Declaration of Intent

shiv

By the year 2024 I swear I will have stopped seeking you out
In book cemeteries and avant-garde poetry anthologies
My tear-away thoughts will have reattached themselves with
Adhesive precision and left-brain rationalization

To the cerebral headquarters of my hard-won clarity
Anywhere you have left the English language intact and unexamined
After making love to the well-worn finger-cushion of
Your backspace key

As fiction is indented by the preference of fact
The blank page finds itself stepping outside for a cigarette
One progressive day I too will wake cured and singed in the margins
With the past and the present occupying ring-side seats

My hostage-taker of a memory and I will duel it out
With half-remembered swings before making a rock-paper-scissors pact
That will settle nothing but still
Cattle prod me into shredding the Statue of frauds

We had drawn up by a cursor 18 years ago
When we were both ill at ease
Inhabiting our reincarnated twenties
Without the constant presence of a keyboard witness

I will be old-fashioned and post these monopoly pieces across our
Counterfeit mental-snapshot galaxy by hand
Daringly, without a stamp or hope of either of us reaching
Our narrative destination

My aberrant heart will slip like a fish out of your net
No longer stuck and smeared across our non-consecutive pagination
The guts of my vowels swallowing the sounds behind
Your silent mouth charades

Free of love-culprit lexicon
I won’t allude to your alphabetic beauty anymore or
The way your swirls and closed-circle consonants caught
Me unawares in between concurrent sentences once

On the other side of the screen unbelievably heady
With the asinine thought that our eye lines might collide and
Religiously convene at some point
If you hadn’t been invented by me

I like to think God would have made you up
On failed origami folds of foolscap
To keep me company on the
Private grounds of the unpublished page

Where I became a well-paragraphed but surly-versed beauty
Trying to blot out the famine of my longing by
Devouring all the blindfolded, yellow-bellied words you had
Stashed in the basement of your word museum

BEAT

Shiv,
you are my hero. period.

bravo, once again.

Argie

Incredible! I really don't know what to say but...whoa!

shiv

Beat and Argie--thank you so much for your feedback, I appreciate it more than you know!
Glad you enjoyed it and thanks again for taking the time to let me know.

Aoibheann

Don't think I've commented on any of your work before, but I know I'm not the only one who looks out for your name on any new topic on this forum. I'm never disappointed either, I've enjoyed each and every piece you've written. Thanks for sharing it here, excellent as always.. seriously beautiful stuff. (I am articulate, clearly.. )

shiv

Aoibheann Brady wrote:

Don't think I've commented on any of your work before, but I know I'm not the only one who looks out for your name on any new topic on this forum. I'm never disappointed either, I've enjoyed each and every piece you've written. Thanks for sharing it here, excellent as always.. seriously beautiful stuff. (I am articulate, clearly.. )

Thank you so much Aoibheann! Your comments couldn't have arrived at a better time for me, I'd just had a bit of a poetry setback and disappointment and was thrilled to read your post, restored my faith in myself somewhat... Thanks again for taking the time out, I really appreciate it.