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The laws that find me bind me

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heavy and wasted

as in the first weeks of lost love,

as if the lifting song of summer sank in the bog

of my many crippled attempts at salvation.

 

Loose skin around the cheekbones.

Fissures repeat kaleidoscope visions.

Snake bites on my ankles like

the opaque rules of tedious afternoons, trying

to cut clean into a full separation the already divided wind.

 

Exhibitions and energy not worth keeping.

Anger resolves with an ethereal kill,

making and placing food on the table to limit the direction

of desire. Desire to stalk a pale flame

and grow a core of heat, but instead

snipped and clipped at the meridian centre,

pitted against love at its softest point. Love

at its most isolating point,

flayed across a concrete pyramid, inside

a Minotaur-maze of forgotten exit passages.

 

Dealt and received, a stack of conditions

that can never be lifted or walked away from.

I will speak because

the explosive veined-sun dominates our Earth’s universe,

and bloody barren corpses infiltrate the ground,

calling upon mealworm dialogue – calling for useless conversation,

eating makebelief applecore practicalities and gossip seeds

like ‘Bobok’’s people in various degrees of decomposition.

 

Let me live on the rooftops, away from the ghosts

puffing up their tuffs with spintop epilogues of I, I, I, and God

in all four pockets – enslaved, once-beautiful divinity,

to sloppy-string opinions and ritualized overload.

 

Great stained-glass eyes of the one eye, where are you?

Only the sound of a shallow drumbeat drumming,

plunging me into this sewer-tunnel template, dangerous

as the planet we are all forced to manoeuver on.

Save me from cherished traditions and filing-cabinet dreams.

Save me from my bodily needs. Transform me into

an angel or into the one transformed from the angel –

never to come here again,

        except to hold my only true love

        and to cradle close the heads of my sleeping children.

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Reference to Bobok:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobok

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Copyright  © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “The Kitchen Poet”, December 2013

     

http://www.undergroundbooks.org/2/post/2013/12/allison-grayhurst-5-poems.html

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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.