Regular Melancholy

There must be something

other than ringtones.

I need freedom with a heavy clapper.

The steeple in my road is silent.

You show me a cathedral with a crown,

tell me about the chimes.

A flat, E flat, A flat, C.  Ascending.

I find the notes on the piano,

imagine the clang of hours.  A clock,

not yet time.  Pick my thumbnail

like a dewclaw.  Crave

a farm bell, a cowbell.  Anything
but this incessant death knell. 

tk/September 2014 

Another elegant read by the dashing R.A.D. Stainforth... 

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Found

There are dozens.

Unearthed.  Scrappy.

I open the door.

Some try to get out.

Casanova figure-eights,

makes love to my boots.

Fat one naps in a hammock,

another watches from the eaves.

Then there is you.  Waiting.  

I practice this moment in my head,

half-remembered.  Silent.

Nostalgia draws us, deliberate,

as if we have always.

I hold you, feel the scratch.

Look in your melancholy eyes.

Tell me everything.

I like to be sad.

tk/July 2014


Beautiful poignant read from R.A.D. Stainforth... 

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Magi

Natives, Slavs, dark Irish, moan

for elsewhere, sigh like an accordion―

they hover with snake eyes,

offer melancholy and vodka.

Smoke rises from their pipes,

twists the many places before

with all the next stations―

part boxcar, part gypsy wagon.

They swaddle in babushka, braid bone

in my hair, rock me in peat and hay,

croon lullabies of painted roses.

I am colicky―sleep takes a long time.

I dream of conjurers, hypnotists

whispering  a distant star―

a scent of madness and resin candles,
the raven-smooth face of the Black Madonna. 

tk/March 2014



R.A.D. Stainforth melts my words like candle wax... 

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*The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, by Henri Rousseau