Tag Archives: #abstract
THE WATCH AT GREYMARSH
The fen-light fails. The heron lifts.
A horn speaks once from the blackened ridge.
Who rides the causeway with unlit eyes?
Who bears the token the dead still keep?
Queen of the threshing floor, stand.
Your wheat is ash. Your barn is a mouth.
The reeve has sold the river’s name.
The mill-wheel turns on a stranger’s oath.
Bring out the bronze that never learned mercy.
Bring out the cloth cut under a comet.
The marsh remembers every boot.
The reeds lean west and will not lie.
Prince of the unlatched gate, turn back.
Your banner drinks. It will not drink you.
A child has counted the horses twice.
The second count was only wind.
They come with lanterns sewn in their coats.
They come with laws that smell of tin.
The old stone cross has shut its face.
The well will not give up its coin.
Wait for the drum that is not a drum —
the bittern’s knock on the ribs of night.
Wait for the woman who names no king.
She keeps the spark in a hollow key.
If the ring of water should break its vow,
if the last red fox should cross the road,
then open the chest the monks forswore
and give the field what the field is owed.
The battle is older than either host.
It wears our hands. It wears our breath.
Let the pipers walk the drowned mile.
Let no one claim the morning yet.
:: rev,98,2026, ::
ECSTASIES OF THE REPULSIVE
A womb, borrowed.
The worm’s whisper pays the rent.
We too cradle strangers—
cities swollen with children
whose names we rehearse
and do not know.
Marrow tunes its teeth.
Hunger keeps the violins.
A promise, gnawed to white thread.
A vow, set on the table
beside the bone it came from.
At the banquet of thought
we eat our own gestures.
Yesterday’s embrace
is tomorrow’s hand,
still warm,
already portioned.
Soup of breath
slurped from the husk—
is this not prayer?
The lung keeps a ghost
only long enough to spend it.
Someone, elsewhere,
inhales our leaving
and calls the air clean.
Silver gulls tip yesterday
into open beaks.
Salt. Storm.
The unfinished child.
The beak does not ask
whose water.
A lullaby snags
on the singer’s tongue.
What soothes
is the swallow.
We sleep
where the mouth closes.
:: 10.04.2026 ::
A FISH SLEEPS IN THE CLOCKTOWER
A fish sleeps in the clocktower
and dreams of teeth made of clouds.
The bells forget to ring.
The hours forget to pass.
You asked me,
“What color is silence?”
I said, “The one no eye can hold.”
It lives in the space between two heartbeats,
where the world goes quiet enough
to hear itself think.
We buried a ghost in a book of feathers—
each word a spine,
each sigh a storm.
The pages turned themselves at night,
searching for the body they lost.
I found your voice
pressed like a fossil in my ribs,
and the stars stitched your name
into my lungs with moon-thread.
Every breath I take
is a small resurrection.
The sky remembers our names
when even we forget them.
It keeps them in the dark,
between the stars,
where nothing is lost
and everything is waiting.
:: 09.19.2026 ::
THE RASPBERRY’S SAVAGE THROAT
the elephant courts the millimeter
as if distance itself had grown a trunk
and learned to blush in fractions
the snail dreams the moon has already lost
and keeps the defeat folded in its shell
like a letter never mailed
his shoes are blanched and emptied
the color of a gelatin rifle
issued to a soldier who has not yet been born –
the eagle possesses the grammar of an inner vacancy
the way a mind owns the space it refuses to fill
his water is flecked with small arriving lights
the lion wears a clean and restless gothic mustache
his skin remains unhurried
he laughs the way an encore stains the air after the last note has already left
the crayfish holds the raspberry’s savage throat
the apple’s quiet calculation
the prune’s slow mercy
the pumpkin’s unashamed heat
the cow walks the parchment road
last animal in a ledger of meat
where every hair is weighted like a stone that remembers being alive
the snake leaps and pricks and pricks
circling the basin of love
where hearts hang pierced and still dripping
the butterfly, buttered in straw, becomes the butterfly the straw was always waiting to become
the same butterfly, buttered in straw, grows large
and is smothered, fathered, and put to bed inside the straw
the nightingale draws heart-stomachs out of gut-brains
which is only another way of saying
it lifts the lilies that roses hid
from the carnations that lilacs never admitted they were
the thumb keeps its right foot tucked behind its left ear
its left hand locked inside its right
standing on the left leg
while it vaults, again and again, over its own right ear
somewhere the millimeter is still listening
and the elephant has not yet decided whether love is a unit of measure
or the thing that refuses to be measured at all
— E.P. Robles
OVERSHADOWED
Night.
