Everything points your way;
You can see the golden eye.
What the Queen has bequeathed to stay
home runs and apple pies loft back into your sky.

Each ruinous nation
rejects finally even the fallen tree;
Above the skies stares salvation
where still the angels sing.

Where were you when she was born?
You were a tree, a river, and finally a tear.
Whose lips were those that were shorn?
Shaven notes from the throat so none could hear.

This dream awakes you, but you still sleep.
Outside the cold wind sings her favorite winter song.
One can feel something moving beneath the Solstice deep:
Eyes that speak of staying and, yet, in their golden radiance, of moving on.

©2011 Stephen K. Pickering

____________

“Her Face Was in a Bed of Hair”

Her face was in a bed of hair,
Like flowers in a plot-
Her hand was whiter than the sperm
That feeds the sacred light.
Her tongue more tender than the tune
That totters in the leaves_
Who hears may be incredulous,
Who witnesses, believes.

©1880 Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson – Her True Self from Flash Rosenberg on Vimeo.

There’s something about standing here.
Purple lake.
You lake monsters curl
around Nessie’s frame
while locked inside
twirls Nessie’s babe.
The bark peeled away,
the arrow fires straight through
the cotton woods
where the vision stood.
One can hear the fields ticking,
the silence purring
Delta blues
Bitches brew.
The vision spirals inward
to that place
where nothing escapes.
The gourd swallows the flame
until we’re full, until we’re done
until we’ve given up
and then smiles it back to us again.

© 2011 – Stephen K. Pickering

This is in iambic tetrameter with the form of an English Sonnet.

The Night Sea

 
I want to breath again
Beneath the Mythic pond.
This fiction blew the wind
And bore the dew soaked dawn.

The spirits sing from wells.
The earths throat opens wide.
They say what no one tells.
Their secrets kept inside.

The king is sleeping still.
The drawbridge dream released.
His knights ride up myth’s hill
Then swim her magic seas.

Hearts’ white deer fly through snow
To kingdoms none have known.

© 2011 Stephen Pickering

Which city does the emerald river flow?
Where flowers dance in secret sacred shapes.
Symbolic eyes forgotten long ago.
Its palace mystery singing to the Fates.

The grand old river swells the earthen banks.
The deep wood’s breath is like a lover’s song.
Its Mystery water rises where love sank.
We hold on floating down where we belong.

The waters deep each morning fill the Sun.
An orange glow that fills our eyes and hearts.
The moonlight shimmers where our souls should run.
These circles light the spaces where love starts.

I long for the day when she will turn and say
Joy streaming from her eye, “You finally came.”

I was just glancing at Youtube, and it said that it was national poetry month. Man they have a day and a month for everything, don’t they? Hehehehehe. Well, since I’m a poet, I thought I should write some poems, especially this month! Just wrote this sonnet a few minutes ago. Hopefully I can do one each morning for the remainder of the month, in honor of the month. I’ll just keep posting them here so I don’t have to have a new post for each and every poem. Maybe I’ll do a Youtube video at the end of the Month in honor of “Spoken Word Poetry.”

Sonnet – April 11th, 2011

New York and light.
East Egg above.
They dance all night
The Jitterbug.

Their dreams play notes
Her favorite song.
The things they wrote
She danced along.

With eyes like that
That guy could sing.
She flys him back
Across the sea.

The city’s moon:
It strums their tune.

Download audio file (Theres-Something-Dark.mp3)

There’s something dark about this town.
It’s made my heart all broken sore.
The stars upstairs they hear a sound.
The dark hair girl she’s at the door.
I want to go somewhere and weep.
She hurts me with her darkest stares.
Through her I walk the lonely street
Of silent dreams and cold nightmares.
The scars of vice in Central Park
Arrest the man the news had lost.
He waltzes girls back to the dark
Who think of nothing nor what it costs.
These folks who tell their dreams goodbye,
Build towers up to cut the sky.

These flowers bloom and the night goes on
The T.V. tells us what’s right from wrong.

_____________________________________________________________

I’ve also been working with some that have varying lengths. I think the best bet in the long run for me, is to let the line speak for itself, in the sense that, however it hits me, whatever length that is, just go with that. And then I think you get to a point where you don’t really need to fit the line into a structure if it doesn’t come to you that way, which naturally is free verse.

So I guess, one of the points of writing within structure, is almost like exercise. You do that (or this) for a while, then your brain feels strong enough, confident enough, if you will, to walk out on the “limbs” alone.

