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Where are you? I’ve been calling

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and waiting, soiled and famished, anticipating your return,

circled by predatory chains. There are things

we need to talk about. Are you

here, or just a synchronized inspiration, energy

as icing for one day? It is not enough.

I need you here, not galactic but like a man

before his wedding hour, needing me too,

focused entirely on my fulfilment. Where are you?

In the sparrow-droppings? In the kitten’s fear?

I cannot go forward so close to the lurking eyes

of mire and sacrificial doom.

 

Why are you leaving me blindfolded,

tremours and hard lumps invading my body,

aching against the sky for you,

on my knees, in many ways excavated, sagging without

mettle or substance? Where are you –

in the sideboard? The baseboard?

 

Compel my breath into freedom,

sing loud in my left ear, love me

like a solid spike, but weightless in its consequences.

I drive the rattle. The world is huge and

I am capsizing, eaten by its ignorance and filthy demands.

Where are you? Did you fly away?

Can you be my gravy, not dry and vague

as a passing half-hearted smile?

 

Can you not pay for my funeral and be done with the obituary,

sending me into the afterlife, a new life

of baby days and infant trust?

Where do I hurt? For you, everywhere. It is impossible

to escape, impossible to cross my legs, fold my arms.

Tender or with a shovel pounding,

break through this cobwebbed room,

give me a background I can play with, a full dish, delight

in the splintered wood.

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Copyright  © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “The Brooklyn Voice”  October 2013     

http://www.brooklynvoice.com/2013/10/14/octobers-poetry-selection-poets-allison-grayhurst-gale-acuff-ben-nardolilli-sarah-hamsher/

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Click to access 20151023No_Raft_No_Ocean_by_Allison_Grayhurst.pdf

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http://scars.tv/cgi-bin/framesmain.pl?writers

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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

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“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,”  Eric M. Vogt, poet and author.