Month: December 2016

Where is that soliloquy of dissent
Fossils of triumph and assent
My buried determination unblinking

Where are the bones of my skeleton
Arcade and trusses and scaffolding
Holding me head to the sky

Where are the hallucinations
Painted mirages flickering
Fantasies drawing me across the desert

Where is the necromancer
That will brush away ennui and dust
Or must I resurrect me

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats”)

The bridge to nowhere towers
Spans my window and the Columbia
Tessellations of steel triangles
Support lonely headlights flying south
From a silhouetted shore

Meanwhile giant steel barges hoof silent
Below this gate to nowhere
Ferrying boxes from shores more distant yet

And in the east rises a purple sun
Returning from some other shore
Beyond overcast evening twilight
Spilling sunrise over nowhere

-T. Weeks
(A response “Excelsior”)

Standing at an intersection
I weighed my options
Guessing at the best way to go
Next to me was a man
He told me how he had become lost
One wrong turn had led to another
Now he did not know where he was
Or how to find where he had been going
I tried to help him and point the way
He just smiled and thanked me for the kindness
Taking a breath he started in a new direction

“Where are you going” I called after

“Over there” he responded

“How do you know that’s the right street”

“I don’t”

“What if you end up someplace you don’t like”

“Then I’ll choose a new way to go”

“You’ll never get unlost that way”

“Wonderful
Since I’ve been lost
I’ve been free to move in any direction”

-T. Weeks
(A response to “A Riddle Song”)

A fence leaning darkly
Tired gerontocracy
Tilted that way and this
Holds the ancient line
Gaps knotted and widening
Windows for loitering shoots
Daring to lean across the sills
Into the other side

-T. Weeks
(A response to “All Is Truth”)

Opened a drawer
Found a key
Old crowded teeth
Gather at one end
Last memory
Of tumblers departed
A handshake defunct
Circular symmetry
Crowns the head
Inscribed 962
A cipher indecipherable
A pin in a map
Bleached white

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Mannahatta”)

Cold dark silent mirror
Lying beneath cat tails and bent bladed grass
Swollen with ice melt and winter rains
The pond sleeps
Shallow even breaths sway tall pines
Expressionless rivulets flow in and flow out
Without intention
Pure conduits of motion
Neither fowl nor amphibian tread the shallows
Only delinquent drops from the thin canopy
Disturb the surface
Rings of random movement

-T. Weeks
(A response to “To a Locomotive in Winter”)

Oh the gathered frost
Shadowed refugee
Mourning morning
Periphery witness
Of a changing world
In exile and nostalgic
For that hoary hour

-T. Weeks
(A response to “The Mystic Trumpeter”)