Category: Poetry

Only the twilight
Knows the shadows of my heart
Seeks the touch of you

 
© K. James Ribble

Em-paneled before words I speak
No one can hear as I become witness
To an extraordinary play of light
And shadow reveal the timeless beauty
Of life, my heart like lake-effect snow,
Like scant air released from antiquity,
Billows beyond the legion of escarpments
Taken from the millings of godshards
As all emotions (like motion) form the
Broth of natures healing, forming sentient
Beings, omniscient healers, reckoning in
The shallows of the sun, their stillness
Therein lines passages like a shrilling
Of thought, past equations of sunlight inclining
The Songs of Light against the darkness of time.

 

© K. James Ribble

Abutment against time all
Lexicons alike blurred past
A thousand algorithms
Rendering space upended

Many minds can dwell among
Us unrepentant towards cause
Yet find ourselves amazed that
The sun still rises every morning

Without fail

Canvassing the sky with time’s
View of the Laws there can
Be no other awakening – lest
We quench our thirst as the

Last known remembrances to
Ourselves a prayer unto us the
Dreamers who love with utter
Abandon at the Gates of All Cost

 
© K. James Ribble

Moon water catches
Breath of Life, the
Unending songs of
This lonely planet

Grabs grief like a
Lost child finding
Solace and grace
In starlight of heaven

Here, I float within
This still and quiet vision
As if hovering above lost
Tales of a Cambrian sea

Like visionaries and their
Ways of water, their prophets
Exceed the common good
For all of us and I

Become captivated reflection
The tide acknowledging my heart
Along the shores of every step
I’ve taken towards revelation

 

© K. James Ribble

This sorrow knows no
Secret beyond the
Glossy shores of home
We call estrangement –

Between the chasm of the
Cloudless sky and the intentional cost
Of our gaze, I become monument-as-
Love to you, exceeding the

Smile of these ashen stars above,
All of them set on fire like you, millions of
Castaway ships, like galleons entrusted
To the rich legacy of your beauty:

Such is Symbol of all that is feminine –
Bearing the weight this deep attraction
That pillows my thoughts inside your heart,
Ocean brio as Image this love of ours!

 
© K. James Ribble

I had forgotten what it means
To hold your hand
To walk next to you

I had forgotten how
A simple touch of your neck
Can raise the texture of your skin

I had forgotten what
The sound feels like
To simply speak your name

How the sunlight
Touches the Etruscan
Brown of your hair

Memories of you
Evaporate with time
Inexorably lost on the

Breath of kisses
I had forgotten to
Give to you

There, among all these
Memories lost, spent
Before the tilt of light

Can name the early
Morning glint of golds,
Reminding me of you

 

© K. James Ribble

I hold these conversations with my young self,
Reckonings and recallings, all
Beckoning to the relegation of pure sound, the
Amber-rhythms of just how the words resound //

My younger-self acknowledges my presence
Warmly smiles the distance before the sun
In the waves of his own remembrance,
Like facing two mirrors with self Knowledge

The light from that time has not hit him yet
So the insights are all incomplete, merely images
Reduced to recollections. This bounty which is
Catastrophically unknown. And so it goes, a

Duvet of soft folly sprained across the cantle of
Our mount, this beast of burden weighing softly,
Strong as the ripstop applied to our waste – in
The same flawless patina is our face in the stars

 
© K. James Ribble

*Inspired by the song of the same name from the album, Moonwater, by Rudy Adrian

In the Hall of Perish lies
The memory of our love
This sage palais
Extending out to the
Long mall of my heart
Like flatlands of exhale that
Spread beyond this
Earthen horizon

This dull stubble of soil
Capsized on the vast plains
Of anchored corridors
Maps us like a presidio
Of swollen desire as the
Bladed lace of your sighs
Voice the stars, in thought,
And you begin singing …

It is in this dearth of burden
Where there is poetry
[there is no poetry]
Between where we think
We understand and
What is known only
To the universe of Melody

This, this is where we live now
There is no viscera of vision
Only slow light fanning against
The wings of the moon as we
Become the radiant fray
Varicose and indignant
In the treachery of
Love’s travail

 
© K. James Ribble

The sweet nectarine
Of her breathing
– a state of mind –
\Rough\
\Uncut\
Like the way unbridled
Longing of thunder sounds
Under warm currents of Want
A thin copious layer betrays
The brusque and bathed intent
Of a willing heart now
Fierce before my hand,
A merciless touch of
Envy in subtext of masks
Vindicates the Cumulus
Of unholy desire as an
Irreverent rain begins
To surge within me
Her willingness now on
The edge of Writhe,
I plunge the taxonomy
Of her rapture into
A catapult of Machiavellian
Depth as each gleaming
Breath unfolds
Unimpeded by
Our embrace.

 
© K. James Ribble

There is this reoccurring
Dream that haunts my soul
Takes place upon a stage,
In auditoriums accreting the
Ambient matter of life arising
From a script, oratories that
Contravene my understanding
From too many re-writes –
Invariably I am always
Entering an empty house
(a dress rehearsal?)
From center stage right
As the Leko’s burn from the wings
Spraying cadmium oranges
Against manganese blues filtering
Gobos that play the light in fog
As if I am in a forest
And then the lights go out as
I face the empty seats and blindly,
Trustingly walk downstage
Toward an instinctive understanding
So that, in my waking hours
Of searching for grand meanings,
The black entity of those theaters
Swallow all my fears and self-doubt
And I embrace the serif of illusions
Like the blue, blue grosbeak
Awakening to Spring.

 
© K. James Ribble