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THREE POEMS
By
Sharma Taylor
Love Poem
If you tell me you love me you would be lying.
Love does not feel like this.
Like a tight fist
This loss of understanding
Hot pain and silt in the eyes
Like sand
My brain is flapping in the wind
Like sin
while your damp shirt is outside on the line.
Love Poem II
Some days the blood on your tongue drips like honey.
‘If you loved me you would not leave me,’ someone says.
doors slam
cases are closed
Game pieces are packed away in dusty boxes
awaiting the bitter rematch.
Who keeps score?
I am left alone picking up the mess on the carpet
wondering when we will stop acting like children
in grown-up shoes.
I drown in the:
‘Why? Where? If? How? When?’ and ‘Who?’
Poetry Submissions Offspring
I click send and watch my poems
disappear into the abyss.
In a twinkle of an eye.
In a flash.
Why is the internet called a ‘web’, anyway?
Dangerous place!
Palms sweat.
Heart sinks to where blood pools.
They are babies suddenly alone at night
before I can call them back into warmth
they disappear from sight.
Are they ready?
Wish I could
go with them - like children, in the dark
hold their hands
wait outside the bathroom, standing guard;
peer under the bed
make sure there are no monsters lurking
to pounce when I am out of view.
Do they return, arrive safely
or are miscarried in trash bins?
Do they float in zero gravity?
Do they remember me?
I stumble
stubbing my toe on the floor
already forgetting what I have lost.
Keys rattle in the door.
My flat-mates look at me, concerned -
they do not recognize this blob
on the couch
as animated as the dishes piled in the sink.
I haven’t eaten or left the apartment for days
that feel like hours,
haven’t slept, haven’t showered.
I’m a ghost with dried fingers like claws.
The poems return in dreams unbidden.
“I am a poet,” I say abashed - this feels
like a fiction as someone laughs
in the next room, glass breaks.
I speak
though I know nothing.
What happens if they don’t find the way back home?
Is a mother without her children still one?
I am here.
Three
poems.
© Sharma Taylor, 2009
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