Author: Thespian Drummer

We change with the weight of time, our
sarcasm as a genealogy of repentance
lifting us to an-other gait toward redemption

and yet our words follow us, belonging
in ownership of Self relying only on now as,
a moment too soon, the flutter be-comes lost

like shifting sands aloft, foretold in
the breath of air, (which just sustains me)
I become this moment of elevation

a geometry of cynicism thrust against
the glare of my own honesty and in
that instance I am the flame of intention

© K. James Ribble

The moon is glib tonight
lost in its own thoughts
light shimmering
across this riverbank of lust

Transitory, her station lifts me
into her arms, carries me to a calmer
water just an arm’s length away
from my own awareness –

and so I reap the full weight of
what it is that I am seeing, my
own moment of clarity reflecting
the Self as I am at last, atoned.

© K. James Ribble

Summer has released me
into the arms of Autumn
surrendered by the shrinking
light of yesterday’s longing

as I place my hands into
a Mother Earth that cradles
me toward a new existence
aloft the portico of my dying days –

Please bury me again, sweet sun!
Bury me at a glacier’s length as time begins!
Like a leaf I fall to the furrowed soil,
my life begins anew in its fall to sorrow

Only this Moment’s time and place
denies the mystery of my monuments
to the Eros of my loving and feigns the
egregious light of day that succumbs to
the loss, the loss of all my sworn tomorrows

© K. James Ribble

as if pandering to a propaedeutic
staged in the tumult of preface

I am of myself monastic in time,
relinquished of thought for one moment –

– as the day is just beginning in
a hagiography of presence and light

© K. James Ribble

still the smell of summer
lingers a welling of mist
moist with the allegory
of copper and the lichen
of change ||
where dusk
admonishes a crescent
moon with remains
of its lingering light
passive ecliptic
aloft and alone in its glide

© K. James Ribble

the last time we spoke
winter made notice of
white along the snowbound
hills of Vineyard Lake
where the trees, barren in
a frozen grip of silence,
bore the gold of September
as each leaf died when we
were still in love – my intuition,
frost made imminent as the
crisp and dying light of solstice,
knew our hearts would long for the day in
memory to purge this night’s moment –
and now, like the falling snow that
gathers in these hills with stillness,
our love departs each from the other
as a noon-day sun emerges
from these crying clouds

© K. James Ribble

The clouds are forming again
columns of coral pink
symbols, the air
as water where rain
becomes willful
potential to a pale
windham white
and creases the sage
of your eyes in earthly blue
– just for me –
this visual poetry
of fire, like these clouds,
air (the water tomes)
hewn of grace
and the grace of you.

© K. James Ribble

A centering of Self
-a seeing-
brief glimpses of
a young, twenty-year self,

my view of Then
finessed by the
Spectacle-of-Life –

it was all so New!
and Now?
Forty years Later …

I am full
of a howling,
my path to
this very Moment

Revealed by the same
connection of (to?) who I was
to a love I feel
emerging before my eyes

it’s as Grecian as
Isis, this grip
on the grasp of life
like wisdom of vision

Time tells me
I am [still] ‘Here’
healing the Song of Self
inside (a (canopy) of) Love

who could say?
and how many thoughts
I’d given – sent to
to the ether of this very Moment

then, in recognition
of my self, of
embracing Who I AM? Now.
So as the light slants Autumn

sending shadows long
like me, I’ve become
a perfect circle surrounding
the days and nights ahead

coming to know
the same young boy
is now the man he IS
this, in a resolution of Time.

© K. James Ribble

The summer has spent itself –
growth’s pinnacle released to
the angle of the sun,
its shimmering eloquence,
end of day / exhausted
||
The scent of epilogue
betrays my utterances –
Autumn approaches in
turquoise abandon, quick
to deny her vices
||
today I wrapped the
bell songs of September
into the palm of my hand –
Three times the toll was
found on the end of reckoning
||
Alder and sparrow wreak
the heaviness of the warren
the hills, that view of you,
left adornment aloft of flight,
reflected intimal in our moment

© K. James Ribble

I manifest in time like
Ektachromes of Evans
and clip the sunlight gold

in a cloudless sky-
surprise as your life
evolves un-told before

the dawn of your own
anxiety, a mystery of weight
(pulling through me)

an anchor of the unknown,
an unidentifiable fear
crossing the room

becomes a fantasy
and so the dream I
dream at night

adorns the day
overcome with vision:
You strafe the cold before,

My love, I wake to you.

© K. James Ribble