Nocturnes

 

These are poems from my upcomming book Nocturnes. I’ll keep y’all updated

 

Hotel Olympus: Bacchus Suite

1903, when I appeared:
dream on you children of the night.
My diction free, my wide eyes teared
as I drew beat on her sad flight.

I learned early to close those eyes
but through the lids I still could track
the rhythm of this girl’s rise.
I wished my could remain black.

My pennance for all of mankind
in times before I came to know
that I’d arrived contrived and blind
was singing to the red sun’s glow.

Such grey eclipse was never known
to me and my kind as her skirt,
not even from sonneteers’ groans
or voyeuristic lines of hurt.

Yes, Virginia, Venus again,
and Salomé, we built your shrine
but no one tithed even a pen
for this poem on this muse of mine.

Tossing empty bottles never
could replicate that rennaissance
and my all became the endeavour
to rekindle this non-romance.

My lyric journey found me long
with vagabond gods of the vine
in groves and graveyards bleached by song,
twisted greens, entangled by wine.

Finally I set out to seek
a stanza I could call my home
where poems are pretty, if oblique,
close to the mansion’s distant dome.

That’s when I saw my lost love last,
beside the mountain that I climbed.
I watched as she wandered past
and I lapsed in to the sublime.

My rhymes are up. I set them free-
not that I’ve ever felt this way.
Narcissus and Bacchus taught me
to loose them from my own decay.

But maybe there is still a chance
that as I break windows with verse
they’ll crash below and catch a glance
from and end the poet’s curse.

 

Nocturne: Orchid

Orchid, my dear,
is my abstract blood.
It may not appear,
but it’s more than a bud.
It’s hanging white head
is my solemn bed.

The red of a rose
cannot speak for me.
A violet prose
can’t paint poetry.
The shape of my heart
is no fuschia’s dart.

I’d love it in Spring
to be a canary
who’s yellow form sings
the tune tulips carry
and all of my yard
is for flowers and cards.

But it always snows
regardless on me.
Though you’d love a rose,
you get poetry
and, for a start,
this symbolic heart.

My love is not dead.
My head even floods
when I see the red
of your cheeks filled with blood.
An orchid, my dear,
is my marriage to fear.