GARY PRIEST - POEMS

Gary Priest writes short fiction and poetry. He has over thirty publications online and in print including Daily Science Fiction, The Eunoia Review and Literary Orphans. He lives in the UK at the end of a dead-end road, which may explain everything.

​This Morning’s Sun

​This morning’s sun reminds me of your old love letters.
Creased across the middle by thin black clouds.
Yellow, with an undertone of self doubt.
Wanting to explode,
yet intimidated by all that white space.
Unable to capture the warmth of earlier days.
 
This morning’s sun seems ignored by everyone but me.
Earbuds dislocating them from thoughts
of the failing star above their heads.
Safe in their soundtracks,
as I think of everything evaporating into dust,
adding tracks to my armageddon playlist.
 
This morning's sun casts barely any shadows.
Which forces me into painting my own.
Using green eyes, red lips and black hair
to create an undercoat.
While various eighties indie bands
deepen the hue of my manufactured gloom.
 
This morning’s sun will soon enough sink.
Its uncelebrated February light spent
across an uncaring hemisphere.
Quickly upstaged
by the starfucking antics of another slutty moon.
Throwing sloppy silver kisses at everything.
 

Three Castles
​

​I’m keeping castles at bay
with dreams of dirge in battleship grey.
No towering heroines
or chivalric skeletons.
No kings to cuckold or venerate.
No queens of dark guile and silk battlements,
to scale, defile and otherwise penetrate.
 
I’m keeping castles in check,
with defeat the divine form of attack.
No subtle strategy
or sly banditry.
Just a headlong surrender to the black.
No bishop, crooked pawn or graphic monarch
will keep me losing myself to this trap.
 
I’m keeping castles in ruins,
with time the executor of hopes undoing.
No kingdom won.
All damage done.
Old lost empires wailing and mewling.
Bricks and mortality reek of rusted heraldry.
Now decay is the only foe left 
​

Discarded Cherries
​

​Spitting out kisses
hard as peach pits.
Your tongue, definitive as a dictionary.
A cloven-hooved dragoon
whose regimented drool
has conquered my lips.
 
You pin me at the hip
with lepidopterist accuracy.
Pulling off clothes as if wings.
Your touch delicate and invasive.
Fingernails persuading skin
into bone.
 
My fledgling flesh
pressed against your
storied pink architecture.
My awkwardness tormented
into fluidity under your
amused tutelage.
 
You make me beg
for each inch of heel.
Your thirsty mutt,
spewing doggerel.
Delighting you with filthy
sweaty morsels 
of subjugated lust.
 
And when you are done,
I am left to my 
smiling defilement.
Lost in a listless bed.
Red and soft
as discarded cherries.
 

 

My Absented Self
​

​I cannot fathom
how missing someone
can be a good thing.
Remembrance
of a lover, however temporarily lost
always possesses a razor edge
and is as comfortless as a bed of black thorned roses;
as frantic as the ballet of the trapped moths;
as disturbed as the silences between an irregular heartbeat.
 
 
And yet you blithely inform
me this is the case,
and I must accept it.
I must swallow this new alphabet whole.
I must not choke on vowels,
or become overly distracted in my
digestion of large, foreign consonants.
You tell me it is the blissful absence of certain colours in autumn.
It is the enjoyable crackle of silence between songs on an LP.
It is glorious space after the final full stop of your favourite novel.
 
I am not convinced
that your response is suited
to the poetic algorithm
of my brain.
There, life is sorted
into categories of loss
and economies of pain.
There, every moon has a melancholy growl
and love is infused from the first with longing and woe.
Your suggestion,
that there is value in vacancy,
seems at best, heretical
at worst, revolutionary.
 
 
And yet here I am;
my logic half dismantled and redirected.
Not quite accepting the positives
of being missed,
and yet finding myself ridiculously happy in the knowledge
of the fact,
that in some unused closet of your heart,
in some unpainted hallway of your mind;
my absented self may have taken up residence.
 
 
 

Smoke and Mirror
​

​Naked, except
for the red glowing gown
of her cigarette.
She is trapped in a nebula
of carcinogenic narcissism.
The silver backed cell,
a trap for dark rimmed eyes,
brown as a forsaken Eden.
 
Taking inventory puffs.
Wreathing herself in smoke.
Her neck, unadorned,
thirsty white flesh.
Taut, imperfect.
but as yet free from the cruel
jewellery of passing time.
 
Her pink breasted magnificence.
Gravity as irrelevant as death
or affection.  Stomach flat
as a butterfly pinned to a board.
She adores her reflected glory.
All open legged abandon and fog.
 
And in this misty cloud of whispers,
she is seduced.
Long hours removed from her skin.
Lost in nicotine vanity.
An unsmiling tableau
of addiction.