 |
|
DAN LEACH
I have enjoyed writing poetry for a while, using whole words whenever I can. Usually am avoid with even through sense. Technically, by sieved feelings and emotional pants.
RAILROAD
Linda’s memory is about
As long as the corridor,
So that when she reaches the door
At the far end, and turns
She has another
Daredevil expedition ahead of her.
Like an engineer, wandering
From footplate to footplate,
Her carriages catalogue behind her
Ferrying thoughts like faceless passengers
And dropping them, random
At stops along the carpet,
Until the return journey
When she’ll maybe gather them up again.
Starting
If this were my first poem;
If this were the first time I’d set my fingers to these keys;
If I had never before communicated in English;
If it were possible for me to make you understand me
exactly, no matter what words I used
or how I spelt them;
If I could talk to you about these things
coherently, without the need to script myself
I would whisper to everyone
At the same time
With the same voice
And understand you back in
One
Simultaneous
Instant.
Non-dimensional
I have such a hunger for these words
But their frictionless
Flatness stops me
Nail-raking them from
This page;
From forking them from between
These lines
Keeping them printed
Like stale spaghetti,
Unbending, and inedible,
They won’t travel from
This page to my teeth
And I cannot gnash them
Into anything.
Shepherding Legends
Come pure night-time
When the horizon frames the sky and the earth
With seamless darkness,
And the surface waters
Stop as still as a clock between tics
A flock, slow and quiet, lows,
Pulsing superstition, like blood
Through its vessels;
Muttering with hooves
That cobble paths behind them.
SCREAM
Though your eyes register it
And your ears ache from it
Its sense has been shaved from it:
The air between
Has slimmed it
Until it has become as banal as cereal.
no sounds of water
only even fields of car-park pebbles;
Screams here get no louder than this,
Their meaning lost with distance,
And now—though it carries on—
It is simply a scream
And easily ignored.
Faceless Is Safest
The boy between the buildings
Was writing a truth
Upon bricks that barely had
The light to read by.
The bricks made an alley as tight
As the width of a broom
And the boy had squeezed right in
Nearly burying himself
In the pile of city-grit and stray waste
That had settled between these two, private walls.
As high as he could reach
He was spraying three words,
Elaborating swashes and curlicues,
Until, at last, the shaft of the alley
Filtered the sun from the boy,
And he left the paint for the bright pavement,
Leaving his work
Alone and staring
At bricks six inches from their letters.
|
|
|
|
|