Shadows lean in.
Cold fingers find the keys.
The moon cuts the room in half
with a single pale edge.
One note, then another—
tears running the length of the glass.
Inside the wood,
laughter that once lived here
is still trying to get out.
One candle left.
It does not go out.
The night stays.
A black page
No one will finish.
Dust in the first light.
For three measures
the right hand forgets
the left.
A laugh dies
between the teeth.
|| 08.25.2026 ||
BEAUTY WITHOUT REGRETS
You said Let’s Dance
And I went after
My Steps were Awkward
You moved my Feet
I feared the Fools
I sought in vain the Words
To make your Life make sense
To Me
You lied my Sister
You broke the Heart
I think You know
Mistakes Never
I listened You spoke
I understood not well
The Beautiful Lady
Without Regrets
I wept You laughed
I sang You cried
You sowed the Seeds
Of a Wrong Oak
My Wheat took Wing
You had Enough
I waited always
My Cries were Deaf
You lied my Sister
You broke the Heart
I think You know
Mistakes are Never
I listened You spoke
I understood not well
The Beautiful Lady
Without Regrets
:: 08.13.2026 ::
CAT IN CHARGE (CIC)
S OM E CO UGH
a ll NIGHT
t he s mall ones
loo king inside
a c ell / bonified
statical values
CIC is the one
the “Cat in Charge.”
:: 07,17,2026 ::
PENNY IN THE GUTTER
A penny in the gutter
glimpsed me—nothing worse
than squandered opportunity.
Lost through holes in a worn pocket,
despair dressed as a lonely street.
Here I stand between walls,
heart once vibrant now whispering:
“Should the mind overhear—who?
Silence answers, knowing, feeling,
Do we stoop to reclaim it?
And perhaps in stooping
we embrace a dying soul
curled in the park—”
a penny for your thoughts,
your heart, your soul.
:: 07.17.2026 ::
THE HANDLE THAT SMILES
:: 07.12.2026 ::
I fall asleep and the doors open
like eyelids made of midnight.
The same soft wound in the dark
yawns wider than galaxies.
Inside, the Universal Mall breathes
with Escher’s stolen lungs.
Stairs devour their own tails
in Möbius hunger,
balconies bloom into black orchids
that croon lullabies,
escalators sigh upward through rivers
of reversed rain
where drowned clocks swim like silver fish.
Every store sells what I once lost:
the exact color of my mother’s safety
before her screaming,
a jar of unwept infant light
that still sings in ultraviolet,
and small unworn shoes warm
with the memory of home
that walks by itself at 3 a.m. looking for me.
I walk past forgotten gods
eating eternity from greasy paper cups
that never empty.
Neon signs stutter in the first language
I swallowed as a baby —
shards of mirror still cutting my tongue,
infant starlight burning cold behind my teeth.
My older selves stand guard in cheap uniforms,
eyes tired, kind, unflinching as black holes.
They nod as I pass, smoking cigarettes
made of my unlived futures.
They have watched me almost leave
for thirty years of almost leaving.
Sometimes the glass elevator finds me.
It moves only sideways
through the memory of every version of myself.
Inside, a saxophone murmurs low
in blue thirds
while smoke curls like slow incense
made of dissolving galaxies
around the trembling idea of leaving.
I press my forehead to the cold glass,
just as I did in the photograph
that has not yet been taken,
and speak to the small boy still hiding
inside my ribs —
the boy who was born knowing everything:
“We are almost done hiding.
This time, when the walls fold
into the wings of impossible birds,
we will step through.”
The Mall exhales —
vast, ancient, reluctant, almost tender.
A new door appears.
Plain. Unremarkable.
Cut from the silence
between one heartbeat
and the place where God stopped answering.
I reach for the handle.
It is warm
and it is smiling.
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