Poet’s Corner | At A Time

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At A Time

I feel your loss
You are not here
You’re in a there
A place I cannot be
At least not immediately

We have certain times
When we are called
Before it happens
We stay in the here
Or the there

Depending greatly
On which one
Is meant to be
We’ll reverse the order
And begin again

We belong in one
Or the other
But never
At the same time
Always alternating

Just like here
And there
Being different
We are only in one place
At a time

© j.kiley ‘18
Non-sense

Poet’s Corner | ‘Lost In Waiting’

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LOST IN WAITING

Lost in waiting
Tripping on two ended words
Looking for comfort
Anywhere it will give

Feeling uneasy
Trembling in word salad
Brain inside it
The constant echo
Of continual searching
For messages

The past
Understanding it
But it won’t let go

Confusion
Definition make no sense
Skin feels raw
No settling into ease
What is so unstable
The mind is unfocused
Tearing security to hell
Dipping into the acid
Of disbelief in reality
Breathing nonexistent
Trembling replaces it
Nothing soothing
Calling in the troops
Of stability

Will it come
Concentration
Calmness
All will settle
In its time
Not anyone else’s

Does one feel the corruption
Does it call out the demons
Or send them away
Looking into the eyes of the devil
Unsettles any calmness into fear
Anxiety and uncertainties

Let go of the pain that haunts
Escape into fantasy
Seek the rewards
Permission granted
Join the fictional characters
Freedom of behavior
No punishment

A feathered cat inside a canary
Like a woman inside a suit
And a man inside a gown
Freedom to feel the real

Real it is
Afraid of the words
What tempest they hold
But surrender to the “who”
The “are” and the “streak”
Learn to be fully “unrestrained”

© j.kiley 2018
Free Verse

Billy Collins | a poem

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Poet – Billy Collins | Born: March 22, 1941 (age 77), Manhattan, New York City, NY


Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright © 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press.

John Keats | a poem

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John Keats by William Hilton | Born: October 31, 1795, Moorgate, City of London, United Kingdom – Died: February 23, 1821, Rome, Italy

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”
By John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.