WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

Hic sum; es ibi.

Si in medio occurremus,
demergam, quia

alas non habeo tui.

basic translation:

I am here; you are there.

If we meet in between,
I drown, because

I do not have your wings.

elaboration:

I am here; you are there.

If we touch in between,
I follow the fate of a
thousand seafaring wraiths:

I do not have your wings.

✩

Wanting to try two things out here – simplicity, and Latin. Which, it turns out, are not mutually exclusive.

Just for interest, the Latin for the more elaborate version looks something like this:

 
 
Hic sum; es ibi

si in medio tangèmus
fatum patiam idolorum
miliorum nautarum, quia

alas non habeo tui.
  
 
Much thanks to poet friend Francesco Vitellini for his help with the Latin.

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✩
Heavy edit and repost of awful poetry I wrote circa 2008. I hope it has some of the right vitamins in this time.

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Chimera (English Sonnet)

Like ancestors, she breathes the arid air
in climes of coarsest beauty, red the stone;
the blushing fractured earth is leafless-bare,
while he inhales dense greens and hills, alone.

Alarmingly exotic brown, her eyes
that look and want beyond their quandaries;
disarmingly erotic brown, her thighs
that restless, want beyond their boundaries.

Mouth drawing him, a siphoned fluid, hot
like some illicit truck petroleum,
he wonders if what she can taste is not
the hot, but water, seas of tedium.

That searing sphere he feels too near again,
her wicked sun. Chimera she’ll remain.

Chimera (free verse)

Like her ancestors
breathing arid desert air
climes of coarse beauty -
red rockpiles,
blushing, fractured earth -
as naturally as he inhales greens
and sad, time-weary stone
of rural England

Alarmingly erotic, disarmingly
exotic brown eyes
keep watching, watching
beyond vanishing point
beyond self-manifest horizons

Drawing him, siphoned fluid -
hot on her tongue
like illicit petroleum.
Breathe fire!
Or water to the taste?

Thousands of miles of it between,
enough to drown her wicked dustbowl sun;
still he heats like that searing sphere

when they meet, but
chimera she will remain.

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To drink her bathwater;
kneel at the altar of her temples.

To feel the mouth inside my mouth water -
the one that susurrates only
in patois of Love and Truth.

Won’t write of roses, or
the ground she walks on; such
platitudes would be an insult -
even if careening, visceral selves
know of that ecstatic tumult.

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Among the rocks and tides, I see
a reddish, soft anemone,
with tendrils longing, fluidly -
how limpid can your rockpools be?
I want it all.

With casual tenacity,
despite my dour misanthropy,
coerced to notice, favour me,
impassioned deep within your sea;
I won it all.

The tide to ride, salt on my tongue,
the fresh sealife moves in among
marine-lodged flora, lithe and young;
no chance now that you’ll go unsung -
I roam the coast.

Submerging without aqualung,
lip-licking dive with nothing on.
Detain a captive: me, just one,
to swim and surge until it’s done;
we own the coast.

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Thinking
need to get a life.
Missing
someone else’s wife.
Kissing
sweetly in my dreams
kissing
through the thinning seams
of her
flimsy summer dress

To caress and be caressed
to covet and be coveted
by this
unwitting enchanting
non-adulteress.

“Show me what you
looked like at my age”, I say
“Boring”, she says. Okay.

Then look into my eyes,
say some words, don’t care which.
Give me your now:
wish, wish for those things.

The phone rings. It’s time to go.

I know it, before she says it
she lets me kiss her face,
that face
and touch her black,
Oriental-black hair.

“See you later”, she says.
I’m there.

To caress and be caressed
to covet and be coveted
by this
unknowing enchanting
non-adulteress.

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.

‘Blue Dress’ -
can that be your epithet?
I’ll put it with your name.

It’s pushed ‘Pink Top’
out of my mind,
but I was careful to catch it

before it broke on the tiles.
While away some hours
indulging in your get-up,

get down. Brown thighs;
French knickers. There’s another.
What can I peel away from

petite and lissome (stopping
to smell for the unhinging
bouquet of your body), to further

festoon a fool’s brain with?

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☆

Her buoyancy fools actuality
and mocks the stupid smartphone in my hand.
It sits nonplussed, not cut her mustard, and
she’s been released, and unpoliced by me.

Well, fuck the wallow. Hard to swallow, though.
In breath, I’m jittery; I’m made to jump.
The Ovaltine’s become a silly lump.
I saw kaleidoscopic crystal snow,

it melting, muddying, revoltingly.
She left me hanging as she straight hung up;
a pity I have such a damn hang-up.
She artfully took in, withdrew, from me.

A lover’s touch across the flaming wire
she touched me once, just once, and I was fire.

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Entwine they did, enthrallingly,
two artists penning poetry.
Replete with rhythm thrumming, rhyme,
handwritten figures moved in time;
abscond diurnal ordin’ry.

Their verse was wrought so eagerly,
lithe forms, of trope, those aurally,
awoke her from an act in mime;
entwine they did.

A union urged, compellingly,
yet tender, and so palpably,
sublime the peaking mountain-climb.
Collaboration, fluid line,
denouement reached, euphorically;
entwine they did.

☆

Rondeau – one of the several forms springing from what were peasants’ verse set to music with anything from 8 to 21 lines in pre-Medieval France; all then subsumed under the name ‘rondeau’, but later given separate monikers. This is the one still referred to as the rondeau; its four other relatives are the rondel, the rondelet/roundelay, a shortened version of the rondel, triolet (also a short version of the rondel – see my previous post Slipped from Sixers for examples of both the triolet and rondel), and the roundel, devised by Swinburne when the rondeau came to England. Just to confuse you, there is also the rondeau redoublé, which is a 24/25-line version of a rondeau with an outrageous refrain-scheme.

Technical specifics of the rondeau: 15 lines, two end-rhymes, eight syllables per line (no specific metrical foot, though I used iambic tetrameter here to ensure a smooth flow). First half of first line (ie. first four syllables) used as the refrain, repeated at the end of stanzas two and three. Viz. -

a-a-b-b-a
a-a-b + refrain: c
a-a-b-b-a + refrain: c

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Miss her harvest orchard
like those fruits, in turn,
miss the umbilical aegis of bough and leaf

Woman and girl

intimacy
was like poetry
of Dylan Thomas
and Rumi
elided seamlessly,
incanted in halfhushed half-light

Does she miss the crazed sex
of fresh-sweat skin?

The way we made some sense
of the absurd jigsaw
even if the pieces
had to be stamped flat to fit?

Does she miss a little piece,
that little bit,
wry and wretched
in its dry, fossilled swallows -

if only
a momentary wondering
at the skew jigsaw fit?

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