Poems

by Griffin R.K.

“There is a certain dissonance in encounters between a diarist and the writings of his favorite poet. That Rumi in 1270, or Bukowski in 1970, may have written on a whim, in a sentence and in meter, an experience which you believed could only be described verbatim, as it happened, and in prose, is torturous. And, it is painful as well, to know that this single simile or metaphor—the immense power of which, to the poet, may have sounded more like a subtle thud whilst it was absentmindedly penned—is more particular to, and more essentially describes, your life than it does his, yet is still not, and can never truly be, yours.”

—Diary, August 2026

‘May Rain’

This new sky’s weather is

the bane of the Agiads and Eurypontids:

the meteor showers less like showers

and more like tears or tears and some

black planet interred in the bosom of Gemini

makes a single man well aware

of his being the afterbirth of the destiny

of many another man.

‘Dark Continent’

To the swatting of a fly or perhaps

the sucking of a tick; or, to the new

turmeric sky, once black but now red and

slick that Venus might ’cross its length slide—her

witless droll, her slow pantomime. Or, to

the bodies melting in the stomachs of

the Barbary cats thronged in a valley

who swallowed and enjoyed every hand who

could brush aside the dry grass in their fur.

‘The Blazing World’

I’ll leave the hot kiss upon the paprika skin,

e’er beneath the descending heavy air—moving anew,

breathless the night might’ve been; but leave a long blue

exhale, now that the sun winks and the wrinkled moon

draws upon a deep red sea.

‘Two Quatrains, for the Transformer’

The roaring siege engine gores at its leisure,

breaks the uncertain Avatar, gripped for the first

time—burning coals at her feet: the floor of the

club. Her legs are thicker than she remembers.

I’ll emerge from the darkness, empty-handed:

I poured what I had to fill them with you. My

palms will be turned up, steam still rising; and

I’ll be shoeless, a starving ghost—Bodhisattva.

‘Carpe Diem’

Pleasure

asleep in your arms,

though I can’t know

when or that I am.

Lover

to be buried with,

reclining back into a death

with those same velvety insides

behind closed eyes.

‘Carpe Diem (II)’ — for George Herbert

Blood that in veins runs

then under skin is stilled

might make raptures undone;

but us in each other, un-killed.

‘Avril’

The women stalking crow-like

or dove-like in their knee length jackets

under the sloping brow of early springtime showers:

ladies-in-waiting to all-new hints of desire. Suddenly,

the smell of grass’s blood,

and the sound of rain playing her single song

—the very Earth her dulcimer.

‘Haiku (I)’

An Angel unto

Earth a gender mulatto;

roving souls in hell.

‘Haiku (II)’

I notice when you

gaze into your cup before

sips like a scryer.

‘Haiku (III)’

She moves awkwardly:

the beautiful amateur

dances how water drips.

‘Haiku (IV); or, The Five of Wands’

Seeing the other

love letters in your trash, I

feel predictable.

‘Haiku (V)’

Loud madwoman bangs

pots and pans for comfort from

the quiet madman.

‘Tokyo Haiku’

How? Advertisements

can’t even shew women’s teeth

in these black machines.

‘Aubade’

Your suitcase

useless by the door

a constant threat

to our uneasy symmetry

when that which cracks dawn

also splits earth.

‘Quatrain’

A wine-lined kiss with the dewy precision

of a rose thorn, and the world in her sunburned nape.

Do the pains in these things not seem so strange

like a chancre beneath lipstick?

‘Xanadu, Washington’

It’s midnight in summer

and the streets are coruscating.

The moon is slinking away

with her halo tucked between her legs

like a dog.

And every highway makes the world

a bit smaller than when the Earth was nude

—empty, with maybe a few smoke signals

pockmarking everywhere.

‘Pornography Quatrain’

CRT lines

—prison bars;

rattling cups trace lines along

the length of the intimacy market.

‘Sonnet, for Cannon Beach and Tycho Brahe’

The female moon drags the tide up this coast

—a tongue dragging up the length of plates: so

obvious a sound, so devoid of shame;

the foam digests this sand, brings it away.

