Category: Poetry

Touching

We can never truly touch. I know this, as I know the offset rotation of the earth, her drunken lurch through space and time.

Our skin can seem to touch, there’s that, and at one level, that’s enough. The intimate brush of flesh on flesh, friction that we counteract with passion’s warm wetness.

But our atoms remain,
apart.

Electrons may drift in common clouds,
may interact and influence,
But nuclei remain, mine and yours,
literal poles apart; forbidden by universal laws
from ever coexisting, or even
the faintest brush of contact.

We hover, then, enmeshed in human terms, but separated literally, alone in our skin.

Yet, even in this bleak realisation, a twist – we can’t touch ourselves either.

My finger-tips come infinitely close together, yet still a universe of space remains; for what is space if not insurmountable, eternal?

An emptiness between my fingers, an emptiness between our lips, an emptiness from here to there: if touch is but a lie of repulsion, it still compels, and I’ll be gladly, blissfully lied to, so long as I lie with you.

The Hunt

And what’s this, then, you canny man –
To leave just one dead boot behind?
And with it, neither leg nor plan,
Still truth will out, we always find!

Release the hounds again, my boys,
And girls – we are are a modern team –
They won’t be bothered by his ploys,
We’ll have his head, but first he’ll scream!

What’s this, the trail falters here?
Well hurry back, retrace our steps!
Another boot? Another scare?
Recall the dogs, we’ll have him yet!

I smell him now, that crooked thief,
At least the boots he left for us,
Come out, you cur, from underneath,
The coward shadows that you clutch!

Your feet must be on fire now,
And all for what, that noble whore?
Some whispered wit, some vacant vow,
A torrid tumble on the floor?

We’ll have you yet, adulterous swine,
And on your bloody bones I’ll gnaw!

 

This piece was written for Nika Harper’s Wordplay #6. The challenge was iambic verse, with the prompts “a leather boot laying by a field” and “a choice.”

Seeing Double

The field lies abandoned, and her face
Is fouled with fragments of a former time:
A single sole of rubber, rotted lace,
and leather upper, under streaks of grime.

My sight may skip across this vacant view,
And leave the broken boot to settle by:
It’s just another path to travel through,
Another pointless journey for my eye.

Or should the boot my inattention irk,
To tug at tufts of tales yet untold,
And chase away the unacknowledged murk,
That cloys and keeps me captive in its hold?

Both views are mine, and both are there to see
To pass or to be present, the choice remains with me.

 

This piece was written for Nika Harper’s Wordplay #6. The challenge was iambic verse, with the prompts “a leather boot laying by a field” and “a choice.”

Gone

She sits,
not poised at the edge of dramatic abyss,
but snuggled deep in that old couch,
her lover’s arms,
wrap around her too, in memory at least –
too many layers of dust have settled since,
and those phantom limbs
now sway unsullied by muscle cramps,
no pins-and-needles prompting new positions,
– just a glossed-over distillation of those perfect moments
that never really happened.

The couch is real, though,
its depths concealing spores of mold and more memories,
stains of several lifetimes, their passage through the flat,
loves lived, lost and longed-for,
and still the couch remains –

Or would, if not for her:
the couch, the room, the building gone.

Not to ash, as she expected,
but to a skeleton of vague proportions
Ribs and springs and incongruous tufts of stuffing
Coated in soot, no longer a couch, but still more than nothing.

Still more than her lover:
a figment only, created and destroyed
a thousand times in desperate daytime dreamings,
by the crumpled form who sits, if “sits” is fair,
still smothered by the couch, or couch remains,
still now, in every way.

 

This piece was written for Nika Harper’s Wordplay #2. The challenge was free-verse, with the prompts “memories” and “the reason it isn’t there.”