Feeble folk songs drift
Across exhaust coated streets,
While hollowed out Americans
Slurp fifty cent Saigon beer,
Back dropped by the luscious wavelengths
Of distant mountain ranges marrying clouds,
A tan and specked shore,
But all I perceive,
Are your curves, your words, your smell.
Rare dispatches stumble
Across the pacific,
Making surgeons of love lorn poets,
Who dissect the space between
Precious letters,
The feelings and thoughts
You keep bottled up.
But there's only room
For passive aggressive theories to flourish,
Worries of your indifference,
Of your bed littered
With discarded interest--
Goddamn this immutable distance!
And the enigma of your words:
"I don't really feel alone."
.....I
do.....
Oh, the inequality of affection,
Where one is left to roast,
And wait,
Words stifled in cement blocks,
For love is suffocated
By force--
And affection won through deceit,
Is such a bitter drink,
And warmth bequeathed through pity
A somber affair,
And lust acquiesced through guilt,
A passionless gift,
Leaving love lorn poets
To ponder upon a shore,
Of when
Or if, at all,
The recipient of unrecited poems
Will return.
The chorus crescendos into silence,
And you disperse into the horizon,
Leaving only foreign mountains
Dotted with forests...
The beer is warm, the bar
Empty,
I drink, absently,
Look out over the water,
Where listless embers of empire still burn,
The reeking plumes of terror,
Extending through time.
___
Donovan James tries to express humanistic and idealistic views in poetry, despite a ravaging cynicism. He believes that the money and effort allocated to war and fear should be used to feed, shelter, and educate the poor, no human being excluded. He tries to write poetry that connects with other buoys adrift in this absurd and lonely world.
Across exhaust coated streets,
While hollowed out Americans
Slurp fifty cent Saigon beer,
Back dropped by the luscious wavelengths
Of distant mountain ranges marrying clouds,
A tan and specked shore,
But all I perceive,
Are your curves, your words, your smell.
Rare dispatches stumble
Across the pacific,
Making surgeons of love lorn poets,
Who dissect the space between
Precious letters,
The feelings and thoughts
You keep bottled up.
But there's only room
For passive aggressive theories to flourish,
Worries of your indifference,
Of your bed littered
With discarded interest--
Goddamn this immutable distance!
And the enigma of your words:
"I don't really feel alone."
.....I
do.....
Oh, the inequality of affection,
Where one is left to roast,
And wait,
Words stifled in cement blocks,
For love is suffocated
By force--
And affection won through deceit,
Is such a bitter drink,
And warmth bequeathed through pity
A somber affair,
And lust acquiesced through guilt,
A passionless gift,
Leaving love lorn poets
To ponder upon a shore,
Of when
Or if, at all,
The recipient of unrecited poems
Will return.
The chorus crescendos into silence,
And you disperse into the horizon,
Leaving only foreign mountains
Dotted with forests...
The beer is warm, the bar
Empty,
I drink, absently,
Look out over the water,
Where listless embers of empire still burn,
The reeking plumes of terror,
Extending through time.
___
Donovan James tries to express humanistic and idealistic views in poetry, despite a ravaging cynicism. He believes that the money and effort allocated to war and fear should be used to feed, shelter, and educate the poor, no human being excluded. He tries to write poetry that connects with other buoys adrift in this absurd and lonely world.
