It's come to where I post two at a time. Trying to hold the post-review ratio fit. I hope you'll forgive me, but I haven't been too regular. This is in other poetry as the first is Dramatic while the second is a Narrative. Onwards:-
The Tinted Curtain
It was sure to have been a silent night
because it took so many days for dusk to end--
the night when I saw grandfather
sitting ponderous on the far living-room chair
while I lay past my bedroom door
turning heavily in my sleep and in half-night.
And I asked his son,
orphaned at the age of forty-eight,
why we give water
to corpses, sleep to night and end to every wake.
But he does not care for his master's voice
and he cares not for his fall and after.
The windows reek of the residues
of falling water for the sleepers--
they are engorged and turgid, creaking
like wide graves and eyes of weepers.
Yet the still light falls through the moist curtains
after the heavily turning clouds have wept
and leave a halo, sifting around the window
where the lost and hungry sleepers have slept.
There are faces asleep, outside,
and autumn has past, winter passed,
spring and summer passed. Now only it rains.
I feel the fabric against my skin and my face.
Slipping, it stirs my skin to colour in the dark,
and I feel the soft, embracing rush behind it.
I feel it whispered soft, and tinted stark.
-Early August, '08.
-x-x-x
Psyche of Wax
I.
On the cold rock, she still lies there,
and the throbbing skin warms her tears.
There is patience and there's patience
and there is the rippling of fears.
In the tremors of her loved voice
and the coldness of her deep skin
the lean edges of the winds stir
with her lips, "Do the gods begin?
Who will take me in?"
II.
Roars the fire even higher
in the high throne of earthly love.
The zephyr battles, the window rattles
and slicks with water high above.
Warmed in the skin but deep within
she shivers like the face at the window thin.
Through heat and cold her mind grows bold
but her heart, "Who would take me in?
Where must I begin?"
III.
The candle grows blind; her shadow behind
and the darkness of the chamber walls
are rend with the glare of her chasmed stare
while the passioned wax melts and falls.
Softly wings beat and the skins heat
is burnt with slumbering kisses
that have turned back, down the mind's lost track.
The candle falls down, hisses,
sputters and dies.
The shadow escapes and into her eye shapes
the quest, "Will he take me in?"
She stands there, eyes beautiful red
and her hair clings wet to her head.
She loses the feeling of skins.
And the candle cools and dies.
She begins.
