HEATH BROUGHER - POEMS

Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Five 2 One Magazine. He has published two chapbooks, "A Curmudgeon Is Born" (Yellow Chair Press) and "Digging for Fire" (Stay Weird and Keep Publishing Co.). He is a Best of the Net Nominee and was the judge of Into the Void's 2016 Poetry Competition. His work has appeared in both print and online journals in 12 countries and has also been translated into Albanian. 

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                                     Coldly Burnt Away
 
​
The Autumnal onslaught
makes the
leaves
on the trees recede
in color
 
counting backwards from green
 
soon enough the leaves
turn the shade of burning things
 
brightly arranged embers making
it looks as if the trees themselves were ablaze
 
as the eyes scan across the valley
the sight is similar to a smokeless wildfire.
 
 
 
 
                                           I Found God
 

I found God huddled
half dead in a garbage can
in the alley of the city
on a rainy night. I tried to fix
It, nurture It back to health
but It seemed to not want any
of my help and instead preferred
to simply slump there in It’s
current state of carelessness.
 
What can you do when someone
won’t help themselves?
 
Even when it’s the being  
supposed to be helping others?
 
 
 
  
                                                 Live

(written for my uncle while he was in an induced coma and hooked up to a breathing machine with blood poisoning and a collapsed lung)
 
You’ve been thrown the stairs
to the deepest depths of this pantheistic place.
You are alone yet not alone.
We are all here for you but
there is only so much help we can offer.
The rest is up to you;
to climb back up those painful steps
that you were so impersonally tossed down
and make it back to us.
 
It will be a tedious process
but you know better than anyone
that you are more than capable of it.
I know you have already begun
that slow and pang-ridden crawl,
one step every three days. No matter what
you must continue this climb,
step after excruciating step.
 
And when you finally do reach the top
of those evil stairs and wake up,
don’t say a word.
Just breathe for a while.
 
Just breathe.      
 
 
 
                            When the Blaze Begins
 


There are occasions when
that ever-burning flicker
of a flame is suddenly swept up
by gale-force inspiration and grows
into giant whorls of blazing creativity
as the mind sheds its inner turbulence
and spills it out onto the canvass of the page. 
During these moments that little flicker
suddenly spreads into a scorching
wildfire of thoughts, its flames lashing out
like fiery orange fangs biting upward at the sky.
 
 
 
                                  The Sound of the Sun
 
“Listen.”
 
“To what?
 
“To the silence,
or what we believe
to be silence
which may actually be
the grinding lapping licking
sound of the sun
which all creatures have evolved
to block out
and hear what we perceive to be silence.”