Seasons Among the Damned

At my desk the summers come and go,
Taking note of night’s fleeting glow.

The trees were autumn then,
Pale and dying with gentle hues;
The rotten browns, oranges, and reds
That always signifies memory.
It always seemed autumn then,
It always seemed 4 a.m.
On a brisk autumn morning then.
The silence, the silence absolute:
Only the ruminations of a mind
Aflame, forcing the sun to its perch,
Shook the night awake from its slumber.
Those mornings, on those mornings,
Oh, how I mourned for them:
I painted bravery on timid men,
Valour where weakness prevailed,
Honour on mythical epithets
And I thought the thoughts of the young
When the night is still
And the silence too much to bear.
I mourned for men, then,
I mourned for men with gun-powder fingertips,
Swollen livers and exhausted minds,
Enigmas called Man, glorified to Sainthood
And all the other machinations of the damned:
I mourned for those slain by their art
And played mime to their waning authority.
In those autumn evenings, then,
As the sun cast its last light upon the dying,
When the shadows grew long,
My silhouette carried its own woven loop,
Branded astride my throat,
And I thought the thoughts of the young
When the night is still
And the silence too much to bear:
The brevity of life makes art of us all.






At my desk the summers come and go,
Taking note of night’s fleeting glow.

The rhythm of words,
The steady rhythm, with no malice,
Beat upon a May morning,
Among the bulbs and hushed breeze,
Before the blossom, before the fall,
And that lone word: Brevity, Brevity, Brevity,
Bred its incessant hum,
Buried beneath my weary skull,
Stirred my slowing pulse,
And roused my dormant senses
To the guise of another spring.
I took her hand gently in mine,
We waltzed through the garden,
Through the tulips, of course,
The climbing thorns and vines
Of the foetal ruby children,
Traipsed delicately over the convulsing hose
Loosed upon the villagers of the green,
Danced to the music that filled our void,
And stopped short, breaking stride,
To embrace a bed of perennials:
“These cowards must go,”
Her words like a fog,
Targeted sparse, pillaging invaders,
As she knelt and plucked these rogue
Weeds from the earth, my earth.
Leaving only those of the hued,
She tossed the fallen aside,
The chaos of the indifferent stream
Took the victims, meandering
Through the garden and out,
Out into the field to vanish.
Dots of coriander,
Scattered through the tubers and stems,
Outlined the interlock brick walkway
Leading to a latticed archway engulfed
By the rotting fossil of forgotten hemlock
Wilting and surrendering to a new wind.





At my desk the summers come and go,
Taking note of night’s fleeting glow.

On these silent nights, I type,
Devoid of the ghosts of the damned,
I type, exhuming the words from
The ruins where my gallows once stood;
Enshrouded no longer by the shadows,
The rhythm of craven spectres,
I type liberty, to build, to craft
To invoke the gentle beast,
That serene world between sleep,
Between sleep and thought;
I type the thoughts of the young,
When they have shed the callousness
Of youth and rejected the monstrosity
Of the noose and all its children.
Awakened now, on the cusp of drowning,
The sea-weed reds, the sea-weed browns,
Hide beneath in their tomb of sky dust
And sink into their insidious intent.
As we walk across the water,
Speaking nothing of redemption, but growth:
The growth of the escape,
The first utterance of the mime,
The squeaks and murmurs of a voice,
A voice in a pitch, in a tone,
That the dead, buried and defeated,
Cannot, will not, hear.
I type the thoughts of the young
When the night is still
And the silence replaces
The desperate pleas of the damned;
And in that silence, in that silence
I understand the beauty, the truth, the urgency:
The brevity of life makes art of us all.

And now, on this silent winter morning,
I finish. It feels as though
I have been writing this poem for ten years.

As Dark as the Night Gets

Ultimately, it will end me.
Not today, nor tomorrow,
But, finally.
My mind spreads throughout the room,
Trying to breach the walls,
Each attempt grows weaker,
And with each effort I shrink further.
I avoid the mirror for days,
Evade sleep for longer:
I think for hours about more than
The world could stand to ignore.
Then, there on the cusp, in the realm
They refuse to write about,
I stumble on a terrible mantra
And know then that life…
Life is merely the accumulation of courage
To end it.
And so, at the bottom of the world,
With a weak pen swept determination,
I wrote of my death, a silent, lucid tome,
Under the shade of the vacant hope
That it would be read.
I had the sentences, the sentiments,
But the arrangement wouldn’t settle.
I wrote until the birds began their day,
And I stood, disgusted at their music,
Disposed of the paper
Hoping to lose my new maxim.
Even now, years apart,
I struggle and strive to find the words
To complete my composition.

