Poetry: Selections from David Reuter

The View at Lord Grace Park

I force my weary, ground-sore legs

to travel to the cascade,

splashing fast into the root-torn floor below.

They stab like fingers where the earth

once lay intact in all its steadfast verve.

The crayfish creep on river feet,

devouring whatever lingers

in the water’s wake.

The mighty pines are crippled in

the remnants of their fleeting lives

while worms and maggots crawl across their trunks

and desecrate what pride they still possess.

I watch the brown-black motion seep

into the hub of an eroding maw

that swallows all into itself.

 

I check myself against my boulder seat

and force myself to move away,

to leave the jagged path behind.

At any moment, it might tumble down

and we might join the rest among

the worn-down broken fray

and slumber like a bear inside

that constant swirling mouth.

Too much depends on moving forth

to places I have yet to go.

The Eyesore Off the Path

This vile little patch,

putrid in its green against

the gnarled, rotten fallen limbs,

is loitering against the edge,

nagging with its ragged pap.

The ghostly, gauged, and rancid husks

disturb the concrete walk where people move

despite the fetid, wetted stench

where eyesight goes to disappoint.

A cleansing rain that pounded hard

throughout the graveyard of this horrid spot

did nothing much to clear the smell

of carcass shells that haunt this spot.

 

With every passing cyclic phase,

the blotch bulls on

with all its lifeless nerve,

resisting all renewing starts.

It makes the sterile silence loud

and messy with its constant will

to not recede or to admit

the slightest sign of its defeat.

And still we try to keep along

with every bright and shiny effort made,

pretending not to see what lingers

constant through its endless blight.

Remembrance

I saw it when we stood like soldiers

by the spruce that stood along

the boundary line where we conversed.

The ink, slashed deep and dark within,

suggested places off the path

where others feared to think to tread.

 

“It’s to remind me,” she explained.

Indeed, her manner seemed to seek,

in furtive, probing glances,

battlefields that sometimes lurk

in wild, secret spots away

from common corners, overlooked.

 

The mark she’d stained onto her skin

stood out among the sedate lawns

that once were sprawling, grassy plains,

with homes composed in cloddish lumps

to offset traces of the savage lands

that strained inside constraints.

 

They tramped those lands into that place

where we and others came to dwell

until these pockmarked, tatty fields

became a manicured exhibit,

changing savage symmetry

that separated us just like the tree.

 

For now, I watch her coexist

in bliss around the edges of

the tough terrain that others quelled

into the garden that we both enjoyed,

though I resist advances from my stable place

I still defend despite the march of time.

Forgotten

So much depended on these crayons

left to loiter, seeking dust

inside the drawer where no one dares to look.

The fairies flew on aqua and magenta wings

and graced below the smiles of the sun.

With glee,

the trees bequeathed their leaves

onto the beaming lime grass blades below.

The azure streams and honeyed songs

sprung deep within the confines

of their babbling beds.

Her animals and loved ones lazed at will,

their nose-free faces flattened,

beaming forth from all their rounded heads.

 

These days,

the charcoal world lists limp and bleak

amongst its turgid grooves.

The tiny hands that used to sketch

and etch existence with their fancy

flail and toil throughout the chores

they’ve learned they must perform.

And all these waxy instruments of whimsy

that once sounded all her calls across the page

sit idle, resting deep

upon the well-worn grooves

that still persist to testify to

transcendent worlds that they once brought about.

The Vagrant on the Railway Station Platform

He roved before the seated section,

splaying into every space

with tattered fabric teasing through

the whirlwind of his disregard.

His face, hard stuck into a sneer,

and eyes that warred with all the world

kept menacing surrounding space

in beaten, battered, spasmic stares.

That seeing, sightless gaze grazed fast against

the sleek restraints in lacerating waves.

The sound of pounding urine hit my ears

before I saw him spraying there.

 

I left him there in phantom flights

with foes that only he could see,

a telltale gallop in my step.

I’ll never know the burning thoughts

that raged straight through the peaceful day,

absorbing all the tranquil thoughts I used to own.

But still my stomach swings like from a point,

as if to flee a captive force

that holds me there inside its pull.

I can’t begin to leave my steady mind,

denying every rustle from the pile of rags

he wore that day atop his ragged frame.

David Reuter has been published in The Cape Rock, Courtship of Winds, El Portal, Existere Journal, The Literatus, Neologism Poetry Journal, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Perceptions Magazine, Sandpiper, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, Visitant, and Vox Poetica. He has attended William Paterson University’s Writer’s Conference in 2018 and the Rutgers Writers’ Conferences.