Like an old cat stretching her limbs in the sunlight
Warmth seeping through knots in her gnarled hands and sShe sits on a paisley chair in front of the East window
welling in her stiff knees
Pressed roses tumble out of scrapbooks and fall around her feet
Those supple feet with the developed arches and pointed toes
Who quiver when Chopin plays on classical radio
Chopin…all those days in the studio with the accompanying pianist playing Chopin
At the barre…on the floor… before the long mirrors that reflected every nuance
She sees herself now in the mind’s Polaroid
The backdrop of a room stuffed with ballet programs, photographs of performances, newspaper reviews, pointe shoes, and Romantic tutus…Memorabilia of another life…lost in the brume of aging…alone…without applause
Sitting by the East window until the sun moves westward
When she struggles to take a bow
And the curtains close against the dark
Categories:
brume, age, dance, death,
Form: Free verse
bam …
the thought explodes -
a tritium fusion reaction of epiphany
engulfing my every concern
knocking me on my bloated ego …
I have swum your gaze
a hundred hundred times
and more …
I have drowned in those depths
with no thought to the danger
and no sate to my thirst …
it has been my refuge
and my prison -
a warming blanket, and a frigid reality
it has revealed to me mysteries, unequaled
and a brume of toroidal chaos
my joys, my sorrows, my all …
my nothing …
passions and pains and pardons
purgatory … and heaven
have all saturated me in the
emerald abyss that is your eyes
yet …
until this very moment
the diabolical truth of that enigmatic expanse
has eluded me …
it is not the unknowns that swirl there
it is not the beauty or the ire
it is not the acumen or ardor or equity
it is not the anger or the grace of your gaze
that so troubles me now
and seeks to destroy my very being …
it is the glaring, ghastly realization
that the horrid blackness I find there
is nothing less …
than ME -
I am your darkness …
and that is the ONE thing
I can not be …
bam.
Copyright © Gregory Richard Barden, January 2, 2024
Categories:
brume, analogy, emotions, introspection, relationship,
Form: Free verse
He puffs in the nightly brume
His noctambulous proclivity
He calls it, a force of habit
Something automatic
Tonight is especially morbid
Atrabilious even
As he hunches gaunt
Over her headstone
That has grown verdant
Of many a night waxed lachrymose
The midnight wind is severe
A morbid creak fills his ears
He calls it his familiar
His body enervated
A chiliad of nights and tears
Have taken their toll
Gaunt from endless prayers
Then an icy apparition so clear
A familiar, sum of his fears,
Appears, standing in the midnight air
An icy depth and an icy glare his familiar
A formication forms in his chest
As usual no words exchanged
The wind blows the mist away
And soft rain begins to fall
And the owl begins to howl
She is gone, she is gone!
Categories:
brume, bereavement, men, mental health,
Form: Free verse
Snipe and Curlew are skating on the mist
they sing of the water
that sky-water which sways to their songs.
Flat is this land with no coastal margins,
here I am the peak of a mountain
my coated form
darkly winged with strange desires,
an ardor compelled to rain down
upon these wandering streams,
to babble and pour in the Wash is my pleasure.
Osprey skim between the worlds
as they plow the brume and drizzle.
Silver trout dangle in the air
hooked by the wringing and the wet,
the taloned and the dunking beak.
You gandering Grebs where are you gone?
O yes, you are swimming a soaking river
betwixt the two poles of this sodden world,
you wade and paddle, dip with a breezy ease -
with dauntless sweeps you divide the oceans.
Categories:
brume, poetry,
Form: Free verse
I stand …
my toes
wriggling in cold sand
(pigs in winter mud)
sun has set
bloody and shimmering like abalone
the sea stretching from me
to the reach
shadowy and forlorn
but the horizon, still bleeding -
flaming and dripping like hot ambergris
and fading like brume
before a breath …
oh, those dark secrets
the unspeakable things this immeasurable
abyss has been witness to -
heroes and horrors
relentless power
second only to its boundless beauty
a cold like the deep of space
and a heart known even less than
the heavens
yet life abounding …
why …
why do you possess me so?
why is my being
so inexorably drawn to your
troubled depths?!?
why am I so fond of this feral fear?
