Thursday, 23 March 2023

Five Poems by Michael Theroux, pen name ‘Teru’

 





Beyond the Veil

 

Reality has an edge. Beyond is night, with its bright and constant lights.

Night’s stars don’t wink. The largeness of night’s darkness surrounds us.

 

I am drawn into midnight, while all else, all else are images on the veil.

The veil covers the night; the world colours the veil. Stars shine through.

 

Darkness fills the small gaps. Stars blink, flicker, shimmer through the veil

Reality is the face of the veil that hangs before us. Beyond is the darkness.

 

Reality paints patterns on the gauze of the veil. Night’s chaos reigns beyond.

The colours of my life wash through the thin threads of the veil, into darkness.

 

I bleed into midnight. I am drawn into the dark night beyond this thin veil.

There is a vacuum beyond, a steady wind that pulls at souls such as mine.

 

 

Slim Catman

 

Ingredients:    

            1 galaxy, unrotated; 1 smallish sun

            a full moon, over an open sea

            1 each, a red dragon, and a blue

1 candle, too

1 pot of hot rosemint tea

Stir well, with:

            …a spring walk, slowly

            …a river time coming

            …a father, husband, lover time now

Another time, long ago:

            A river time, coming.

(Slim catman, quiet grin,

stands so still in the light spring rain)

 

 

That Gnawing Feeling

 

That gnawing feeling …

something’s been stolen,

a sense of loss … melancholy …

leaving emptiness

shrouding the day …

stretching each moment

into thin hollowness

 

Loss of purpose follows broken momentum

The slight shudder, the missed step

Chilling the blood …so slightly numb

Distraction’s whip

 

Six long blocks ahead, trees converge

Broken sunlight softens the concrete

 

Nameless Others, busy in their otherness,

scurry by, their colours intrusive

staring inward, oblivious to my visions

no one looks up

 

This is my life: the dwindling days

call my attention to long, shifting shadows

the moist, clinging memories

of times long past

 

Like a wet dog, I’ll give a good shake

And loosen this dampness

Scatter this sadness

Into sparkling shards.

 

 

Four Magics

 

In one life I busied myself counting categorizing sand how many kinds

how many colours can there possibly be after all they are all only sand

and sand can only be so diverse so for an entire life sand became my life.

 

From this I found that there is more to sand than one could ever imagine

and while sorting one beach worth of sand the sand of my life went by.

 

In another life I chose to seek the sounds of water and to innumerate

the tones of the splashes as they fell as they stopped abruptly altogether

upon encountering some object whose own place was directly in their path.

 

This study taught that this planet’s tears come and go in a continuous cycle

without start or finish and my interception my very interpretation is meaningless.

 

In my last life my fascination became fire and the self-consuming flame

so for day upon day to watch the candle as the wick and the wax went

the vapor rose the heat dissipated the light spread thinned and vanished.

 

The lesson taught that the distance from the subject became more important

as that distance became less and less until touch brought enlightenment.

 

In this life there came before me the endlessness of air and the openness

of space filled or not with more or less nothingness for which I had no names

no method of measurement no metric with which to place myself in context.

 

For air and the absence of the same do not follow my rules or the lack thereof

leaving me simply in awe to wonder at the immeasurable allnessnous.

 

 

Half Moon Riding Low

 

Half moon riding low

Crickets sing in lavender

Soft songs of old friends.

 

Tomorrow, hot light

Will coax on garden madness

Tonight, stillness reigns.




Michael Theroux is a husband, a father, a grandfather, a botanist, a mouth harp player, a decent chef, and a guy-who-knows-how-to convert-waste-back-into-goods (which makes a living). Although a great many efforts have been formally and/or self-published, almost all have been scientific and technical works. But through all life’s changes, Michael has always written … accumulating an enormous catalogue of poetry, prose, book-length stories and a quantity of scraps, bits and pieces. Entering the literary arts field at 72, Michael is now mining that accumulation - sifting and selecting, polishing the gems and submitting for publication. Probably should have started sooner. Curious, how flyme ties, eh?

Michael E. Theroux, pen name ‘Teru’

https://www.terutalk.com

https://www.facebook.com/michael.theroux.7

 


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