THE SOUL’S ACTIVE INGREDIENTS

TS Eliot just paid me a visit.
He was tapping on an African drum.
He described the wasteland that he left in ‘65
and the wasteland in which he now resides.

The drums, he said, contained embedded rhythms he hadn’t learned at Harvard
or in the litanies of London.
Rhythms that only accidentally made it into his poetry when he had a vision of discontinuity.
Rhythms, he said, that would stun Rimbaud and Donne.

He’s been drumming ever since he stopped breathing,
and if and when he re-incarnates
he says he’ll teach the poets a thing or two about how the senses interface
with the soul’s active ingredients.

Greg McNeill (Animalinside)

MIDNIGHT, ALONE

Maybe my flower,
twice folded,
petals torn at the creases
turned her sour
to my outstretched mouth,
wilting slowly.

Maybe my lungs
burning the dusk air
on the windswept veranda
turned her away
from the threat
of my warmth.

Maybe after months of waiting
for the sun to rise
she finally realized
winter is hers to keep
behind closed doors.

Jacob Jans (Boplicity)

LIQUID

she moves,
glides really, across my soul.

liquid wind around my glass heart.

not as a river ebbs,
but as a tear traces a path from eye to cheek.

as a ripple echoes upon a once-still pond.

as a child floats in a womb, our child.

soft.
as if a gentle breeze
takes the time to say hello in your ear.

she knows not her essence.
and it is this innocence that is her charm,
and her beauty.

oh how I love this woman!
would that I had the words that could
describe this feeling!

alas,
to convey this heart
would be to betray all language.

sometimes words have no meaning
powerful enough to pay justice to those
that hear them, or say them.

but when I watch her walk,
this liquid loveliness,
I forget all about words.

and think only of diving into her
and swimming in her ocean until
my words can become her beach…

C. Fuller