A Curse or Blessing?

“Your young men will see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”
—Joel 2:28

Past lives haunt me in old age.
Last night I woke up smelling blood,
Combat and agon riddling my head.
Dark days of war, the clash of steel.
Mead halls full of brash young men,
Bitter words and strong drink,
Hands clasped in friendship and valor;
Eyes crossing old foes and elders.

For years I slept like the dead: dreamless.
But now in fits and starts, awakenings,
Horrors grasp my mind, violent days,
Nights hollowed out, ancestral curses,
Unfinished business, bones rattling
Darkened lairs of shadows and murmurs;
Unbidden rituals of murderous intent,
Where men are broken in anguish and misery.
I sometimes wonder who and what I am;
Such worlds returning now to curse or bless.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

The Blooms That Will Not Rise

Most of us have given up
the myth of everlastingness.
Oh it was fine for the hooded crowd,
a justification against bare plumage:
the splenetic screech of the Peacock’s tongue:
a ceremony of love among so many dismal nights.
But now? Stars explode, dark holes swallow
them whole. What’s left of paradise?
We live, we die, then we’re forgotten. Our names
attached to someone else’s broken image.
Never ours. Instead we slip between
unnoticed and unnamed, an uncreated spark:
never to be known, because never part
of the circling flame – a mere loan to sun and moon.
At least that’s how the knowers know. Who knows?
Any thing risen from the blooms enfolded tomb?

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Lies Never End

Have you felt that desperation of heart?
You know what I mean. When nothing
One says or does changes things;
Only the pain remains, the memory of defeat.
We’ve all been their, right? Especially you.
It’s a look in the eye, a rejection;
A softening of the lips, the turn of the head
As it shifts toward absence; the silence
One is given even when there is so much noise.
Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it. You’d be a liar.
The others always seem to know something you do not.
Why is that? Why do they stare bullet holes in your skull,
Only to turn their deadly gaze away
Challenging their eyes with a curse.
If they care so much why do they pretend otherwise.
You’ve been there, you know the truth…  will the lies ever end?

©2021 S.C. Hickman

The Red Stain

Even now the saurian gaze of his stone cold eyes
Reflects neither the slate tinted sky nor my green mind;
Silent in this stark wilderness, windless rubbings 
Of a scree slide petroglyph’s alien codes forestalls
All confusion between his red threaded tongue 
And my peckish appetite, a tremor vibrating
Through us freeing our intemperate stares 
(Balance of a life hanging
       down…) toward the red stained 
             Sunset

bleeding…

©2021 S.C. Hickman

The Ventriloquist’s Art

“Being a ventriloquist is a lot of fun.” —Jon Padgett, The Secret of Ventriloquism

It moved. Sightless, thoughtless. The wooden armature
Among the fabricated twists and bends, the painted
Lips and hair, the floppy hat, the elongated nose,
The red glitter of shoes: all moved. Self-propelled
Among lifeless wood attached neither by cables
Nor the Puppeteer’s grand schemes of trickery;
A hunk of carved monstrosity, the terror of the corpse
Alive to the inner thrust of dust, the fluid vitality
Animated by its own trifling need to be, and to be free:

             Spoke! 

The man, if man it could be called, sat silently
As the living wood arranged itself, mimicking
The rigid lifelessness of the man thing — a secret
Complicity between man and wood, ties of strangeness:
A composure of tension subservient to will and power,
A confrontation with the fatalistic art of defiance.
Each unwilling to give way to the other’s will,
The subtle dance of eye and eye channeling
Some well-learned but hidden mystery, a quickening.

The mouth’s aperture, an abyss within which one is lost,
The caustic wit that supervenes between two dead things;
Man and wood, an art that calls both to the dark world,
Where voice and mind seem relative to unbidden relations.
A practice sets the crooked lips which moving hint of cynical forays,
Time’s carnival opening on to broken harbingers of uncanniness.
The tribe of daemons inhabiting neither man nor wood
Take up their positions in-between both, like clowns
Awaiting the Ringmaster’s voice — the act arising of its own accord.

