SEPARATION.....I am so sorry
Engaged,
plotting marriage,
I nodded,
while looking through you
at every women in the park.
Married,
seven years,
a child, come between us,
I miss the lust
publicly displayed by others,
Divorced,
free to roam, I sit alone
watching couples with children, and lust
for the blessed trinity...
of the three of us, to be, again, at home.
poem by John Tansey
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Your Old Shirts......
I have not, yet, recovered from the potent
Memories of family outings.
They peal like the anniversary
Of a loved one’s departing.
On such occasions, it is the intimacy
Of other families
That defines the negative space
of our seperation.
Living in the old neighborhood
I am haunted by ghosts.
And now that your gone, I
Wear your faults, I never forgave.
Like an old shirt of yours
Which warms me,
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poem by John Tansey
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Reunion.....
Dedicated to my ex-wifes grandmother
Upon the anniversary of his passing
that worm-holed the world
with a warped space,
leaving
the black hole heart
of one woman,
agape
with grief
and parted from the star of her life;
In the privacy of her longing,
she succumbed
to that portalled space,
aligned by stars,
that pulled her,
as earth herself
on the anniversary of his death
toward the gravity of their love
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poem by John Tansey
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Rockport...Visual Imagery
Pea green sea squalls,
Whorled out of a Nor’easter
Ping with the sting of the ocean’s spray.
Wind roped ocean waves
Lope, in the wind sail gales,
The chilled cheeks of my taut face,
Shouting windward and away...
Far up the winding slate rock walls of the jetty;
The wreckage of a whaler, among white caps
And Narwhale bones.
The bowsprit of the sea,
Rises like a fish tale out of the coast:
The imagined mermaid of the manatae...
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poem by John Tansey
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Old Shirts...This reads like a woman wrote it
Old Shirts
I have not yet recovered from the potent
Memories of family outings.
They peal like the anniversary
Of a loved one’s departing.
On such occasions, it is the intimacy
Of other families.
That defines the negative space
of our separation.
Living in the old neighborhoods,
I am haunted by the old ghosts.
And now that your gone,
I shall wear your faults.
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poem by John Tansey
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Love Subsists on Lust...
Love Subsists on Lust
Like an animal, sensing your smell,
I skin sift your approach.
A concussion of air;
A draft that draws us close.
Eyes widening, my ears prick up
At your hand on the door,
Your foot in the jamb.
And as your lips purse to utter my name,
I place a finger to your mouth...
Swallowing the vowels between us,
We grow in the silence,
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poem by John Tansey
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In Shadow...
Of late I have been feeling it...
even gleaning a Spring wind
that comes on a breeze
leaves me in its shadow.
But like the small animals
that too know their time
to disappear,
I have no thickett of twigs to crawl into.
Evolution, Nature's choice for moving
need not rush for anything
Subtle and insidious
like the slow creep of continents.
Until overwhelmed
with the proof it is so
and through all the poems I would write
to all the volumes I have lost
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poem by John Tansey
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It Is The End Of The World...
'It is the end of the world...
This time it is coming'
With every new generation
comes predictions for the world's end.
As if we are all too afraid to die alone
and must take the whole world with us.
Even at the sake of our children's living in it
Like when I stood before you, Mom,
in my five year old body
As you prayed every day,
'Sweet Mary, Jesus and Joseph
Please blow up the world already'
Even now I could not understand
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poem by John Tansey
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Dewpoint.......Final couplet is the poems' kernel
I am at the point
Where I can absorb no more.
You can only get so rain-soaked
And then rain-soaked no more.
Like a slug, sliding across the floor,
I leave a slimy trail, like fingerprints,
Wherever I go,
Bleeding my lifeblood,
I wear the hematomas like a shroud.
The body can only take so much pain
before the bones break, the marrow spills out
and the face becomes twisted, wrung...
An old, sunken in, sponge.
Stepping out of the shower, upto a fogged mirror
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poem by John Tansey
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THE GALACTIC SPIRALS OF DEAD LEAVES...I of IV
October is a gregarious month;
all things seeking shelter.
Watching the tidal ebb of twilight
drawing its last breath of birds,
I know winter is approaching;
Reversing the spin of planets
like baseballs, having arced since spring,
Gravity is returning, condensing,
like clouds in my eyes.
Twilight leaves the extremities
as fingers, cold to the touch.
Mothers walk, clenching the air
children’s voices cannot rise up over
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poem by John Tansey
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