Poetry: Selections from Krystle Eilen

Mapplethorpe

after Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait, 1980

 

half youthful, half emaciated,

 

he reflects the epicene

and the languishing.

 

his head is all shock and flurry;

his mouth a toothless brevity.

 

half Madonna, half Antinous,

 

he reflects a decadent flower

both wilting and transcendent.

 

his eyes suggest a having seen,

two eternally startled interims.

 

a princely pauper

whose aspect reflects that of

a parched orchid culled

too soon.

 

published in Hive Avenue Literary Journal

Lethe

 

i am a winged thing flailing,

driven into my bovine body, and

back into my savage infant soul.

 

in the beginning, nature

conceived another deadweight,

and i find myself stillborn.

 

i am forever waiting to

open my welkin eyes

and outwit the brute.

 

i want the earth wrested from me;

i want no longer to acquiesce to

the stranglehold of gravity.

 

i am forever looking forward to

eclipsing the round

seared by fantasy.

 

published in Hive Avenue Literary Journal

Eavesdropping

the rooster call of the early

morning: as though in greeting of

a pestilence foreseen by

way of the half-glow.

a dog barks in response to

this intrusion while the roosters

sound out histrionics reminiscent of

Father Time’s marriage to terror.

here i mistake a bird’s song for

a swimming butterfly: a kind of

synesthesia whereby a stillborn sigh

reveals itself before the inner eye.

Nature, unleashing her canonical tide,

bruises the air with blind stirring

and makes way for her cruel

and saintly design.

published in Dipity Literary Magazine

 

 

Numen (a journal fragment)

 

“Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.”

—Plotinus

 

I luxuriate in the silence;

the Divinity is with me.

 

I know enough not to look

elsewhere.

 

I must be drunk with drought

until the sun

 

cuts like an icicle.

via crucis

 

                   i.

to behold paradise

god must be heaved up,—

for to become seraph

is to gouge the eye out.

 

                   ii.

always at one remove

is to be found divinity,

otherwise effaced

by twin identity.

 

                   iii.

riven apart

by mimetic sparagmos,

man is condemned

to die on the cross.

 

                   iv.

to shed the serpent’s skin

is but to reiterate its meander,

for conquest precedes

the bind of surrender.

 

published in Poetry Life and Times

______ as a weapon

 

i only count up

to ceasefire, patiently waiting,

but why wait

when the hand cremates

into a shadow

like an entombed particle of dust

retreating heavenward

at the memory of

thunder.

Reminiscence

 

How I would like to

keep the hearth of antiquated

aflame,

calm then impassioned

— either with spirit stirred

or apprehension,

never ashen.

 

My wick fosters

a cloud far-reaching.

As for me, I am restless

— either in glee or in fear,

I am restless.

nausea

 

is life really just one big distraction?

one big clock in, clock out?

is hell’s furnace really just the sun,

and is my face really just a scorched

mantle?

am i here just hopelessly divining?

rhapsodizing?

in soliloquy

mute to God’s ear?

brouhaha

 

i dance an impish dance

in the drawing room,

timeless

and with bones poised to my breath’s rhythm;

occasion for a bohemian,

like chanting in a seance by virtue of the strength in my step,

by which the creak of the floorboards opens to a womb of webs

and my frazzled puffs of smoke

becloud the chamber lid of wine

against my impassioned intonation.

eternal intermission

 

my days linger

slowly

yet sees what a mayfly sees

in winter solstice —

far from somber;

in exhilaration, neither;

i wait out the hours

in their serene circumnavigation.

they, unbothered

while i, listless,

meander along

the crossroads of

evasion and

submission.

still waters

 

oh to seize the gray,

bear down when missile hits;

i am no capsizing ship.

 

somber in hue,

caution thrown to the wind, but

i won’t give in to the trade.

 

the way up north may well be nigh,

but i am as yet too wary,

too cautious to be known.

Krystle Eilen is a 22-year-old poet who is currently attending university. Her works have been featured in Dipity Literary Magazine, BlazeVOX, and Hive Avenue Literary Journal, and are soon to be published in The Orchards Poetry Journal and Young Ravens Literary Review. During her spare time, she enjoys reading and making art.