Category: Poems
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Togetherness
You pray in perfect sentences like an architect’s muse has grazed each phrase, and I want to tell you that God prefers groans from the deepest recesses of the soul. I hate your Pentecostalism, believing it’s religious babble amounting to nothing, but then I remember you wept when I did, when friends forsook and rejection […]
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A rondeau for the ostracised
Find me outside the temple gates on littered streets Where beggars roam and hawkers sell their rancid meats Where lepers and malingerers don’t have a chance At ever swaying to the beat of Triumph’s dance Where you’ll find rickety, old huts with threadbare sheets. Here succubi know men, and the unclean beast eats Here thrones […]
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Relief
In college, I asked you out when I was drunk, the spirits combining with my feeble spirit and engendering a lewd boldness, I never wanted you, but I wanted to possess you. You said yes, but we closed that chapter the next day, never spoke of it again, years later, distressed by prescription but desperate […]
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If life has meaning
If life has meaning, then do tell me what it is – Do whispers of distress become a din of ache Or do we wait in sorrow for unending bliss? I’ve walked beside these broken tracks, I’ve heard the hiss Of rusty trains. I’ve attended regret’s long wake If life has meaning, then do tell […]
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A song of experience
A lament rises from these dry bones,encased in a coffin of a wasted life,when I was young, my father,the demon, said, “I am thineand thou art mine,”with a devilish, deceitful grin,when I was young, my mother,the angel, said, “Stay strong andsurely, you’ll succeed,”with a sincere, simple smile,when I was young, my brother,the stoic, said, “Yourfeelings […]
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The gravedigger’s son
The shovel and spade, nick -snick-flick, the earth like rotting flesh, and movements and sequences, nick- snick-flick, instinct, impulse, reason, combining with each nick- snick-flick, making my father weary, and the eulogies for sons lost in accidents, daughters dying of cancer, got to him, and the fire and brimstone spewed, unnerved him, and so, he […]
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The whisper and the drizzle
I’ve always dreamt ofliving in the mountainswith you; in a quaint,little cottage with itsfireplace, and high,vaulted ceiling. I’vedreamt of the two dogswe’d own and the longwalks we’d take whenthe mist kisses the pinesand the twilight caressesthe steeple of the oldcathedral with its delicate,orange fingers. But latelywe’ve found ourselves ina cul-de-sac of melancholycircumscribed byramshackle huts,trash bins […]
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The Busker’s Rondeau
I’ve played these cobbled streets for many years pouring into my song blood and tears I’ve known the vagabond and patient sage – their lives I’ve scribbled on my crumpled page although my tune begins when the dust clears perhaps they’ll think then with soft smiles and cheers of how my song soothed all their […]
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The house we called home
The old house with its towering red gates, two garages and imposing cornices remembers the patriarch’s fists and seething rage more than the timid woman and the wimpy child do. After all, he did shatter its mirrors, break its tables and chairs and stab its walls. The mansion with its lawn and pink bougainvillaeas running […]
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Find me again
There’s no point obsessing overwhat’s done, visiting thosehaunted corridors where theghosts of yesterday projectspectral visions into the vastspaces of the mind,what was and who we weredoesn’t matter anymore,those people are gone,replaced by a coupleholding on to the meagre hopethat’s left once illusion fades,taking with it daydreams ofhalcyon days and purple sunsets,of hand-holding and walkingthrough the […]
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