Best Darkly Poems
Falling through pompous poems, spiraling
Slippery sinking, rhyming rolling
In down directions, foreign for me
Cascading in chalkboard screechy sounds
Hanging by nails that can catch and clasp
Clinging to hollow hopes once grasped
Sliding sorrows, long lost dreams dashed
Descending dusty thoughts that propel
Nothing now left of me, you can tell
I know you see me from up there,
from halfway up the steep and twisting lane.
In early half-light as you take your walk
I no doubt seem to loom as you descend,
appear to grow, to rise from earth,
my boxlike rectilinearity,
severe and unadorned geometry,
a silhouette against the solitary sodium source.
I once hosted fiery-throated hymns
from dedicated souls in Sunday best:
“Marchog, Jesu, yn llwyddiannus”,
“O! Iesu mawr, rho d’anian bur” –
voices rich and raised and resonant,
so filled with faith, so gorged with God.
My pitch-pine pews were polished
by coat and skirt and trouser twill.
Abandoned now, unloved, slab-still,
void and stark and desolate,
with quarry-tiled floor that would resound
with joy were anyone to walk upon it,
I present gaping emptiness, a thing felt,
a cave whose darkness, palpable,
is peopled by retreating echoes of my past,
like timorous ghosts far too afraid to speak.
But there is One I must not name –
though He might be known by
the four letters of the tetragrammaton –
who lodges in my roomy quarters,
cowers within my tight square corners,
seeking shadows when the sun stares in.
I hear Him breathing as
He sweats in His remorse, a thing smelt.
He hides from the accusing eyes of every nation,
the eyes that witness daily His forlorn creation.
(The chapel speaking here is in a small place in West Wales, UK)
(Translations: “Marchog, Jesu, yn llwyddiannus” = "Ride on Jesu, all victorious"; “O! Iesu mawr, rho d’anian bur” = "O Jesu, let Thy spirit bless")
impressionistic inspiration
in visualised expressions
Raging, fierce winds of Mars
marched across Earth’s skyscape,
in the season of the decline of Man
Fall of the God-chosen specie,
autumn of impending extinction
Twas an apocalyptic mushroom noon
when the radioactive rains descended
upon the cities of carnage
War-torn topography uterine shelters were closing,
as phallic missiles were radar target trace fire opening
Bomb pockmarks
marring the beautiful faces
of the cosmopolitan ladies
Uranium continental premature blood splatter
brings a copious end
to the foreplay disaster chatter
Civilization shamefully undressing
their disfigured body of technology
in the warped climax throes of gamma-ray grief
Nuclear twilight offer enticing mutated midnight promises;
cobra kisses of cobalt breath,
instant non-gratification death
delivered on a decaying silk bed of roses
Black widow drone infertility moans
poisons the stratosphere acidic harshly
See the silhouetted pain reflecting
from the montero-shaped mirror
Oh ... how the grim night glows darkly!
Hear the military pawns of Mars,
grunt boots on the ground dying
Civilians combat the fear of pandemic infection,
as the Venus flytrap mouth of human aggression
is ravenously opening wider and wider
Man’s morbid love fixation on death
will make him try to extinguish the light of life
Thus his fatal end, he cannot blindly see
When come the nuclear twilight,
the winter night will glow so ever darkly!
Europe won't survive a cold winter
Israel's and Saudi's ties to us grow thinner
Latin America now under communism's spell
Iran, India, Turkey among Russia's clientele
Mr. Putin's grand strategy now nearly in place
Come say a prayer for the human race
Ukraine can't hold out forever
After that, watch Vladimir pull his levers
Either the United States grows a spine
Or soon on potatoes and cheap vodka we dine
~ Bone up on your Russian, Comrades! ~
Alone upon a foggy night,
With waxing moon a ghostly light,
Resounded wings.
My mind contrived a murders flight,
While lack of cawing did rewrite,
Infernal things.
Resigned to capture budding fright;
I drew the curtains snugly tight;
My nerves hairsprings.
And though a superstitious rite;
I wore a cross to non-invite,
Undead darklings.
The third hour rings!
And witchly brings,
A inly fright on stealthy feet.
My courage swings,
As terror clings,
To fragile faiths undone belief.
And thin as strings,
My reasoning’s,
Assure a vampire’s kiss is sweet.
Unvoiced inklings,
Entrée stranglings,
Awaits your breathless Marguerite.
Across the floor without a creak,
Asquint, I see a shadow creep,
Phantasmaly.
Then lips are ice against my cheek,
A summer ice that burned like heat,
So wickedly.
