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Steel and Spice

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Inch across

the bell-cups of lilies

in the dead oblivion

of decades of reality’s denial.

Inch into the sweetness

of a lilac’s centre,

nourished on imagination everytime

over the bite of bitter soup.

Gather the crows in your morning sky,

ask them to envelop you and then ask

their forgiveness.

Hiding your panic

in the promises of miracles, licking the acid

off of your skin to make for a good story,

for the belief in an undamageable surface.

Mistaking silk for bread, counting on

God’s kindness to come on the brink

of desperate need.

Will you now

be a slave to the feast of worms or

strip-mine until what little gold you find

feels like abundance?

Maybe you are safe, living in this

burning garden, protected with a poet’s peace

and by a faith that bypasses gravity’s consequences, but

has consequences and demands of its own – ones

you must live by and dedicate yourself to keep

turn a blind-eye to practicality,

and press all fear into a resounding prayer,

existing on the substance of

divine gifts, gifts that are final,

that have no price to pay except that you

leave yourself leaning, tied and planted only

to this holy dreamscape liberation.

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Copyright © 2017 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “GloMag” March 2017

GloMagMarch17

“Steel and Spice”

“Definitely one of the most profound poems I’ve ever read. Reading it, my mind goes, how does she know?!! The struggle to come to terms that a seeming reality is not what it is, venturing into the unknown to ‘inch’ to a lilac center, the fear, the uncertainities, the depression, the angst of life itself as one journeys…to be a feast for worms or will just a little gold do? Wonderful! She sculpts as well as she writes,” Allison Grayhurst GloMag March 2017, Glory Sasikala, editor of GloMag.

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Published in “Rasputin: a poetry thread” April 2017

http://rasputinpoetry.blogspot.ca/2017/04/allison-grayhurst-licks-skin-acid-for.html

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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

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Custodian

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Shelter or summit –

a wood they call it, in

a stream, lined up with crossroads and fields of

four directions. Adolescent

they call it,

a dormitory of unforgivable energy,

magnificence embedded into organ-memory,

wondering what could be equal to this

collapse, would something be equal and claim

a path to recovery.

Foul play

they call it, marginalized, a display

of tragedy, like a crippled horse, on the grass,

in the afternoon.

Unjust, you call it, a senseless chemistry

that begins brightly and ends in ash.

Belong with me. Belong here in this intimacy

in this fraction of time, square footage of a place that is ours,

that we imagined and manifested and will not be corrupted.

Forget what they call it, their exhibitions of

ego-soothing massage.

This is our strategy – to touch the canvas

with our intentions pure and concentrated

as they first were – disappointment, devastations

degraded to one sleepless night, then returned

for a greater glory.

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Copyright © 2017 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “Sick Lit Magazine” March 2017

Custodian – by Allison Grayhurst

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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

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