Author: Thespian Drummer

If I could kiss every strand
of your starless-night hair,
and every lock and curl that
exists upon your perfect frame

I would find my breath clasped
between the rhythms your heart beats,
exchanged of air in waters from the
sacred lakes and fires of your soul –

And as I cross the settled rivers of your
soil, across the endless acreage of our life’s
land, you become my journey to a discovery:
that the rules of breathing captivate my

soul on the coastal sands of your gaze,
the portered bronze and marbled phrases
of your eyes in colors I cannot explain
seized in the twilight of a night’s single star

©K. James Ribble

Writing Prompt: the rules of breathing

The fingers of autumn now
reach through a time of day when
the sun light says it’s going to rain

as a slight of summer begins
to close her harvest eyes making
fall yawn before the respite of

dawn’s reflectance – a tinged epistle
penned by the color of your eyes in
what rests beneath these canopy clouds

under a curtain of shade that veils the
mountains in a blank shelter of shadows
where traces of turquoise and pink

tinge the hues of your sweetest smile

 
© K. James Ribble

Where the bosque
in subtle daylight
recedes from rock
and juniper, you
come to me
as Infinite
with moonlight’s
reflection in your
eyes, where the gaze
of the sky itself
cannot remain in
blue long enough
to capture imperiled
your dusky hues and sighs

© K. James Ribble

Verdant evening sky slowly
gives way to the breath of dawn,
night vanquished as revealed

through my eyes of distance
in forty years, like a sounding,
like the depths of an ocean

fathoms measured in days,
–my thoughts as echoes–
that time now in singularity

astray in a story that began
as I have begun in witness
absolved in ferly days since

when my journey began,
where now there is a view,
a silent periphery forming,

rock-strewn and tree-fallen,
along lands of a gentle wind
as every moment of every

day becomes a counting in
the make and measure of my life,
soundless like falling stars
fading aside the morning sun

© K. James Ribble

Together the landscape before us
finds comfort in the light diminished

the chiaroscuro of time we walk
discovering the same toile colors

through the same months and days, like
shallows through warm pockets of water

in a cold sylvan lake, like an awakening in the
sanguine fog of memory as a dream, bold

as the tempera of optimism blossoms
pretentious in the swollen mouth of measure –

like a hesitation slowing us to moments,
showing us the open wounds of pride

betrayed by the sincerity of our honesty, our
deepest hearts grown gibbous in the winter

of our familiarity, where a word read triggers
dreams of something you swear you dreamt

before, like a vision just outside the grasp
of recollection in the faded ocher shadows

of a snow-drifted stairway blurred in the
sienna tone metonymy of a life gone wry.

 
© K. James Ribble

>Writing Prompt: existential dissonance<

I catch the very edge of time here
reticulation of an instance catching
the dew with knowing there’s so
much more to come on reflection
as minuets seep in the notion that
I was so much younger then before
like thoughts gathered in the tonal life
of sound, an illumination like photogravure,
an imprint of our own orenda, a lingering
of the soul’s restless instance drenched
in morning gold, where the sun’s blanket
of light, like a guest of these hills, surrounds
our love so complete, so infinitely calm
that I have fallen into the chasm of this
place fully embraced, into the natural flight
of a soft breeze on the notes of its song,
and the motion of summer’s tallest grass

© K. James Ribble

I enter your words, mirth-mouthed
in clothlight, lost in the hidden vestiges
of your afterworlds that form the distant,
departed valleys of a barley-amber gray,

where sounds of blue entrancement seek the
drift absolve in a suspended water of the moor,
your heart, a nemophilist listening to the
earth residing inside the stupor of starlight,

projects your love, a terrestrial entelechy,
an orb of myriad conscience that transforms
me, becomes a fulfillment of purpose, an
anaphora of the soul formed of the body

liberating in its purpose to languish warm,
reaching redemption in the musk and
might of an hour’s salience, past this time,
past recollection to a bead of its moment:

where a glancing calm consumes me,
surrounds me in the pulse of living
and loving to the pause of each second
when I become the verity of my Self.

 
© K. James Ribble

I am meeting you
in my own lifetime
pretensions barreled
in an exculpation of

voyeuristic blame
profligate fleece of white
in pain’s grey and
cadmium yellows as

a foreground of rage
red as the earth below,
becomes a carousel of
clouds born of sunsets

sooner than the evenings
bliss of dawns promise;
I walked many a mile
in the rhythms of my life,

yet you come to me
again and again on a leaf
of aspen’s grasp singing
like the birdcalls of their kin

to homes surrounded by
life etched in the cover
of silent cloudspeak
their closeness like a

feint of thought
here, as form, as a
symbol of Who I Am,
this quiet sings to me

in the couched symmetry
of a mountain flower
soft as the rain in summer.

© K. James Ribble

Like the branches
of a tree
tangents of life reach softly,
stark interstices float
with the lofting of time –
each a corollary
toward its own conclusions,
Zen-like yet outward-facing
monastic in flourish, empyrean,
forming a choreography
of sunlight,
a time-dance of
oak and moonlight,
searing songs of
effortless calm and being
in a rainsong of air
filled with smells of juniper –
a fermentation of softness
becomes an amelioration
of candid loss
where the night has gained
its penury of sun,
intimates the evening
as last rays of light
lay bare across the arms of night.

© K. James Ribble

Mother of sacred time
obscure and vague like

sorrow of yesterdays
long forgotten

ministering urn of upheaval
an open crystallization

of shapes bears witness
to a grain from the smallest

angstrom scaled in pale whites,
sub-atomic – so small

even creation cannot perceive
its existence, an imminent insouciance,

like states of missed understanding,
only the light, a pause of photons

can grasp the attendance of
my heart & gives way to

divine particles, to know you –
, now ,
and be known.

© K. James Ribble