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Stephen Pickering

Category: My Poetry

  • A New Poem | “May’s River” (Part Deux)

    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.

  • A Poem | Scarlet Fever

    I want to become the flower
    Drinking a hawthorn berry shower.
    I feel that the painting is alive
    That I could jump inside
    and live a life.

    The love you want resides inside a flame
    Burning Jerusalem to the coast of Spain.
    From the secret Indian province
    to the street children’s colorful ribbon dance.
    A carousel song.
    They want to belong.
    Children of the Sun
    in the land before time begun.

    We are the whispering ones,
    following the trail of crumbs,
    grasping for song,
    hoping the the poem will come along.
    “Run along, run along, my dears
    before those little eyes fill with tears.
    They are the dew, you know,
    Freshly made from the melting snow.
    The only God is in your head,
    but he’s real and he’s meant what he’s said.”

    We’re so tired. We need some sleep.
    It’s so important that we dream.
    It becomes the patterned sleeve,
    The path by which we leave.
    Tomorrow’s sounding more like a bell
    On which the doves of heaven sing
    To the serpents of hell.
    Will we wait here all morning in the rain
    For the climbing of that midnight train?

    It’s made of blue smoke and jazz,
    and all the things that we didn’t have.
    Halve a peach with me.
    Sit down and eat.
    When you were a baby covered in red
    Did you know the song would awaken the souls
    and bring back the dead?

    Don’t forget the poem,
    or Lucy living under Lake Victoria’s soil.
    Blood made of Sun.
    Run, rabbit, run.
    London is here,
    but her price is too dear.

    I’m not sure what would make us happy tonight.
    A glass of mediteranean wine?
    Distilled from the soapy sea
    Of flavored memory?

    What should we worry about,
    cry for and shout?
    We may go to sleep,
    Lie about and dream,
    or maybe there’s something on T.V.,
    then walk quietly the evening streets.

    The poem at the end of the mind
    peeks its eyes up through the morning’s rhyme,
    effortlessly following the golden thread of desire,
    moving by magic carpet and doesn’t tire.
    It winds up a European cobblestone street
    looking for a safe place to curl up and grieve.
    It is the red, Irish beauty among the leaves
    and the flight to the maiden czar across the eternal sea.
    She who holds court
    at the end of the World.

    At the bottom of that eternal, endless sea
    The golden bird, golden horse, the princess
    We want to return and long to be.

  • Poem | “Thunder Painting”

    Don’t be desireous under White Mountain.
    The river’s tall feathered tail
    Will blast you into the crag’s milky fountain.
    Will whisk you away
    To a faraway place
    In the steam boat’s desert Sun,
    Buried beneath a 17th century ruin.
    You won’t get to stay up and play.
    Each door will turn you away.
    You won’t burn your fires at midnight
    Or dream of the horse haired magic of twilight.
    The cattle callers will stake their claim
    Down your captured, straining, mustang mane.
    Only for the bewildered and assertive has time begun.
    So now you are forever on the run
    From the father with a shot gun,
    From the book that’s never done.
    A story of a man who climbed a cloud
    Getting passed the Giant by not making a sound.
    But the danger is he may sleep on the stove or be a meal.
    When there’s a castle on your head
    That’s part of the deal.
    If you find your way down
    You’ll be the talk of the town.
    Covered in Goose down
    Eveywhere you go golden eggs roll around.
    Rescue Mother from the debt.
    Take Newton’s weight off your head.
    Lift the Goddess of Sais’ silken veil.
    And for the New World set sail.
    Buy your Indian master whose been two places at once
    Before he sells Manhattan for a buck.
    Inside his pipe is a 10,000 year old pine,
    Japanese Geisha girls and black Saki wine.
    It don’t take science to tell us it will never die.
    It’s one hundred deer skin catamarans
    Sailing Chinese warriors to settle Peruvian lands.
    They’ll block your walls and tear down your office
    If all you can think of
    Is sex with the White Buffalo Goddess.
    So when you approach her, lay down your mask.
    Let the blue Moon dance on the snowy fields and pass.
    Let the deer’s eyes see through the men with guns
    To the glistening forest and endless mountains beyond.

