Category: Uncategorized

One Word Of Hope

I’d rather write the truest book

  for just one man to read

 

Than draft that one of mass appeal

  to blush but never bleed

 

I’d rather speak that one great line

  to a canyon vast and wide

 

Than forever to recite mundane

  what an audience will comply

 

I’d rather die a poet’s death

  than an actors out on loan

 

I’d rather live within myself

  than in crowds where I’m alone

 

I’d rather give my last few breaths

  to that child at my knee

 

And leave with him one word of hope

  —that he may then set free

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

 

Forever Carried Away

With prose…

I saw only with my eyes,

as the words left my hand 

 

With poetry…

my eyes were abandoned,

leaving only my heart 

 

But in the distance played a lyric,

freeing what my words

could never unchain 

 

And hearing its melody,

my heart forever carried away

  —in song 

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

Coloring In The Spaces

Trying to understand

  why you marked up your body

  —I stared at the ink

 

The memory of your open promise

  still inside of me

   —unfulfilled

 

Retracing that promised memory

  with new symbols

   —stained forever

 

You colored in the empty spaces

  I was unable

   —or unwilling to see

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

 

 

To Love No More

I lifted you into my heart

But one arm was missing

As single wing and one handed

I carried you inside

All the while, you pointing at

My lost absent limb…

You told me you’d love me

If I could find that one misplaced part

The part that would then

Make me whole

I looked into tomorrow

And searched through the past

But my arm had reached out

For something beyond my ability to see

I could still feel the numbing sensation

Of pain

Where the arm had previously

Been attached

The vibration of loss

Now prosthetic for all that was severed

You pitied my deformity as I hid

My eyes

As best I could with only one hand

Telling me the fault was mine

For always reaching beyond what I

Could know or see…

And with your final stroke of malice

You left me further disabled

Climbing back outside a wish I knew

Was never to be mine…

When you left you found the old world

Different than the one you thought you knew

A desert of frozen stone with a black sky now

Surrounded the stillness of your abandoned love…

As you hesitated to turn around and

Reenter my world

The one that just a moment ago you had

Admonished and left for good

A lone arm reached out and closed the door

Behind you

Leaving you abandoned in a sea of loneliness

And despair

  —to love no more

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

Dedicated To Lisa Wynn in the next AOP.