Longing for you fell upon my lines,
Staining the pen-strokes a shade of green;
Your color spread across the page,
And your eyes revealed that singular meaning.
Letters aligned themselves with precision,
Standing in rows like soldiers;
Words embraced within my heart,
Filling the pages of my notebook.
My eyes counted the pages gone by—
Pages that wrote of nothing but you;
The poet fell silent,
As the words spoke only of you.
It sinks in deep
Staining you like bleach
It will stay there even when you are free
The weight of it will be excruciating
But you’ll move on despite it all
And you’ll be ok even on the hard days
I fold my fingers round the silent spine,
feeling the tender threat of invisible teeth.
A subtle needle nips beneath the skin,
drawing a solitary, shining seam of crimson.
That dark droplet slowly drags its weight,
a ruby tear trembling on immaculate ivory.
It bleeds into the delicate, velvet veins,
staining the pale bloom with a quiet, scarlet ache.
Held high against the gathering shade,
surrendering its soft, porcelain secrecy -
a single white rose,
forever marked by the hands that cherished it.
Faces all on fire,
eyes catching the dancing flames~
light in their pupils,
dark fireplace gathers each gaze
keeps them when eyes look away.
Wood splits and whip-cracks,
sparks surge up into night's arms
like stars finding night~
the fireplace adores show-time
in its arena of stone.
Ash calms burnt embers,
stones lament the loss of light
warmth without a flame~
the fireplace cradles the shape
of what can no longer burn.
Smoke has lost its verve,
curling up now from the seams.
staining blank-faced stones~
glowing warm in the half-light
clinging to the afterglow.
Dark, damp, and dank now,
night has drunk the final warmth
Cold soot scents the stone~
the shiny green-black hearth waits
keeping winter for the years.
Morning finds no glow,
only the smell of old ash
clinging to the stones~
the fireplace dreams of footsteps
time itself tending the cold.
The last ember died
while darkness quietly drank
its final warm breath~
the hearth retains every face
beneath its moss and silence.
I wear a smile but it’s out of spite,
my fixed sign’s reading ‘Battery Low’.
Growth’s stunted by artificial light.
Across our visage muscles are tight,
is it possible someone could know?
I wear a smile but it’s out of spite
Over time you form a stalactite,
a landmark directing where to go.
Growth’s stunted by artificial light.
Walking widdershins is never right.
Staining each fingertip with a glow,
I wear a smile but it’s out of spite.
Imposing shadow comes with a bite,
so deceptive letting nothing show.
Growth’s stunted by artificial light.
Natural progress will bring delight,
even when delayed by vertigo.
I wear a smile but it’s out of spite,
growth’s stunted by artificial light.
Old ruby glasses
warmed the world to match my wish,
softened every edge.
Staining the panes guilty red,
with light beaming inside me.
I don smart glasses
to smooth away awkward things
with bright white captions—
names, prices, warnings, labels—
until all is declared shamed.
Yet nothing has changed.
The older glass and new code
serve the same old eye.
persuade the incoming light
to return what it answered.
A tree becomes mine:
memory, fear, weather, want,
all falling on it.
The lens never changed the tree;
The bark shows my fingerprints.
Once I took them off.
The world refused to explain
itself to my eyes.
It had yet to find an eye
that could see without glasses
I sleep with shadows
hollow dreams of lustful death,
pleasure begets sickness.
Beneath my eyes lies doubt
begging, pleading for grace.
I walk with shadows
consuming objects, life forms, moments–
Illusions of control.
My image dissolves before I do,
my outline fades into absence.
I scream with shadows
giving life to the everlasting eclipse,
our shrouds staining pavements.
Wraiths of darkness rise and scatter
like roots of a dying tree.
I answer to Shadow.
Light brings color and joy.
Looking down at the darkness I cast,
light has no place in my world.
I am a dangerous dream,
might I add an influx of disdain on your judgements of me,
Distant mirrors dancing in the image of coddled leaps towards your faith,
Turned to shadow, staining my internal bed once clean,
Intern I sprouted wings for flying far from thee,
Your image I flay,
You’re becoming a memory,
I am a dangerous dream yet not as deadly as thee,
Running in molten thought for the melting of me,
Dancing all the while slaying my prophetic dreams,
In an instant turning like a page for wiping the slate clean,
I see through you now,
yet to you, I’ve become unseen,
All your mischievous doings found ashened and wrinkled never reaching me,
You are a dangerous vision,
A weakened image,
A comedic nightmare,
I remain a dangerous dream…
By Phan Tan Hai
I sit reading a page of history—
the lines leaning, trembling with sorrow;
my eyes sting as I trace each word,
cold smoke rising into my soul.
