From A Life to Sanctuary

Free Verse Poems

 

My hungry mouth brought your milky breast, oh, what ecstasy the silky flesh affords

My father’s straight white teeth glistens like pearls in my eyes as he lifts my small frame high, traversing the sun.

Our laughter echoes in the disk of my mind.

Mark my days!

Primal joining, brother and sister surround me in bed. Body to body, we wrestle, play, cry, bathe and share our kindred blood, our memories that bind.

Yonder my bare feet trod upon the sunlit blades of splendor, passing trees unnumbered. A corrupted Adam did see such beauty, primeval, its cycle of birthing in decay.

Within my limbs, my soul finds its delight, a sprouting hair under my chin, a marvel.

The body beautiful is sleek, smooth and firmly adorned with blushing youth.

Perfect in my ways was I unaware of my stench.

In lovers’ kisses my heart inclines, my nature seeks abandon in my body’s partners.

Caress a fragile universe of pleasure and offence.

From womb and husband my child did steal my breath away.

Mechanically my time was spent upon its stage, here and there, everywhere for my small lovers ever dwell within me.

Windows mirror the Jones in my Bette Crocker chambers filled with pulsing pressures of jobs, cars, children, and trinkets in vast array, ever needful.

A dry cloud of promise, turning and turning, no moisture therein.

Measuring myself and seek to know the dark towers and their mysteries.

A person of letters, my company, aloof and proud, study myths, languages, philosophy and science amid volumes of stunning thoughts, the truth never conceded.

Restlessly my hands reach the harvest of the numberless poor, the discarded sick with meat, clothing and compassion fulfilling covenants long foretold.

Praying at the altar of casinos, my deception complete, my days, my nights flashing fragments of neon.

Safe within its carpeted halls and slots, my mind securely slumbers without a pension for my journey into midnight.

A whorish taste, hustles the angry signifying streets and morning blues fill my lungs with intoxicating smoke, higher and higher than the billows.

My need sings its own death song.

A perpetual nodding at the stones for five losing all except the longing.

My hearing is tainted with self-doubt and like Jacob my mind grapples with the whys of each dawn.

Upon this earthly terrace my stumbling finds its voice in the applause and faces of a ready audience.

At its gut a false crescendo, soars and plummets into the smog.

A shadowy self, my Jung did uncover.

A life examined from of old did touch its zenith in self-acclamation.

Yet the dark unknowable yearning lay naked and chaste in its place.

My Mephibosheth for now my feet no longer trod along the corroded corridors of my decaying terrain. Repugnant in the nostrils is my soul’s sickness with arms trembling, they carry burdens.

A certain dreariness of being did unfold, of secrets too long held by shoulders stooped with age.

No opiate, no ritual, no fear, no alliance, no skin clings to me now rather the Master of all beacons my essence to an awakening of His revealing glory in wondrous plains of eternity with healing balms of truth and love. All of me longs for its start, its end, its Maker in Sanctuary!

 

more by DEBRA BISHOP

Photograph by Angels Wings

 

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