This ashen tongue…
It slithers through deceit
Like dreams of silk
Over the morning mist.
Your mouth tastes of promise;
It shimmers over mine
Until synapses burst
And blind, I cannot sift
Away the beauty from its lies.
An angel born of darkness;
Your dagger rooted in my spleen…
Around its icy blade I twist
Until my bowl bejewels yours
With tears of ruby warmth.
Yours is the serpent bite,
And mine… the rift.
*
Weekly Photo Challenge: Summer Lovin’
There is a gentleman artist in Scotland who has adorned his garden with numberless sculptures. Most are fashioned of driftwood rescued from the sea, but there are a few metal sculptures and it is one of these that I have chosen for this particular challenge.
Although something tells me that their iron love is bound to survive beyond the summer.
There are those who preach caution: infatuation is one thing, love – quite another. The first seduces the senses and blinds one to all but the object of their desire. For a time it is impossible to think of anything else, and yet such flighty passions will subside, and their object relinquished in search for another. Whereas love… as the bard would have it:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
So I will throw caution to the wind and confess to being in love. I was caught before I had any idea that the affair had begun, and now there is no escape. If it were mere infatuation, its candle would’ve burnt out long before now. Yet here I am still, a writer adrift. The more I write, the more I love it. Seduced by the sinuous texture of words, by their music and subtlety, I journey into the realms of the imaginary. This boundless sea is my home.
Opaque… desire undisclosed;
An empty everydayness stalls,
Awaiting your return.
Caught in the shackles of your scent
In voiceless rain all dreams descend
Your absence to conceal.
Blissfully blinded to your faults,
Forgiven lips your touch exalts
And draped in colour, burn.
And when my eyelids blossom grief,
Their longing will caress in sleep
‘Till they unlearn to feel.
*
Our youth will pass
And our looks will wither.
We’ll discover that our wisdom
Was the confidence of fools,
That fame was fickle
And wealth coundn’t pay for happiness
Or bribe away all sickness.
Hearts will grow weary of passion,
Limbs will ache with dreams of paths un-tread,
And our eyes too often
Will be denied their sleep.
As our autumn distills into winter
We’ll forget to grieve
For those childish beginnings
When we surrendered, unafraid
And dared to be free,
Crazy in love.
*
My lips have found a home
They linger in experimental substitution,
Searching out the alcove of your neck
Wherein a second heart subverts
All promise of a first.
Fingers stumble on the brink of an avalanche
Deliberately stunted,
Lost in the memory of a strawberry field
Forever.
*
Looking back,
There lay unremembered the wind,
The chill of a morn that entranced our feet into dance.
There had been a smile,
A brow had knitted concerned
And gloves had gifted the warmth of your hands onto mine.
Infuriating youth,
Your presence eclipsed all concerns.
A half-recollected reverie,
Our story translated on a screen black and white:
An undercurrent of fleeting moods,
Life’s certainties transmuted into chimerical objects,
And beliefs bathed away
In a covert upsurge of shadow and light,
Music and silence.
I kneeled at the feet of a not yet love,
Doomed to be haunted by its evanescence.
*
I can’t pinpoint the moment when the tether first gave way,
Determined to forego this silent land
And let my grasp escape the prison of your hand,
I swayed unbound, yet promised my departure to delay.
Don’t ask for more of what I cannot give. Another day
Will unremembered loose its lustre and unplanned
The end will come regardless. Understand
It is too late to hold onto the past, for miracles to pray.
Forgot will be this love after a while,
Too soon you will unlearn its end to grieve
And rather than awaiting for decay to gnaw its wilted heart, I leave.
This memory – a keepsake of the happiness we had –
Will take away, and to its every torment add a smile.
Remember only sunlight if you will. Do not be sad.
*
Daily Prompt: Those Dishes Won’t Do Themselves (Unfortunately)
Until the moment when your palm made prayer of my own
And lips then followed suit to cast the sin away
The taste of pure joy to me had been unknown.
To hold that moment always: no price too dear to pay.
Too quick to love, to sorrow turned delight
When you were named: the heir of my foe.
Had I not eyes to keep you from my sight
And to my heart deny this willful woe…
A moment’s weakness and the harm was done. Lament
Will not exchange your lineage for another.
What have I done? For what must I repent
To purge this longing and all feelings smother?
Had I the motion of the stars within my reach
I’d make them turn the flow of time and make it dawn
For yet another chance I would beseech,
Relive the day in flight. From you withdrawn.
If only you were nigh to hear my plea,
Make yours another name, your past deny
And with one word set all my troubles free,
Make me believe the truth to be a lie.
I find shelter in the line of your clavicle, a geometric diagram,
The resonant alcove of a moonless night rendered penitent.
There are no truths to be found in the extension of your limbs
A parody of allusion, this puzzle not mine to piece together.
I watch your reflection embedded on the surface of the window,
A calamitous prototype of a self never to be fully revealed.
Like a ghastly superstition, you adhere to the periphery of my psyche,
Aping love.
The climax of this play, so imprecise that I believed it a rumour,
Will see me flutter off its stage as if I were a dancer or a compulsive gambler
Whipped by the mundane into senseless sacrifice, and yet…
Dangerously unsteady, we cling to one another to the end.
vic briggs 