Before words can flow the beginner’s alphabet must
Surface through those wooden lips till each nuance
Binds the machinic wisdom of those crafted traceries:
The ornate obligations that stoop to bend lip and hand;
Fragmented churnings assuring practice of an ancient kind
Welds man and wood to the known paths of illusion’s fakery.
Shape those letters to the air where the ancient throng
Bestir themselves awaiting incarnation in the chance meeting
Between wood and man following the oldest form of magick.
Delusions skein coiled round the lips that speak, a voicing
Only poets know and are known by as if the world and time
Offered all a chance remembrance of the awakening into catastrophe.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Fastidious

Fastidious. Circumspect to the moment’s crafting light,
my mother. Her eyes lost in those memories, visions;
some called it the ‘inner light’ (what did she see?), othering
worlds just beyond the seen, where the known and unknown

cross each other like lost travelers: puzzled, observant, quickened
by strangeness. Stubborn and focused she’d shape hands to thread
creating dreams made visible, objects both magical and ordinary.
Slipping from one memory to the next, voicing her perplexity with time,

she’d quip and quote women I’d never known except in daguerreotype;
brown tinted lives gone gray in the world we’ve all forgotten; yet, uncanny,
her remembrance bringing such thoughts and images back from somewhere,
somewhen. (Where? When?) I could tell when she was about to drift —

wander into the othering place where men were not allowed. I often wished
I could follow her there, down into that blessed region outside history,
where she seemed to gather strength and power, a woman’s power
               to carry us who could not carry ourselves. 

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Night’s Changelings

Day by day the cracked earth stings,
lips chapped to the sun’s unslaked fiends;
step to step sounding the gray dawn,
circling furrows in a vicious crawl.

Eyes strain against the heat, the fake light
hovering in illusive trailing’s of a rich man’s life;
a semblance of paradise, not the grasping whirl,
a dust wall presaging terror in a knot of icy fire.

Red gasps at end of day, twilight’s reign 
where two worlds shake the inlaid chest;
the silver on the winged cloud lies of change,
where only now the confused cry of a lone hawk fell.

He lays there listening, night’s changeling
rifting paradise of its last silences: a voice
breaks free in the emptiness: a drifter’s mirage,
oak-born owls swinging branch-wise against his mind.

©2021 S.C. HIckman

Chasing Devils In Our Wine

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Maybe it was best this way. Not belonging.
Not having a home, a place to rest my head.
City after city, job after job, a life alone, roaming…

Never did fit in with the crowd. Tried. Never worked.
Like my mind was cracked. Touched by some unpleasantness.
Kept thinking it would pass. It didn’t. Nothing ever does.

Yet, I was not alone. There were others like me. Nomads.
We’d come together in the night, stalking nightmares we deny.
Bars and lonely women empty as we were and are. Endless.

Maybe we are already dead. Is this the end of it?
Lining the tunnels with our cardboard lives, chasing devils
In our wine. There is no solace in this bitterness. No pity either.

Why rage against the night? What would it do? The stars
Are mindless as we are, indifferent to our plight. We live,
We die. That is all. Stubbornness our only recourse against sincerity.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Wisdom Chaser

Will you trade words, earth wanderer? Know the dark ways
that harry a man down, squander resources, break minds
beyond hope; mix words, riddle the stars,
curse the very land that wastes all. Speak, brother

of the leaf and wind, rock and sea, let them see what is –
eye-spent drifter without hearth or kith. Can you read
the signs, break bread among the warring tribes, teach
children the natural ways; bring back the wisdom

of the deep seas grace. Why trouble the sky
with your lies? Speak plainly, cunning one, else walk away
into the darkness of your kind. Trouble not the elders,
nor the little ones who must survive. Would you learn the lore?

Know loss beyond redemption? Enter the bloody fray
where brave and coward alike fall before the ancient truth?
Then follow the taloned pride of the Eagle to his rocky lair,
the night-winged Owl as she stalks the moonless realms;

know the language of deer and panther in their innocence. 
Unlearn hatred, walk free of spite and terror alike. Cast
your eyes against the broken ways. Give us back the face
you had before the cry of flesh and a woman’s death.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Oedipal Bastards Like Us

Oedipal bastards like us deserve our fate.
Bitter days in blind disgust. Old men’s memories
Haunting us like a woman’s spiteful curse.
Mangy as a dying dog he wanders between bed and bowl.

He used to be fit and thin, a stubborn man,
Solitaire but not alone; neither clown nor killer
He stalked my nights a ghost, a suicide.
Pain pricks us into thought whether we will or no.

The crossroads always signified a terrible destiny.
The shotgun spent, his skull unpacked,
The world went dark, and silent. Even now
His eyes are blank, the hollows black and lonely.

