Geoff Lathy

Cold eyes stare into bleak darkness
As present voices fade out,
As muscles tighten and hands shake,
As eyelids blink and breathing shallows,
...

When April’s wintry sun
Flows across the burning churchyard
And its rows of rank stone…
There’s nothing to it,
...

She loves me, she
Loves me not,
Petal by plucked petal.
She loves me,
...

The urgency of trust,
Is like sap,
The bitterness of love,
Like tears on a black rose.
...

Softly, gently, blurs my world,
in spinning shades of yesterday;
yesterday were the crystal edges
of my mind, clearly, sharply, unfurled,
...

There was a blue flame
burning, burning
on that day, that day,
that fiery, fleeting day,
...

The cold night
laid its fingernails
in icy screams
upon my eyes,
...

We sit and wait, while
Away the howling hours,
Watching in comfort,
The slow poison of the west,
...

Dumb motherf.....r,
Too quick to trust her,
(was Oedipus ever this blind?)
Too quick to draw breath
...

We sit and converse,
But do we build,
Or do we but lose,
Trust? And do we lose love,
...

Breathe, just breathe,
Don’t feel at all costs,
Never cry, it’s too critical,
You’ve got to die,
...

There lies a weight
Of tears
Behind my eyes
I cannot cry.
...

...

I step carelessly into the ghastly night,
Where trembling shadows dance in fright,
Where ranks of gravestones humble sight
And no sweet voices recall our plight,
...

Bert knew,
As sure as drawing breath,
The dissolute nature of flowers.
Did the famed Bard, I wonder, see red
...

Bright morning through dark crystal distilled,
fading shades into silent stone. The…
Sibilant whispers in my outstretched hand,
heavy glittering behind silken stone tears.
...

I watched
As heaven’s tear dripped,
Rolling, sliding, tearing
From the leaf’s green
...

Shadows lengthening in diesel fumes;
Nine millimetres of time in the dusty sunlight;
Twenty millimetres of uniforms draped in ideologies:
The rushing sound of fear,
...

“I have done nothing but in care of thee,
of thee, my dear one; thee, my daughter,
who art ignorant of what thou art....”
- Prospero, “The Tempest” - Act I, Sc.II.
...

Fingers moving waterlike,
rockover,
green, clear liquid,
in dawn blinking,
...