New Poetry by Phillip A. Ellis

I Dream no More

My forebones crack while smiling, groan and grind
when my lips whisper, speak my heart's thin pain
(as cold and sly as rain that coats the pane)
and rattles, gnashes at night, against its rind
while I am falling far from my split mind,
a comet caught by the sun, its brilliant reign
hating the very thought of healthy rain;
despair, depression, deep ennui? Its kind.

I dream no more, lest dreams become as life:
I smile, my face collapses, falls apart,
releases the stench of weary, gnawing strife;
I dream no more, lest dreams fall stricken numb
like birds ensnared in lime, gravity's heart,
their tongues all torn apart and written dumb.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2013


Sonnet IV

Down in the chambers of an animal's heart
is the rhythm that powers the interplay
of Persian and sparrow,
the inexorable play of predator and prey
that echoes through the arms race of evolution;
when the cat stalks a bird I see it embodied,
in the play of muscles and hungering instinct
that also echoes through the songs of songbirds.

This is neither the time nor sestet
to mark that the process ends with all parties
running on the spot, as time turns the wheel
that sets the world in motion underneath,
like a treadmill or turntable powering the encounter
between fur and feather on the patio.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2013