Thespian Drummer

In

The spruce and juniper

I climb in cogitation

seeking wisdom of light

flush among the trees

of the forest deep

the same xeric light

tendentious without these

landmarks

wayfaring, beaming light in

principles of love

Relative or not.

In anxious atrophy like

ideas never acted on

the chance to try once more

bears the weight of

knowing:

same place, different time

 

 

© K. James Ribble

Without any acumen of

stage and grace, thoughts

of you occupy the estuaries of my

time, and to my astonishment,

I am free.

 

 

© K. James Ribble

Photo by © K. James Ribble

 

 

 © K. James Ribble

 

 

© K. James Ribble

I am beholden to the month of June
like a reliquary where a larkspur sky
contains the blue woodgrain of lost stars
in a sacred exploit of shaded form bleeding
light from the purification of my time here –

As if I am the offering to this place,
this landscape of harsh beauty, a litmus
of the blue-black night on a wide open
horizon, I hold my light in ascension, to be
present here – now above the ramadas

Of my own body as this resting sky of my
oblations break to the crease of a Lapis blue
ether, like flux in the canted road ahead
among dogbane and saltbush, bringing me
closer to the cardinal refuge of night

 

© K. James Ribble

There’s something like silence
in a cobweb of magic
hailing me from the subtle
coasts of a blithe awareness
slow and distant in its crafting,
a conflation bearing the tender
thunder of golds in a night’s rising
sun where the black inks of my
horizon sits below the sliver
of Chalcedon’s crescent moon
rising, dawn chasing the night
now in earnest in the anise light
of daybreak folded across the
expanse of my own determination –
this is where love lives in its
infinite decision, a dedication
to where I stand wandering in
these lands awash in the
agate-red clouds and amber
whites of my own emergence,
crisp as the desert air I breathe

 

© K. James Ribble

 

Writing Prompt:  silent magic

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