RD Armstrong, US

 

Free Verse   Anniversary   I watched you sleeping After a night of sexual chaos Breathing contentedly The sounds of the world filtering Through the open window Along with the gray light of dawn It was the best thing in my life So right So unreal A piece of silk floating on the black lagoon Blown in by the ongoing tornado That is this crazy life We call home I could scarcely move for fear That you would bound away like a startled doe I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry But then that moment was lost Crushed and absorbed into the hungry maw That was either your insatiable need for Validation or the ongoing tornado I really can’t determine which Now I sit here Amid the ruins Another error In the grand scheme of things Another Told-you-so moment Two years forward And still spinning   Previously Published in Muddy River Poetry Review.     The bucket is suddenly empty for Leonard J. Cirino, US   Ghost dog dreams Chasing / being chased The old demons Unrelenting Last / lost hours Agitation and fear Disorientation Haunted by Old dreams / nightmares Not crazy but insane enough Terror in an old dog’s eye As in life – so in death No going out gently Midnight at 3 pm Old dog terrors Ghosts returning 100 unfinished dreams 1000 unfinished thoughts 10000 unformed words You face the end Unblinking The last rattling breath No grand ideals left Only the growing cold The room filling with A slow creeping fog Moments / memories winking out Madness takes the wheel You veer off the main road Heading off into the undiscovered country No one can go with you this time Your vision clouds over Your words undone A rippling image of the moon In a leaky old bucket A painful cry of a distant animal A sudden cold wind rises from the land You turning to face creation The image of the moon Suddenly stilled The bucket empty   *Leonard J. Cirino ( 1943 - March 9, 2012), THE INSTRUMENT OF OTHERS. 100 pgs, Trade Paper, ISBN 978-1-929878-33-8, $15 retail…The late (1943-2012) Leonard Cirino’s poetry explores the space between the world our bodies inhabit and the symbolic world William Blake glimpsed, luminous with spirit and mystery. Negotiating that space requires more than verbal dexterity: it requires a faith in language that rejects Language Poetry’s misreadings of Derrida and Wittgenstein and disdains the Iowa School’s faux-naïve nostalgia for family, farm, and Italian hillside villas. But timeless work is never quite in fashion, nor ever wholly out of it. Consistent with Cirino’s previous work, The Instrument of Others offers an array of accomplished poems that demonstrate his observation in “Rumination on Instinct” that “We barely know the possibilities / of what we should know, and what to believe”… from the Preface by William Doreski. Direct Link to Lummox order page: http://www.lummoxpress.com/lummoxpress/instrument.htm from Leonard's Blogger A Place for the Poetry of Leonard Cirino and his Press