All his life he’d sought paradise, failing that
He’d plunged his mind beyond all telling, fallen
Now beyond redemption, a shadow walker.
Suffering has no sense, just silence, lost in darkness.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Night’s Carnival

The sun cannot repair the damage of the night,
The silences between your smile and mine;
The focus of our desperate thoughts and dreams,
The shattered wisdom of our ancient sapience;
For now we dance upon a field of tears
In the twilight of this age of dust;
Two deadly members of that hated race,
Dismembering our blasted world of rage.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

The Vicious Circle

Old bones still twist him back to day,
Her smile, dismissive, finds him young again;
A stubborn fool whose memories bode ill-health:
“Who is he to turn away these bright bolts that slay?”

He’d have it other than it is, but knows how fiercely she asserts
Her sovereign will, challenging all her lovers;
An agon beyond truce – love’s honor the only prize:
Shadowed by the witchery of her ancient curse.

Coldness be my steel against her evil spell,
For I have need of Ananke’s broken shield;
I seek dark blessings worth their deadly tally:
Life, this life, repeated till the vicious circle closes, still and silent.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Tattoo Apocalypse

Tattoo’s appeared. Curious he let it go on.
Flesh moving with a serpent’s coils across his abdomen.
The clown’s eye opened on an ancient tower curled round his neck,

Where the monkey man swung upon the vine turning
And turning into a woman’s scream upon his buttocks. 
The story of the world slowly unfolded. The barcodes of a sex toy

Erased the history of the Renaissance. No one knows why
But the island sank, and some surmise it was the bad ink
That dripped into his veins when the open sea of sores popped on his nose.

He offered her a dream voyage into the mystery of his primal rage,
But she knew better than to follow him into that rising sun’s bloody haze.
The world is fading now, turning gray. The prospects of change have changed.

Travel agents have bargained with him for new destinations.
The edgelands of his bony scalp have thickened to the storm of memories now.
Even the arresting officer commented on the weather patterns

Drifting on the sea of his cracked skull. At the funeral the tattoos started fading.
So too did the landscapes of our earthly life. Now a uniform darkness covers all.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Midnight Rendezvous

We walked along the edge of night
like lovers seeking some secret destination —

the slow pace, the glances; kisses,
eyes crossing under the street lamps.

The quickened pace in the rain, surprise:
forcing us to cling in the wind’s sad motion.

Even at the corner, in the dark of that alleyway,
knowing as we know and are known —

emptied of the pain, memories;
we touched and it was too much, reluctant…

reaching at last the place of light
and darkness, our midnight rendezvous.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

This is no time to sleep…

This is no time to sleep   death
Will come soon enough, but not now;
No now we must stay awake, listen
And voice our concern. The best
Have already passed by, no return
From the country of the blind. But I hear them whispering
Like those leaves that shatter the morning light. 
Maybe it’s better this way, a difficult gesture 
Whose confusion keeps us asking for more
       life.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

She Sang Me Into Light

I’ve been searching for her all my life.
Under the deathly lights of this black night,
Even as the mists turn white before the sea’s cold foam,
I feel her presence somewhere ahead. She said she’d stop
And wait for me between the darkening sands and the moon born sea.  
I hear her mocking voice who would lead astray. Whispers… wastrels!
Her fierce cry breaks across blank skies where nothing is.
I peer into the wet mesh, faceless as the morning sun I can barely see.
Her voice held me in its power, my mind locked to the sea’s enfolding savagery.
I could not move and yet I moved as she sang me into light.

©2021 S.C. Hickman

Blind

i am a blind man which way shall i go
crossing

is this the valley where the bones stitch themselves whole
falling forward

touching her flesh brings nothing back but nothing
rushing

funnel me down step by step until i’m wet with the last wave
collapsing

staring into that warmth burning in my sockets i know
emergence

sluiced it rises to meet what is at last
birthing

---

S.C. Hickman ©2021

the lingering

death is always lingering in the air
the hoofprints of another always vanishing

and we like wounded deer follow the scent
knowing we will be edged into judgment

no one can speak to those moments
the solitary agon of desperate thoughts failing

in that darkness where even ghosts lose themselves
we find her laying there in a pool of blood

we would like to meld our mind to hers
know what she knows as the last thought leaves

---

S.C. Hickman ©2021

Bones of the Earth

the bones of the earth have lost their luster
no one left to acknowledge their light

even the rust colludes with the chemical death of giants
somber eyes sinking into black holes lifeless fold into this darkness

it is expected that the weather will change
even now the dead oceans churn to a slow forgetfulness

what will rise out of this ash to sing
when the day is long and nothing remains but these blanched sheaves

---

S.C. Hickman ©2021