Swimming Herward
A thing like any other
A churning thing
Nod, blink, and push asunder
Against forgetting
Midnight and swarthy dancing
The faces turn
Rib-bringer, water-basher
No shore unspurned
Extinguishing candles in sync
Undoing a life in the rink
They crane to look down from the mast
How long till the future is past?
Indelible, unenvied
A grasp at tadpoles
Come clean for better backsides:
It's still another hole
Retrace — the losses stagger
Oh, boundless seed
Such flippancies to flatter
As mums to weeds
And yet I say yea, there's a use
That thumping about on the roof
It eats you away to your core
Awash in the ocean's uproar
This bloodied spoor of heaven
Truncated tendrils
Will yet abysses upend
A cruelly deathless kill.
Still rants "the swath of fodder"
O'er-booming knave
Without his clay the potter
Is not so brave
Because she is there, sinews groan
For damnable halves, the seas foam
But lightning and shadows beguile
The sinking and spent-littered miles!
COME! Wrought to galvanizing
Clenched, turgid twist
No palmed proselytizing
(But then, no clamor for a kiss)
Kicking at sleepy fathoms
Pulses die so slow
Nothing but trembling atoms
And chewed-up souls
Goodbye to the eyes, leave it wound
What simpleton curses abound
The water reclaims what it bore
As onlookers grouse, "What's this for?"
A twilight extinguished with gall
Why right to relapse in the fall?
Should everything heave, this dies last
If only the future would pass
© 1994 John Brocato
A churning thing
Nod, blink, and push asunder
Against forgetting
Midnight and swarthy dancing
The faces turn
Rib-bringer, water-basher
No shore unspurned
Extinguishing candles in sync
Undoing a life in the rink
They crane to look down from the mast
How long till the future is past?
Indelible, unenvied
A grasp at tadpoles
Come clean for better backsides:
It's still another hole
Retrace — the losses stagger
Oh, boundless seed
Such flippancies to flatter
As mums to weeds
And yet I say yea, there's a use
That thumping about on the roof
It eats you away to your core
Awash in the ocean's uproar
This bloodied spoor of heaven
Truncated tendrils
Will yet abysses upend
A cruelly deathless kill.
Still rants "the swath of fodder"
O'er-booming knave
Without his clay the potter
Is not so brave
Because she is there, sinews groan
For damnable halves, the seas foam
But lightning and shadows beguile
The sinking and spent-littered miles!
COME! Wrought to galvanizing
Clenched, turgid twist
No palmed proselytizing
(But then, no clamor for a kiss)
Kicking at sleepy fathoms
Pulses die so slow
Nothing but trembling atoms
And chewed-up souls
Goodbye to the eyes, leave it wound
What simpleton curses abound
The water reclaims what it bore
As onlookers grouse, "What's this for?"
A twilight extinguished with gall
Why right to relapse in the fall?
Should everything heave, this dies last
If only the future would pass
© 1994 John Brocato