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- 12/25/2010
- 503 Words
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Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Poems - 13. AT THE COFFEESHOP
1.
Ah, Alfredo—
I saw you at the counter
between the interminable seasons
of hungriness, while just outside
the storm had begun to putter,
and I stood to hail you, but
said nothing (or perhaps I dropped
my coffee, and was muttering to that)
and you turned and you weren't you after all.
Wouldn't it have been embarrassing
if I had hailed the person-not-you?
But if I did, perhaps the person would have become you.
If I could have said the four secret words
that would have brought you.
2.
Do you not recall how we, at school,
learned names in the C minor of secrets
just as we'd secrets in your bed, the cool
afternoons laid out on green coverlets?
I dreamed that I had become a peacock
tailing a wide wall of feathers
of purple-green feathers
and learning the peacock's strut and stalk
when my cry flew out the window and door
because I was too short for these rooms
and too long for these rooms, and the more
I cried, the less I belonged in these rooms.
I have forgotten those four secret words.
O words, noisy noose of the self
and no more use to myself
than the colorless notes of dying birds.
3.
The boy runs up, and all
his blood burns with the call
of being alive, being a boy;
yet he is not joy.
The boy turns round, his
heart hooked to his eyes
and flesh, secretly again;
yet he has no sin.
The boy falls dead, grass
green and purple-veined pass
through an empty fence;
yet he lacks silence.
The boy was the man.
The grass was the din
of flesh in air's rushes;
no word stands for this.
4.
On underground trains, he hears the sound
of wild mimosas that touch, touch the dead.
He shuts his eyes to keep the silence in
because outside brings the hush of wings.
Those mimosas, having touched the dead,
produce in his mind the hushed green sound
too much like the wild dark, those dreadful wings.
He shuts his eyes to keep the silence in.
Softly, softly;
do not move the leaves;
do not make me fly.
5.
If you saw me Alfredo,
you would be surprised at how like a ghost
I have been I have become.
But I am here discipled to this loss,
this pale flit this flutter,
voiceless inanimate ether
to not give that cry to never risk
thought beaten stretched to flesh,
in the clear intolerable mesh
of a ghastly cry a greenish feather.
But if I saw you, would I recall
those four secret words at last?
Alfredo, Alfredo, you cannot know
how stretch those interminable hours
of hunger that are like hands, hands
that link, but cannot warm each other.
Somewhere, in darkness shut further
from your soul than even the green
and purple-green cry dreamed, imagined,
are four million secret words that gather,
harden, obsidian themselves sharper, blacker,
until they seek reality through my throat, my skin.
Copyright © 2010 corvus; All Rights Reserved.
Ah, Alfredo—
I saw you at the counter
between the interminable seasons
of hungriness, while just outside
the storm had begun to putter,
and I stood to hail you, but
said nothing (or perhaps I dropped
my coffee, and was muttering to that)
and you turned and you weren't you after all.
Wouldn't it have been embarrassing
if I had hailed the person-not-you?
But if I did, perhaps the person would have become you.
If I could have said the four secret words
that would have brought you.
2.
Do you not recall how we, at school,
learned names in the C minor of secrets
just as we'd secrets in your bed, the cool
afternoons laid out on green coverlets?
I dreamed that I had become a peacock
tailing a wide wall of feathers
of purple-green feathers
and learning the peacock's strut and stalk
when my cry flew out the window and door
because I was too short for these rooms
and too long for these rooms, and the more
I cried, the less I belonged in these rooms.
I have forgotten those four secret words.
O words, noisy noose of the self
and no more use to myself
than the colorless notes of dying birds.
3.
The boy runs up, and all
his blood burns with the call
of being alive, being a boy;
yet he is not joy.
The boy turns round, his
heart hooked to his eyes
and flesh, secretly again;
yet he has no sin.
The boy falls dead, grass
green and purple-veined pass
through an empty fence;
yet he lacks silence.
The boy was the man.
The grass was the din
of flesh in air's rushes;
no word stands for this.
4.
On underground trains, he hears the sound
of wild mimosas that touch, touch the dead.
He shuts his eyes to keep the silence in
because outside brings the hush of wings.
Those mimosas, having touched the dead,
produce in his mind the hushed green sound
too much like the wild dark, those dreadful wings.
He shuts his eyes to keep the silence in.
Softly, softly;
do not move the leaves;
do not make me fly.
5.
If you saw me Alfredo,
you would be surprised at how like a ghost
I have been I have become.
But I am here discipled to this loss,
this pale flit this flutter,
voiceless inanimate ether
to not give that cry to never risk
thought beaten stretched to flesh,
in the clear intolerable mesh
of a ghastly cry a greenish feather.
But if I saw you, would I recall
those four secret words at last?
Alfredo, Alfredo, you cannot know
how stretch those interminable hours
of hunger that are like hands, hands
that link, but cannot warm each other.
Somewhere, in darkness shut further
from your soul than even the green
and purple-green cry dreamed, imagined,
are four million secret words that gather,
harden, obsidian themselves sharper, blacker,
until they seek reality through my throat, my skin.
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Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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