The Windows to your Soul [sonnet]
If just one piece of all the sum of you
could be preserved so I could see your heart,
I know already which would be the part —
the one which for my treasure I’d accrue.
It would not be your soft neck or your thigh
(the smoothest region like a baby’s skin);
although they send my senses in a spin,
there’s something else of you for which I’d die.
Enough of all this mystery! you exclaim;
what could it be to mesmerise me so?
The answer is the windows to your soul;
to look through them has kept me whole and sane.
By now, this fact should come as no surprise:
The body part I want would be your eyes!
© 2011, Alan Morrison
The Hand of the Wind [poem]
Why would the wind have such long fingers?
Unseen, they reach through leafy hair,
chilling the neutral nightsome air —
the frisky daytime glare emboldened
by their
blow-by-blow
rain-or-snow
batten-down-the-shutters
flappening flow.
Heaven has no Rage
“Heaven has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turned,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorned.”(William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1697)
e.e. cummings quote
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting”
(e.e. cummings)
Landslide [poem]
Yes, darling,
I’d love to play with you —
but not the games you seem to favour,
which mostly involve
a crudely parodied sideshow
of a woefully widespread
Black Widow spider.
Yes, darling,
I’d love to have sex with you —
but not if you use it, my mind to control,
ruthlessly wrapping
your clitoris round my neck
like a succulent scarf
with a scream for a soul.
The Empty Swing [sonnet]
There is something about that empty swing
which speaks to me of spaces left unfilled
by little people who no longer cling
like climbing vines nor grow like daffodils.
Some other void usurps their playful place
(where laughter once concealed the hammerblow);
now ominously haunts the interface,
while dangling hollow chairs sway to and fro.
10-14, Part 1 [sonnet]
Some say sonettos throw you in a cage,
imprison you, your back against the wall;
claiming they herald from a bygone age —
a time of courtly love ‘Neanderthal’.
Poetry, they feel, should always run free —
stream of consciousness, never bow the knee
to any structure pre-prepared, rigid,
or written verse is bound to be frigid.
Flaming Tongues [sonnet]
In all my many tangletimes of love,
I never have relinquished all control.
In sensing peril’s pall (as I adjudged),
I never pledged the last ounce of my soul.
God knows I wanted all the tongues of fire
which beckoned me in flames to form a whole.
Yet never would I give what was required;
(I hadn’t met the other magnet pole).
I Knew Two Lights [poem]
An age ago I knew two lights
which hovered brightly in my eyes;
on an eighteen-carat platter
they were served without goodbyes.
But fate made the strangest turn
and took away their glow;
then latterly (not by chance)
they came into the fevered flow
of my mute meandering mind;
and now I disturbingly find
that I must
unbury the dream
revisit the scene
renovate the theme
rekindle the joy
reawaken the pain
repair the destroyed
restore the gleam
by the going-through-of-it-all again.
Startled Shoes [sonnet]
Where is the open heart I vainly seek
who will not flee from love in startled shoes;
who, when kissed, will show her soft undercheek,
for whom defensiveness is not a ruse?
Where is the forthright face, unspoilt, wide-eyed
whose stratagem is only beauty, peace
and truth — whose countenance cries humbled pride,
whose mystery unfolds without a crease.
The Naked Troubadour 