contemporary poetry

Without Me

I made a promise to myself – To become famous:

Not for money, but for Art….

The wanting has grown long sinuous roots and become Ancient;

a deep tree from which Words Cascade – brief and delicate.

Springblossoms breathlessly summon parables,

Settling as dust does on one’s skin; unfolding

an Unforgettable gaze of beautiful eyes.

 

I will not let you go.

You promised me the art of the possible

I gave you desires enough to fill the Universe.

Intimacy?

An engrossing challenge for a world in which it now

Plays to virtual galleries –

A meditative climax: No more than the trading of stenches

Kinships crafted by a shared toothbrush…

You approach heartbreak with a precision tool

And inseparably utter the cascading syntax

Of an emotional truth: You cannot love me.

It is an absurd discourse of alienation,

which collapses between squeezed embraces of relative strangers-

On what are relative matters of love and

Endurance!

Full blooded, full-bodied and lascivious with Rage,

Step with me into the twilight of kisses, where conjugating

A mental breakdown, we may taste each other’s authenticity

– Just one more time.

I am not afraid of death, not afraid of that fractured blue hour of Being;

Incarcerated at birth, I was caught by Life and dangled: a

Cameo fiction between image and idea

– A feast for photographers of moral disaster.

We all carry with us portable kisses, sunk to the bottom of haphazard intentions;

Unclothed, even God would want the Emperor’s new clothes…

         What are you looking for?

 

Me?

I was re-issued on double-cassette and got sifted out with the rest

Of life’s technological redundancies –

I have given up Staying Alive just as

Others have given up cigarettes.

 

You’re laughable with your misdemeanours and

European imagination.

I prefer death from poverty.

 

I have no voice remotely connected to the human heart.

What’s done is done in life’s book of love.

Marauding, unearthing – ours is a dying language

Yet, I will eat your sins

 

Were you to promise:

    “To never live Without Me?”

 

 

http://redroom.com/member/renee-sigel/writing

Renée Sigel

Europeans

Now we are in Europe let us take
To selling mushrooms by the roadside,
Broad-brimmed platefuls and uniform buttons
Plucked before dawn in the forest of birch,
The dank delicious one-legged flesh
Climbing from grave-pits as big and as deep
As the forest themselves, for it does not
Take long to establish the custom, not long
To forget the beginning, to hold up
A bucket or basket of mushrooms
And talk about always and offer a shrug
That proves our knowledge and our ignorance
Identical, proverbial, entirely
Beyond the scope of history or law,
And since we have always been here
On our fold-away chairs near the crossroads,
Hunched in black overcoats, pale as our produce,
Seeking and selling the flesh of the earth
By the handful and kilo in brown paper bags,
We cannot be other than real.

 

From the volume “November”

 

 

 

Sean O’Brien

Our Gaia

Look down from space and feel wonderment,
right past the moon, as dry as bone dust, past
our landing spot in the sea of tranquility.

Catch your breath, see rising earth, aglow
a gleaming membrane of the brightest blue
that’s girded with great drifts of cloud,

Gaia is our ferry on this sea of existence.
The great oceans and rivers are her life blood,
the mountains, her spine, the land, her bones.

Ley lines, or meridians carry her life force.
We consume the great forests of her lungs,
pollute air, she breathes with moons pull.

We pour tons of concrete, steel and tarmac
on a heartbeat that pulses beneath our feet,
tearing wounds in her skin with our ploughs.

All Gaia’s living creatures are her senses,
seventy percent water, thirty percent earth,
about the same proportions as land and sea.

We are her seed, the forgetful progeny
of a super organism, we’re naked without earth,
a conscious assembly of earth’s elements,

know ourselves, we will know the universe.
Are we as fleas destroying our planet’s fine pelt,
or birds flying free, who rid her of parasites?

 

 

 

Gael Bage