled right

over it,

yes; and my

tongue lapped it

dry, bitch.

*

I too want to write a poem like this,

but better.

I want to talk about melons and banana

and grapefruit;

a red wine flavoured with blue-

berries and plum and ripe cherry,

enhanced by subtle oak.

03/2016

Temporary Harbour

Much like the clouds
The salty mane
His weary squinting eyes
Otherwise engaged
They turn away – distant
Seaward of course
Rising hills, hand in hand
With windswept wharf
On this – port town morning

©Orion Foote, 2015