Category: Poetry

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Desperation

Boiling out of the sky-white flakes they touch your face and vaporize
Eyes held in awe of the world which seems designed to inflict red
A soul tithing to your own personal demi-urge // disaster an end in itself
Pat and sever, kiss and yearn, touch with disgust the coal glowing there
It holds heat — throw yourself at it, unquenched hatred coloring the snowbanks

Spit at his feet, tell her she’s a shitty friend
Tear the paper
Light the photo on fire with a yellow bic lighter from the seven eleven
Go out in the street and scream at the stars that have to be there, hidden behind the storm
I hate you, I said
The interstices of pixels sintering through my retinas like laserlight

I turned to look, but you were gone
A final glow of desperation

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Things

Things are good
Things are tragic
Things are desperate
Things can’t feel
Things are nice
I can love them but they don’t love me

Things fall apart
Things are beautiful
Things are reassembled endlessly
Things won’t hurt me
Things can be controlled
You can buy things
You can be kept warm and safe by things
Things won’t abandon you

Things are ugly
Things don’t look you in the eye
In the grocery store
And you can’t look back at them
Because you are ashamed
To see the look in their eyes
That tells you that you deserve the shame
Or nothing
So you never look at anyone

And pad your life with things
And push people away
Because things can’t be destroyed, only broken
Things are your life to the exclusion of hurt
Things are where you lie awake at night
Things are there when you come home
And there your things are
You hug your things
You cry into their soft fur
You can give your warmth to things
And they will return that warmth
But they are not warm, themselves
So if you pour your heart into things
You might not get love
Decide now, between things and a world

Buy things
Fuck myself with things but not feel it
Minimize risk with things
Defend myself with things
Tell things what I need
They won’t tell me
Drive into the desert in things
Show the world who I am with things
Automate things
Someday soon, things will be able to care for me

I go home and choose things
Sort things
Wrap myself in a blanket of things
Go to sleep with things
Things will be fine
Things will be normal
Sleep

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Manifest

Let me feel the breadth and depth of life
Seeing the path laid before me by my own spirit
Unafraid of the darkness
The moon glittering on the hills and streams

Let me yearn for freedom but not power
Awake in the days when life proves my worth
A scent of sweet pea blossoms glowing in the evening
Smoke rolling in from distant mountain fires

Let me be settled in a time and place of my choosing
A home full of love and joy
A garden of sunlight to bask in
Passion cooking on the stove, a hug and a kiss the fountain of days to come

Let me breathe life into others and they into me
Listening to their stories and joining their path for a time
Divergence becoming a gift, knowing we may never see one another again
Taking their stories with me and spreading them like seeds

Let me cast spells into the lake of time
A rose in my right hand
The iridule of a mussel shell between thumb and forefinger
Intent of my heart to wind a cosmic spring

Let me cast forth my power into the night of the universe
Unearthed and desolate
A span of iron forged in the cores of ten billion suns
Harmonic foam scintillating with the radiation of me

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848ET9112001

Today the world ended and was reborn in an instant, out of the sheetrock and neatly filed papers, let loose in the sky, all those things that no longer seem important.

On TV, the path of a jet from Boston is traced out, over the ponds and streams and mountains and lakes where I was born, over the Berkshire Connector, over the road to Montreal.
Banking swiftly into a straight line with that feeling you get when history is ripped free of itself and the universe that had been falls away.

What we feel in the pit of our stomach, when a tsunami breaks in the quantum foam, when the underlying connections are ripped clean for an instant. And the true humanity of it all is made plain by an exodus of human beings, people walking calmly and quietly, hand in hand, helping the injured, making their way together across the bridge of time.

In memory of those who fell
And the universe they carried with them

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Journey

Copyright (c) 2014 by Nicholas Roy, all rights reserved

I set out across the land
Knowing not where I would stop
Settling with unease each night along the way
A route through brambled undertuff
The stars to light my way

The heat of days
The salt-crust red of skin
Dust and callus hands beridged

I found along my arc through deepest steamcrossed plain
A field girded round with wire rusted, barbed in vain
No longer were the cattle bound within its mesh
Flesh had long ago made way for sun bleached scaffolding
The beat of many rays

The rhythm found
I trudged along
Not asking what to seek

The time would come when I laid down
To rest of that was sure
Parameters for marking home
Elusive as the dew

Thirst of days
No water found
Heat and ache and nothing new

Then one night, under the stars
I cast my thoughts adrift
Found peace in looking up at them
Felt rain within my chest

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Nearly Winter In State College

Golden hued white against the gradient halfblue
Comet tails of the anthropocene
Jets arc up out of Baltimore and DC
The glint of their skins lost in the crystalline winter southern sky
Over the Appalachians
Altitude so great as to become an abstraction
Passengers plying their way to Chicago, Denver or Los Angeles
Christmas presents wrapped and boxed in the hold
And on earth, at my kitchen table
I look out on the snow-covered lawns, breathing deeply
Banana bread and coffee fill the air

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Different Soil

The land heaves to meet the sky
An arch of sandstone and limestone
Washed away by a quarter billion years’ rain

Among the scarred hilltops and ridged remnants
In a green valley in the wilds of Penn’s Woods
I sense the transience of my position

Where I come from I was certain
Of many things which are just as untrue
The words, clinging to the heels of my feet as I tread Iowa Avenue’s sidewalk

As you breathe, there, you feel them
Words pass through the membrane of your lungs
Dissolve in the blood and cross a barrier to saturate your being

Breathing here, the oxygen is the same
Knowledge and wisdom flow through the valley
But I miss the words

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A Shift

The world still looked the same, but it was different
He walked from the gym, back to where he parked his car
There were still cars here, and people, dirt and beauty
He could smell the bar-b-que cooking down the street

It was the same old world, but the underpinnings of it had been replaced in the night
Everyone was talking to themselves – no, they were talking to thin air
But the thin air was everyone else

The old rules faded into the background, burning away like ground fog at 6 o’clock on a sunny spring morning

The guts of the plane had been changed while the plane was in flight
The re-tooling of the world system had taken place before anything could have been done

At every point on the curve, it looks like the curve is going straight up from here
But things still seem pretty normal