LESS THAN PERFECT

I knew her well, a long time ago,

Look at her now!
Like others, a spring chicken once,
Now winter lingers always on her brow.

The brevity of human glory,
The ominous land of old age,
The grim simplicity of life
Chronicled on crumpled page.

Accusation; more hideous than crime,
The fact that beauty has no height or width
The very likely sleeping truth
That all people - love may merely be a myth.

Look again, where to find new wrinkles,
Genuflection; serfdom in her eyes.
The silent echoless cavern of her mind,
Her truth; a rearrangement of her lies.

Her love is but a mirror of the lover,
The keyhole found, but the key is wrong,
Her wailing, piteous and shrill
Was once her maiden song.

Knowing too little, feeling too much,
That’s her lot, as all her sister peers,
Memories, embellished self-deception,
Once smiling eyes, now well of bitter tears.

She swims a sluggish river known as treason
Certain in doubt that doubt will come again,
In ever shifting battleground of fear
The ink of malice in ever moving pen.

TIME AND TENSE

“Those who concentrate on the past have no future”

The priest said to me in his habit of dark,
Shiny shoes of the man pointing east and west
Holy water sweat bubbles; his sacred mark.
 
He could close his face up like the door
Of the confessional, shiny and hard and blank,
Now he knows that the future he promised
Us all was fool’s gold in Heaven’s bank.
 
Still he’s the one taught me to think of the tenses
Present continuous and future the same?
The past just a long list of very dead bodies
Or a lichen-dressed headstone that carries a name.
 
The futures packed into the next twenty minutes
When the angelus bell sticks out her brass tongue
Forget all the joys and the compliment sorrows,
All the winners and losers, every song ever sung.
 
Still, sometimes I think of my father and mother
And the  grandparent quartet that I never knew
Who moulded the man I am, better or worse,
Not one of the rabble, but one of the few.
 
The future was here a few seconds ago, now past
Like the shower of mist and of sheen
And the hands of the clock, and every new season
Converting the yellow and brown into green.
 
Answerable to no one but myself and me
And I never ask any questions of time,
Questions of asking and never reply,
Hour hand, minute hand, second sublime.

 

SEARCHING.

The lighthouse keeper follows the sun,
The prisoner tracks the moon.
Inverted bats weep in the cave of sleep
When they hear the banshee’s lonely croon.
 

Driftwood drying on a desolate shore

Fronds of lacy seaweed hair
Adorning the petrified wooden shafts
On the suede sand dunes; bare.
 
I know I was but a footstool for her
But she had such perfect feet
Of velvet toes and heels and soles
Monumental arches complete.
 
Only hatred can sharpen a mind
Dead men’s fingers no longer probe
Useless as the eyes in leather shoes
Or the seas on a cubic globe.
 
The gods conspire against us all
The world is not kind to the weak,
We must abandon ever finding
That which we most eager seek.
 
Still we search for the unfindable
The ties that always bind
And march upon a hidden path
Where the seeing is always blind. 

Horizon ever stretching further

As elusive as the Pimpernel,
Heaven’s sorrows a gateway
To the Saturn sins of Holy Hell.

As blind men we must fumble round

Not knowing what we seek or hide,
Blessed is the one that finds the way
That he might look inside.