Six Poems by Benjamin Blake

Old Bones

Weary, bleary-eyed distraction
Forever trying to make it home
Shuffling ‘round the living room, slipper-clad
Chain-smoking on the front porch
Weighing-up the size of the crescent moon
And wondering where the stars went

O, cardigan
Worn out in the sleeve
Stained and frayed
Save me from myself

The tardiness of time is a bad sign
Slowly being buried
Beneath a mound of unread books
This fox is turning silver
Lost, like the mind
Like kitchen scissors

Old flames, once extinguished
Won’t keep one warm

 

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Summer Kills

Watching from windowpanes
Locked away from the murderous heat
June can cause a man to go completely insane
But still, there is pleasure to be found
In the thought of sweat-pricked inner thighs
Barely hidden behind
The veil of an emerald-green sun dress

 

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Little Deaths

Beating hearts and throwing daggers
Love-letters on fire upon the front lawn
Everything dies
In its due time

The hand that caresses so tender
Forms the fist that strikes across the face
The mouth that finds a home
In the taste of sugar-sprinkled skin
Grips the teeth that clamp tight
Over a tongue that holds
The most depraved of secrets

Naturally
It often ends
In a not-too-small death of sorts
More often than not
At the arms of the other

We all leave a trail of corpses in our wake
As we skip merrily down the garden path

 

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Mourning the Absence of Alcoholism

Half-dead
But feeling more alive than ever
In that basement room
Where the floor tilted
As if it were as drunk as we were
Settling down into broken glass
The radio singing me sweetly to coma

 

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Subdivisions for the Newly Dead

This endless sprawl of stones
Each polished to perfection
Sit behind towering black gates
Greek-pillared mausoleums
House mummified housewives
Stagnant infinity pools overlook
Choked deadened lawns
Even the dogs are deceased
Crawled under the digger’s shed
To die alone
Flowers cut, and dried a brittle brown
Family portraits faded from a scorched earth sun
There is little, or no, sustenance here
Delivered from sin
Into the arms of apathetic angels
The rustle of up-stretched palms
Pushing up through malnourished soil
Search for something to snatch, then sink
Back into the ground below
Let us perish in peace

 

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Shore Leave

I missed my boat
Passed out in some girl’s bed
Head beating like Zulu war drums
And sick as a dog
Left to die in the summer street

 

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About the author:

Benjamin Blake was born in the July of 1985, and grew up in the small town of Eltham, New Zealand. Since then, he has spent time in Australia, and Southern California. He is the author of the poetry and prose collections, A Prayer for Late October, Southpaw Nights, Reciting Shakespeare with the Dead, and the novel The Devil’s Children (published in October 2016).