Pelicans dive, they see themselves in this

spit, and reel upward, their talons without

the real enemy—the shadow’s honest

counterpart: the threefold heart out for blood.

Suck in and taste this sad blue haze; have this

all-pervading opium dream. Eyes that

cage men and free animals. A color

repopulates the Earth, spreads a perfect

infection. What do you see when you close

or flutter those unbothered eyes down here?

‘Alexander Selkirk’

Steeped in the languid air,

the faces of the cliffs

slide into the veins of the sea

—a sea that still is,

and always will be.

I see,

the lines carved into the back

of an old pale stone; and he

who stands by his demon lover, the sea.

‘Amélie’s Face’

I see the length of your face

obscured by the lilies,

attached like planets

to the warm inner spheres

of an uneasy wind—an eye, an ear,

then the thick lips like twin blisters

just prior to their burst,

middling athwart their death and birth.

‘Jataka’

Yours truly, Dante.

I really only cared to see the sunset once

anyway. Spin Samsara’s wheel and I might

slip up and call you Beatrice again. Another

selfsame life, transposed into a new key.

You were a sexless angel. I was Polyphemus,

and you were the nymph. I was hanged by

a belt and an umbilical cord with a texture about

as leathery. Then I leapt under Juggernaut’s wheels.

I regretted that when I had to relearn my ABCs,

stupider that time around. I was a crow and a dove

and a crow again and couldn't compose letters to

you three times over. I was a sadist and a masochist

and couldn't love you either way. These lives sure

do march on, like a wave that won’t break.

Another selfsame life, transposed into a new key.

Dear Beatrice,

‘For the 250th’

Ebony and topaz: to what glasses clink

and a line that’s drawn in sand;

and Hiawatha stamps his feet

down Dutch-made Wall Street

in this one asylum, under God

expectant of Jihad

in a nightmare

under a turbid semen moon like

a veiled face and where Eve

is still Adam’s rib.

But, crooked like a rib

this country surely is.

‘Sardanapalus’

Belching foam like Aphrodite’s matrix,

the long stretch of soapy ziggurat stairs

under the creeping rocs that led to

Sardanapalus. Rustling the textile, the

naked foot is cast in gold: a burning

down below his adobe-walled womb.

His courtesan throng’s swelling like

a belly and his concubines blow

bubble gum into the shape of buboes.

Taken from a crow, her bleak pinions;

and he’s flung into the full-mooned

sky, crying. The Tiamat-trodden sea

and the El-forged sky: the starts trod

on in both, like a muse in the artist’s eye;

and the wind is very cold again.

A god will whisper a fake desire in your ear

like an itch someplace that’s truly elsewhere.

‘Francisco Pizarro’

Who knew that a country could be a grail?

Or a body of water truly a body?

Women with skin that can rival fire, and so

sweet they let the mosquitoes idly suck away,

run out carrying a similitude of a thing I’ve

seen before. In our less enlightened days

you could very well see the same invention,

in an hour, twice or more; and I’m surprised

that the pigs don’t seem to bore them.

‘Enemy of Pygmalion’

I spent, with you, an autumn in the queendoms,

when a man was rare and a woman was rare.

So, there I saw a hunchbacked old spinner kissed

by a man-nymph in the august of youth; and

a lithe woman following like a fledgling an unaware

fool from end of Earth to end of Earth,

all the while pursued by beautiful and perfumed

follower after beautiful and perfumed follower

herself; and a lonesome karcist strum his dulcimer

every night for a year to a transiting planet

he mourned as it went behind the dun, young Sun.

All that world’s now dust

without luster or fame or name.

Only, perhaps, one spire remains,

if not but one cobblestone wall amongst the many newly laid.

Those were the autumns when you’d yearn for a living lover

as one might yearn for a lover dead for many decades

knowing how soon they might go.

