The Silent Teacher, 2024/5
This starts, as if a funeral.A green casket of plastic
Folded back, cracks as it crumples.
I am speaking and I am quiet.
From the outside, we both pale,
And I fail to breathe
Because when I am here, and when I learn,
a family grieves.
This starts, as if, a funeral
The smell of death but not decay.
The thiel does not congeal,
But I can feel the blood it had replaced.
It pools in my glove.
My sweat.
In death, the evidence of life could not be clearer.
Your flesh, in stiff relaxation, held memory
Of movement
An energy contained,
Within the joy of every smoothened wrinkle
I see a lifetime of love and regret.
But I do not know you
I know you have lived, and you have died.
But you have lived, and you have died.
I return you to your casket,
And I return to mine.
Four walls encase my mind in rumination
What do I wish to find?
It starts, as if, a funeral.
I am small, and I am alive.
When I gaze out to the crystalline sky
I understand my place-
too small, and too big
Vast like the expanse of space
An infinitum of possibility contained in one tiny body,
That moves no boulders and fells no trees.
When I breathe, a universe within a universe
Within yet another,
Enables me to put pen to paper
Knife to skin
And now, I see what is within.
My shoes meet Polyflor flooring,
The heavy rain from only outside.
Over the sea of lab-coat white,
The instructor speaks.
This starts, as if a funeral.
Little Love, 2022
There is a love I care to share,Not uncommon nor neither rare.
It doth float not from scents of flowers
Granted not by higher powers.
But, by the very words you spake,
By each breath and chortle make.
What should I do? That little love
That sails deep seas and clouds above
That little love which sings for me
As sweet as I do make my tea.
And I wonder doth the love too sing
into thine ear, is’t joy it brings?
I feel that love each time I drink
in thine sights and pause to think.
Bathed in sunlight’s melodic beams
soaked in moonlit, tranquil dreams.
There is a love I care to share,
Natural as leaping to a hare.
For I think that it’s fair to say-
If there is a love it’s here to stay.
Prompt: Breath, 2023
There is a beauty in stillness. Her lips are unmoving.The inaudible flow of words and song,
sing themselves into existence-
Pleasing notes hanging in the air
like Christmas baubles. But,
no air may rush into her lungs,
no air may rush out.
Her eyes, shut, welded.
The trickle of iron rushing
through cracks in her eyelids.
Golden, gilded eyelashes reeking of opulence
and High-Living.
Encrusted each with mascaras of diamonds.
Her nose is petite, just how
he likes it. Oil, viscera
pool at her feet,
The stench of stagnation.
How she wished to clean it,
unable to bend.