poems || John Pursch

Being

Who speaks in tones known only 

to the raven’s husky midnight scrape 

of pawns, nails, and artificial teeth? 

When we see metallic envoys 

easing down a city street, 

why do we naturally run for cover? 

Wooden cracks and time warps 

hamper our descent, 

but friends still turn a frozen hiatus 

into campfires of bronzed eternal youth. 

Arched potential fills the solar beat, 

laughing into random pleats 

of dawning marigolds beneath 

the glorious rush of graveyard 

boots at high noon, soaring through 

the unlocked doors of future’s leaden gaze. 

Ahead in absolution’s sure, directed drift, 

the essence of our mythic haze dissolves, 

implicit in its stepwise urge, waving 

clean precision from ocean tide 

to bone-chewing brawn 

to full phenomenal light.

What Absence May Be

Rustling pages and sound of the pen, 

gorges of sampled demise, 

filtering truncheons and cattle car cries, 

plentiful mirrors of flexible farce 

and swamps that go soft to the touch, 

whimsical neon and pylons of hope, 

rippling vermilion at dusk. 

How drafty, this logic 

of spanners and bees, 

of simpletons given to greed; 

how bleary, this nascence 

of trailing divinity’s 

dismal secretions and 

cool prophetic oaths. 

How hot can it be? 

I don't have a watch; 

I carry a clock to the sea. 

How far shall we go? 

Who cares what we say? 

They marry and follow the road. 

The burgeoning trees of familial girth, 

obscene in obeisance to nudes; 

the criminal trust in imperial bonds, 

obeying our terrible deeds;

in a comment on decadent smitten disease. 

Page upon page upon pages go by 

and I don't know what I write; 

the pen glides along and symbols flow on 

but I'm all alone in the crowded blue day 

and the water is cleared of what absence may be.