Short Tansey Poems

Depression



My depression 
is steep
It is as a deep back lhole in space

From which neither the 
light of dreams
Nor a loud thunderous 
scream
can escape.




John Thomas Tansey...

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Sacrifice


My love has no edges					
	it is like a great ripe fruit,

both, sustaining and life giving 


Your love is a sword
	its' hilt as a cross

both, protective but life taking.	


As you cuts me in half
	sucking the juice I provide

in willing sacrifice
         To sustain you


John Thomas Tansey...

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Broken



Like a wild stallion,
that will not be saddled, spitting the bit,
I bucked and threw every rider
galloping toward the infinite open...

With nostrils flaring, mane blowing,
it was a brief sprint of being harnessed to no one;
Until, as all dreams, I was stopped at the fence
only to be led back, by a lead, bridled and broken.
 



John Thomas Tansey...

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Nobility


Scouring for something to read
Someone else to be,
I am lost in this dark sparse room
With nothing to do.
Stuck in a neuronal loop
Of the neurotic mind.

I want to be noble.
Fight with a crowd of rebels 
For a righteous cause
Or die
Saving some small child.

Then rising from this clamor
To a state of bliss,
Die with the truth
Still safe on my lips.

John Thomas Tansey...

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It is always comforting to know,
As you grow

That your childhood heroes,
As fixed stars in the firmament,
,
Remain for stability
In the changing aging of life

But as they die off
As, well, they should

In the course of life
Like the passing of your parents

Which raises you to the next rung,
Of being a parent yourself

You must come into your own
And become a star to someone else.

John Thomas Tansey...

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A child 
put to bed,
In a large, dark room;

At first, frightened
But then, the door creaks, 
slightly ajar,

Where a skant slant of light, 
carrying booms of laughter
floods the room
From its narrow wedge

The warm familial sounds
Of aunts and uncles

from a party next door,
Where old friends and family are

So the child rises up, 
out of bed
And walks toward its light…

This is how we should enter Death.

John T Tansey...

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Primal Language										 

 

Speaking gutturally in the fractured  

Fragments of a foreign language, 

A tongue unknown to her 

 

She is come from another country 

gesturing with her hands 

Between the islands of broken English 

 

Within her hesitations are the silent 

Stutters of clarity 

Using  her body as a  language					 

 

I know what she is asking 

Between the atolls of words 

Are oceans of sterling imagery



John Tansey...

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Evening sets with self-delusion
stirring the synapses
with a steaming 
cup of coffee.
A dimly lit oil lamp
shrouded in Saffron 
casts the room in an amber hue
where words meld like gold 
onto the page
		in an alchemic blaze.

Morning rises, dispelling dreams
out of every fold of darkness
to a sterile whiteness
that turning back 
such ingots
into leaden blocks of stone
I wake, both bleary eyed 
and blood shot, into this failed, 
pale bleak
		truth of morning

John Tansey...

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