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Mikels Skele


Who

The morning grew clear toward mid-day,
no clouds, just a west wind
to stir your memory.

How you thought truth was in you,
how you swore allegiance to companionship,
how you lived in the night
and passed judgment on the light,

a light you rejected, a payback,
a settling, a comeuppance,

how you failed to notice, even then,
that you hadn’t the status to be rejected,
how you slowly saw, slowly, grudgingly,
that rejection was neither of you nor for you,
and how little it mattered.

Later, you try to start over,
still wearing the skin you were born in,
all those scars the only evidence.
​

Just before the final extinction

Just before the final extinction
There were strange and wonderful creatures
Elusive slabs of silver
Darting through the water
Among shape-shifting bulbs
Trailing fierce limbs
And some barely-there whisps
Still deadly with near visible
Strands of poison

And the stone-clasping tendrils
Living dually beneath and above
The frothing rock wacked about
By unseen surrounds

Miniscule bits buzzing through the air
But strong enough to pierce the
Thick outards of others
To suck their vital fluids
Long bendy tails with no body
Slinking among roots and shoots
A mouth at one end and nothing at the other
Lumbering bellowing lumps
With long tusks
That dazzled white in the pristine sunlight

Oddest of all, a bipartite creature
Split nearly symmetrical
Nearly similar but cruelly not
Moving by alternating stilts
Spindly and unbecoming
The two halves bound in eternal embrace
Clutching each other’s throat
Desperate to let go

But trapped, trapped by fear of succeeding

The Word Fire

“The word fire,” says Sensei,
“does not burn your lips.”
But say, Sensei, that the word fire
Burns your heart, the heat rising
Through your neck, and, yes,
Singeing your tongue on the way out?

What if the word eagle
Makes you feel like soaring,
All the while tethered to your
Earth-born dreams, that seem only to rise
Slowly?

Or the word dying, though it seems a lie,
Still feels dark and wet, not exactly cold,
But too thick for that?

I think, Sensei, that even your
Ancient schemes cannot touch
These depths.

Your finger points only to a place
Where the moon might have been

What dogs lack

What dogs lack is perspective.
There are no dog priests.
No dog poets barking rhythmically at the hollow moon.
No dog inspectors, no dog police.

A sniff is just a sniff, a scrap is just a meal.
They fill no days pondering the meaning
Of the star- rooted sky,
Or why  a corpse will disappear
Slowly, like yesterday’s breakfast.

There is nothing sacred or profane,
Nothing indelible stamped on the
Hide-like souls of dogs.
They eat.  They shit.  They sleep.

They’re in heaven or hell, one the same as the other,
They see no difference between
A special day or no particular day.
You can’t sell a dog an insurance policy.

They like the warmth of a human body,
The sound of deep sleep,
The feel of an embrace across the depthless
Helix, as distant as love, as close as touch.

If there’s food, they will eat all of it.

Along About Now

Along about now,

A particular group of photons,

Some 200 million light years away,

Is heading in our direction.

They’re out there.

At the same time,

A delegation is leaving my face,

Bound for cosmic intersection.

After all the debates have passed,

Long after the poor old Earth

Has been wrung free of its

Infection of life

Two photons,

Their memories wiped clean

Will pass in the distant night

As unaware of our anguish

As we are of their fate

Away

Voyager 1 is expected to leave all solar influence behind, and slip into interstellar
​space soon, very soon. It will be the first man-made object to do so.


An inconsequential piece

Of jetsam

Floats miraculously out

From the sun

Out, out

So long, goodbye

We’ve heaved you gone

And yet you write back

Every day

As if you’d found work

Out there

Beyond the heliopause

Where strange bits of nothingness

Collide ceaselessly.

What do they make of you?

Too smooth, too rough?

Too many kinds of things

patched together

To be of any use to entropy?

I do hope

Things work out for you.

Picture

Go to page 2 of Mikels Skele's poetry
Mikels Skele's Profile

How Swiftly Came
​the Killing Season

How swiftly came the killing season
swept in from hinterlands
just when we had remarked upon
the sameness of it all.

How soon the must-not-be-named
became quotidian.
Weren’t we standing there,
thinking how sensible

not to raise a ruckus,
how preferable to simply
turn our backs to the foul wind?

How did we come to this?
Didn’t we say how better we were?
What comfort are platitudes
now?
​

How It Is

No more winds, please,
let’s keep it on the down low
lest someone pull the chain
and down the drain we go,
merrily down the drain, life is but a word
fashioned from old shoe-strings
and faded bruises

Was that a victory or a loss?
Or am I asking the
wrong question?

The way clay fits the mold,
even if it starts out flat
and all wrong…

No, no, it’s not true
that life is just a story,
that’s just what we trick ourselves with,
to make us feel we are not
blind worms, dodging concretions
in the all-too-lumpy soil

But we are not worms
any more than worms are us

Simple. That’s it.
Simple rain falls to earth,
clouds dissipate, and we think
it’s the sun coming out,
but it’s the sun, not the clouds,
that’s been there all along,
least of all, we.
​

Thunder Snow

The clouds thickened and cracked the planks of heaven
Heaved overboard their burden
And crushed the green and brown spring in pale dunes

Robins puffed to pigeon size
Buds disappeared beneath white-laced wings
Of earth-shackled trees

No one about but Cossack girls
With speckled jeans and high boots
Pulled along on bright orange leashes

Their dogs resolute and patient
Sniffing remnants of bygone colleagues
And sprinkling messages in the snow

Long ago such snow shrouded mysteries
What was it I imagined?
All of life and death I suppose

All of longing all of waiting
All smothered ambivalence
All new and green erupting from stagnation

Serpentine

The salt of sailing bruises the blood
And infects the ordinary with wonder.

Drink up!
It may be only swill
But it quenches well enough.

We take stock of barriers, boundaries,
Of stops,
But it’s the continuants that carry meaning
Through years, around days, hours.

A life seems to grow more tail as it winds slowly,
Hauntingly, toward oblivion,
Or so it seems.

This meander, this immense detour
Charts what passes between us,
So ephemeral, wight-like

Those threads of love grow thin,
But strong as spider silk.

Two Short Poems

A Pond in Cesvaine

A tree

Jammed helpless

Into soft shoreline watches,

All aflail,

Untethered lilies,

Like unmoored souls

Floating into wilderness.

Wisps of anguish

All but unremembered.

A Kurzeme Meadow

I remember

Your summer dress

Billowing fragrances

Of untold yearning

Long into the night

These flowers, too,

Have long since passed.

If you live long enough

If you live long enough, you will see them die.
Longer still, and they fall like spring snow.
There are those who say grief is all second-hand,
That we grieve for ourselves alone
When those too like us prove mortal.

I suppose, for the first fierce blow,
That’s true: we stumble forward, gut-shot,
All death and bewilderment;
But after that? After the long parade begins in earnest?

True, a kind of acceptance sinks in,
A not-quite numbness, a sedation,
A shaking of the head, “Why,
Just yesterday…”

But there are ghosts.
They follow us everywhere,
And in some unguarded moment, a grief descends
Pure and sweet, almost holy,
And wholly devoid of self.

In these moments
We cradle our memories like children,
And all we long for
Is one more touch. 

​                        ♢
Go to page 2 of Mikels Skele's poetry

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