A Confession, Spoken Years Later

The violin's first yawning sigh
pierced the humming tension of the
poised orchestra,

and, as the timpani swelled and crashed,
a chorus of trumpets seared into life.

In that moment,
at the peak of
the first crescendo,
the full orchestra
raised its voice

and I fell in love with you.

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

ruminate

though we are as far apart
as the peak of sun and moon

i am afraid that the distance
between synapses falls shorter
and so i think of you.

in the late hours
when my body is dead
and my mind rages
it turns to the past
and considers:

i could not heal you
because i have never
been able to heal myself.

rumi said that the sky
will bow to your beauty
if only you do
and i told you of this
hoping that i could
believe it myself.

you taught me however
that i am useless
when it really counts
and to always doubt miracles
because the good isn't often
as good as it first appears.

your lies embittered my trust
and thus eroded the hope
that i could keep on caring for you.

realise, please, that all our tries to
lose ourselves in our senses
failed.

you can find a metaphor anywhere you look.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, February 26th, 2008)

Thursday

Thursday was a dream in sepia,
a two-tone Western classic plastered with
nostalgia on the facade,
but in truth nothing more than a parade
of the barely concealed flaws and vices of our past.

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

Inkless

His three-cent black ink Bic
clacks against the hard wood of his
desk not out of habit,
I realize, but because his hands tremble from
some dread impulse of nerves.

This must be his penance:
ink to page as whitewash to concrete.
Though he ever scrawls,
each judgmental slim blue margin
stays as empty as the next.

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

Nascency

Fledglings, like all newborns,
are at first bloodied and unrecognizable,
without the plumage that will later
captivate watchers with its radiance.

In birth, life is indistinct.
Only time, the slipstream
of experience,
can grant the glory of differentiation.

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

Capturing the Soul (tentative title)

A Moment Late

The cameraman captures his quarry in mid-stride
as the young girl turns to her left.
In the next moment, the image is perfect.


In The Negatives

As his camera rewinds,
the last frame pressed neatly into place,
he comes to realise
that he will be forced to relive
a week of misery.

He wonders, however,
if, in the negatives,
a new perspective
will show its face.


The Blessing of Silver Bromide

Forced to reverie by the stills,
he finds that it is easier to portray his own reality
in the near-black of his dark cave
than it is behind the shutter;

walking in the light,
reality is right there,
so close,
tangible but untouchable,

while in the darkroom,
it is spread flat before him
and a single drop of a chemical
can change reality forever.


As Zeus Severed Man

He broods over the drying photo sheet,
acutely aware of the imperfections,
the inconsistencies between the printed page
and the vision screaming out to him
from deep within.

Art, he considers,
is perception.
The raging muse can inspire,
but the artist cannot portray
the true form of the flame.

Imperfection, he considers,
is art.


Nulla Dies Sine Linea

The young photographer,
his aspirations birds
with clipped wings,
sits cross-legged upon the floor,
his portfolio spread wide and empty before him,
the jaws of the future gaping from its depths.


Ars Gratia Nihil

Servile,
he works to placate the violent muse;
she is not an inspiration but a force
of drudgery,
snapping whip and
flinging stone.

In these hallowed halls,
creativity comes not from within,
but from the clenched fist of
professor - expert - master of her craft -
when in reality,
creation must come from the artist-within.

Freed,
his is the life of expression,
happily absent from the
dark realm of academia.


Separation Anxiety

Pawing endlessly through
page after page of
old photos,
he wonders what he has
made of his life.

At all the key moments,
he is there,
not in the scene,
not participating,
just preserving.

Now,
he sits with his camera,
alone.


Perscribi Non Est Esse

His world of still frames
crumbles about his feet
(it's not the disparate moments which he may choose to live,
but a steady flow of time with which he can not
force-feed the half-starved, carnivorous shutter).
Each frame is silver-kissed
and in darkness given to light
(his art is womb-carried, painfully born,
but static, always immature,
powerful, a thing of life, but dead if left alone).
The camera is plenipotentiary,
the product impotent
(beauty is not a moment cast apart from the whole,
but the aggregate of life, of second-by-second struggle,
which not even memory's lens can capture).

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

Fortuna

This solitary die's haggish cackle says it all.
Lady Fortuna? Her cauldron's bubbling,
her fire's burning,
and she's dead-set in her ways.
Lady Fortuna? What a bitch.

