Sonnets

Sonnet 3

Lashes of eerie black beat over stone,
Crowned with ghost white bubbles and frozen foam.
Her skin, goose-bumped and gale-struck clung toward
Bawling drowning begs of despair ignored.
Draped in a tattered white dress among flung
Debris and wave-swallowed bodies of young
Daughters, blooming to be the grey depths’ brides.
Their corpses no anchor dragging the tides.
For the Atlantic heaves only shamed swell
And blue skin shimmering under its spell,
Cursed for its backwash and baneful cold heart.
Deserving, perhaps, yet knowingly not.
   Yet through storm and sin, the separation
   Is thin. Humans are nature’s creation.

Sonnet 4

His face was stern, war-worn, tired, and stress-creased,
Deep in prayer for Athenia’s east
And strategy, yet undone as it were
To think themselves unseen from the Führer.
Deep they sink, women and children below
To deck the sea floor, where the algae grow
Through their innocent eyes, now brought to hate
Those who steered their world down to its cruel fate.
His hubris, to plunge them into the sea
Even Ozymandias could not flee
Descent to dust, the topple titanic.
Harrow and hardship from men gigantic.
   Yet through storm and sin, the separation
   Is thin. Humans are nature’s creation.

Sonnet 6

I skirt my psyche’s dim edge, still awake.
The freshly laundered sheets shroud my stripped skin
Like a snow blanket on my mind within
Singing gently, the lyrics slip and break.
My body slack but mind alight, I shake
And sink. Worlds surface my mind, I dive in
and seize the night, in a slip I’ll make spin
ink stories, yet it’s only fear I make.
This gaunt world is not of my creation,
My deepest truths and foul lies laid abreast
Upon my eyes like an accusation
Thrown in my gnashing teeth, clamping for rest
I can’t wrest from my fitful sedation.
Please, peace from my pain is my least request.

Sonnet 7

I find myself in a place I am not.
Endless sharp tiles on my bare soles like glass.
The horizon’s gaze black and blank, but alas
I see my tile reflection like a blot
On the perfect landscape on which I trot
Aimless, for a goal requires heart of brass
I lack in this haze. My lungs filed with gas
That chokes, burns and twists my stomach to knot.
Yet the blame lays on my heaving wet chest
that cannot find a path through this man’s land
Made up by your wealth, your west, and your crest.
I cry because, God, I can’t understand
How the rest find a path, they pass the test.
All I have is this void. What can I stand?

Sonnet 8

I gasp as I wake. Strapped in a wrapped sheet
And drenching cold sweat, yet my mouth is dry.
I lie in this ice night, under the sky
Tortured by the hour, by my thirst, by heat
And by my mind that cannot be complete,
It riffles through memories, regrets. Why?
Why do I brood on my flaws, my reply
I yelled at glass friends thrown on the concrete?
Dawn arrives, and the growing light hits me,
Illuminating my face and my mind
That was sundered by chains I’ve since broken,
Deep under my flesh, its shattered debris
Like pellets under wounds not yet defined.
I pray they heal, and I may be woken.