I Am Your Penumbra

I Am Your Penumbra

by | Jul 16, 2024 | Poetics

I am your penumbra,
A light on the edge of your darkness
As you radiate the next big thing.
Impenetrable importance,
Believing you are there to be got
But you are not.
Only I demarcate you,
A fringe land to reveal you,
A flash to your pan,
Precise without weight,
The intimation and the notion
Cast off from you.
A vapor of your ruminated breath,
Like memory and tentative whispers
Of your importance.
The exhaust of genius,
Vented and alone,
Witness and penitent.
Your principal derivative,
Containing your value
So you don’t bleed out.

 

St. Albert, 2024

I Will Not Beat You Down

I Will Not Beat You Down

by | Jul 11, 2024 | Poetics

I will not beat you down
I will not run you through
For your drumbeat of indignities
Sustains me with commonplace comforts

I hedge my bets
And run for King,
The dying art of hubris,
Jonesing for a lesser role,
Petitioning surplus humiliations.
Praise wounds from which all stressing weeps

Crown me with your donkey’s yoke
And I will burnish it like chestnuts
Unattended for three seasons
Tumbling in pocket flannel
Never knowing light or worth
Until one day
Spill with sundry coins
Across the clattering counter
Radiant in its lustre

Like lambs raised by wolves
Your pity knows no greater love
That I should be grateful.

I will not beat you down
I will not run you through
Though you have earned
A hero’s death, unbidden, unprepared

For this grand interruption
I wonder how you will take it
That it will take you
And I a breath more than yours

What good will I make of that intake
To honour your catalog
Of accidental kindness
That you should be
Commended to whomever
In the bleak forecourt:

There stands my friend
For whom I never had to take a bullet.

Single Wing

Single Wing

by | Jan 14, 2022 | Poetics

A single wing, unattended,
Will fall, not flying.
Fluttering, spinning, helical conscript.
Like flight, but falling.
Delicate thrall of nature.
A loop aloft.
Greeting gravity.
Conceding nothing.

St. Albert, 2022

Solange Sings

Solange Sings

by | Nov 29, 2021 | Poetics

“Sing lustily and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, then when you sung the songs of Satan.”
John Wesley – directions for singing, 1761

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