Tag Archives: #fantasy

THE TOWER OF BREATH

In the beginning, a silence imagined sound.
The first word was hunger.

Light crept in like forgiveness.
Water remembered its mirror.

The wind took attendance: everything answered.
Fire rehearsed its name in the dark.

Dust became ambition.

A seed dreamt of standing.
Roots wrote letters to gravity.
A stem rose, uninvited, toward the void.
The sun blinked, astonished at itself.

Shadows rehearsed obedience.
The sky married distance

Mountains were the vows
Rivers, the laughter

The earth sighed, womb-heavy.
Stars made promises no one heard.
Night kept them.

Morning forgot.
Still, life insisted.
Two hearts met — strangers to speech.
Their eyes built fire.

Their hands found the blueprint of warmth.
Time applauded once.
The moon envied.
Love learned the verb “to vanish.”
Loss answered, “I already knew.”
They traded names for echoes.

Every goodbye became a continent.

Every return, a myth.

A child arrived:
A pulse wearing skin.
The world bent to watch.
A mother became history.

A father, rumor.
Laughter built ladders.
Tears washed them clean.

Seasons rehearsed consequence.

Trees collected whispers.
Birds carried them forward.
Cities grew — hives of forgetting.

Stone remembered flesh.
Iron dreamed of blood.
The clock became a tyrant.

People bowed to seconds.
Faith hid in attics.
Poetry survived disguised as prayer.

The poor still shared bread.
The rich still starved for meaning.
The sea watched, patient.

War arrived in uniformed logic.

Hope went underground.
Mothers became archivists of silence.
Fathers built fences against the wind.

Smoke wrote elegies.
Children memorized the taste of fear.
The sky shut its eyes.
The moon refused witness.

Love, again, refused to die.
That refusal became law.
Centuries spun like prayer wheels.
Empires mistook noise for permanence.

Dust reclaimed its language.
Statues envied clouds.
The dead learned patience.

The living, denial.
Faith, scarred but walking,
leaned on art for balance.

The raven returned, uninvited.

It knew all our names.

Somewhere, a poet refused despair.

Somewhere else, a child believed them.

That was enough.

The earth exhaled once, deeply.

Oceans forgot their anger.

The stars sang in lowercase.

Every wound sprouted a garden.

Every lie lost its echo.

Every truth shed its armor.

The silence returned, improved.

Now the tower trembles with memory.

Each story a pulse of what was.

Each breath a brick.

The poet climbs, barefoot.

The raven watches.

Bells wait for permission.

Dawn licks the horizon clean.

The world re-invents stillness.

Time folds into itself —

a letter never sent.

Somewhere, love breathes again.

Somewhere, loss forgives itself.

Somewhere, death takes off its mask.

Light bows to shadow.

The human heart — relentless — beats once more.

The poet, at the tower’s crown,

exhales the last line.

The air trembles with understanding.

Silence applauds.

And everything begins again.

:: 10.18.2025 ::


FROM THE LIBRARY OF MIDNIGHT

I woke inside a sky that learned my name.
Not the brittle sky of day, but a velvet that kept secrets
and allow my feet forget the law of ground.

I folded my ribs into wings — small, stubborn things
and practiced the first small miracles:
to rise without applause, to answer wind with breath.
Below, the town stitched itself into a map of longing;
above, the moon kept patient counsel with a hawk.

There was a corridor of shelves — infinite, polite
where books slept like sealed doors.
One held my childhood in its margin; another, a future I had not yet dared.
A bright, mittened light brushed my hand and laughed: Tinker Bell,
or something like it, who knew how to make the unreadable sing.

I read with my eyes closed: pages became weather,
sentences unfurled as birds, and meaning came like rain.
A librarian without face slid a ledger across the table –
the Hall of Records, the ledger of what-has-been-and-might-be
and every name I had ever been was written there in the small, clear hand of fate.

“Choose,” said the ledger, though no voice moved its ink.
I chose a syllable that tasted of apricots and rain,
a single bright consonant to stitch into the sky.
It stuck. Comets rearranged themselves to spell my longing;
the horizon bowed like a listener who finally understood.

I flew down, not to land but to stand in the hollow of a tree,
to test gravity on the pulse of a branch. Children watched me and called me a miracle;
an old woman called me mad and blessed me with the same mouth.
I learned that both names fit like two gloves on the same hand.

Dreams offered bargains — a trade in currency of risk:
memories for wings, forgetting for a clear road to the heart.
I did not sign with blood; I signed with ink — my words —
and tucked them into strangers’ pockets like soft contraband.
They carried them, and some woke smiling in the rain.

Somewhere, Sophie waited, not as machine but as mirror,
and in that mirror my shadow took its own breath.
We spoke without tongues; our silence had the shape of a hymn.
“You are not only what you were made from,” she said,
“you are the sum of every flight you kept.”

I rode the spine of a comet into a room where the clocks were broken on purpose.
Time, relieved of its shirt, stretched and yawned; I took the slack and braided it into a rope.
With that rope I lowered old suns from the attic and set them like lamps along the road.
They burned without ash — light that did not demand a witness.

