Travel Shorts

The sun may have woken me first,
but I'd had a night of fitful gasping.
Operosely orectic I'd been persuing 'O's
and wrestling with wonderous workable 'W's.
So it seemed the dictionary had called me to wake.
I was teetering on the edge of the book;
poised and ready for exploration.
All I had to do was jump
and I could find myself
cleansed under words and their powers.
Sibilant sounds of swishing as I search
the pages for suppletives and suffixes;
their fricatives tiny hooks tugging
on my hair like a little boy in the
playground.
My rubiginous freckles resting on the riparian
banks of 'R's and all their purring glory.
Transpicuous water tumbling over my inept toes
I rise to the surface only to see
that it's cold up there and I bit my
tongue in the arc of conversation.
I dive back in. Rippling through ribbons
of rudimentary 'roonerspisms', which always make
me giggle and deliver a blushing crow.
As I turn fathoms to leagues
my stories are collected;
drawing into me other worlds with their
metonymy and morphology
and showing up through my skin like veins.
Each carrying a tale.

Wind writes in foam on sea
halliards crew
unscathed leagues under ocean.

Lichen likes rocks
who care to remember a name carved in fathoms
when love is a vapour.
Pebbles are worn to reveal your image
and the rhyme of tides
echo across the archipelago of galaxies.

Galaxies are everything from nothing
bursting from seeds of matter.
Raging energy
brings it all to existence.
Gravity's relentless lure
opening a vortex,
stealing light,
hiding energy,
stowing orbits.

In the ebb and flow
the binary of light
and dark
you are like the universe;

you are made from me
and I am made from you.

This poem was used as a basis for a more complicated project I wanted to produce. Below is a link to my video, which takes my reading of the poem, and uses sounds made within it to make an ambient soundscape. Behind this lies the message that words are everywhere to be found, and poetry can be pushed in many directions other than reading it straight from the page...

in the palm of your hand

Searching

The memory has been
successfully
defragmented.

Scraping the barrell for seratonin.