Ships caught in the undertow
of waves clashing between storms
trapped in flights no seagulls
were made to fly…
It seems to me that is
what we are;
a series of images trapped
in the dancing, tired murmurs
of debilitated thoughts trapped
immobile in the finality of mortality,
fanned in agonized abstraction
over what we would do,
and what we could not
Victims of infinite desires
we don’t even have names for
anymore, always in flux and always
wanting more
We were truly made for the other,
you and i;
predator and prey, user and used,
creator and created…
desolate in absence and moribund
with presence,
bereft even with affirmation.
So we clasp hands, neither
cleaner nor scruffier than the other,
but similarly, reduced
to a graveyard of words, our furies
wasted in empty conversations
under raddled sheets…
So now, soul to soul, as opposed
to man and woman, ripped
and scarred, we
bring forth the songs, the ones
we sing to quiet our most desperate
fears; those we learned while clutching
our mothers’ breasts; with trembling
intensity, our hearts’ appetites
in guilty hands sightlessly,
desperately outflung, reaching
crying grace, that saving grace
of caring unbound, for another,
lest those dreadful waves we paint
so well over the horizon
of our inner sights, drag us yet
to the very depths of self-deception.
So hello, ourselves to know,
ourselves to fling into the maelstrom,
further than we have ever dared before,
while reaching out for hands
we have only, and so far, known,
in half-formed dreams, longing that
when we push we also pull, through,
defiant still, unrelenting as the condemned,
and to a place only mortals know
to brave, with timbered ships,
and paper boats…there
beyond the rage,
over
the uncontrollable
and the unconsolable, beyond
the rending waves
of the life that we betray
as easily as they destroy us
in the undertow.
Rod McKuen!?!? I’m so happy I found someone who likes his works..I’ve no words to describe how happy I am. My face just lit up.
You remind me of those classical poetry writers with masterpieces that lived forever.
I can never write the way you do, but I will always think of your poems as masterpieces.