And when she drove her daggers deep,
I begged her end my mortal keep,
And boundary.
With aching heart at final beat,
She drank the last of my conceit,
And murdered me.
Immortal is my Antoinette,
My slayer whom shall not forget,
That foggy night.
A Mephistophelean vignette,
Requital casts my silhouette,
In deaths twilight.
To scorn a woman fosters debt,
My debtor e'er bleeds regret
A bloodless white.
Alas she wishes she did beget,
A lover on the night we met,
To my delight.
Darkness and I have become allies,
affinity by association's shadowed prayer
spoken of the same kindred language,
consanguinity in our devout appeal
of blackening night's smoky exposure,
like a coke whore I obligingly snort it
doomed to partake in a dreadful flight
upon an impeding raven's blighted sojourn
midway extravagances of destructive somber ruins,
obscurity's sulphurous gloom of unsung melodies
surrendered in silence 'midst dusky moonlit spirits
The poetess walks along a darkened hallway
Listening for the answers in the night
Her heart contained behind a glass doorway
She sees her heart pulsating with white light
Pounding on the opaque glass she screams
listening for the answers in the night
Behind this door imprisoned are her dreams
Heart on a plate waiting to be devoured
pounding on the opaque glass she screams
Some people call this the witching hour
Creatures of the night begin their feast
Heart on a plate waiting to be devoured
Her heart absorbs the energy from the beasts
Creatures of the night no longer feast
The poetess walks along a darkened hallway
Her heart contained behind a glass doorway
July 12/2013
You keep out everything I don’t want to see
How can I fall for someone else
Feels like theres no escape
From everything I feel that could keep me from being so happy
Its so darkly beautiful when we touch
Like stars colliding creating cosmic dust
Dark beautiful, how is the way your feeling tonight
Its not just about whats beautiful to the eye
Its really what we are about inside
Feel like I am floating
Alone from you, just sinking
You had better make sure I am alive
Because I have got nothing else to believe
In except what makes you the whole of me
Darkly beautiful, knowing only what makes us spark
Chorus
Here I wish to be laying in your arms
Being with you, feeling no harm
Kiss me softly, each embrace lingering in my heart
Make love to me so breathess
From the first touch to the last caress
Heavens got no place I want to be anymore
Theres no knowing what we could leave behind when we die
So I want make the most of my life
Need to share it with you with every beat of my heart
Darkly beautiful in my thoughts of you
All I know is that what sets us apart
Is the sun will never set on what we believe
Chorus
Darkly beautiful, I don’t feel any less
I get the feeling that something great has us blessed
Oh its going be so good
You and me when we’re old reliving our youth
This is my life and I wont ever be alone
The hearts settled and the emptiness has flow
chorus
Here I stand
In the arms of a comely apocalypse
Foreseeing my deathly fortune
Reality never served as a good friend
But it was in that moment
When the sun shed her darkly grin
And hummed a song of comfort
In the mass of increasing terror
The mists of life rise and fall
As we seek to discern our call.
In our human strength,
We stumble,day by day
To find the narrow path;
Then ,enlightened by his grace
We quench the inner quest.
Through a Glass, Darkly
This first translation of an unwritten poem
By Jorge Luis Borges stands against
Invisible Spanish on the left-hand page
Sadly imperfect Anglo-Saxon reflex
Of pure anticipation fine suspension
Clear aperture though when this blurred mimesis
Of vision is erased the parable
Of vision will emerge like messages
We coded into lemon-juice as children
And held to candles where brown letters forming
Were artless alchemy but then these lines
That honour him who read in dark the volumes
Of an infinite library who will be writing
When his loved hourglass turns again to sand.
John Lingard
Sydney
Nova Scotia
2020
The truth
of scripture,
seeing in part-
like eyes adjusting to
the dark.
Through the keyhole darkly,
he could now remember his name
Through the keyhole darkly,
his medicine kicked in once again
Through the keyhole darkly,
he knew his daughter by her face
Through the keyhole darkly,
he was back home in his space
Through the keyhole darkly,
his dog was closely by his side
Through the keyhole darkly,
his eyes though saddened, opened wide
Through the keyhole darkly,
her voice unwrapped the precious gift
Through the keyhole darkly,
a love once anchored, set adrift
Through the keyhole darkly,
he felt the light begin to dim
Through the keyhole darkly,
his markers fade, his reference thin
Through the keyhole darkly,
the killer thief arrives once more
Through the keyhole darkly,
all loss of self—a closing door
(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2016)