‘Almost a Ghazal’

To hitch a ride to Heaven, I thought

I’d have to kill my darlings. So, a

mistake is why, this middle seat’s

unoccupied. I see the driver’s evil

eye in the rearview mirror. Lovers,

shotgun to back seat, feed to each

other an anesthetic. Her tongue almost

threads through his mouth, thin and

wide, like through a needle’s eye.

A hamsa suffices as an air freshener.

‘To Be Performed by a Song Dynasty Prostitute’

So, don’t bring me home to where the kills have

lost their depth, and the birds their wings; the wind

her hate. Where the shadow and the man are selfsame.

Please, not where I can suddenly move

with such ease, even while self-enslaved

—even while drunk.

‘Footprints’

She looks for gossips she can mock

without their realizing and has forgotten

the turpitudes of girlhood and wears

a shift hung squarely over her shoulders.

She paves her desire paths and under her feet

Eros is welling up to her Sumerian soul

from her soles to her shaking knees to the brain

like oil just beneath the epidermis that is dirt.

‘Sonnet, for Ludwig Boltzmann’

Forgetting is surely time moving in reverse.

Feel the new, old mind from a digested tempest made

fray away in the backward decades;

and hear every word repeal a meaning.

See the lovers, their virginity repaid,

kiss their first, last kiss; and a suicide

spring alive, rise to the bridge like

Pegasus from a severed head.

Meet the victims of the fatal wombs,

excited as they are and confused,

before the blackness before the end.

Still, that damned clock will chime

at the same time every half hour.

Forgetting is surely time moving in reverse.

‘Gymnopaedia’

A man can really only represent

the boulevard on which he was

born, not even a city which, from

above, looks like the patterns in

an expensive brassiere—the rues

as thin as nerves. I recall the face

of a girl—of girls, rather—I knew

in grade school who I don’t dare try

and name. I’ve replaced each face

with those of men who died a hundred

or so years ago.

‘The Paradox’

Above this bedlam, the gods gape amused;

as in, gaze upon the shivering beast in Daedalus’

house who kisses the chains he loved as he

wanders forth free, whilst the unliberated, the

hoarders and the drinkers, are hoarded by the

daric and idly sipped by the wines brewed by the Delta

—both dragged by the refuse as it drains to the sea.

Kiss the chains you love and wander forth free.

‘Nativity Scene’

Two nesting birds meet at their puffball bosoms

like a bucolic postcard’s idea of love and are

shooed away as pests by the manager of the strip

club, whose basketball shoes are untied

and whose face bears a grim Ottoman aura.

‘Indian Summer’

No autumnal mists to hide this bare urban face yet,

only the stucco slathered on the swastika

houses like lamb’s blood above an Egyptian

door. I’ll be waiting for the snow blindness

and the Jazz Age luxuries and the mere two

other eyes besides mine to share such views with.

‘Frail’

His black canals of mascara

tears travel as far down as they can,

past the failing lips like arrows that

draw the eyes to the collarbones

which dip and curve like a Mongol bow.

I recommend he finds an angel instead

—every city offers them nowadays.

‘Suffering’

Some things,

they say,

you’d best forget.

Do the tortures in my days

with my memories end?

I’ve stirred awake at noon

licking wounds

with no written history.

I’ve stood at the bus station

with a nameless father’s trepanned head

fixed squarely on my shoulders,

as old as mankind’s cockcrow;

a Saxon’s severed ring finger

sewn to my palm;

and a warrior’s false imaginings

churning my brain.

‘Metamorphosis; or, Daphne’

In being held, you may come to be the

blue eyes, the rest escaping, burning and

bursting, flung down to finally be the

seething leaves, thirsty and dull and

quieter than sad inhales.

This love is subtle

and simple like the scraping of a crow’s

feathers like parchment against the hidden

skin and the ancient lizard bones when he

takes flight into seaside night, so very loud

when all is quiet.

And, in howling come night, they may mistake

us for wild men yelling, or our pressing naked

feet for fallen reeds cackling

from the dark chill, settling after sundown.