    Sent from my iPhone

    Posted via email from stephenpickering’s posterous

  • Poem | “9 Miracles”

    We can all be good.
    The rough beast crawling towards Bethlehem
    says, “You should.”
    But we can let it go,
    face in the wind, rain, and snow,
    as the falcon of our soul soars off Kilimanjaro.
    The distant bells
    are Black Sea shells,
    and her lips sail closer
    as we fall deeper
    into a dreamless sleep, dryer than the Sahara,
    only broken up by the sparkle of the Sun lasered sand
    that the beast remembers as a once fruitful land.
    At once we transcend Pharoah’s gold
    and the story of Yusef that’s been told
    of falling in a well and into Egypt being sold.
    It doesn’t hold as much for us anymore now that the fire
    has colored the mountain and drinken from the well
    of thirsty distraction that’s blinded to the veil
    covering the passage to the Promiseland.

    We hold true to these words,
    heart given to each other,
    and our congregation formed like a ring of birds.

    One for the Trinity two for the show
    three to take the chances so that all can know.

    Isis can hold us up even as she nurses the productions of time
    in search of her husband the divine.

    We sit on the throne, a Supernova
    that produced all this gold,
    as the serpent slithers towards Rome.
    Ptolemy falls from the Alexandrian stacks
    carrying the Moon and stars on his back.
    Someone such should know
    that the Caliphs have buried his secret scroll.
    The priests drown the halls in chants
    as the prince discovers the burning bed.
    Each Irish maidens’ beauty more spectacular than the next
    as Olympus opens each door to the morning breath,
    and Demeter sprints to Avalon
    with the message of Aquinas’ last glance.

  • Ocean City (A Poem)

    There are stars inside my blood
    And my blood’s inside a star.
    We’ve rolled the comet oceans, survived the flood,
    And harmonized infinite worlds inside a beating pulsar.I saw silver tonight and one red flame.
    My sky was below me and my sea above.
    Though we knew the answer, we couldn’t say the name.
    We became pure feeling, but it wasn’t hate or love.

    The true victory lies inside the undefined.
    True love was two minutes before you were not mine.
    When the ship returns with his golden flock,
    Greece will be restored, and Hermes never stopped.

    The old German man looks down from the Bavarian Alps,
    Watching the Ionian fishermen scratching their scalps.
    The Fisher King returns damaged goods
    To his drawbridge castle hidden in the English woods.

    The maiden escaping the God turns into a doe.
    Pluto knowing both, hesitates, and turns white as snow.
    All the kids take photos of St. Petersburg’s colorful dancers
    While an iceburg dead eyes the city, demanding answers.

    Finally the two of us feel good as rain.
    Two more days and we’ll bake these alleyways again.
    The twelve headed monster respects no sleep.
    But he didn’t know what slayed him was us waking while we dreamed.

    Sent from my iPhone

    Posted via email from stephenpickering’s posterous

  • Where’s the King?

    Where’s the King,
    The radiant crown?
    All winter long he’s been down,
    Down to the ground,
    Driven by a stake.
    Oh, how he pays for the glowing mistake.
    But I’ll take you in my arms at night.
    Alice will soon find the cat,
    And everything will be alright.
    The lake will glitter with moonlight
    With the boxers exuberant by the pool
    Not understanding where he’s at.

    Will we go to school
    Or hooky down by the river
    Protected by the Cottonwoods and the cool
    Shoals that makes our souls shiver?

    An ant awaits us to give up our thoughts,
    To set our books down by the stream.
    He digs his hole in search of the literary dream,
    the fairy tale, the only thing
    that can truly be lived out in Spring.

    He’ll say I loved your wonderful musings
    But the sentence you wrote on Romeo’s confusing.
    Shouldn’t you kiss or at least hold her hand?
    And let go of the reins like a romantic man?

    The Russians are under ground, you know,
    Dating bronze, silver, and golden girls
    Who’ve built castles under the snow.
    Each night I speak to them
    To see how their adventure’s turned.
    Pa Ruuski is not the language we speak
    It’s one you never heard

    Jesus’ triangle sweeps the West.
    Buddha’s the East.
    They say the great mountain fills the South
    With eternal life for he who sucks from it’s rivers mouth.

    But you should take your girl now
    And go back to school;
    Back to the chambers of the golden rule.
    There will be other times
    To play and frolic and rhyme.
    Come back tomorrow and you’ll lose your sorrow.
    Come back next week,
    I’ll bring you the dream you seek.

    Catfish at night: the crickets delight.
    They belong in eternal June
    Hanging from the crescent Moon.
    Lay here for a moment, but then you must leave soon.
    Isn’t that what your mind says?
    But rejoice, for you may leave your Soul here,
    for all of eternity, to swoon.

    Sent from my iPhone

    Posted via email from stephenpickering’s posterous