I clearly see the names of friends
who died and now appear again,
demanding to charge once more with words—
a battle of humans or ghosts.
I see countless question marks
weighing heavily on every page;
a time as sad as smoke
staining the paper yellow-brown.
A time that feels so distant,
yet still chokes me as I read;
my homeland fills my eyes,
ink blurred but never fading.
Head bowed, I walked for ages—
my hair once so green;
as though a hundred lives have passed,
I look back and it is white.
I carefully record each word,
renewing the lines of poetry;
casting a hundred thousand words
to bloom as flowers on the far shore.
I am not the lustful nymph, the easy girl, the simple mind.
I am pure, I am kind, I am innocent and soft.
I am a dove, a swan and a white bunny.
I am no fox, lioness or panther.
I am clean of the dirty gaze.
Wiped blank of the staining blood.
But I still stink.
The smell of their lust.
The memory of their dirty hands.
IT ALL STAYS.
And I am unclean. Dirty forever.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Petunias don’t beg for attention,
they sprawl—drunken, unrepentant~
over garden edges, spilling secrets
in violet and fuchsia tongues.
They are the sidewalk’s graffiti artists,
the uninvited guests at the rose’s gala,
staining the air with their perfume,
thick as a midnight confession.
Some call them common.
But watch: how they tremble
under the weight of rain,
how they arch toward the sun
like lovers who’ve forgotten shame.
Their petals are thin like tissue-paper,
outlasting the gardener’s shears,
blooming reckless and radiant
until frost finally shuts their mouths.
Oh, petunias~
you gawdy glorious fools~
you teach us how to live
unapologetically.
We have come a long way —
you and I —
sauntering along paths of tales,
narrow, slippery, serpentine, endless.
We crouch at spider-ways,
through the fustiness of late-rising dawn,
feeling the rapid beats of a stolen heart and the
entanglement by an unending network of
webs and encroaching thorns.
Cockroach feelers we rely on to guide us
through the length of seaside lichgates.
Life is one Hell of a place, we agree.
It’s a cup of cliché we drink on daily basis—
like hastily brewed coffee at the city’s rush hour.
But, like the radio, it has a tuning fork —
and with it, one operates on frequencies
mute and clear, wavy, far and distant.
It’s a challenge.
Remember Michelangelo
lying supine on ramshackle 16th century scaffolds
and painting the Sistine Chapel for four long years,
his fragile back hurting, his paint brush screaming,
his pots of paint on tilt . . .
Now, that’s some labour!
And with restive paints of stress dripping,
Dripping, and streaming and sweating down on the
broad canvas several feet below, staining
the usefulness of enchanting woods . . . !
Oh, I hate the putrefaction of desolate souls.
The sun peeps over the horizon,
after a long abstinence,
its rays flare skyward,
parting the cloud-curtains
staining them in red, orange, amber, gold
changing rapidly
shifting, blinking, throbbing
with each blink of the eye.
Half-up, a search-beam of light stretches
across the ocean towards you
parting the darkness to let radiance pour in
filling the scene with warm dawn glow
Day all but gone now
I linger still, a little longer, watching,
as shadows stretch out long and limber
threading the scene with sunset-spools,
rewinding through the thinning light,
the strings of red, orange, amber, gold,
clinging to every breath, drawn out slow,
holding on to the moment,
unwilling to let the day
pass and go.
The bad news is that time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” — Michael Altshuler
The sun spills like heavy honey over cliffs,
Drowning the clocks in a sea of amber light.
I pluck a ripe second from the abundant air,
Feeling its pulse throb against my palm today.
Shadows stretch long limbs across the quiet grass,
Tasting the wind before it turns to a ghost.
The sky is a bruised plum, leaking its juice,
Staining the edges of our fleeting breath now.
Forget the iron gates of the cold tomorrows;
They are only echoes in a hollow jar.
Drink the salt spray from the lip of the moment,
While the waves carve runes into the shifting sand.
Mountains dissolve into a purple smoke ring,
As we dance on the blade of a golden spark.
Stars are just pinpricks in a heavy curtain,
Waiting for a hand that will never arrive.
The earth is a spinning top of green silk thread,
Unraveling softly beneath our bare feet.
Hold the burning coal of this hour closely,
Until the light becomes the only thing real.
berry picking in the field behind home
beyond the dark leaves were the blueberries
like tiny blue lamps lit by the sun
we laugh in the hush
and put the berries in our mouths
the juice staining our lips
and fingers blue . . .
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