Thursday, June 1, 2017

STEVEN FORTUNE

STEVEN FORTUNE

Sestina III: A READING FROM THE UNWRITTEN RULEBOOK

Who am I to superimpose another world
on this jumbled universe of voices?  When the monotony
of waiting for discovery invades an empty thought,
a pedestrian day is pried open, and the prospect
of a poisoning is planted in its indiscriminate soil.
The seeds of an identity crisis sprout their first jagged spikes.

Stripping down to naked insecurity, I hang pretensions on the spikes
of faint praise, and hide behind the flora of a world
bountiful in helpings of a more self-serving soil.
Here, omnipresent oak trees of heightened aspirations shadow the monotony
of an immortal thorn bush's middling prospect,
siphoning progressive blood from every heart-massaging thought.

My perception of the disembodiment of thought
is compromised when claims of incongruent tastes lodge in me like spikes.
I am cornered into the potential of indenture in delayed prospect.
A forest of collected works, swallowed by the avalanche of a world
raging into every next tomorrow, before the monotony
of valuating every previous yesterday becomes akin to swimming in soil.

A constructive tone is akin to uprooting me from the soil
of assumed accessibility; I convert to slop the food for thought
I reckoned indestructible to any menu of monotony
inscribed with the appropriate sterilization-friendly spikes
for every beverage of consumption mixed by me for a world
whose mainstream gold all too easily demerits efforts of my Silurian prospect.

The pedestal of saviorhood, on which so many a prospect
is planted, has me wishing on morose days that they soil
themselves in apprehension, having just been bridled with the pressure of a world
sure to not be satisfied with each successive hero thought
to bear ideological armistice.  Subsequently in me, pity sponsored by rationale spikes,
and a mental civil war explodes as ambition fails to compose a treaty with monotony.

So who am I to resent monotony
when I envision the reception of prospect
status like a broken foundation envisions the reception of spikes?
Dusty and dehydrated is my ambition's soil;
shriveled and retreated are the flowers of each thought
once watered with a voice and mineralized with hopeful relevance for the world.

Still, I must pull out the vines of monotony from resignation's more fertile soil
on my settled days, when communication's prospect transcends a thought, and a voice
spikes a volleyball of relevance through the net of a defensive world.






SIDE THREE
I.
Yesterday
will always be more interesting than today
come tomorrow

Come what may
the vested relevance of an expired day
we must borrow

till the hooks of history attach a context
till the foibles of today construct a pretext
till we're influenced enough to know what's next

Time is God
Tomorrow's all the universal dogma that you get

II.

Dissidence
will always drown out the persistence of a preach
No exceptions

Diffidence
encroaches on the followers that yearn to teach
their reflections

how to humble the defiant without numbers
how to raise the dead beyond the doubt of slumbers
and the soothe the gloom with which a hunch encumbers

Fact is myth
as long as dreams harass the known with the observed






CAN THESE BONES LIVE?

Assembled for an encore of conscience
anatomy and skin assume their calibrations
and the pestilence of posture

A flock of animations
imprisoned in the frame
of a sudden sullen nullification
of providential purgatory at the hands
of a puppet-stringed parole

They are vehicles of thirst
Saturnine recipients of posthumous
decrees deeming them a threat to crash
the gateway to gluttony
A steroid that aspires to exterminate
the social engine room of equity


Their skeletal scaffolds uphold a hapless
formality abyssal in comparison to hollow men
Stuffed men bloated with the imitation bones
of arbitrary straw
less alive on the grounds of man's ineptitude
to animate without a prophet's license
and more alive on the grounds of man's aptitude
for rigging every subject with a purpose
and immunity to repossessed perdition

STEVEN FORTUNE

STEVEN FORTUNE is an English poet who was born and resides in Cape Breton Island, on the east coast of Canada.  He is the author of three collections of poetry, and has appeared in several literary publications, both print and online.  He also has editing experience, and is currently the head editor at MCI Writers’ House, based in Montreal.



1 comment :