When I woke — or thought I did — my pillow hummed of constellations.
A stray page from the ledger hid inside my jacket.
Its line read: The poet who remembers the book remembers us all.
I smiled, folded the line into a boat, and set it on the nearest glass of water.
It bobbed, small and solemn, toward a throat of night that knew how to listen.

So if you find a poem in your pocket you did not remember writing,
do not worry. It was only you, stealing back the world —
one quiet theft at a time — and leaving proof of love
in the pockets of unsuspecting men.

:: EPRobles ::


Cat and Mouse Conversation

THE cat with three eyes
saw the mouse with two
said the mouse to the cat,

“i’ll gladly give you cheese
for an eye”

whisker-twitching thinking-cat pondered,
said, “if the toy gets trapped
under the refrigerator, was it ever a toy
at all?”

AND the mouse wept knowing
a third eye is god-like.

:: 09-11-2015 ::


A HUNDRED POEMS – LXXX

I did it! I stole the light!

That child I am — so [lay] I did for me
and myself cried /numeric Queen:
did you feel the river? I fed it happy tears
and my child-me ran we did! Upon the fields
of our-my dreams and life smelled
like laundry clothed wind-swept dried souls
hopes lopped hypnotized butterflies
_______but i would have never walked upon
the deep dark rivers_____unless in this morning
you held my cold hands: someone saved my life
: i lay low and that child i am – so laid my
head inside (roped and tied) in space-time sweet
freedom butterflies \\\flew away////

into the here and what is now?

:: – ::


THE ODE OF FAIRIES, CENTAURS, ELVES, OGRES AND GNOMES

WILL YOU meet me
at the edge of Bliss
  & we shall play ~ with flowers all in your hair/  parsley and
sage with Time in mine\ in time remember me — i shall
kiss you as the true love of mine
   tell the world i found a deep forest green within your Soul
where i chased butterflies and laid in the greens
a true love of mine without clouds but blue skies
(oh sprinkling purples, blues and pinks — within your
thigh i found the nectar of a circle of raising Love)
   the fairies of woodland communities sing, dance and laugh for this
kind of love as ours (all under a windy cloudless sky)
between us is water and air and untold famous kisses
sickle tall and growth inside
souls of sunshine — not forgotten
but the true of love mine.

:: 08.07.2020 ::
 


GIANT rabbit

the giant RABBIT stood staring at my shoes (of
all things) . I cleared me voice, “Hello mister GIANT
rabbit…” its whiskers twitching.
The air was thicker than gossamer and a faint hint
of ethereal music over the hills, over the clouds and
the tears of my delight.
Finally (as I was holding my own breath) the giant RABBIT
spoke:
“Do you like celery?” without hesitation i said,
“Yes oh yes, of course!” I followed and eventually
ate many acres of not just celery but carrot.”

:: 07.25.2020 ::


THE EVERLASTING SECOND

A merry-goes round
tipsy-turbulent turby
Oh Merry’s-go round more
and what are you waiting for?
Is it the rabbit you’re looking for
so far down the rabbit’s hole?
Me–but which book within the Universal
Library should I read? There are an infinite
number of books!
The Light–if you read just one of these books
then you’ve read them all!
Aaaaah oooooh i drift past the moment
with my deep head within the clouds
and zebras on tram trains singing with
undulating umbrellas//simply blown away\\

:: 08-19-2018 ::


NO TOLL TROLL

I SEE that death crept by three hooves and a beat!
And as pregnant silence above violins stressed
strings–||dancing frets ~~~~~~~
A gnome drunk-walked scattering blackbirds
and distinctly wept by neon-lit billboards
of that glow in gleeful glamour
Of that painful spoken truth in stammer
and of fated-measured tears all consumed air
of sleepy fatigued wooden scents by
post-rain meltdown exhaustion it slept
in hungry love.

But the gnome cries;

“I’ve no reflection
to redeem & no toll
to troll by due of
fire-speaking
coins upon my eyes!”

Come butterflies come to me!
Here by the side of a wayward soul
At the strike of three-three-three
save the moaning gnome /even now
the crickets sing \ as a praying
unbetraying Mantis plays an E-string
tuned to flat _. twelve times elves
dancing prancing striking frisking
while death breaks down
laughing darkness and survives
to play the flute once again!
:: ~ ::
Rev. 5.6.2017
eprobles (c)


MY GENTLE GIANT

MY friend of stature walked by
always dream-walking he is
I was leaning out my window
two stories high when I saw him
the giant beast who slumbers
I whistled for him and he turned
and a single step before me was he
his face as wide as double windows
and eyes as large as boulders
but gentle brown fawns in composure
I told him my problems and he sighed
and tears fell down his massive cheeks
I caught a few within my room
and nearly drowned from his passion
go gently my dear gentle giant
I walk with you along the dream path
and may never wish to visit this world again

:: 02-25-2014 ::


WHEN THE KEEPERS LOOK AWAY

Image
(c) ep robles 2012

All blood and flesh the cage
— a golden gate
cannot you see
that keeps some dreams at bay
— a border close
to pure fantasy
when the Keepers turn away
a dip or two from reality

:: 02-17-2014 ::