The Clocks Are Thrumming in Towers of Stone

Poems

The clocks are thrumming in towers of stone,
The mice are gnawing at leavings of bone,
The trees are stirring still out of their grave,
O fool-headed me, the lowliest knave!

I count by the hour the minutes that pass,
And inside the minute, the secondhand glass;
Lonely a-room by the darkening eye
I sigh thousand breaths, indifferent sky!

How awful the stuff that sits in my head,
Short-simple and dull, the bulk of it dead –
The single flower that fats in the dross
Is seeing the size and gross of its loss!

The Ghost-girl

Poems

The ghost-girl inhabits a room in the attic
of a lonelier house
in the fashionable part of the town,
where she is singing the songs
of a goldener age,
wearing a blue-and-white crown.
The people suppose the songs are the sighs
of the wind that blows by through the trees,
or else the sound of the passerine birds
as they whisper all night
in the breeze.

New Little Poems

Poems

A handful of new poems which are small and measly, on the whole.

————

Drops in a pail

           Plip-plop plip-plop

Dead as a nail

           Drip-drop drip-drop

Gone with a breath

            Le-sigh le-sigh

Gray like a death

            Oh-my oh-my

————

Sonnet

Sadfaced and stale, I’ll swallow some tea
Lonesome and cornered before a gold mirror.
The ghostwords, they sing: oh darling, oh dear –
But I have no voice, no voice singing me.
Face down in arms, I send up a plea:
The lost hours waning and I, plucked with fear,
Sigh ten thousands breaths – oh love monstrous near!
This stone in the gut, this salt in the sea.
Oh sweet-wicked thing that ties up this tongue!
Oh roguish the boy that beats on his drum!
Eight days of the week, I mixed up my head:
I sleep at the table, I eat in my bed.
I look out the window, the moon’s in the sky –
I love him so awfully, I think I may die.

————

An Optimist to a Pessimist

Your boots are sagging in the mire,
The rain falls down in bins.
Your glasses broke, the frame all wreck’d,
The record player spins.

I have some new shoes here for you,
The flow’rs are growing tall.
The prophet’s blindman anyhow,
We’ll waltz, a music hall.

————

Street-corner Song

Lovely windowshops on the quiet street
I buy a penny candy for my sweet
A long way away, a long way away

The county parson, bass-humming a hymn
A light from the church, a swallow stops in
A long way away, a long way away

I pick up a tulip, was dropped on a stair
The whitest of flowers, so lonely and fair
A long way away, a long way away

I talk all the hour and smile at my flower
The birds in the tower wing out of their bower
A long way away, a long way away

————

Monologue of a Lovesick Youth

In the slim hours hanging before me, a spoil of hope makes the heart a finick-bird,
three-toed, the inverted laws of a three-toed world,
where a body at rest does not stay at rest, not hardly at all.
It was a capital show, the movie to-night:
the people moved as clouds in dreams and scarcely spoke aloud into the wind.
But a silence born of winter snow is all the less,
since all the words are frozen things and cannot find a breath, no, even if they live.
Oh to-night I think I’ll spy a star and listen, soft, for them.

Irrational Charm

Short Fiction & Prose

On a Wednesday morning Emily woke from bed in a quiet house. The curtains were not pulled to the bottoms, and so at the edges of the windows sunlight was coming in. In the quiet house Emily sighed and pulled a blanket above her head and made to enter into dreams. But being as she had slept the entire night through, she could sleep no more, willing or no, and gave herself over to the idle awakeness that aspires to slumber, for that was the best she could do. It was a dark and a small space, under the blanket, oh it is only in darkness and aloneness that these thoughts ever come, thought Emily; or closer to it, that I ever allow them to come. For Emily was some small master in self-discipline, and kept her mind an empty space, pure, when wandering out in public, at the library or riding in cars, say.  She was nearly deadened by a fear of invisible skulls, invisible heads. It was irrational, a little charm, but she performed the act of censorship as a secret testament to her self-denial, to her private crusade for the pureness of things.

Ode to Pennies

Poems

In the jingle jangle street
Five pennies have gone sinking
In little copper pockets
Gone mad with all the clinking.

Shame

Poems

Plummeting in the wake
of a tea-kettle burn
the heat enough to drive
the mind to madness
all slumber is half-baked;
I roil in the dread of night.

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