Thespian Drummer

There, in the in-between
of memory
and knowing –
your hands
reach for me, soft
delicate
like the dew
in reflection
tears of diamonds in
the blue of Spring grass

You come to me like
a sinew of light,
remains of yesterday’s
bone in tomorrow’s hand
Intrepid
Lost,
I lay beside you
Wandering
catching parables
of fate in
dusk’s ligaments
and the smell of rain

Our pyramids
in ever glowing
canyons
Form a lotus
kaleidoscopic
in white, carpeted azure
aerial frequencies calm in the
grasp of nightfall,
moonlight
Laying presence in
Your eyes reflecting rain, the
Summer fast approaching in
every color washed bright

© K. James Ribble / Sinew of Light

Dusk bleeds light into the torniquet of night
scored by the echoes of the raven’s cries,
their pleas and petitions ignored by Theia
in an unscripted silence known only to
a scoured and shadowed moon whose lies,
told by laurel, cinder-laced clouds, tints in
gathered admonition to your body’s aura and
and its projections – who could know such voids?
For even siblings of heaven cannot perceive
the station your heart resides in sighs
where nightfall rests in the Hallway of time.

© Thespian Drummer / Shadowed Moon

The moon lingers inside
the brushstrokes of you,
your soul resides here a place
I know of I sense the passage
of time there, as human as
the Given sentience to recognize
These feelings, I know a Time:
to Know How it Feels, how Earth
Smells, how it sounds, and the colors
Of its place in this galaxy –
How her waters taste like
Life itself how the sound of
rain Rocks me into a sleep
of Untold Solace –
Drunk with the sovereignty
of reminiscence, this Ownership
of time has no presence Here,
it emerges into a Light
the bounty of which My love
for you is gladly paid
nothing in This universe can
compare To the gaze and glance
Of your smile, a sweetness
bringing Tears to the wingspan
Of every swallow in these lands
Where I belong to you
Where We Belong to us

© Thespian Drummer / The Moon Lingers

Evening closes on an
aging Summer, becoming airless
in white clouds earned by the
sun’s last glance – a final gasp
of dusk in pearl’s pink:
– time’s pallor fading
toward the autumn of my life –
here the closing moments of
long days and short nights
begin a final dance to equanimity
the evenness of night begging solace
from the promise of dawn, like
the loss I feel since you left – it
lays iridescent claim to my heart,
rains in places I can never reach:
light dimmed by nightfall-final say.

-edited- © K. James Ribble

I sing now in a key
of awe and lament
in this moment singing
Songs of memory released
and unencumbered by time
parsing through me as I
love in the face of loss,
in twilight never known
piqued from the fount of a
simple look you dreamt my way
dreams of past lives
they come in absolutions
and the reckoning of wonder
I speak now in a language
I cannot articulate
where we exist in an absence of time
of quiet, of peace and an overwhelming
sense of gratitude edged in
the twilight of miracle
Like seeing the reflection of timelessness
seep through the sky’s canvas of blue
— from a lake’s alpine mirror —
revealing I am flayed
among the stars and their kin

Incantations of summer bear
witness to winter using autumn as her
bridge, so

I forego the loss of light each day
only to bring prominence to providence

opine quietly on the conifers in their
confessions of synesthesia and lay to
rest on cue imminent as an autumnal equinox –

any misgivings I may have had are now
dissolved into the long road ahead
measureless in its primacy yet undiminished
having made ready my own confessions

of all my love for you

There is a song in the day’s remaining sunlight
that fires pink on Sierra browns, reflected
delicate in the strands and traces of your hair,
the catered glow of your presence forming
an audition to the edge of Autumn

This is a Summer that presents herself now
in terms of color, in stark melody and
intemperate decisions – given the length
of time one gives in a life of wonder –
like the premonitions of my dreams

giving way to your cosmic Light –

Here in this immeasurable twilight, I
linger in the realm of your eyes
like a lost star formed in the birth
of a Chaos in tatters, as your stare bores
into me and I forget where I am

Were it not for this lucid frame of reference,
the light noted languorously in degrees
of ascent, while you and I comprise
the captions of antiquity, as our time here
is lost forever in the memories of my heart

© K. James Ribble

My view clears the bow of

Your horizon, the shape of

Its cantaloupe orange burned

Into the cleft of time

Its pirouettes in favored light

spread Clear, opaque as moist rain,

Paired to my heart’s countenance

Of grace in metaphors for eyes

Of Feathered daybreak, enveloped

purely as my devotion to your being –

So Come to me in lilac and jasmine,

In the ascendance of who you Are

I am in infinite wonder of having left

My heart to no one but you.

The stars are making noise

Tonight

While a motionless moon

        Lays flat across the arms

        Of night

Her glyphs left in-situ

A wild thing in oviform

Flying in the flogging

Of daylight

Pallid in the paucity

Of Star birth, they’re

Members of a tribe

Known only by the Old Ones

The lines and hashes of kindness

        borne of them

        but for the languid

elements of reminiscence and

a threadbare patience

            left alone in a sanguine sky

© K. James Ribble