“What happened to you?” I wonder

There was a time my arms were the only

Place you called home

There was time, I wonder

Words you said lingered in the air

Falling into a quiet smile

Words you said, I wonder

If the stories we invented together

Ever came true

The stories, I wonder

Who’s left to tell them once more:

the first sign of a returning season

Who’s left to tell, I wonder

The rooms we coloured are empty.

No one hears the wind outside

Under Water

Perpetual, permanent mystery

Her body under water

And my hand

Across the land

Silence is howling

And my eyes are closed

'The silence in the words I tell you'

A thousand times

 I’ll tell you words 
That travel somewhere

 While what I mean 

Is that

 I love you

 The same untenable place

 Of a discovery 

Is held 

By 

Silence

Morning Distance

Inside,
I am dying
Your eyes
show nothing
within me

Don't want to
love you tomorrow
I want to love you
now

You tell me it's
morning
world awakes
We can't stay
in bed

What is it
in sleep
that pieces
us apart
again?

Promises
fill the closeness
with which we
hold each other
immobile

But there's no
touch
Our skin feels
different
when we only
look at it

Punctuation

You are my punctuation 
Without you words flow 
 And their meaning is lost
 As I can’t breathe

 No sense is taken 
Without the pause
 Of your presence.

I am a man

I am a man.
 I feel. 
There is no sense
 In which I am 
 apart from my sister.

 I am a man. 
I am my body, 
and each part of it
 in its fragility. 
My strength lies 
in bending 
after broken

 I am a man,
 I am able of cruel sweetness
 and the sweetest cruelty 

 I am a man. 
My beauty is unintended
 And I am made of insecurities.

 I am a man.
 I cannot keep 
what comes 
in victory 

I am a man.
 I care and I forget
 I lick my wounds
 and nurse my dreams

 I am a man. 
With no apology
 I give my love 
and learn from 
kindness 

There is no sense
 In which I am 
 apart from my sister.

...

We have no faces
     Why do we need them?

Our love speaks in old forgotten symbols
Words we did not say and we could not think
As we closed our eyes and felt ourselves
slip into each other.

We have no faces
   Why would we need them

Our songs are memories unwritten
tales untold and smiles of heroes
that no one recalls

Dreamlessness

I would like to write you a poem

Yet they tell me it is not the season for such things

My lips hesitate and withhold a thousand promises

“Come back to our country”

But who knows now of what country I speak?

Dreamlessness, planning not to be hungry

and never being satisfied.

I am restless and yet can only be paralysed

Whilst I lean against your soft unspoken skin

and look for the address that I have somehow lost

The house where we used to evade the thought of

time.

Anonymous Elegy

Who is Carl Blakey?

I sit alone on a wooden bench
outdoors and let the sun seep
under the skin of my question

Who was he and who am I?

Perhaps he only an inscription,
and I nothing at all
alive only in the receding memories
of our friends.

Dead and faceless.
Like any scream

'Hold my hand'

Hold my hand

For while I run

There’s nothing

Steady

As your hand

Never to meet the sea

All the people I have held

All the lips that I have met

Stare at me and do not deliver

Any of the hopes I searched

them with

Wayward hands somehow untired

Flow down rivers of desire

never to meet the sea

The Geology of Songbirds

Why does the glacier
Kneel before me?
Does it believe that our total knowledge
Can save it?

And is it right?

I approach in twilight.
The snow compacts beneath my shoes,
Its sound redolent of my horse chewing apples.
He did love the snow.

In times like these,
Mementos mori abound.
The weedy bird at my feet,
Growing smaller each day I pass,

Fading in among the gravel,
Shrinking.
That songbirds turn into gravel was
The first thing I ever learned about geology.
 
These things are so circular.

I climb higher to
Improve my view.
Searching as I climb
For the perfect rock to bring to you.

Unable to find it.
Yet we do such things—
We search for perfection in objects,
In love, as if such essences exist.

Filling our pockets with pyrites.
This poem,
Itself a pyrite—
Words I write to be loved. 

And yet the glacier kneels.

Its skin cracked like an ancient painting.
I bid it to stand, and wonder,
When all of its light has vanished from the earth,
What of our total knowledge will be lost with it?

by Robert Sassor