Tag: poems

77 words

The valley sinks into the mist;
the yellow ring of the horizon
eclipses the cornea of the sun;
the ridge blooms purple on my wrist,

fading, inimical and black.
The earth exhales into the dusk,
frost forming in the shaded husk
of afterglows. My wine and sack

(more…)

117 words

The waters soon close dark and velvet-heavy
around a stone big enough to smash a skull,
the ripples torpid as in mud or gravy.
What will it take to clarify these dull,
foetid waters, for our men to reject
The notion that wild animals are as tame
as they; our feral women a foul object
one shudders to give credence to, or name.
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112 words

What would you like to do, dear little girl,
When you grow up? Something with animals
Or children, perhaps? Schoolyard love soon palls
And that scary blank expanse you see unfurl—
Look closer: it’s a blueprint for a sort
Of intangible palace you’re supposed to build
Around yourself. Then, at last, when you have willed
It into being (no hurry; women fought

To clear a wide array of paths for you),  (more…)

176 words

Rumour Mill

Rumours may have reached you of
my imminent demise.
They’re largely true, the eyes
of Don Quixote’s every love

look down and almost see my flask
of wine, beer, whisky, rum,
fuel that helped me come
this far, where bells now lift my mask.  (more…)

501 words

You There to the Left of Me

Your world is rotten, but even more than
That, it’s hypocritical, it doesn’t
Consider its rottenness as rotten
Because it’s as willfully blind as it’s bent
(And by bent I meant crooked, and I meant

Corrupted, too). I hate everyone of
You, every so-called liberal thinker wont to
Repeat popular mantras like “One love”
(As if you wrote it yourself, as if you
Were original, as if it was true  (more…)

30 words

At the gates of heaven
he did not know the names
beyond the bombing bay.

But many miles away
he could still see the flames
judging the dead in Dresden.

(more…)

404 words

I.

The pure products of America do anal
as the spent end of what once was Europe
waits and wavers, wax on the stem of the Black Pope’s
candle, chalk ghost of the last Neanderthal
bloodline washed from its last daughter’s birth canal
as from a chalkboard or a warehouse floor.
Uterine father – wrist-deep, to the neck – where
do you look when the headlight fills the tunnel?  (more…)

3,063 words

John Collier, Portrait of Rudyard Kipling, circa 1891

Nobel Prize-winning poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling was born on this day in 1865. For an introduction to his life and works, see the following articles on this site.

• William Pierce, “Rudyard Kipling: The White Man’s Poet” (French translation here)
• Andrew Hamilton, “Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’“
• Margot Metroland, “The Conundrum of the Kipling: Rudyard Kipling, 1865–1936“
• William Solniger, “The White Man’s Burden, 2013“

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Paul Nash, “We Are Making a New World,” 1918

523 words

November 24, 1916

Author’s Note:

A sestina written for all of our folk who were duped into being part of that first war to end all wars, that brother-killing-brother war, that beginning of our end.

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84 words

Some nights are never-ending hells
for these old veterans in our care.
We do not hand out pills, but shells,
as out of battlefields they stare
from over sixty years ago
on far-off Guam or Guadalcanal.
With trembling hands they try to show
how the bravest or youngest fell.
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