Verlaine to Rimbaud

In 1873, French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, lovers, quarreled on a Brussels train station platform. Rimbaud wanted to leave, having enough of the tumultuous relationship, but Verlaine insisted he stay. Rimbaud refused and in a blind rage, Verlaine shot him in the wrist. For his crime he served two years in a Brussels prison. During this time, he desperately tried to repent for this sin and wrote poems and letters of and to Rimbaud. Having no writing utensils he was forced to use the coffee rations in the prison to write on contraband paper. This story inspired the following poem. Enjoy.


Verlaine to Rimbaud (from a Belgian Cell)

He dips the tip in the grinds,
Swirls it to the point,
Extracting a blotch to smear
Across the selected scrap
Of contraband paper.
The scene, an acidic departure
On a train platform,
Reverberates aloft in his mind:
He scratches words and phrases—
Incantations to the blue-eyed devil—
And mutters over his tears:
Immutable devotion and adoration
To the young man,
That very demon, laid wounded
In a sterile bed with our prisoner’s
Bullet lodged in his hoof.
Counting hours, measuring the remaining,
He scribbles corporeal anxiety,
Fermenting his art in absolute desire,
Desperation and the aching sense
Of the finality of all this poison.
Two years to repent,
A lifetime to recover:
A man driven to madness,
Driven by the feeble,
Flaccid deathly yelp of his passion
To write the final verses—
First in spoiled coffee grounds
And then, if he must,
In the briny remnants of his pleas—
To his intent, to his muse,
The sardonic, young Saint of Charleville.
He no longer wrote of love,
But, only, about it:
Bereft the pulse of his wonder
He lingered among the cafes of Paris,
A mind soaked in Absinthe,
To die a pauper,
Leaving behind only a wealth of poetry
And a haunting fleck of shrapnel in Brussels.

Another Failure of Art

I cannot paint; I cannot draw, sculpt or mould:
My hands are dumb to the lines, shades, and forms.
There’s little sublime in my visual
Interpretations of the world.
I cannot translate the mind to canvas.
I cannot show, but I can dictate,
Determine your internal sight.
I can make you see anything you want;
Or, anything you don’t.
From the minute to the cosmic,
My words will guide this picture show:
Landscapes, cityscapes, the mundane, the splendour,
The horror, fragments, impressions,
All vivid, all unavoidable
Once I have pulled the switch.

First: A colony, first miniscule, but with rapid growth,
Thrives in the soil, divided into a thousand
Individual dots, each splitting,
Splitting, splitting, expanding
The civilization exponentially,
Until finally six billion individual dots
Collude to create the illusion
Of a light blue sphere
No larger than a dime.

Then, look: a stone park bench,
Inundated with moss among the pillars,
Rolling autumn foliage spirals beneath,
And there below the granite underbelly
A pair of hand prints, one large, one dainty,
Frozen in the concrete base, perhaps,
Left on a whimsical summer afternoon
By a father and son tandem?

Finally: Through the haze of a rainy night,
A spectre of yourself reflects in the train window,
But through it, with deliberate focus,
You can see faint signs of a vanishing city
Jutting up from the earth, like jagged teeth,
And you know, somewhere through the fog,
Nine stories up, she sleeps.

My hands are dumb to the lines, shades and forms,
But I never run out of images to paint.

A Return of Sorts

Upon Holding a Notebook Again

I bought a leather-bound notebook,
Much too impressive
For what I had planned for it,
And carried it down King Street.
As its power began to take hold,
The images flashed,
Flipped through my mind
Like a rabid, demonic sketchbook
Until, as it had once been,
My second vision began to consume
The material realm:
I have been away from myself
For far too long.
I found a coffee shop, a cliché,
As the notebook returned
My essence: The Obligation.
I stood, pen in hand,
A rough, bearded beast,
Slouching towards Byzantium.

Memory and Trauma

Forget what they told you:
February has the fiercest ingenuity.
April’s where the dead go to blossom,
Where exposure finally took Him.
All my life has been in a room
Full of concave mirrors
Bouncing the voices back and forth,
Some louder than others,
All returning for another haunt,
And my gaze, as it ages,
Stares back and remembers:
In my room I watch the hours tick by,
I think of you and her and him and then.
It all bounces off the walls and into my eyes,
My ears, into my blood, and through my bones.
These relentless reverberations come and go,
Return at the batting of your eyes,
And flee at the sound of the phone,
And the constant, fleeting versions of myself
Cannot compete with their lingering side effects.
I lay awake till dawn on most nights
Reliving all those joys and terrors.

Short Elegy

It’s been two weeks since:
His broken voice on the phone, meandering to the topic
And I awake for 30 hours, 2000KM away.
That night at the bar I saw the ghost
Of a lost sailor and had to leave.
I thought of you at the harbour
And through the cobble stone paths.
You called the day before. No one was home.
The snow held us in Maine for three nights.
I didn’t make it home. I heard they packed the place,
Flowing over the balcony and out the door.
My brother, he now believes you were an angel
The entire time, spoke eloquently.
He has been at your house ever since.
Stewing in my regrets, your death
Has shown what can be lost in the silence.
I waited too long.
And this poem can only fail you.