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Sentinel Poetry (Online) #47, October 2006. ISSN 1479 425X
The Internationl Journal of Poetry & Graphics…since 2002
Front Page l Past Issues l Submissions
Ernest
Williamson III
Handle Bars
amid the peaceful standstills in Augusta Georgia
1981, race stains the ground with cantankerous isms
blurted with a placid hate
but I'm 12 years old now
my bike is still black
the chain is of rust
orange
the hand bars are tokens of deceit
my hands slip with frustration
but I'm happy
I'm free
I'm alive
though I wonder if happiness and freedom and vitality
are wishful thoughts shared by the establishments
the founding fathers
of yesteryear
and the jails filled with seas of ebony
of seamless forever
will I have a motor bike in 10 years
or will I be writing about one in a room
with bars
that are too greasy
to hold on to
A Confounding Patriotism
I love the way she forgave my sins
alluding to comparable separations
in tunes by Coltrane and George Benson
she's so often in the midst of rare moments of peace
her name is legions of vaulted African equations
beautiful proofs with contrived improvisations hissing
in the weltering sweat stained in Western tents
I still love this place
it's a firm chair aware of its feeble legs
brave yet weighted with apathetic isms
like my woman
aforementioned nicely in line five
sexy true yet ignored
and not just mathematically
The Selling of the Souls
irrespective of minced happiness
a smile splintered partially in tune
with the nice weather
unclothed sunlight cloudless skies
and yet partially colluded with problems
hell
sandy ligaments
in feet and hands
lying to the bruises of incoming apathy
like a car accident
with blood stretched on the concrete
or a racial slur leaping from ignorant young lips
as a Christian elderly Black man drives cautiously
down the street in search for carnations for his wife
of 65 years
but what can the writer sell his observations
what can the greed of the eye effuse to others
when the writer's own inner galaxy trembles
in drifting orbit
maybe I can stare at the word STRONG
carved
in this oak tree on
south of too many confederate flags
rendering swastikas in gray shadows
or maybe I can write with two hands
and paint one sign outside of my weary house
reading
not for sale
not for sale
The First Love of Last Recollection
a breathless mirage of woman
parading round the green
leaving flowers disjointed and flooded with depression
turned aside as tired limbs in need of water and salt
she had eyes of black pearls
steaming the vocal chords in her lovers
like a black widow leading her prey
into the silk of misrepresentation
with no signs of sorry
and though she looms in the wake of day
in
the balance of
I still make note of her
like the enamel shaded white
leaning toward yellow reminders of life
you grow you age
but as the time leading towards death's migraine
you remember
Poetry in Terms of Sight & Sound
poetry is an inert gas
but subsumed by the wisps of cyclical wash
it's bad seed
it covers the earth in dark sounds
bats whining for berries
masked marriages yelping in disarray
based on easy traditions
money
status
pseudo matches
for fires with no heat
meanings with no definitions
kisses draped in wooden words
no pith or sadness
just affinity for laughter
contemporary poetry
words supple too much to touch
yet rigid to the ears of all the seasons
of dying leaves
