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Soldier

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Bleed and cup my blood

into the robe of your ever-after.

Be on your feet and bark at the joy

that lit fire and now is nowhere.

 

Spider in my sink, spider that is holy.

I want to kill you, but I will not. Today,

I empathize with your scurrying fear

and how you dangle, almost flying.

 

How long must I sleep beside the lizards, with

their devouring claws and eclipsing cold scales?

 

In a river, the laundry was made. Soft and thunderstruck,

you are in an open yard, counting rooftops

and dewdrops simultaneously, keeping in time

with the innate music that saturates your origami mind.

 

Breastkisses, bellykisses. It started and it is

rushing, restless and rained-on. You know a place

where traffic will not find us, where fingertips are never afraid

of fondling, and noise is floating overhead like a weather balloon.

 

Insanity scrapes the insides of shells until all flesh is gone,

consumed by a dead-hour echo of a pulse.

Step on me, I want to be stepped on, torn

apart by a moth. Gritty nails and wrinkled throats.

 

You give pressure to the cord. I am

losing myself to the undercurrent surfacing –

thwarted by my own aggression and desires growing

a thousand eyes.

 

Bridges everywhere I will not cross because I have crossed

into a more real role. I don’t smile unless I feel it. I feel it

hardly looking at pictures. But at you,

it is different, always established that I will fall backwards

into the water for you and you will be warm for me,

lap at my earlobes, under my knee caps, morphing your

temporal needs with my own. Faith, you said,

cannot be a part-time affair.

 

You land on my petals, demonstrate

vulnerability, wise in the ways of how to gently land

and how to bud at zero speed.

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.Copyright  © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “Winamop” September 2015

http://www.winamop.com/poems.htm

http://www.winamop.com/ag1500.htm

http://www.winamop.com/us.htm#ag

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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.