….

Laid low, laid out like soulmates never meant to meet

in this life, in the spectrum of folly and limitation.

A painting layered, re-mastered, re-mused and then,

burned by neglect.

Miniature moment of perfection, condensed

to hold a legacy in swirling matter, hard and glittering.

Fractures as long as a walkway

stretching the borders of a great body of water.

 

Stringing thoughts like a child’s dream. I know,

but I’ve learned not to take synchronicity so seriously,

learned there is only choice, and chance caved into,

selected to stand as fate – the end result, resulting

in a theory of complexities and open systems.

 

Stuck in the ground, protruding stilted like a statute.

Tell me it is true, that nothing pure is subjected to disease.

Crickets in the late morning.

When I am fixated, it is fantasy, false as poison in soup.

When I am lucid, liquid budding, my fingers are flames,

and all that they contact pulse with their heat.

 

Various clouds like currents perpetually pumping –

financial lack, and I, myself, curled up on the bottom stair.

Beds I defend, determined to lay in, over and over

hurting for considered crimes. Erasing perimeters, I clutch

at fraudulent mercies, securities of working furnaces

and washed hair. How to love damaged flesh, radiate love

for what is broken, far beyond romanticism, dangerous

as a cockroach and forever mutating –

translucent shells and pores – radioactive

and growing more grotesque under slabs of rotten wood?

Love, I do not understand you as I am older

and keeping up the climb. Medications and

broken down dishwashers.

Debt like ghosts that stick to my aura, smothering out the colour –

Oh weedy garden! Sparrow on my roof, talk to me for a while.

How can I love, middle-aged, half over, clear

of a younger person’s hope and indecision?

Pointing at ecstasy (a snail on my forehead) pointing,

pointing, stung.

 

Copyright © by Allison Grayhurst 2014

 

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry” Volume 4, Number 1, June Issue 2014

http://themuse.webs.com/June%202014/muse%20june%2014.pdf

http://themuse.webs.com/latestissues.htm

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You can listen to the poem below:

 

In response to the poem – Walkways:

“This is brilliant! Brilliant. Reminds me of when I first read Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. And I wanted to stand up on the city bus and exclaim aloud: “Listen to this!” A comprehensive capturing of human earthly experience in all its dimensions without missing a beat – beyond the conscious mind – dancing with the levels of our knowing and sensing – that we feel but do not always recognize, and rarely, oh so rarely articulate. Clearly, Grayhurst’s poetic journey has taken her to the mountain top,” Taylor Jane Green, registered holistic talk therapist and author. 

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