Month: Jun 2012
Unbuckle the Limits
It’s long past time to unbuckle the limits I’ve imposed on myself so as not to be too outrageous and footloose. The time has come to think, feel, say and do things which I’ve never thought, felt, said and done before. The extreme brevity of life (a gift) dictates that I must cast off all chains (even those which do not appear to be chains – of which there are many in our lives). I’ve never been into conformity or conventionality but now I’m turning it all up a few notches and more. Fear nothing. Do anything. Normalcy is madness. True friends will understand.
Loose Ends [sonnet]
If, from the start, we’d only been good friends
with me not hijacked by your whirlpool streams
we wouldn’t have to leave all these loose ends.
(Once more I learn that nothing’s what it seems).
Your vortex hit me like a speeding truck.
I knew you wanted more than I could give
(to tell the truth I wasn’t thunderstruck)
so I became a restless fugitive.
However, what blazed up was not in vain.
there are no accidents, as we both know;
and though we’re now like strangers on a train
experience provides a chance to grow.
Who knows? In other worlds our paths may cross.
Where love has been, one cannot suffer loss.
© 2012, Alan Morrison
Inferno’s Archetype [poem]
I think I may just be a closet arsonist.
Although they always try to fit asbestos gloves
around my charred enflamed and probing hands
and make their vain attempts to wash away the
palisade of fire which stands between my brightly
blazing dreams and fortune’s fragile guillotines
I will engulf their crude repressive fearfilled
riot shields with heat-ignited fuel-drenched rags
in bottled cocktails unconcealed. I rain them
down upon their heads until the blanket sound
which marks their vast extinguishing experiment
can be pronounced officially as dead.
Summit Mist [sonnet]
Somehow you got your heat into my flow
and tinkered with the workings of my heart;
I thought I’d hurled you from me long ago
but every tactic used you did outsmart.
It’s like I chose the highest mountain top
to climb although ascent means certain death;
such scaling heights as yours (each side a drop)
enthrall me — I can hardly draw a breath.
But yet your body gives me confidence
and — like no other flesh has ever done —
you baste me in your moistful hole intense
and melt the avalanching midnight sun.
While on your summit all I see is mist
through which no other mountain can exist.
© 2012, Alan Morrison
For Every Dream which Drowndly Dies [poem]
We turn over the same bit of soil with our clodded shovels
time and time again. Like nodding donkeys on an oilfield’s
dour terrain our motion moves perpetually, verse with no
refrain. Prosaicly [phonetically speaking – note there’s no
mistake] when we’ve finished with our spades we try to
smooth it with a rake! This patterned repetition is embedded
in our psyches as an over-slightly loathesome spikey lump
of worthless writhing superstition. Obsessive-compulsive
behaviour, said the uncredible shrinking man whose lack
of obvious mercy far outweighed the hurting crowd of
interspersed subliminally underversing fountainheads.
If only we could grow some substance to our metaphoric
beards we would find that from then on there would be
no further processes which sanity proclaims as weird
(nessly) charging blame. For every dream which drowndly
dies, ten thousand more will take its place; but only when
some courage makes our unevolving souls begin to grasp
the higher branches with our empty-fingered hands will we
then find our wings to fly and make a stand against the lie.
© 2012, Alan Morrison
This Awkward Art [poem]
This life is a latticework of leftover
drownful dreams which, when painted
with our drainlike thinned-out blood,
leaves desperadoed ebbing stains
of wholly homemade gravy-feigning
pigment wash upon the canvas
brushstrokes’ brave and brackish
left-outsided wilting undergush.