The World As Seen With A Pen

Complete Me

Write on my heart in italics
in bold fonts of your choosing
fill my empty spaces with color
scar me with your hands of calligraphy
tattoo my skin with your lips
soften me with your touch
fill my thoughts with your words
with the sound of your fingers
steal my breath with your mouth
uncover my depths and drape me
unfold my dreams and stain me
with the ink of your eyes
fill my pages with your stories
trace my flesh and bone
with the dye of you and only you.

Kevin Harling


Falling Down

It is all
descending
like the sky
sticking to my
lungs like
marmalade
and thumb
tacks.
Descending
like stairways
and thoughts
trickling
like sand
in bars
of erosion.
Coming closer
and nearer
to the coral,
my shoals
breached
by linen
white
lily
and lotus
breath
that feels
like
crayon.
It is all
descending
like time
black and blue
with passing
aged by truth
and blistering cold
that agitates
nostalgia.
Its all falling down
like a drape
a final curtain
one last bow
upon the
chin.

Kevin Harling


Clarity in a Glass

Opaque truth, maritime
arriving like an angel, transparent
tempered by whistling mouths
fall over me like perfume
dowse my nocturnal hours
scuplturing time with finite purpose
cradle my heart with prophetic kisses
touch me with truth in sheets
pure white and accessible
wrap me with delicious comparisons
pomegranate, with insights like a comet
conquer the stars and night without arrogance
fill the spaces with abandoned hours
of nothing but truth like glass.

Kevin Harling


Loam

Impervious
acrylic
memory
stood
in the
mirror
windows,
somewhere
close to dawn,

dusk showed its
face
auburn
and standing
like a silhouette,

shrouded by
shadows
of light
moving
towards noon,
and

the moonbeam
glass
that dissolved
into nothing
turned its cheek
like pollen
quietly whispering,

honey,
golden strands,
sand and moss
and leaves,

spoke,

everything is
falling down
like gravity
undressed by
satin,

meeting the
loam in a handshake
of grass,
bones
green with
envy eroding
this mantle,
wishing that
it had become
an island,

the margins
exist
and preclude
assumptions
or contracts,
everything is
disclosed like
the sunshine,

water, random
beads and,
drops its
hopes
on the faces
of those
etched
by stone,

like monoliths
chanting
sky and stars
and ceremonies
that go in the
garden, eden,
lily afternoon
hands,
that look like
they are praying,

everything is kneeling,
crumbling
like stale bread
but never
submitting defeat.

Impervious.

Kevin Harling


Oh Enchantress

Oh enchantress, twilight,
trembling miracle of light
shaped by fragrant beauty
the smell of flowering rain
touch me in the dark spaces
with small light-blue eyes
study my phantom frame.

But leave my poetry alone
do not disturb its tender ashes
its tendons and cheeks, its gasps,
its perforated palpitating breath.

Oh enchantress, invisible,
like a glistening hemisphere of night
tentative and unnerved by laughter
listen to the orange lament.

Oh absentminded kisses
distant and divided into two
teeming with the stillness of necks
turn the glacial solitude upside down
shatter this pollen waist
undress these phosphorescent hours
with udders of sleep.

But leave my poetry alone
its laurel towers, its germinating flour,
its wooden girth and abandoned merchandise.

Let its scarlet surface take shape
let it pour down fertile
broken apart by the earth
giving a voice to the sulfur emptiness
dissolving like a rain of reconstructed syllables
like songs of wheat, winter, oats
like a landslide, let it topple over
let it transform the ground with umbrellas
in intervals, like a pause of cold air
like a ghosts breath, let it whisper.

Oh enchantress, bedroom,
entangled vegetation
lagoon of skin and sky
sleek silky sweat mountains.

These words must not perish
for they are beyond silence
untouchable balconies
innocent bystanders of dew
topaz flashes of light, adolescent.

Leave my poetry alone
its patient leaves of crimson
its secret islands
its volcanic petals
its violet underground
its hurricane voices
its consonants of floating flesh
timid.

Leave it alone.

Kevin Harling


Opus

Precipitation
thats what this feels like
colloquial and bunching
around the edges,

rendered,

like a knot of olive trees,
the diffidence of the wind
ancient and worn smooth
by its own air,

imprudent chairs
and pregnant windows
like the light
that is rooted
in apples,
domesticate
the sky
with tendrils undisclosed,

rewritten,

like a veranda,
the immensity
of foam
magenta in its vigil
touching the
echoing pink-pebbles
with jasmine
degrees of silence,
the mulberry face
of time
made of domiciles
of chocolate
where jelly fish and geckos
gargle iodine
in uninhabitable
chapels and mosques.

I feel the chamomile
envelope of the generations,
isolated like the pansies
in late november,

I feel the chestnut
embrace of the sea,
like a chrysalis of lemons,
like the aroma of crickets,
like the rhombus
that finds itself
in a very difficult position,

I see the porcelain veil of
translucency that is
spoken in yellow decrees
like a buzz of erasers
pivoting on a delicate
gold wind.

Kevin Harling


Ode To The Poet

Are you only flesh?
Are your limbs made of verse?
Are you an aviator of love and beautiful things?

