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By S.T. Brant
The Conscript
Thoughts in the blanks of the Collected Larkin
Darkness lunges into day to distort and plague
the meaning of a gesture-
Step outside and get eaten into the darkness
of the universe.
Everything is loud, alerting, brilliant, and freezing to my heart:
a captain in a cage. Strung to his stalks,
in his cell his dreams pick his bones
and brew them into nightmares.
Without love things decrease.
I pray.
The heart submits:
Nothing remembered in the wrathful dark
Desolation of the streetlights
Leaving off their purpose to the hour.
I pray.
A Revival Song
The dead stampede the shore, turnabout, lament
And hurl the fleetings of their spirit
That they still claim and set them free.
“No more memories!” they cry- yet…
By the rhythm in a wild midnight
Everything that distresses leads within.
Desire distresses in many forms:
Straight, crooked, burnt, slouched, flaccid, doomed-
Straight has a carnal power most removed
From mental strictures. People held in veils by love,
The pure… do they have the nightmares
Of the crooked?
They jar themselves
From their darkness.
“Jesus did not forget my name.” Each season
Is a Winter, but not all shiver.
Salvation cannot be rushed or be undone
Or understood or counted on.
A Life of Severe Greatness
Greatness unprecedented: former possibilities mute.
The universe is delicate:
The sun comes in excess to excessive creatures.
Wipe the sun, the goodness.
Music sings a warning tale: Change
Is in the atmosphere.
It’s impossible to know
Your lover: loves inspected at a distance.
Distrust is a gateway to the grave
Where the betrayed will be revived
By the betrayed.
Will you greet your doom off stage, end of scene?
Do we have a choice to not acknowledge?
Turning
The Homeric rule, the lesson: the Iliadic over the Odyssean.
Cunning can save but one man that wrath has put to sea,
Wrath, having ruined all upon the shore previously.
Orpheus played one note. Every string, one note: why change
Perfect
On a lyre made from a palm in Eden.
All is recollection, Plato says, stole from Orpheus: all returns
From whence it came, no matter its fragmenting on the journey.
If all is as united, or will be, as it began, life is all assembly,
Returning all to all, remembering, remembering, remembering.
Living, a nostalgia of ancient days.
Out of the Dolor Springs the Nascent
Find your freedom in the greyness
legioning life; nowhere’s silver
but the Dionyistic instants
conscience fractures
respitefully to soul.
Life split in to tint
the dreams that fancy light,
the dark-gold Apollo
meeting Hades, riding him
from earth, the new tyrant,
Time’s new Captain.
About the Author:
S. T. Brant is a Las Vegas high school teacher. His debut collection Melody in Exile will be out in 2022.
His work has appeared in numerous journals including Honest Ulsterman, EcoTheo, Timber, and Rain Taxi.
You can reach him on his website at ShaneBrant.com, Twitter: @terriblebinth, or Instagram: @shanelemagne.
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