Red Ovation

Blow with me, love,
upon these embers
now,
so faintly aglow,
yet glowing still.
Can they spark and live
again,
and rise in red ovation
to warm this fading room,
this shadowy heart?
Our fuel’s spent,
and only breath remains
now.
In misty expiration
we lean toward
the heated hearth,
stirring coal and ash
to one last hopeful flame.
Should it burn again,
miraculously,
let us arrange ourselves
in full view
of the apparition,
partaking of the anomalous [...]

Please Excuse Me…

All:
I have tried, unsuccessfully, to focus my thoughts and feelings into prose. For whatever reason, I cannot, and you are, I’m afraid, stuck with what you see below: threads, patterns, mysteries. This is what I hear…
Thanks for reading…
CC

Morning Bells

I awoke to the tolling of bells:
the ancient clanging,
the mystic jangling
of the heaviness of bells
in my heart.
Deep did the brassy throat call
to me
in spectral salutation:
ghostly yet familiar,
like the ashen, expressionless face
of a love departed.
Did I sleep through the changing of tides,
eternally swelling
estuarine telling
of the age-old story of tides
in my heart?
Long did the briny voice sing
to me
in reedy [...]

Aria

they say the spirit lingers
for three days,
hovering mere inches
from the now vacant flesh
it so transparently
inhabited,
waiting to drift
silently
into the next room,
down the hall,
through the door,
into the night.
the truest of ghosts:
haunting not
but brooding
over what remains,
billowing into cloud
and singing
over those that hover beneath,
burning rabidly
like the red flame 
of autumn,
filling the air
with the low gray
smoke of winter.
and so he heard
your song
stirring!
for he,
liberated,
transfigured,
glorified,
abandoned [...]

Windows Warm

what are our dreams
but windows,
warm or cool
as the season demands,
memory-framed
vistas
on the old, dark
mysteries
of the night

EH

it must have been hell
in the end:
paranoia rising
dark and sudden
like a storm
in the Gulf,
the memory of electrodes
screeching behind your eyelids
like lightning
without thunder,
silent and hot
in the Idaho summer night.
unopened letters
drifted together
in snow-white banks,
a full season’s worth
of what passes for love
or friendship
flaking the worn-out
back of the chair
you abandoned
for the panel-creak
dark of the hall.
or maybe hell
had nothing to do with [...]