Mike Ravdonikas: Poems

I was trying to finish a poem. The poem was trying to finish me. We both reached the end of language – where he begins and I stop – and stood breathing, eyeing one another with contempt. Him refusing to become whole, me refusing to pull any further by his lank hair. You try dragging that stupid head when it’s stuck in concrete.

Night Closing In / Now, as the sky turns pink, chase everyone else out of your skin to see how violet it can get all by yourself before the pre-OLED screen blackness puts a lid on us, before the green spaces release the sulphur from this day’s recycled waters, before white glare infests construction sites, before the Gulf retreats from sight and leaves the sound to the hotels and villas squeezing empty beaches. @verse by MR

@verse by MR

Pine Scented Night / An empty pool of frog, behind a brick wall in Antibes. A window with a slice of ceiling, ceiling fan, its groping shadow. An accelerating van to rip in two the croaking, dwindling taillights as it sneaks together at the break. @verse by MR

Sun Salutation / The deep East of night slowly shallows and soon golf-club lakes will collect pools of sky, quenching, drowning the lights of my city — so present an hour ago — in the mist of a morning, and sending me crawling to bed from my yoga mat. Fancy that: Sun salutations have summoned the actual star. @verse by MR

Don't believe the hype / Upon these shores the hunters and the fishers built their pile-homes, sharpened arrowheads and spearheads made of local stone, until their Bronze Age started, something like 5000 years ago. Imagine those first tools, made of a flimsy metal: some would be enthralling, some — no match for good old stone. @verse by MR

Inbox (1) / Back when the words were real: a frost to break a bough in half, a wind to peel off walls — a kiss to make a dead heart catch a beat, surprised, a kiss to make a city catch the plague and never notice, nor regret, a kiss to make you cry, evaporate and fall to Earth as rain. Each sentence hissed and sputtered like a tear in boiling oil when only steppe was plain, when clarity could spoil a lifetime of nuance. Those times we danced and swirled through like a night, too short to type, too singular to sleep, too full of tongue to bite. @verse by MR

Oxygen / Three hundred seconds spent observing the far end of your Parisian RER, the bark-like pattern left by long-dried lines of droplets on the glass, the kiwi marmalade synthetic fabric of the headrests, rubbings on the floors and corners left by a fair share of the 47 million tourists (and their luggage) passed through here this year alone. Twenty five minutes, only watching: clouds, the concrete domes of Charles de Gaulle, the buckwheat gravel on the railway, the metronomic passage of the poles, each one a “now”. The tunnels, dark on “in”, open on “out”. And by the time you disembark, you’re ready to assist your loved ones with their masks that dangle from the ceiling. @verse by MR

I asked a genie for looks worthy of sagas. He gave me a saggy look.

Homage / I didn’t buy Bukoswki’s book for fifteen hundred bucks, signed, first edition. He would have laughed his ass off: tiny earthquake in Green Hills, LA. @verse by MR

Out of the corner of my eye: an open fan. Who brought the cake? Who took the slices?

Paper Plane / I found an unsent letter to my grandpa who is dead; stroking the surface, like a cheek, or wrinkled knuckles, made the sheet into a paper plane — and I won't watch it land, because the true one is still flying. @verse by MR