Your friends are not your friends Your friends are not your friends. There is no such thing as a friend. The wasp devours the honeybee on his dutiful search For the final flower. The flower stagnates, smelling sweet for no one. If it’s true that you kill the things you love Then she loved me […]
Read more "Your friends are not your friends"Between Grief and Joy The beaten path is nondescript, a right of way through pristine lawns and tree-lined streets of gracious homes, well-shaded in the heat of day and sound as caves on winter nights, with mantled fires burning low to warm the dens of hibernating souls. You head due south beyond the park and […]
Read more "Between Grief and Joy"Husband: All Earth I. Led Zeppelin on Spotify, movie posters on walls, Coors Light and Old Spice, here she dove softly into cool dust. At home, it was canyons and dirt, long showers after boring sex. Her husband: all earth. Here, they were all bodies, purple Gatorade, no sleep. II. Third Eye Blind on Spotify, […]
Read more "Husband: All Earth"Political Harvest Toward the east Through back porch screen Clouds are forming their ranks Against the sun A crow’s distant cawing Gives voice to solitude Worn like a thorny cloak And mocks that final promise Hope and lifeline once Now become more lethal Than foreign shrapnel Pines murmured all night In their high, strange tongue […]
Read more "Political Harvest "Praise for a June Morning At half-dawn the male cardinal slams his beak against my bedroom window, time and again only to retreat every few minutes to trill his maleness. The mourning dove coo ooh oohs in the woods as a smooth breeze invites maple-greens to ride its flush – to suggest fresh is how […]
Read more "Praise for a June Morning"The Stick Dawn is doing dawn, breaking its yolk. At the bank of the Trinity there is oneness. It is in small part, about the destiny of a conifer branch, cracked in an early winter’s wind. At the shoreline, its rhythm laps at the graveled bank, bald as a drumstick, thick as a child’s innocent […]
Read more "The Stick"Slivers After Creeley’s The Flower I think I layer tensions like bottles shattered in ditches the thirsty refugee hides. Each faulting gesture blocks breath, catches in my chest, cracks knees in a fall. Tension is a wasting blade It slices that one and that one and that one. R.T. Castleberry‘s work has appeared in Roanoke […]
Read more "Slivers | After Creeley’s The Flower"Our Mettle Purged our steel tempered our blade whetted unsheathed our valor proved approved To pierce the outer darkness cleave the inner sphere Strike while the iron is hot and the heart is cold the symmetry earth-shaking and that old sentry defense slumbers Love is a sound sleeper and no match for a determined offense […]
Read more "Our Mettle Purged"Hard Noises Education is not the antidote for the destruction of the world See: Cracked skin dry knuckle wet with blood on a climber’s hand Jagged teeth slack jawed bottom of the mouth skyline See: No triumph over the bootheel of power in this lifetime The mountains are not silent For the skiers sscht sscht […]
Read more "Hard Noises"Barred From The Hive The birds have gone to sleep tonight And after more nights the unnecessary drones Will be homeless, barred from the hive, Buzzing around the discarded soda bottles And trying not to die but verily dying While I lie here waiting out another year Of my lifecycle Alone Alone, Barred from the […]
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