MARINA GIPPS Poems

I was told to cover myself with agreeable surfaces
as if that writer who had won laurel wreaths.
I said No for I was full of shovels,
needing to further unearth my depth.
...

The fear of a past found in a birthplace.
Any record of me.
I remain anonymous and watch-less.
A beggar who gave it all away in her old days of royalty.
...

In heaven there are no roads,
Only clouds we drift through with light feet,
And the years are shorter too
with no more counting of days.
...

I waken from isolation with the noise of birds.
Only they are not alive. They are dead and chattering away.
As if high pitched notes of a woman wounded by the wayside.
How words subdue all nature. Throw another wren into a ditch.
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No candle burning. I listen to the wind
howl past me with the cool gust of chance.
My lover, always gone into the leaves
this broken television holds in its blue shafts.
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We are late-bloomers, vials of acid, you say.
Is that why I am always withering away?
Someday I shall be immune
given that I have been toxic for so long.
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How is it one may love endlessly as if longing for the final drop
to funnel out from a frozen pipe in the old plumbing of a madhouse?
Beware, brazen girl for your red hair has caught fire many times.
You walk upright when the world is closing its eyes to you.
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I cry for the lost baby inside of me that never existed to a man I loved.
I cry countless nights for him knowing he will never return.
I cry and then I die and he doesn’t care.
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She would prefer not to speak
of a friend who wrote verse:
eager to live, to marry, to die.
Wed forever to the devil herself:
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Out with a tornado,
teaching it some wild
variation of tango.
Past lives appear
...