L.R. Harvey Poetry

Inanimate Envy of unthinking things,  who know by lack of knowing that beneath the dirt is dirt and dirt and dark, who pit themselves against a cold existence with a quiet fold of wing or twitch of eye,                the ones who sleep at night unbothered by the promise                of confronting the abyss: A weed inclining to the light,               A coriander seed asleep inside a paper bag, the worker ant                who bites my pinky toe and asks me to consider pain like this                but times a thousand for eternity, and I decide I'd rather not               consider this, or anything, if that were an alternative, but since               it's not I think I'll go pray again.                                                              

Reconsidering a Definition “ What if the warm hope denied should be the truth after all?” — George Macdonald So maybe faith is something more  than chance though less than certainty,  a state-of-being categorically before   the cards are flipped but after the finality  of betting all the pot. It is the groom who stares at ribboned doors to wait, if be it doubtfully, on things unseen,  the fugitive enamored by a shuttered light as testifying to his need for reassurance                  that haven isn't an allusion of the mind. It is a hope most manifest in fickle ones like me—the ones who deal in 'shoulds' because the 'wills' have proven slippery, who testify to the unprovable exist- ence of a dormant organism, largely underfed but still inclining to the light.

A Prayer of Sorts   This poem won't redress it right, will not be adequate to pacify the putrid cyst about to rupture in my chest, and I am also sure our efforts of self-medication haven’t yet resolved the problem that my uncle Dennis still forgets my name and then my aunt’s   until reminded, and protests still are rendered necessary for the wel-  fare of my friends, and as of now I haven’t slept uninterrupted for what's near a month, and so I think I’ll go outside and feebly blink up at the dark until I get so sick I’m yelling something inarticulate.

A Slow Ascent Sometimes hope is said and well-                articulated, others just a tiger beetle groping up a dune like all depends                on getting there, though if or what is ‘there’ I doubt he knows, and if                 he does it’s hanging on a thin belief. It seems he’s settled in a rhythmic              perpetuity of sorts:  A couple inches   and a sliding back, a couple seconds                pawing at the firmament in evident despair, another try. The more I write                the further I am straying from the meat of this comparison, though, so maybe it               is  nothing but an iridescent beetle fixed on reaching something higher than                himself, regardless of the fickle ground.

Half Awake I’ve rocked my way to something like belief the way a mother gently rocks her child till its existential screams  are soothed, but recently it seems as though a pebble’s wedged itself beneath the rocker blades. In sifting through the ripples of inconstancy,  I've found and pocketed a very scanty number of the diamond type, but one I have uncovered is that people tend to be a little grumpy when you wake them up abruptly with a cover-yank, and here I find I’m no exception to the rule. I do not want, per say, to go on sleeping through the afternoon, but when the cold alternative is waking up to find to a shaky house that wants some serious repair, a simple afternoon  siesta seems a little less contemptuous.  The problem here is I'm exhausted for a sleep I love to criticize in those who sleep, a rest I need but also overuse— not baby or adult, I guess I am the toddler who resists his lids to crabbily soldier on.

A Birthday Wish *6/15/2020 I think I learned to think this year, if thinking were denoted as 'emerging understanding of an inability to go  on sleeping in certainty,' and as the globe went gimping for another turn around the room, I too approached the kind of sniffing canine intellect that circles but will not recline. It's something like  somnambulists discovering they're not awake, a virgin's realization of an itch that won’t be scratched a while yet, but strangely I am here to ask you not divide the frothy sea or even point a beeline through the desert if this is not the year. Instead, I'd ask at 26 you help  me learn to camp around the tabernacle  covered in the cloud, content to pitch my tent in holy ambiguity and maybe even rest a bit—just please don't let this little nap become, as it can often do, a full-on sleep.

An Elementary Epistle  The message was distorted when she got                the line, flimsy as the plastic yellow slide  or granular as rubber bits of shredded tire,                but man those purple shoes were nearly spiritual, the spouts her mother twisted                 from her head enough to make a camel thirst, and it was this that kept me periodically                 peeking over to see what she would say  on hearing my real, if whispered, profession.                 It's easy, recollecting back when you can   see the storyline as full as I can see the waters                 of the Tennessee from where I’m writing this      (it too remembering a past or sorts), to say                 that surely there were more efficient ways to speak of love, a less dependent method                than a recess game of telephone around  the monkey bars—and yes, I will agree                 the margin for misinterpretation was high,  but so it is with anything that’s worth        

Close to Home The house was raised without direct           architectural intent, seemingly erected                     overnight but well-constructed, "measured to the standard of the times," or so            the experts said. The only problem                      was the standard of the modern times was low, the experts self-proclaimed,        s o when the chaos roared one afternoon                    the over-bloated pimple he had called      a home was splattered round the yard            like existential mirror puss. Soaking wet                     and terrified he cowered as what once  had been his certainties came crumbling           down around his feet, till just some siding                     and the brick exterior were all remaining of his pre-existing order—‘so really what was left           but just to wipe my eyes and start to reinforce                      what proved itself,' he recollects it now, ‘to torch the rest and get to building once again?     

Sonnet from the Waiting Room At least the waiting room has magazines.                Though not the kind I’d label interesting,  they’re loud and bright enough take my mind                 away, if momentarily, from what’s inside, so I can’t complain. He calls me back and asks                about my symptoms, nodding as he clacks his practiced judgement on the keys, and says                  he’s treated this before and even has  the fix on hand. On promising return                 he leaves me stranded in the spinning room with walls of mottled green, and it was 90                minutes tops, in hindsight, but when the in is begging out , each minute seems a year,                 and every second asks, but are you sure?

Museless That bitch has ghosted me again,                  is likely frolicking about with some  fedoraed ignoramus who has suddenly  discovered how to say the shifting thing. Was it something I had said? Was it my inability to say what begged for saying after all these many years?  Look, I know I used to disappear at times and leave you wondering  exactly where I went, but when  I say I’m different now I mean it! Come back—I'll be here waiting for you, my ear pressed up against the door you slammed. I can just make out a mumbling of sorts,  but now it's garbled, inarticulate.

Paradox and Parable He's seeded them like pollen         in the Chattanooga valley during                  May—in other words, thick ,  if quite impossible to catch         and stash away. 'You die to live,'                 he says, and other axioms that give the logically inclined a mental          hemorrhoid, the theological                  a chance to understand by redefining what it means to understand,         the way you must relax a bit               to let what's in come trickling out.    In middle school the doctor         cranked my pinky-finger's                 middle joint to resurrect it whole, and man it hurt like hell,          demanding quite a bit of faith                 that what’s to come would make  the surgery worth it in the end—         it's in this inability to mend                 the broken things we find the posture  needed for a deeper sort         of mending. It’s quite amazing,                 really, their invitation for a pe

A TWITCHING PROOF If understanding were a feast, my personal experience would be a morning’s clinging aftertaste, a faint remembrance of something I once enjoyed but since puréed until the flavors lost identity. I still  believe in good and God and in a certain objectivity, the latent kind  that lingers like a coffee tongue to taint the taste of everything,  but now I find the evidence in that which naming 'evidence'     is quite a stretch, like Monday when the radio was testifying that a change is gonna come and I became the instrument of change to something underneath my wheel. I felt alive  and dead at once, but oddly positive  that someone other than myself was at that moment grieving for the loss. Again, I wouldn't deign to call it full-proof, but still, the twitching squirrel   with his little hands uplifted in  an aftertaste of praise was evidence.