Category: Poetry

Emerge

Thespian Drummer


I’d lost all my strength
The natural urge to create
My apartment became a mess
Even the ants left.
The spark to create was lost
The art that reignites my heart
Giving birth to what I believed
Had died and felt abandoned
On the stage of my masculine agency
LIFE became optional
LIVING was perfunctory
I GAVE nothing in return
FOR the kindness of others
REAPING emptiness and
SADNESS . . . 
Finally awoken from this dream a
Dream of a sad, burrowed fog that
Lifted as my line-of-sight
Opened towards a doorway
Where I see all of you, your visage like 
Comrades-in-arms gathering
At dawn, like sunlight-as-water 
Spilling across the field of a new day.
 
© K. James Ribble

Dreaming Again

Thespian Drummer

It’s just like a ladyship knowing they’ll never die
Awoken by dreams scattered across her bed
The filtered excess of thought-in-motion revealing
All that remains of memory long faded by waking

Even now I cannot divulge what’s left to write
In that I may substantiate that lost vision just
For you so that it may reveal a conscious moment
Too lingering for it to become lost along the day

This urge this uncommon urge to want to know
Seeking deep access to what I cannot see inside
A realm all too real for interpretation of words
Yet catching all cataclysm of doubts lingering

Longer than my mind can unhide before they’re
Gone into the fray of a day’s motions in art form
Those unknown, unfettered bastions of grace
Lifting me up propping me against the wall of dreams

Returning me to you

Again.
© K. James Ribble

Let’s Start From the Top

Thespian Drummer

The dinner table has been set
All the guests have arrived on time
All gathering in the anteroom
In a minute we’ll hear the chimes

Before this night is over
And the glistening caste is die
A magnificent truth shall be revealed
In the conceptual blink of an eye

We dine by the banks of a river
Caught surrounded by the wind
Fully embraced like an innocent child’s
Mother whose womb is next of kin

The Evening hosts the land of the river
It’s beckoning makes no doubt
All the guests surfeit without an answer
Understanding what we cannot mount

We smell the city river water
Sweet aroma of the stream
The sunlight dances all around me
And I hear summer wind in the leaves

© K. James Ribble

Unthawing

Thespian Drummer
I’ve become my own sole course catalyst

Setting larger-than-life diversions
Into play – a clandestine motion
We both knew was life changing

From the smallest seed came

The Light of a look beyond my view
Inside my own soul of mission above a life
Catastrophic geography cannot bear

Between capsized mountains of my progeny

The newborn symbols of my years on earth
All standing on the sands of a time I cannot change
Nor grasp, just out of reach – to each man

His own adroitness his own pouring into the

Children of their own generations through time
As decades of lost words escape the edge of winter
A season inside me so cold yet memory survives its grip

Memories of an unthawing of sorts on

A slow and uneven pace like a stream
That starts and stops as the days get
Longer then rushes to its ocean

Like the downstream recognition of

Where I’ve been alongside people who
Matter to me assembled in the breadth and
Depth of my hearts ache to tell their

Stories from my perspective –

Spring is here now in the North:
A vast and limitless world of possibility
Unfolds like the cherry tree outside my window

© K. James Ribble

Glimpses

Thespian Drummer
 
We just catch glimpses of it
Fleeting fury of life’s understanding
Awareness of something familiar
We do not know at the cusp
Of our time to expire
From an unknown source we
Claim to own . . .
Faster than Light
Its surface is a matte of clarity
We cannot fathom and its
Course is soft, at first, to the
Touch, instilling in us a love
We try to honor
 
 
© K. James Ribble

As The Day Begins

Thespian Drummer
Sunlight the sum of all that I Am
Covers me like a blanket
Like the one my mother swathed me in
Photons splayed across the room
Revealing her presence as if she
Were standing next to me
I am exposed to the warmth of Light
The Light of Angels who administer
The love of this illumination just
Like water that flows among the rocks
Of the river just outside my window
I am surrounded and embraced
Once again showing me how I am
Loved in this world and how I
Can love others . . .
All my life all my life I have sought you
And you have always been there even
When I thought I was all aloneYour sunlight spills and drenches me
Its warmth is all around me
Bathes me in its perfection and I
Am overcome with the splendor just
Like a boy who falls in love for
The first very time. And I am
Embraced once again warmed to the core of my
Being once again.

© K. James Ribble

DeCay’s Banquet

Thespian Drummer
 
Chigaon DeCay woke one day and asked himself:
What if I were in love?
What if I could walk up to you
And grasp your hand like we
Were the last two people on earth?
What if I could live once again?
Is not my twelve year sleep long enough?
Is not all that time I’ve recorded pathos enough?
Dreaming all the stars of my ancestors!?
Venerable engravers of my life
Who came before me colliding with you and I
Like we took our exit from the subway on
31stand Seventh piercing through the smells
Like an afterthought like italicized stage directions
Knowing the author’s notes are open for interpretation
A carrion-feast of stench wilting at the thought
Of living a life of nothing one more day!
Enough!he roared, enough of this chattering way
If I could play for you the music of who I am
What would you hear? Would you hear
A pastel wash of Major 7ths and Diminished 4ths?
A swift ravaging abhors this Love we’ll find!

 

© K. James Ribble

Logos

Thespian Drummer
Decades of silence surrounded my voice
A tempest on the ocean floor of my soul
White noise echoing in the great hall of life
Where scars of your vibration remain inside
My unconscious reflex, thoughts of you filters
Real tears that flow along the currency of my face
Of fears that cannot lessen nor teach me that
Your place in my life remains a constant
A recognition that straddles me between doubt
And being honest like the luxury of daylight reveals
You surrounded by vast mountain steps approaching the
Shore of a rocky beach, water singing its songs
Of calm the forever rhythms of your grace bearing witness
To the symbol of you and I swell in the over-flow of
My admonitions of who you are and I cannot escape
Even these words cannot free me from this truth that you
Are my logos my Knowledge of who I am as my voice is found
© K. James Ribble

Allowance

Thespian Drummer

Her royal entrance is my own undoing
Watching her pace belie the ebb-indefinite
Snap-madness of her gait-way creates an
Allowance for such motion of flight

Where I’ve become a mute
A mere walk-on within her play a
Theater with no lines to speak
Only lavender movement and blocking

That feels cast aside by her glance as
I am reminded of the fallout love we once
Gathered inside the upstaged wings of silver light
A duotone of bastard amber and daylight blue

Emulating Life once more across a
Doorway transporting me to dreams of us:
May I touch your face once more?
Gently kiss your forehead beside the

Blackness of time’s open dream-way
Coalesced before my eyes like the munition
Of my loneliness and abandoned life?
Catered but not served in this house of ours

Lies the same doorway and exit of entrance to
A path of undiscovered ecstasy
Divinity casting its last rays of sundown on
My own undoing,
my own undoing . . .
 
 
© K. James Ribble

Proclamation

Thespian Drummer
 
And when at last the final days
Are even now above
The clearing of my soul
Trumpets shall fanfare
The Seventh Chords of dawn
In the land of eternal victory
Proclaiming all glory to be his
As I raise high my sword of loyalty
To be sheathed forever in
A common bond of trust
And filial piety
Visions of the kingdom
Lay upon my heart of
Silenced golden hills
Fragrant and displayed with
A joy and beauty undreamed of 
There beyond the mountains of my life
Lies my father’s house the
Foundation laid with his own hands
And I run there the royal-blue
Turquoise-ambered sky
Completing the evening of my Death
For I am reborn and welcomed home
 

 

© K. James Ribble