I wonder what your words unlock
within your mantle of imprisoned night.
Whether your days are filled with starfish skies.
If your petals like hands can elude the dew.

Are your bones composed of pollen?
Are your legs more like a conflict of earthly virtue?
Are you populated by flowers?

I reach for your ancient strings,
to touch your fragrant solitude.
To imagine your distance with verbs
full of light.
I try to reconstruct your feathers,
taste your solitary wine,
to feel your sulfur chains.

Are you a stone dove?
A stiff sea or a wind full of moons?
Are you a sentinel of salt?

I am looking to chisel your joy,
to hammer your statue mouth,
to crawl inside your threshed skin
like a hummingbird searching for nectar.

My poet,
time sculptures your footsteps.
We walk towards your autumn,
extracting your theatres.
We spend hours in your trembling dawn,
waiting.
Waiting for your resurrected roses,
your porcelain visions.

Are you without a voice?
Are you between the earth and the sky?
Are you without wings?

Kevin Harling


The Geography of Being Human

By way of osmosis
the light disolves
assimilating my olive
skin.

The leaves of my pain,
coral chemistry, lofty and
undiscovered in recent excavations.

Be very careful with
the contours of my fleshy geography,
my cenotaph and monuments
of tarnished bronze.

Logic should dictate and disclose
the inscriptions,
the lines I scribbled in the sandy
darkness,
the maps I coloured in for
passing tourists.

Be very careful
not to dislodge the boulders
for I wear my stones like wreaths.

I am antiquity in a book
with fragile bone white pages,
hidden in papyrus caves.

Be careful how you rescue
these shapeless elements,
the architecture of my singed heart
hears and whispers without distinction.

I have crossed the barren wilderness,
exposed my geometry with uncivilized lines,
the tentacles of truth pulling like a mirror.

I am not demanding , I am waiting
once these words are spoken where do they go?

Kevin Harling


Painting The Truth

Let me paint the truth
filling the canvas of honesty
with each word
layering one upon the other
with an uncompromising faith.

Let me portray the landscape
with an abstract uncertainity
holding true to it's form and function
let me describe in exquisite detail
everything I see there,
never wavering in my purpose
to accurately colour
the blank and empty space.

Let me with every line
brush stroke with my palette
blending and mixing,
let me sketch freely and roughly
drawing out what lies underneath.

And above what is really there
let me with a realism carve out
some meaning from what it
is that I survey.

Let me do it deliberately
without distraction.
Let me find the art
the beauty and the brilliance,
...and let it radiate outward
from within.

Kevin Harling


If Neruda Spoke

I am colorless, the sorrowful
words that whip by in winds,
the iridescent things that
whisper, the etched brittle
emotions that take form in
shadows. One minute bleeds
into the next, the meddle
is welded as sparks cry.
Your diamond resilience,
this seagull sky. I am
whittling the now in
intricate lines. My
eroding charcoal mask,
fades. I stall, seconds
galloping to nowhere fast,
ships tossed about on an
ocean half mast. My trans-
lucent colors, your opaque
gaze I cannot see through.
This vast expansion of a
page, these sublime details
charmed by time. My granite
heart clearly entrenched,
the wings of grace that fall
like an avalanche of glass.
All is lead. A molten river of
lead. I can sift but i cannot
sort it out.

Kevin Harling


A Poets Conundrum

By what standard can a Poet be measured?

Is it by a heel of light they judge?
By a prenatal deployment of paper and ink?
By sacrificed teeth graciously removed?

Do lifeless stones have feet, or clashing buffaloes
wings?
I ask you

Do stars cry with a despair that even black space
cannot ignore?
Does a scream of laughter arrive uninhabited by lips,
or does a river suffocate with air?

I ask you

When dawn transfers its fingers to night,
like a song palpitating westward among
a celestial flock of birds, does the day
precarious in its travels weep in its
ending?

I ask you
By what standards can a Poet be measured?

I ask you?

Kevin Harling


Words of Derision

Words like an abacus
calculating thoughts into figures
words that abandon numbers
words that abate like thoughts full of fodder
words that abdicate just by definition
aberrant words that assassinate character
words with hands covered by blood
like a red sheet full of lies
words abandoned by meaning
words that will not abide
defying words
words used to abstain
words that abstract
that we use to take away from
absurd words like fingers that rust
corroding what is said
to the ways we express how we feel
like acid rain
words like breaths of asbestos
words full of chagrin
words like a cesspool
words without creed
that we use to collate
words that crease thoughts
twisting and bending them to our own ends
turning them upon themselves
in the name of vanity
in the name of bribes like teeth
biting remarks full of disdain
the gesturing tones we trample with
with absolute disregard
words full of pompous mouths
like a shower of poisonous arrows
words that argue like bondage
words without flesh
crucified by sin
by not accepting our crosses
words that impale like a bed of nails
like coercing bones
words that gut
the way we dissect another's feelings
corrosive like stale air
words full of pyre
meant to set hearts ablaze
this world is filled by such words
renegade and confrontational
syllables and consonants of derision
meant to subjugate to enslave.

Kevin Harling