New Poetry by Phillip A. Ellis

For Derrick Hussey

In memoriam: H. P. Lovecraft

Though time, like ice, is slow,
the moments pass, accumulate
with the weightiness of glaciers
between now and the now that saw
Howard, plunging into deadly
breathlessness, pouring the will
to fight to fightlessness, and the final
rattle of lungs, and thence silence.

And, as (I imagine) his hand
faltered, dropped the pen a span
of space, onto the bedspread,
his beloved aunt surviving
him a second's worth then more,
tears falling along her cheeks
in mournfulness, I expect there may
have been a tuneful bird that day.

I can imagine the single, solitary song
honing in through a semi-open
window, with the white, washed curtains
breathing inwards. And the song
itself is catching in the throat
of Howard's closed ears, and some spark
of life is thinking, even as it fades,
"How beautiful is life!"

How truly beautiful is life,
when there could have been a man
as moving to us as him preceding,
and living still in our memories
and our actions even now? I don't
know if there was that bird,
but I can imagine it this easily,
and it is with this that I am comforted.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2008


Tori Amos in the Morning

Listening, Tori Amos in the morning and YouTube
underneath the palimpsest of a poem,
and, like a shadow of cigarette smoke, the globe
made of tin, of the moon, lost now to time,

a free verse poem, but with slant rhyme, a growling
stomach that complains almost, all against the song
the way that a cat rubs up against the shins
and ankles, or the winter sunset wanly shines.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2009


Phillip A. Ellis is an external student studying English Honours at the University of New England. One collection of his poetry has been published by Gothic Press, and another will be published by Hippocampus Press; his concordance to the poetry of Donald Wandrei has also been published by Hippocampus Press. He is the editor of AustralianReader.com (http://australianreader.com/index.php), and Similax (http://similax-poetry.blogspot.com/). Click on the post heading for Phillip's web page.