Fresco

by TheHumanAnvil, posted in Poetry

And they said they wanted to write
My poems for me
And chew my black tobacco
And drink my honey tea
But friend O my friend
My words are mine alone
Though yours may taste much sweeter
Their seeds to me are as stone
So leave me be, let me see
The world with my bit of error
And write with a trembling hand
All that I feel of terror
And be true as a single-faced coin
And roll in a scentless sea
And come as a corpse on the other side
Dead and yet so free…

Kohl

by TheHumanAnvil, posted in man, love, poem, poetry

There is shadow under her eyes
Eclipses she called them
From the tears left behind
Of the pain that came far too late
To flow and feel with the pulse of time

I look at her bare back
With the bedsheet pattern
Still alive on her skin
The crests of her shoulders
Peeking like crescent moons
From under the sea of argent hair

So I turn away
To another day
A still life, blur, Monet.
Years ago to this Tinseltown:
People leaping out of their skins
Skeletons dancing in glass cases
The enamel skulls selling
A hollow reed laugh
And a touch at the base of your spine
As a keepsake

She was standing
Under the irreparable light
Doused in city flames
And dressed in the dark left behind by dirty minds,
Counting cars that passed
Without halting for her

My feet were silent
My thoughts far too loud
As I hovered round her shadow
Like a leftover cloud
With neither thunder nor rain
In the threads of my vein
But the promise of a shade
And the warmth of a bed

It’s been years since that night
And every night since then
Whence I swallowed her sorrow
And she pardoned my pain
And together we have slept
Counting each other’s scar
Some dealt amongst us
Others unremembered for far
And yet I can hear her
Counting cars passing by
And there are eclipses under her eyes
From all the kohl she forgot to dry…

Goddess

by TheHumanAnvil, posted in man, love, poem, poetry, woman

And I buried the sky
Deep in my womb
And there were stars in my eyes
The moon south of my waist
And the sun spilled forth white
From the cusp of my chest
So my children could glow
So my children could dream
And not be sheeps led on sermon
Taught to bleat and not to scream
At the world for not being fair
And keep a woman unaware
Of her hips and her hair
Drawn only if in pair
And shown smiling everywhere
To please and to care
And never do truly dare
Be a child of the flower
Wild under bower
With roots of our own
Chosen by us to be sown
In our graveyards and glade
For a fragrance that would never fade
From the words once unsaid
Now shared unafraid
In all homes and every hearth
Before being born and after birth
A song, O this song
To be remembered for long
We were there, we are here
No longer in fear:
Of the Bible and it’s fable
Seven sins under the table
Forced to pay for it all
Every Adam and his fall,
Without why, when and how
We are one and we are now
Equal in this fight
Of Us and Our Way
Once Witches of the Night
Now the Goddess of the Day

Of Bones Beneath the Branches

by TheHumanAnvil, posted in Poetry

There were cypress beyond the city wall
With cones like eyes upon them
And I tended each for long until I felt
They saw far too much of me
And showed far too little of themself
(Those leaves with their whispers and those roots with their secrets)
So I did not water come the summer, I did not water come the winter;
And the leaves, they yellowed and fell,
And frost took the roots
Slipping needles of ice into their breaths
Till decades were laid silent
Like sand beneath the ocean.
I walk beyond the wall now and then
Dressed in nothing but the evening
And stand under the cypress
And watch the antler twigs sway
Hiding nothing now but melancholy motion
The sense of sleep
And I wonder at the difference, if any, between our shared nakedness

Dewdrops in the Ocean

by TheHumanAnvil, posted in man, love, poem, poetry

I close my eyes
And the dewdrops upon my palate
Rise, like an ocean left unattended
On hot stove
Left to seethe and boil
Fold and uncoil;
Echoing towards an inconsequential eternity
Where nothing rhymes
Beneath the repeating waves
Washing themself at the shore
At the feet of a silent, silent kingdom
Rooted in reminiscence
Of a homemade horizon promised
Upon an unpromised path
There the shriveled hearts sprout as mushroom
In an endless cortege
Moving in stillness
Like taste upon the tip of tongue
And snail upon the lips of spine
An ode to the essential
Both the dirt and the divine