The Poetry Marathon

Haiku, mark my place–

Thumbtack on the empty board;

Anchor words to page.

Never a night so long,

Lashed here, to Homer’s Galley

And knowing, sleep’s music, so wrong

Would undoubtedly drown me

Wholly, completely, sweetly.

Pillowed Siren, Scylla and Charybdis

I have closed my ears thus far

But I nod and your voice softly whispers

“Come away, come away. Sleep is yours.”

I must not, for a moment, til dawn.

Never a night so long!

Pillowed Siren, Scylla, Charybdis

have won and I am no more.

To the waves of my sheets, I succumb.

Surrender–surrender complete,

Has never felt so sweet.

there was,

in that place,

between

where the tide could reach

the sand

and where

its treasure lay

strewn,

the strand,

the frass

of upchurned storm

and wind,

driven to this reach,

beyond the waves

wild ride

and here

stand I

amid

the fractured

shells

of hope

The almond flowered,

An umbrella from the sun,

Vast pink canopy

I wander

vacant halls

where life and laughter lived;

Hopes and Dreams

packed their bags.

I slept on;

I thought I heard

the hinge turn,

light steps

in the dappled dawn.

Wordlessly,

they latched,

and locked,

and left

through garden,

to curb,

to catch the yellow-sorrow cab.

Kick memories,

rattling,

down tiled halls;

Mark

the echo,

empty, cold;

No embers to be stirred.

Citadel

Of words

Of thoughts

Wherein

To hide

To blend

Be lost

Shakespeare and Poe share the same family tree

Genetically prone to dramatical spree

Such as murders and the quoting of ravens and such,

Perhaps just a little too much.

Stevenson’s prattle of pirates and shore

While Wordsworth rambles of flowers galore

And Frost with his goings, his stopping, his walls,

Dickinson’s bees, drunken hauls.

Rhythm and rhyme, insidiously vile,

Seeps into our soul, with the gentlest guile

And sticks in the cracks between tear and smile.

Forever. Or just for a while.

There once was a poet from Perth,

Who weighed each word for its worth.

Her thesaurus was tattered;

For to her, all that mattered,

Was pentameter stretched ‘round the earth!

How much is too much?

How long can keep going?

Will I see the dawn?

The Lost Weekend

It was a bender. A binge.

To make anyone cringe,

Who’d been on one and swore, “Nevermore”.

By mistake, she had started,

And forgot why she fought it,

Entranced by its mystique once more.

By the time she awakened,

The toll had been taken,

As she laid prostrate and feeble and wan.

She knew now, ‘twas a fable,

To assume she was stable…

From the lure of a Poetry ‘Thon!