Her gaze is locked,
her bespectacled forsight ready to
roll snake-eyes: loaded dice, of course;
the eyes of the asp.
Fortuna may throw a game
every now and again,
but she'll never throw you a bone.

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

The Winds of Hours

[i am awash in the wrongness of this
your vagrant fragrant skin
your hair like lace
i am trapped in
your spider-strong web
your lips and your words
you are life]
a quiet breath fails to compete with the winds of hours which carry through the ages and across the earth they crumble empires and stop the hordes of madness there is little to do in the face of comfort when i feel as though i can bare my heart and put it to the grindstone there is truth reality is awakened existence is paramount my senses spark with unusual clarity
[the late night
early morning
conversations heal and
the back seat of the car
the faux leather
the heated sweating skin
is what you say you are living for]
the winds of hours fail to compete with the brush of eternity in the hourafterhour and the nightafternight there is a forward and backward learning and living when everything is connected we feel holistically intertwined but there can be no other way when every moment bathes in the perfection of permanence
[i am awash in the slipstream
your every touch is catharsis in
the wilderness brought on by wild
brushfire]

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

Here Ends Freedom

Here ends freedom-
here at the last line of wilting apple trees
in the delicately planted Thane's Orchard;
here, where your youth flourished,
and you ran wild and rebellious through the
orderly rows.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, January 14th, 2008)

A Thought in Passing

You're starting to look rather hunched,
like the parenthesis of which
you are so fond in your lofty prose.

Rather fitting, then, that you
will be relegated to a parenthetical remark
in a footnote on page eighty-three
of my autobiography.

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

Nagasaki's Burning

And when the flash of light filled our pores,
only we remained.

We became pure then. Absolved
of our sins. Our hearts were lifted
of their burdens.

Was that searing sun not
but that which illuminates the heavens?
We walked, fearing to look to the
moonlit night,
but christened by
two-hundred twenty thousand angels,
we became clean.

How bitter that by our purification,
a new filth surges through our veins.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, February 26, 2008)

Lessons of the Sea

One reaches a point during the maelstrom
when the rigging must be felled
to save the vessel from
the snapping mast.

There comes a time during the reeling-in
of the great catch when,
to save oneself from keeling overboard,
one must cut one's line,

and even Ahab must have learned
of futility as he drowned in the
white wale's wake.

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

Sifting

I've been trying to fill
some of your emptiness
with a bit of my excess,
but you are ever the sieve
and I not a shower but a storm.

With so much of us gone to waste,
how best do we employ what little is left?

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

It's Been Rich, Calico Queen

Wash your paws, calico queen,
'cause we caught ya red-handed
and the signs of your sins
stick out like your thumb on the street-side
while you're waiting for each night's ride.

Your local haunt's fresh outta milk, calico queen,
can't keep your kind here anymore,
and though it's been swell,
you got your pack and you can make due.

Yer crafty like that,
ain't ya, calico queen?

(copyright a(scetic)verse)

ador

un
ador
ned

simply flagellate
bruisebreakbatterskin
purification of s(k)in
arbitrating truth
of holiness

ador(ed by all)
ned

(copyright a(scetic)verse, June 15 2007)

Of Canals and Oceans Wide

How can you bear the force of ego
when you stand toe-to-toe with
the face of Poseidon?

The breadth of the ocean mercilessly swallows
any bigness of self as you sway
in the salt breeze atop a patchwork rock wall
looking into infinity during the hours of
night.

In the sun this would be less bleak.
Light gives the sea air a playful bent,
where the dark grants the wind a melancholy.
This ocean begs apostrophes such as these,
but enough time without the self in
this place shocks you into knowing,
suddenly and silently, with a placid nausea,
that you are toe-to-toe with unperspective.

A mother's fluid shares the ocean's mystic
sustenance. When you are old and weary and
you can take no more, to womb, to
sea, to the self-beyond-self, you shall return.

Be consoled in the revelation of the water.

copyright a(scetic)verse, July 19, 2008

Expectations

I have so much to say and nowhere to begin, no goal in mind, so for the sake of brevity:

I need a place to make my writing public, to expose my voice to eyes and minds capable of guiding my writing to the sort of place it will be. I expect honesty at all times in reaction to my poetry (which will be almost exclusively what I post here). If you're reading this and you write as well, I'd be honoured if you should choose to share your writing with me. Let's make this communal, huh?\

And with that, let's move on.
~ross.