BOB MACKENZIE

 

Slow Drag

 

the beat slow drags

rain drained ideas

now to forever

rock and roll music

room filling rock music

loud playing rock music

time past memory

cannot hide pain

thought forgotten

yet deep within

awash in rock and roll

I drown in the music

head filled with beat

beat of the past

of time passed

and music rocks me

 

This Is What You Don’t Know

 

this is what you don’t know

we’re all very afraid

 

this is what you do know

we’re all very afraid

 

we block out the terrors

but lock the fear inside  

 

This is what I do know

 

There are walls here

they are your walls

 

Leaving It Behind

 

she walks with the wind at her back

as though escaping something dark

she knows cannot be far behind

 

she stops and her shoulders shudder

forcing tears she holds back to come

then she walks on more quickly now

 

she feels the shadow at her back

following always following

has known this dark force far too long

 

in summer’s bright noonday sunshine

she walks in the dark and shivers

not from cold but some old terror

 

nobody sees the fear in her eyes

few even notice she is there

a woman walking through shadows

 

this dark she knows is inside her

buried for years but now haunting

all her sleeping or waking dreams

 

nobody knows why she ends it

they only see a pretty girl

not the fear she has left behind

 

Innocence Suspended

 

electric silence in the night

a frisson of lightning withheld

dreams of innocence unsettled

 

innocence doesn’t rest easy

swims seas of sheets in drowning-dreams

storms in the air and worse to come

 

the last of the gods to succumb

ancient innocence dreams darkly

drawn into deep waters and drowns

 

innocence awakes to thunder

earth under her bed falls away

a vision of the end of days

 

a deep sinkhole under a bed

suspended inside a dark dream

innocence adrift outside time

 

source:

"...a 40-foot-deep sinkhole that opened up under the bed of a pensioner in Guatemala City on July 19, 2011.  Inocenta del Rosal Hernandez, 65, awoke to a loud boom and found the earth under her bed had imploded, creating a circular hole.” (The Atlantic, August 2018)

 

BOB MACKENZIE

 

BOB MACKENZIE grew up near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in rural Alberta with artist parents.  His father was a professional photographer and musician and his mother a photo technician, colourist, and painter.  By the age of five, he had his own camera and ever since has been shooting photographs and writing poems and stories.  Raised in this environment, young Bobby developed a natural affinity for photography and for the intricacies of language.  He now lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Bob’s writing has appeared in more than 400 journals across North America and as far away as Australia, Greece, India, and Italy. He has published nineteen volumes of poetry and prose-fiction and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies.  He's received numerous local and international awards for his writing as well as an Ontario Arts Council grant for literature, a Canada Council Grant for performance, and a Fellowship to attend the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia. For eighteen years Bob’s poetry was spoken and sung live with original music by the ensemble Poem de Terre, and the group released six albums.