I will stand here
in a million different bodies
for a million different reasons
on a million different days
and still
your hushed and haunting voice
will whisper me
from the black of your belly
your mad mystery,
begging …
“come”.
Copyright © Gregory Richard Barden, July 17, 2023
Categories:
brume, analogy, dark, death, introspection,
Form: Free verse
Contest: Trilonette Contest Sponsor: Joseph May 6-21-23
#1
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
River of Clouds
Lazy mists dawdle through valleys,
Wending in a river of clouds,
Surfs deep dales on rising tides.
Silver curly-cue veils dally
On twisting rivers like a shroud -
Leaves a pale kiss on riversides.
Mystic Rom roams the pine alleys,
Gypsy brume evergreens beclouds,
Cryptic nomad without a guide.
Flat bottomed shades float like galleys,
Wispy fogs tickle thunderclouds
Stolen cloud ships on a joy ride.
Rising tule croons playful songs -
Alto whispers for a singalong.
Categories:
brume, river, sky,
Form: Rhyme
we tremble …
or we don’t
night wears a net of stars
or a brume canopy
but in beamy blue or ink
it is only the mystery we fear
the dim trepidation
but a mask.
we are all bound -
from first thrum our
courses are set
and naught but ours, solely
that trek, our dearest allowance
yet only one harbor calls
one anchorage, just
a realm of limitless patience and price
an enigma, amaranthine
where the choice has been made
for all of us.
we call it’s name
with screams … or whispers
and we tremble …
or we don’t.
Copyright © Gregory Richard Barden, June 3, 2023
Categories:
brume, age, analogy, blessing, death,
Form: Free verse
Lowing fog horns
shake scales from rooftops.
We see the seawall drowning,
the surging waves rising
unfolding spume and brume
into mountains.
From the pub on the harbor front,
we can hear the buffeted gulls feeding
on the sluice of passing squalls.
"Look out the window" you say
(the window is a hundred pieces
of sky caught in a fish-eye).
"No boats will fish today," I whisper,
but we both know
that there are small boats out there,
they call out like cows, as wind- ghost
lead them through gray havens.
Categories:
brume, poetry,
Form: Free verse
the mist ...
was thick and blue
like some demon brume let
loose from the
bowels of death, itself
it swept along the edge of
the darkened forest
licking the evergreens with
its cyanotic tongue
and making them whisper
their unholy language
“come … swim our deep”, they breathed
“join with us” …
but I held
I knew this land -
knew the spells that ocean of
trees could cast
and knew well the safety of this
highland meadow
so I waited …
searching the wood edge with my eyes
it was my charge to do so
for that shadowy realm, distant
was Merlin’s dominion
and only ONE soul was allowed to pierce
it’s black heart, unharmed -
Arthur …
my brother … my king
whose sword I could now see
glinting in the darkness
heading my way
and shimmering with the
promise …
of home.
Copyright © Gregory Richard Barden, January 4, 2023
Categories:
brume, analogy, fantasy, history,
Form: Free verse
Watcher ...
he wandered the upper
moorland mists -
the highest fells of Scottish countryside -
wrapped in robes of wan, wispy light …
aglow like the full of the moon,
and aback a white Arabian stallion …
he commanded the
brume and twilight shivers,
and could cleave sunlight with his sword,
turning noon to midnight in a swipe -
daubing the bluffs with
dreamy fog …
THAT, tales say,
was the essence of enchantment,
transforming the deepest darkness to a
glistening, pearly wonderland,
where starlight suffused every thing
and everyONE,
and the grandest of dreams were
realized, by simply breathing
that glimmering haze -
filling your being with a confidence and
care, immeasurable,
and drowning your spirit in
joy and contentment -
waves of euphoria permeating your marrow,
until nothing mattered but that light ...
not even the realization that
your mortality was at hand, and your
soul was now happily,
horridly ...
