Two Poems

GEORGE ZANCOLA

IN OBSERVANCE OF MY LONELINESS

I’m writing because the TED Talks didn’t help, and it’s late, and there is no cable, and I’m tired. And there is no window to the outside world, and I’m thinking the starry scenes above must be screaming like a silence, or some other sheer mad poetry ripping within me. And like bravado in solitude, the voices persist in my monotone mania. By scientific jargon, the confinement is given title with a hell-bound twist on words like darkness, and terms like schizophrenic are brokered by inappropriate pronouns, and the poet in me is the lover in me, and both entities are in disconnect. No one could see me, and I could not shine in that light, And I sought the improbable as wonder fractured into many eyes, with no escape from the glare.

To the watchman I cried loud enough to be heard, but he stared dead ahead into his own life. He would allow no one access to my room, except the nurse with a needle to stick in my arm. She had memorized a manual of efficiency. She was always on time. I couldn’t help but ask if hourly injections would redeem me from an inability to see light. And if they didn’t work, she said, there was shock treatment.

I remember again the dance of the watchman, and the nurse. I recall the power moving through them, so hidden, obscene, and they witnessed the power that moved in me. I was frightened by the path they made into my solitude, and they were frightened, too.

FATHER

From the empty motive in his throat to the fright he bore in the shadow of death, my father ruled the earth.

An island stood in the middle of his heart, and long boats moved through his veins, each boat a shout, each shout a spear.

His redemption resided inside silk purses filled with his peculiar visions of heaven. His freedom came in gold and silver.

His being moved like a fat dancer in the thunder and light of the howl of love he found inside trenches of pain.

The old man was a trawler who fished with a net of spines, eyes of wire dragging his charges further into the sea of drowning.

He found his ideas in a deck of cards he shuffled in triumph and rage, his poverty clutched in his fist, his open hand holding

only colour and wind. The man’s kingdom thrived in sight, in sound, in air. His voice was a scream in the cave of loneliness.

His love and kindness brokered his abysmal will. In the genius of hatred, with a hammer of deceit, his dark countenance boasted of trespass,

with laughter mad as torture. Greed defined his holiness, and largesse the miracle of his faith. He stood at the

front entrance of the world wanting peace, and from his place of bones, from the emptiness of denied truth, with words

thin and cruel, and his thought a distillation of fact into fancy, he was the end of all things, and the harsh and horrid beginning of everything.