Five Poems by David Alec Knight

 

Fighting Hell To Hold

Living on
the edges
of knives,
fighting hell
to hold,
damn them
and shame.

I have held
a ladle of water
to the lips
of a blind ghost.

Let me love you
back to life

City of Crows

You, city of crows

I feel you, breathing --

To always walk

through the crowd

while never being

part of that crowd...

You, city of crows

I feel you, breathing --

You push forward back

and I break against you;

you break against me:

there we go where we get.

You, city of crows

I feel you, bleeding --

Be good,

but don't be

too good...

It's that faint praise

and the loud damn,

a sudden unified panic,

the slow engine scythes

of a small city

thinking it's big

cutting me down

to feed its carrion.

This Street

This street
has a poem
and this is
the poem:

We slave,
we scheme,
we work.
We love,
we dream,
we lust.

The news
is broken,
pundits
awoken...

As Conflict Corrodes


Cold warriors lost when confronted
by warm words are weighed down
within an armour: they sulk to find
an inviting oasis merely mirage.

Storms threaten over foreign horizons
and skies open like bomb bay doors,
but when rain assaults their positions
they feel it as little as they allow fear.
The rain! The rain! Relentless it is
as the sun's monotonous rise.

An old cold wind carries a wail
from a world away -- howls
of emaciated feral dogs roaming
at the diluvial rain's end.

From over the rise dogs descend.
Those cold and old warriors draw
their septuagenarian blades
corroded by countless campaigns
through weaker adversaries.
Their blades fall heavy from grasp,
gnarled, gnawed with metallurgical flaws.

Every mirage a nightmare,
wild dogs rip at weak spots,
and the corpse pickers wait above.
Oh, how they await.

His Ninth Life Is With Me

Storm. -- sleeping intently. My slippers
are near flat under his head and neck,
one ear buried. Storm - awake, sitting
in good feline posture. Both paws are
up to his chest, are hidden within one
slipper, paws there in place of human toes.
I imagine he smiles, but there's no illusion
as the sun through the window catches
in contrast to the white and creme colour
of his fur and the flesh and gum shiny pink
where part of his jaw is gone. Storm smiles
with his eyes as he stares at me, motor-purrs
as overcast skies break and the noonday sun
casts a shadow play with the slat curtains behind.

David Alec Knight is a Canadian writer, residing in Chatham, Ontario. His poems have appeared in Wayzegoose, People's Poetry Letter, and Canadian Writers Journal. Anthology appearances include, The Sandwich Mill Anthology (1997), $10.00 Cash Value: An Anthology of Assets (2000), Ellipsis... (2008), By The Wishing Tree (2021), Poets For Ukraine - Volume 1 (2022), Muse (2022),and Love Lies Bleeding (2022). Recent poems have appeared in Verse Afire, Cajun Mutt Press and The Lothlorien Poetry Journal.

Since graduating from St. Clair College in 2014/15, David has worked in healthcare as a Personal Support Worker. In 2021, he was recipient of The Ted Plantos memorial Award for Poetry. The Heart Is A Hollow Organ, David's first book, soon followed.

Leper Mosh, David's second collection of poems has been published by Cajun Mutt Press and is available on Amazon.