Three Poems by Daniel Cyran

 

SKY, WIND, NIGHTFALL

 

It is true that endurance

keeps the gods from contending the visible

 

To touch the earth pure in desire

as all aflame continues—complexity enriched

 

Tapping rock, drumming red dirt, ages come & gone

 

In candlelight these bandages cannot sulk alone

 

The impossible is balanced

at the edge of understanding—

 

Speaking through a blade of grass

or a shaft of sunlight

 

A book defends the mind

against the tyranny of the day

 

Whose bombs plastered

across the morning's eyes?

 

A different war reaches the doorstep

of the dispossessed every hour

 

Solitude was invented by my strange, singing scars

 

Breath holds on by a silver strand

binding together dreams and futures—

 

AS FOR THE DREAM BODY'S CONFISCATION...

 

yr voice an amulet yr voice the fix of creation

yr voice in slow green hills

yr voice sullen yr voice sudden yr voice flashing back

before yr eyes jogging through memories of dry sand & sea

yr voice the candle's wick yr voice the dish of ice cream in the sun

yr voice boiling eggs on sidewalks of deserted ghost towns

because barking tongues do not walk through drum circles

of the mind without phoning first—

who would believe the poets made it all up

ALL of it!

follow desire & you get there

as yr past lives try lifting all that blood in yr shoes themselves

the last time i caught this voice sneaking

away from industrial fallout

the voices spoke the voices silence

parading as a murder of crows flying south

with cameras in their skulls

i was plugging my metal thumb into sockets of air

just out of reach

sparks in space flung into dead water skies O darkness of night

inside these walls the stories of dead men & their cages

erupt with the world's cold-turkey shoulder

to the wheel of good fortune

spinning

& spinning

& spinning

in reflections

upon space-time's nefarious window sills

through this body of weather temptation startles from dust alone

 

FORESTS OF VOICES

 

I'm sitting in a green painted room. It's raining.

I'm surrounded by forests of voices. At the end of the wall

with the door frame flying at half-mast is a street lamp beneath

an oak tree's carcass which has been smoking my eye lashes

since midnight last night. There's fish hooks with worms

dancing at the ends dangling from the marble ceiling.

They glimmer when the sun climbs through the window bringing

all my secret lives to their knees clasping hands at once.

I am tempted to put out the fire in the gaping mouth next to my chair

every time the doorbell rings, which is every time this cardinal

aims a song through the barbs of my rib cage,

picking and twitching at its feathers which are the colour of cicadas

at war with the lies between your ears. A vision of eternity burns out

behind the eyes of javalina sniffing in the kitchen for gooseberries.

Trajectories of our own leaving, swarms of grief, songs possessed

by loss. If you are looking for it, it will find you.

If you are asking of it, it will ask of you. Tick talk goes the clock

as a long lament of bumble bee wrath remarking how we no longer need images

but new modes of reaching the Nameless. I wouldn't know.

My ears are houses to allegories.

How are you doing?

I'm sitting in a green painted room. It's raining.

I'm surrounded by forests of voices.

 

 

Daniel Cyran is the author of RESUSCITATIONS, his first full-length poetry collection. Daniel believes in the human spirit and the capacity therein to create goodness. His work can be found on the web: https://www.starkandsaintredwood.com/