.

Plastic

 .

    Plastered with glue,

sticking like betrayal like a spider’s eggsack

to a branch. I watch your gorgeous

pontificating, watch you mourn just a little. The injury

rips only part of your body, fragments you.

Grief becomes a tremor,

an uncontrolled twitch under your left eye.

    Everyday, I journey to the drug mart, handle

bread and vitamins in the same hour,

thinking of your music,

showered by these harmonic intonations

of your irate loneliness.

I will never get clean. I knock down garbage bags,

pocket unsharpened pencils,

buy myself some tea, thinking today I will let go,

rid myself of your domination,

purchase a splendid fantasy to replace

your magnetism – saw at roots, trust

the broken staircase and climb.

    You have been kind, when your thumb strokes

the back of my neck or when you let laughter escape

from your stoic eyes. Money

has never been my brimstone or firewood –

there or not there, but always with the fragrance

of just-skinned leather. So

you see, that

is not what I want you for.

    But I do want, and not just a portion of your stamina,

not just a gasp of deep disturbance, but to be at the vortex

of your desire, the one you rely on

to rebuild your toy train set.

    It is too much, picking up shampoo bottles,

looking at lipstick. I know it is too much – these yearnings

that beat and these necessities I need

are the same, but you

 

are still in my mind

pushing, ploughing through and through,

saving me a plot beside your plot

beside the potpourri covering a stranger’s grave.

.

.

Copyright © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

http://barometricpressures.blogspot.ca/2014/10/surrogate-dharma-allision-grayhurst.html?spref=fb

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-DuKJaq66ClMlFIWWU5cTY2RTQ/view

.

First published in “Whisper”, 2012

http://www.ur-online-shopping.com/poetry/archive/Archive10.htm

http://www.ur-online-shopping.com/poetry/archive/Plastic.shtml

.

You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

.

“Allison Grayhurst intertwines a potent spirituality throughout her work so that each poem is not simply a statement or observation, but a revelation that demands the reader’s personal involvement. Grayhurst’s poetic genius is profound and evident. Her voice is uniquely authentic, undeniable in its dignified vulnerability as it is in its significance,” Kyp Harness, singer/songwriter, author.

“Allison Grayhurst’s poems are like cathedrals witnessing and articulating in unflinching graphic detail the gritty angst and grief of life, while taking it to rare clarity, calm and comfort. Grayhurst’s work is haunting, majestic and cleansing, often leaving one breathless in the wake of its intelligence, hope, faith and love amidst the muck of life. Many of Allison Grayhurst’s poems are simply masterpieces. Grayhurst’s poetry is a lighthouse of intelligent honour… indeed, intelligence rips through her work like white water,” Taylor Jane Green, Registered Spiritual Psychotherapist and author.

.

Book reviews of the River is Blind paperback:

“Throughout (The River is Blind), she (Allison Grayhurst) employs 
reiterated tropes of swallowing and being consumed, spatial fullness 
and emptiness, shut- in, caverns, chasms, cavities; angels, archangels, 
blasphemy, psalms; satiation or starved. With a conceit of unrequited sex as “my desire”, nocturnal emissions, awakening in the morning, the poet lives at capacity, uninhibited, dancing,” Anne Burke, poet, regional representative for Alberta on the League of Canadian Poets’ Council, and chair of the Feminist Caucus.

.

“Allison’s poetic prose is insightful, enwrapping, illuminating and brutally truthful. It probes the nature of the human spirit, relationships, spirituality and God. It is sung as the clearest song is sung within a cathedral by choir. It is whispered as faintly as a heartbroken goodbye. It is alive with the life of a thousand birds in flight within the first glint of morning sun. It is as solemn as the sad-sung ballad of a noble death. Read at your peril. You will never look at this world in quite the same way again. Your eye will instinctively search the sky for eagles and scan the dark earth for the slightest movement of smallest ant, your heart will reach for tall mountains, bathe in the most intimate of passions and in the grain and grit of our earth. Such is Allison Grayhurst. Such is her poetry. THE RIVER IS BLIND is a must-read,”  Eric M. Vogt, poet and author.

 .

 .