|
 L.
Ward Abel is a life long poet, composer of music and spoken-word
performer. He has written and recorded music for Abel & Rawls
(now Abel, Rawls & Hayes), as Max Able (his former alter-ego)
and with spoken-word pioneers Scapeweavel. His poems have been
published widely in the U.S. and Europe, in print and on-line,
including or forthcoming in White Pelican Review, The Pedestal,
VLQ, erbacce (UK), Versal Two (Netherlands), Ink Pot, Texas
Poetry Journal, Open Wide (UK), Poems Niederngasse
(Switzerland), Southern Gothic, Dead Drunk Dublin (Ireland),
Poetry Super Highway, Tertulia, Juked, Identity Theory, SouthLit,
Gold Dust (UK), Muscadine Lines: A Southern Anthology, many
others. His chapbook, Peach Box and Verge, has been published by
Little Poem Press. His new book of poems, Jonesing For
Byzantium, will be published this year at UK Authors Press
(Bristol, UK). He lives in his native rural Georgia, USA,
cultivating his latifundia.
Ensuance
Only a memory of my later self,
me yet to be
of which I am now
a part---
this is all that I have
in the offing.
I can't seem to meet me,
to get ahead of myself,
always on the crest
of horizon
but never beyond.
The past seems easy enough,
but, like a road sign gone behind,
it changes,
is not as fixed
as one might think,
obscures
like something
the earth soon swallows.
This vacuum of Now
is merely a bushwhack
without leavings,
a bridge over bridges
leading to a bridge.
A Day After The Fair
A gnaw entered my thoughts
after someone said for the thousandth time,
"you never know when your time is up":
what if I did go-on-to-glory?
Never to return home or walk through that doorway
again just after six fifteen p.m.
as the news painted the walls red,
my girls later remembering me fondly post-event
"daddy would've liked that" or "he once said..." If
moments no longer mattered in my unleashed soul, if
all care evaporated, would I , too,
remember me?
Captiva Island, April 2006
When the sea,
this green infinity
fashioned in a way
that I can barely grasp,
when the sea
stretches before me
it's as if
it waits
for my response;
patient
like a silent teacher
that is larger
than I can ever be.
She knows a universe
that spins
in her cranium
and only spins there,
beyond me and
my finitia. I am as silent
as my teacher, I am
wordless,
ignorant,
at loggerheads with
eternity;
a shorestander.
---
|
