Poem of the Month - August 2017

 
(in Czech, hon means ‘hunt, chase’; in Faroese, it means ‘she’)


   ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever been beautiful.’

she speaks a mundane line that becomes lyrical, then she sleeps.
I engrave it in my sordid tales, that are far, far from poetry. yet in
my criminal perversions, I call them love poems.

we chase the bitter account of unwritten verse as we chase love.
outside her window, the storm fulminates. she reasons that her
uncaptured poem must be hidden in the stars, beyond the mighty
thunder & the noble lightning.

I’ve hunted beauty on dark nights, & came upon dragons &
windmills. the word itself must be lost in archaic ruins. all the
beautiful things have been stolen by the poets, & we go there
to get drunk in their galleries.

so when she brands herself not beautiful, I consider it. the way her
hair hangs in loose curls, a depraved wilderness. the white nighty
thing she wears to bed, as it slips off her shoulder & exposes her skin,
& the dew on her skin. the arrogant pout on her lips, the watered
steel of her eyes that say, ‘if you’re a man, then take me.’

and I would take her that way, in the fierce grip of my hands that
gives credence to my desperation, lay her down & lay upon her
barbarically, as the storm puts itself upon the soil. because I don’t
make love to beauty.

the miles metaphor to raindrops;
the raindrops shatter on the window.

if there is any poetry at all,
it’s in the rain…


(Art: Vladimir Brunton)

She has never read my journal
nor found my shoe box of intimate
letters blown with a kiss into the wind
only to sail back within a lost bottle

She has never nibbled upon this
or that causing me to sigh in tones
of quivering lips and words found
in the silence of an idiosyncratic heart beat

She has never placed her palm to my cheek
tracing and tracking the written tears
that have kept secrets upon my flesh
some not even shared within the pains of me

She has never seen the candor that she
extracts from this mind and soul, nor
wrapped this man with naked calming arms
yet with her, there is no mystery of me

She knew that he loved her. Why patronize then
and beg of his love in gold?
 
Was a homemaker when
she saw her mom in absolve for her own jaded rite on the curb.
 
Torn between images of a different sew sheet lying down,
no comforter could swaddle the growing old,
and thus collapse the mother, and the daughter,
she carries the genes of before.
 
It's not written to appease the boy. It's not about the man.
It's about the woman, the woman,
who through broken heart,
knew only the overpour of money on the pipes.
It never rained. It never stormed. So she wasn't prepared for another person's love.
 
And she stretched it like the band of elastic.
But bands break,
and hands break,
and men hang by a rope.
 
But it's not her fault, that she wanted his attention,
that she wanted his heart unrequited
or unconditional enough.
 
So men hang, and girls cry,
but not because they loved,
except that only too many die.