The Night Was Young

I wanted to write a poem but I decided to take a break from the "postmodernist" poems that I usually write (I'll post examples later).  Instead I opted to use saturated imagery and metaphors with conventional references.  I also tried my best to make this poem as rhythmic as possible although inevitably I still included discreet elements and discontinuity.

I also wanted to experiment with combining visuals with the verses.  And so I included photographs I took during yesterday's night out with friends.


The Night Was Young

The night was young as the brush strokes in your
Breath, always magnified like a big bang.
The night in her throat held the soul of an aeroplane,
Impalpable like viscous dreams changing skin.

Eyes of vitriol, moist bruises of lost youth,
Taste the pulsing stasis in my fingertips.
You were born with the name of bursting
Clouds, across footprints diverging into flames.

Your fever was the prodigal luster of cold
Ambrosia, a solitary feather’s silhouette against
The white pain of oral histories, poisonous
Nostalgia implodes like prophetic mist.

Beneath the elastomer, the death wish and the
Doubts of tortured electric void,
A labyrinth walks on a tightrope,
Questions the black branch of double vision.

A wagon of fate or faith, a jar of
Four-dimensional blurs of brothers and sons,
Of arsenic, of promises fired by a
Canon into a polaroid of your sixth sunset.

There’s an innocence that punctures your
Shoulders, where intuition sublimates towards
An orchard of transience, frames within frames of
Split euphoria from refracted truths.

The night was young, as it still is.
My carriage never left your back pockets.
If today an eyelash falls into a
Mirage, I’ll drink my somnambulist fears.





Poets do not finish their poems, they abandon them. – Paul Valéry