Author Information
Vessel In Blue Gale
Is there a sense of closeness in your lostness?
Or are they mine; crystals of coldness?
Drawn long like the Arctic sun
Draws fingers: a divining rod of sorts
To find water, listless blue and formless
At substanceless rest it will still burn
Like good coffee or bourbon
The coldest warmth always flows first
Last and strongest in the elasticity of it’s concession
Like a tree grown to bow in the perennial gales
A curtsy and wave to passing time
Eons and eons of life and abnegation
As I do too, here in fleeting permanence
I feel, feel, think; like clockwork
Grinding grudgingly back to the same old place
So fierce, these are the teeth that bite the hardest
The deepest and widest tear of all
The naked white of my open eyes
Exposed filaments of raw nerves are
Barbs to hook and drag the past
Out of the sea, alone on the pier
Into the deep, a floundering man
Blew to black, bruising back:
To stale new beginnings and tired old stringencies.
NJP 20/10/2003
