Mary Oliver

A poem from Mary Oliver entitled “Rage”…

Rage

– 1986

You are the dark song
of the morning;
serious and slow,
you shave, you dress,
you descend the stairs
in your public clothes
and drive away, you become
the wise and powerful one
who makes all the days
possible in the world.
But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.
When the child’s mother smiles
you see on her cheekbones
a truth you will never confess;
and you see how the child grows–
timidly, crouching in corners.
Sometimes in the wide night
you hear the most mournful cry,
a ravished and terrible moment.
In your dreams she’s a tree
that will never come to leaf–
in your dreams she’s a watch
you dropped on the dark stones
till no one could gather the fragments–
in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.

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Hooked

 “Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives’ tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.”
– Theodore Dreiser

The following is a poem from an exceptionally talented new friend, Arne Tornek. Enjoy.

 

fantasygoth

The hook slicks in.

How easily she snags.

How tightly she tugs.

 

She knows no surrender.

Long in exile, she returns,

To lead you to forgotten rooms.

 

In a careless moment

She sucks the tongue from your mouth.

Coils it round your demon need,

Slips it back behind your lips.

 

You swallow her hard.

Scornfully, she sniggers at you.

Knows that you can’t do without her,

In spite of your painstaking

Hopeless attempts.

 

She washes over your mind like an old friend,

With the comforting allure of a new lover.

And she’s back with her pedicure

In the ring of your desires;

Your powerless soul at prayer

Under the Gothic arch of her painted foot.

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