Melange Magazine

Poetry

Prison Blues

Photograph by Maria

more and more now,
in the pain of the morning snow
I miss the flicker of your salamander tongue
and at night, hard green apples
a shared ritual, how we compared juice, firmness
crunch.
and yes it’s easy, on a Sunday
to miss you.
The lonely chill of frosty daylight
feels sentimental, and does not recall
how we wrung each other into total emptiness.
November does not ask questions
about tears and betrayals and lies,
it only mourns your absence and begs the silk
of your belly for her lazy cheek.
more and more, as winter leaks through the window panes
I reach for you in the empty space of my sleep,
wondering if anyone will ever reach for me
the way you reach for me
forgetting, for blessed seconds, the danger of you,
the way your hands pulled strings and
orchestrated my steps, how seductively
they fastened a scarf over my eyes.

and yes of course I know in forgetting and remembering
that no one’s intention is to hurt another
love simply longs to possess another,
to keep them with a jailer’s hands.

The Book of Sal

Photograph by Daniel Regan

After one year pressed so closely against the warm skin of you,
I question everything.
All the words and whispers
we floated on, as if there is

security or strength in clouds,
as if love’s blinding vocabulary of poems
could mean anything to the lost.

All the injuries we healed together
re-open silently
under a sky of lonely stars.

I wanted to read you, and never put you down.
We spread ourselves like a picnic
before one another,
the strange, unsettled flavours of the other
delicious and sad.

How do I abandon the salt and bread of you,
which has kept me alive?

I have turned myself upside down
to give you love I didn’t know I had,
to rest your stunned heart against the open ocean of my soul.
But I always said, love isn’t enough:
you longed to prove it could be.

How eerie the discovery of sorrow
in the light that promised cover from the night.

I cannot read you now,
the ending changes with every page I turn,
every poem of yours I open
challenges the things I thought were certain.

If only I had believed, as you did, that we could overcome
the darkness of the things that made us
before we were each other’s.

For Rory, Moving to India to Follow His Buddhist Path

Photograph by Maria

now that you are leaving,
I am losing you to lepers and Lamas and
rituals I can’t understand,
and I’m trying not to see it as just another loss, or another test,
though I could argue effectively
that I need you more than the impoverished millions you will pray for.
You will bypass the further sketches of gossiping queens, overdoses, and broken hearts,
but you must know how your presence here
kept everybody sane.

After my lifelong friend John died at 31 this spring, his sister wrote
saying she finally understood the purpose of monks and contemplatives,
because while she and I had to keep going, had to work or look after children,
fix supper for the living after weaving through traffic, while all of this kept on as if nothing had happened,
someone had to mourn the sadness of the world so
the rest of us could go on.

You are that person, called to some greater peace
than I can feel or give. From late night raves to the monastery is hardly a stretch
to those who knew you well- you were always looking after everyone else and now,
you must look after the world.

I will miss you on Fridays and on Sunday afternoons, and on Tuesdays, too,
when my little mood pills aren’t working and no one wants to listen to me cry
I will miss you when someone turns the music up and when someone else breaks my heart by dying or when I don’t know what to say or do, and you would know.

Here on this side of the world,
there will be a giant hole
but here, in the quiet raging ocean of my messed up heart,
there will be a place of calm that you created there.

Don’t look back, my soft friend, don’t look back
Do not look back for sun or rain or war
Follow the moon to the Tibetan night
You were meant for something more.

The Scarecrow (for Matthew Shepard)

With you pinned up in the sky
like a scarecrow in a field of apples,
knowing for hours you were going to die,
it was almost Christian
how you gave up the ghost.
You were a bruised light
tethered and
softer than a pale blue dust shard.
You were psychedelic in the papers,
as they whirled you into hero, target
victim, saviour, shame.
Yet you were only the Hanged Man,
baffled by the things that this world lacks
how few devices in it left to save you.

Damage

You pace along the drizzling streets of October,
and your thoughts are winding storms.

You can’t be sure he is prepared for the life of a poet,
for the rain-soaked rooms your soul hides.

It has never been other men that your lovers have envied,
but intangible threats like orphans and the sea.

How now, love? after sealing yourself
from its seething gutters and radiant suns,
after shutting down the heart, even the body?
Live by experience
is already your epitaph.

You can’t be certain, but you believe he sees how you see.
Still, you fear those less complicated,
shiny girls with firm handfuls of thigh, smooth and poreless,
breasts that rise effortlessly, unbound.
You recall too closely
how fleeting the seduction of your madness,
how damaging your damage,
how you are addictive, then purged,
how they resent the crash after the delirium of you,
how quickly men tire of humans.