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DUSTIN PICKERING - POEMS

7/15/2016

3 Comments

 
Picture
Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press, publisher of the award nominated Harbinger Asylum. He is a host for two readings in the south Houston area. He was a Special Guest Poet at Austin International Poetry Festival in 2013, and was published twice in their anthology di-verse-city that year. He also was a feature for Public Poetry that year. He is published in Lost Coast Review, Seltzer, Artistic Muse, Pyrokinection, Texas Poetry Calendar 2016, and others. His interview with bestselling author Kiriti Sengupta was published in The Statesmen, a popular national newspaper in India. He self-published The Daunting Ephemeral and The Future of Poetry is NOW: Bones Picking at Death's Howl. His latest work is called Salt and Sorrow published by Chitrangi in India. He lives alone and doesn't watch TV. He is an autodidact, songwriter, visual artist, and book reviewer for Yellow Chair Review.  


                          Purple Judas
 

The bride blushes
near dawn’s awakening.
She kisses her brush,
and chases the night into
a corner of her heart.
The dark bridge hides the mask
of purple Judas.
 
The eager will enter the havoc
of sunlight,
combed in bliss.
Her hair is in tangles
but the morning will sort them.
The mask is worn by her followers--
dense morning at the altar of forgiveness.
 
Abandoning the bridge,
nothing seems right to her eyes.
The kaleidoscope rises
but the Father is still asleep.
 
Now His curtain rises,
but His shadow is what is seen.
Where is the Father?
He is where He’s been.
 
The past we forsake
but our fortune comes late.
Past is Future in our hands.
We make of what we seem, to sand.
 
 
                                Pulse
 

At once I am certain--
the throbbing of life,
the pulse of existence,
is not only within me:
 
it is concealed beyond me.
Concealed like patterns, hidden,
the atoms of light
create a room of their own.
 
I am within the room itself,
the Presence is near
and a gift is eternal
only if it is shared.
 
 
                     To: a bullied youth
 

Although your heart is darkened
by steel assaults,
your happiness stays
the day’s golden glow.
 
Laughter in the halls
causes emotional duress,
but you can offer
another some happiness.
 
(Shelter your dreams,
keep them in a black box
where only darkness
will awaken them.)
 
Giggle like a babe in the morning.
Embarrass them with your smiles.
The world will still turn.
 
 
                           She Asked
 
​
A black woman
taught me how to read and write,
the greatest gift next to life.
I lived in a small Mississippi town
near Jackson, where robed men drowned
a black kid decades before.
I left my books at the table,
adoring her boundlessly,
a love only a patient mentor knows.
‘Spite old Jim Crow, though a threat no more,
Ms. Mary Ott read beside me.
 
She asked about me before she died.
 
3 Comments
Pranab Ghosh
7/15/2016 09:16:36 pm

I liked Purple Judas the most. She Asked is also very touching. Great work.

Reply
Dustin Pickering link
7/16/2016 05:04:37 pm

Purple Judas is a twofold metaphor-- I am comparing the sun to the lone woman in the poem, her blonde hair in tangles symbolizing the sun's rays. The mask is not a theatrical or pretend. It is more a grotesque image of the woman herself-- a subliminal or intense self. The combing of the hair encourages the thought of trying to sort things out and control forces outside you. The woman has set free the power that now controls her and she can do nothing to revert. The Father, of course, is God, who remains estranged in the past. I got this thought from Nietzsche whose madman ran through city streets declaring God as dead. This is my radical theology of human consciousness, personality, and relationship with the broad external world of the Absolute. The shadow imagery is also taken from Nietzsche and they symbolize "fuzzy logic"-- how there is an absolute truth and an absolute false, and degrees between, yet we cannot catch the Absolutes on the poles. The bridge is a threshold of truth, implying that the "mask" that is the grotesque representation of the human personality, is the truth itself. I chose the color purple because in my opinion as a color it is vivid and signifies shame, mistrust, fear, and the grotesque. Judas is an obvious archetype of the ultimate betrayal, the worst regret, and the last beck and call of eternity.

Reply
Pranab Ghosh
7/17/2016 10:24:40 am

Thought provoking indeed. The imagery is really touching.




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