Departures

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Elaine Stirling, poetry

You ask me sometimes
why we couldn’t stay friends
why the taste of your poems
juicy at first like asado con ajo
grew bitter, then stale

but I couldn’t find
the words to describe
you’d been crowded

you’d been crowded
like a pool in the ghetto
in a late August heatwave
all those tangled legs
to swim through

slippery shanks of disillusion
torsos heaving the same poor-me
sighs, how you sing to my soul, guapo

they gnawed you like mongrels loyal
to the meat shop of a ghost town
on bone scraps of metaphor
I’d read a thousand times

day after day, you shook
the same words like an oracle
on payroll, they clattered
from your sack and we learned
to keep score

the clatter I tuned out
it was the keeping score…
I couldn’t stay friends

I couldn’t stay friends
with that.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

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déjà vu

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Elaine Stirling, poetry, sonnet

The birch of my imagining recalls
a human tide no parchment can record,
no artful rock or shards of pottery

from west to east we tracked the seething falls
from south to icy north our numbers poured
determined to outpace calamity

a curl of floating bark, my reason stalls
and from it spirals, tranquil, new accord
what dies returns. Such is society.

The weightless that surrounds these crumbling walls
is my true providence, with room and board
assigned to how I view prosperity

So, leap from grief to thrill, you’re but a seam
we’ve named as death. The monarch calls you dream.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

Ashley’s Mad Again

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Ashley Madison, Elaine Stirling, Eric Ravilious, poetry

It’s Saturday.
The ravenous are out recruiting;
rays of ultra-violence are hard
to screen. It seems that everywhere
we might be social, we elect
instead to scream, call
out the false.

I wonder, though,
would any of us do
or say a hurtful thing if pain
had not first entered
through an open heart?

Would creeping toward temptation
feel so sweet, if I’d not left the salt
that drew you to me in the rain?

Oh, twisted glee—they call you
schadenfreude—your days grow
short. The stones I threw, the feathers
lobbed at me, and all attempts
at cataloguing misery have packed
their trunks and vanished,
they’ve some train to catch—

and I’m not boarding
now the windows
of my heart take in
a truer scenery.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
Painting by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942)

The House Upon the Hill

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Elaine Stirling, Malayan fixed verse, pantoum, poetry for fun

~~a pantoum~~

There is a house upon a hill
we used to visit once a year
where daffatoos and cockadrills
in great profusion sprung with cheer.

We used to visit once a year
with pachyderms. Uncertain terms
in great profusion, sprung with cheer,
to certain joy somehow appeared.

With pachyderms, uncertain terms
must slowly be unraveled.
To certain joy somehow appeared
an appetite for travel.

“Must slowly be unraveled”
is anathema to some.
An appetite for travel
to the fixéd mind feels dumb.

Is anathema to some
an urge? To wallow in the past
to the fixéd mind feels dumb,
can blind. The fact? This too shall pass.

An urge to wallow in the past
where daffatoos and cockadrills
can blind the fact, this too shall pass.
There is a house upon a hill…

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
Image by Caralee Clark from http://www.DailyPainters.com