His.
Copyright © Gregory Richard Barden, August 14, 2020; rewrote August 29, 2022
Categories:
brume, dark, fantasy, imagery,
Form: Free verse
A mottled crab scuppers its sea legs
in fluorescent foam.
Blue pods rattle on green tides.
Bladder wrack, Mermaid’s Hair
washing tangled ankles.
There are voices in my open mouth,
they roll over a briny tongue,
intone words from the breath
of spray and brume.
Where the sky hangs, gull beaks open
to scoop the bones of a shoaling surf.
My heart is booming
in a hollow seashell.
This is the Church of a God
disrobed of human thought.
This is the roofless house
of the sun and moon,
a place consecrated to the storm,
to the depths of darkness;
to the bright blades
of the suns daggering rays.
This night the rough
tussles with the calm
and they dance at the edge
of a clashing chaos.
Mother, father, stranger,
we are all here speaking
through a whirlpool’s gullet,
yet who has gone ahead of us
to express this sea-glow
and hat surfaces at the edge
of our own shores?
Categories:
brume, poetry,
Form: Free verse
When I look at the charred plasma
of a bare knuckled wind
I forget the ardor of yellow.
Then I recall the smeared tones
of skunk cabbage
rising through haze and mizzle,
or how in the Far East
the river at sunset
transforms a blistered heat
into the stippled gold of temple lamps.
After the grey scuttle of urban hours
there’s a yellowed drizzle
of twilight in any city
when a chill brume of evaporation
hangs gleaming and electric.
I see the mottled leaf of autumn
how gold seeps through
its flamboyant carnage.
Far away from the ruby panic
of fledgling mouths
or the crimsoned wounds of orchids,
I seek a tint, a gloaming yellow essence,
a sun-flowering at the of day.
Categories:
brume, poetry,
Form: Free verse
When the ripples unfold, a story untold; far, far away.
In the brume of the cold, my humble abode: far, far away.
From a birds-eye view, I watch as they mooch,
Pirates they loot off my roots.
From the tip of the nuke to the low-lying truce,
Compacted the power abused.
I cry I cry, far away I cry
They flow with life but take no form.
Sugar honey coconut from a birds-eye view
My tears straighten from the bending of the storm.
At last I feel, the burns and the lies
Far, far away, through the eyes of my demise.
Mama I’m home.
Categories:
brume, betrayal, blessing, corruption, culture,
Form: Rhyme
Bawling fog horns
shake scales from tiled rooftops.
Spume and brume
spray momentary mountains
over submerging sea walls
From the pub on the harbor front,
we hear the buffeted gulls cry
as they fly
on the sluice of passing squalls.
"Look out the window," you say
(the window is a hundred pieces
of sky caught in a fish-eye).
I shout into her whisper:
‘No boats will fish today,’
but we both know
that there are small boats out there;
they call out like stray cows,
kelpie leading them through gray teeth.
Categories:
brume, poetry,
Form: Free verse
There are wild horses in the heather;
their neighing follows the wake
of hewing wind-wraiths.
The ponies are hardy and stout, they go
in and out of the clouds, slip through
swale and dingle.
The moors are high. You don't feel the altitude
only the depth of the land. When the sky turns sullen
it tilts to smother the earth.
If the scything winds falter, the shallow sod
bogs into sumps and divots
Where trees cannot be, clouds spread
a muffling mizzle over gorse and grass,
a grazing tide carries a spume of chills.
The hills here are thigh deep, rills of dark water
loiter and seep.
The small ponies shake their matted manes,
mist-sprays pool in muddy hoofprints,
the warm brume of their snorts
leads you onward on a lonesome track
for they alone know the steps taken
to cross over each dim acres edge.
Travel with them to a gritstone ledge,
where the heath plunges dale deep,
there above the tall treetops
a bright sky will rise up to meet you.
Categories:
brume, poetry,
Form: Free verse
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