Frank Bana

Come closer to me, dearest love,
To secret homes where we belong
Let my embrace be all your world
Our whispers its most perfect song
...

Cancer blooms in the corporeal garden
Slow, dreamlike, insistent
Not advertising its next appearance
Choosing at will among the garden’s delights.
...

At last I stand before your eyes
Clothed in shreds of consciousness
To abandon what of me remains
To your first and each succeeding kiss
...

Womankind, please make up your mind!
You want a man true sensitive
A vulnerable romantic type
Open to his inner self and willing there to live
...

Our poem is a distillation
wrung from common and raw elements
unhusked grains of experience
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I sleep in a beautiful structure
After years of apartment life
My child shies from all flying insects
My wife says there's mice and there's bees
...

What lies beyond love
Seems to be an unknown country
An unprotected landscape through which run wild
All hearts unguarded
...

Sun coming through
A straw hat
Once I had money
Now it is lost
...

Like an asteroid
Appearing unexpected in the sky
You collided with my surface, drilled inside.
...

Blind is the deepest love, where sight gives way to insight
And the wonder of her face is of no consequence

I summon my powers of composition, unswayed by her attraction
...

Act One

In the footprints of Mandela
On the ladders of the King
...

A cigarette end was thrown from a car window
It smouldered brightly in the road
Another car sped past giving an aura of headlight
Stealing it from the hands of the night
...

our great city: magnet dusty
microcosm of worlds expansive
cultures meeting, lovers mating
in its hold of nerves ecstatic
...

She builds her pleasant garden
Where the winds are not so strong
The sun sometimes relenting
Becomes her companion
...

 
I saw Leonard Cohen on TV
slightly stooped, shining white hair
dinner jacket, black bow tie
...

So Hitler came to power
75 years ago today

so what of it, really?
...

As it happens, I suppose
I am not gay, if it matters at all
And hold almost secret and certainly close
Each memory of you - knowing some
...

I saw a shooting star, a falling star tonight
All green and gold, a peacock tail
(Perhaps it was a satellite)
Anyway it made a sign
...

A slim boy wearing summer clothes
Bare feet like cat's paws on the paving stones
Steps around last night's broken glass
Guitar in hand, heading for the busking site
...

It was 16 degrees below freezing today.

The sky was blue, bright and vast.
...