Nightmares

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Restless Nightmares

"The morning after the battle of Waterloo", by John Heaviside Clarke, 1816. Image care of Wikimedia Commons.

For the final One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, and the grand opening of the dVerse Poets Pub, I would like to bring back a classic – the poem with which I introduced myself at the first One Shot Wednesday, in July last year, when One Stop was still just a glitter and a gleam in the eyes of a few good poets.

It is dark, and due to its age not the style of mine to which you may have become accustomed, but I hope you enjoy it all the same – and if you’d like to see the piece with which I more officially gave my ending salute to that wonderful art community, check out last week’s contribution: One Winter Morning.

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Restless nightmares break,

From wretched slumber do I wake

To a world of endless night—

Thunderous choirs make me crouch in fright.

High above us wraiths now soar,

Men clasp their ears to deafen their roar.

Over hills and shattered streets,

The bands come marching to woeful beats.

A hundred thousand voices cry,

Then all the singers die.

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Undercover

Breathe light.

The moment the

candle flickers to dark

no covers keep the monsters back–

life holds.

* My latest contribution to the wonderful One Shot Poetry Wednesdays! The style used here is known as Cinquain, a five-line stanza form containing twenty-two syllables, in the sequence: 2, 4, 6, 8, 2. Notice I’ve been on a bit of a Cinquain trip lately? So have I. It happens. I’ve been form-napped.

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Subconscious Bedlam

There is a light beyond this tunnel

Sifting reason

Inner treason

Of worlds, unimaginable, I drink

And dip into the rush of thought

At peace, the body lie,

In state the mind, a child

In a gunslinger spaceman drifting through the stars

The cavalcade of imagination

Stokes the fires of the waking.

* This week’s submission to the Monday Poetry Potluck, as hosted by those lovely poets Amanda and Kavita!

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Deception

Photo by Chris Galford

The fire dips beneath the azure sea;

All eyes turn to their own hands.

No one spies the serpents slithering

From the long stretched shadows

Of a garden ripe with glistening fruit.

Demons whisper in the peoples’ ears—

The straw cast down,

The crows descend.

Fruit rots and garden fades—

Ravens circle high above

The corpses of the fools.

Old men stir within their ancient tombs—

The dream is dead,

Another Rome, decayed.

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For The Thursday Poets Rally, Week 28.

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Waiting

I’m waiting on a light

That may never arrive;

I’m grabbing at the stars

And catching only dust.

Every moment builds into

Another moment lost

And still I wait,

Humming in the night,

As though the world will shine on me

In my ceaseless indolence.

Dreams unravel

It is reality waiting

Not this fiction I have woven

Into this false world.