Illustration by Stephen Pickering. "May's River" (cc) 2010. painted on iPad using ArtStudio, with added figurines using Picnik online graphic editor.

You tore on past the river’s flow.
Now I know, now I know.
You walked from the house’s door into the snow
An instinct to let go, to let it go.

The menagerie fortress tower
looms larger by the hour.
Talking to the morning’s vestigial crops
into the elevators’ chop, chop, chops.
And disturbing them like making rings
Outward bound as the sunshine morning sings.

You of the potato patch’s mouth, mouth, mouth
have grown up too early to shout, shout, shout,
and now you’ve got trouble in the military man’s
house, house, house
given way to your sacred gifts’ sound
down South, South, South.

All the Milky Way’s a stir
with the blasted World,
of the strange gifts at night when two strangers eyes meet
down by the wharf with fresh cod to eat
and malted whiskey to drink.
They drive back on one tire
As a family waits by the hour
For some vestigial return at least
For some reason to leave the porch and heat.

‘Twas you that rounded the edges and fastened the ties,
soaked the oars in morning dew butter
before the wind in the hollow’s current died?
Each moment a little more dishonest, and a little piece of you tries,
A little piece of you dies.

Dies to the factories making crap
for the kids churning and drowning in the school’s cyndricular vat.
They reach for the elbows of the crow’s soaring flight,
but their hands seem too tiny in the subliminal sky.

They do not sing beyond it’s beauty.
They come home and sink their little heads into the factory pillow.
The hawk haunts the sky, and the ducks huddle under the willow.
All morning long with a fever blistered pitch
Those sculpted cliffs dive headlong into the ravine’s ditch.

Could you shower up for morning sup
And return fresh and green like a planted cup?
We’ve made winter soup and duck.
We’ve made sauces in planters and pink strawberry wine;
All of this and more from the edge of some perennial vine.

You will come to the forest edge when it’s time.
This we know from the story book rhyme.
You will pass through the walled garden’s oval arch
In time to escape the troops’ Kaiser’s Day march.

We will gather for a picnic ’round Robbins’ Lake.
Take a turn north just before Haliford’s gate.
Be sure and set the case of our dozen forebears down.
So that she may rest without soiling her satin white gown.

Two minutes into her eyes:
the inter tube by sunrise.
Back by noon for a surprise.
Smoothed over by gems from the boogie nights.

The Queen you ask, the heat of the midsummer Sun.
Aye it’s her, that’s the one.
Hold her in your diary secretly until the pressure of emotions
Lifts the gold of the ancient Spanish wreck.
May the two of you bathe in doubloons
Never leaving your room.
None are good enough to fly into this sacred space
that all of eternity’s changlings cannot erase.

But before you leave if you could do only one thing:
Pick up that dial, call the complex, and let it ring.
They and their party will have gone to the beach for the day.
This will give you time to think of what to say.

She wants a little house deep on the other side of the woods.
We know she talked on and on about the city and her friends,
but some lies are understood.

Go wait under that shed and close your eyes
blasted even as it is by flashes of the darkening sky.
Don’t you think she would if she could?
(I mean turn around and stay. Of course, she would.)
But the dancing goes on all night at Park Place.
You’ve done the right thing to leave without a trace.
They won’t remember anything not even your face.
All this time you thought that one memory couldn’t be erased.

Ruby lights throb chaotic motions from the room.
Blue, crazed, and wild, they lay out lines for the glowing Moon.
The jeweled lights never cease
to point toward the balcony’s deserted seat.
You come down a golden flight of stairs.
The company has arrived, waiting down there.
Up from the bottom and flopping onto the beach
even she comes up from 20,000 leagues.

You turn the corner and walk up the street
Thousands of children are at your feet.
His majesty HRH has just flown in.
No one met him at the gates for the parade to begin.
Inside even the cells of the carpet nubs couldn’t withstand
The pressure of a human being freaking out the light barrier
And so dragged the little shanty of a house back in time.

Passed out by the celebrations you left in time to climb the ocean cliffs
leaving alone the flowers she brought you to bob on the tied up skiff.
Parsing weed, bushes, trees, and vine
you’re bruised, scared, and knee-scraped by the sheer climb.

The circled gate
Opened not a minute too late.
And there further than the mountains dotting the African shore
lifted the hand of the one whose eyes gave birth
to an opening in the middle, between Jason’s clashing rocks,
of the Universe’s sacred door.

Sent from my iPad

(cc)2010. Stephen Pickering.