L.R. Harvey Poetry

Dressing for the Day And digging, I,  to find the cinching mechanism, sift through cotton ideologies of yesterdays grown crinkled with neglect, the ones that stick  their folded collars out to ask for, please , just one more chance.  The way the past can pile, climbing towards the basket lip, a pair of Costco khaki pants I yesterday had thought solution to my nakedness—that was, until  a splash of workroom decaf taught ( or more reminded ) that all  grows odorous with time.  So it is with a growing sense of doubt that I go digging now, a shirtless Stevens' Man  on the Dump , expecting in my towel, not  today or any day,  to don the Tailor-made solution, but  hopeful nonetheless to find, if way down deep, the leather belt I need to hold me up for now.  

Impending Death Depicted as a Sieve          Ash Wednesday, February 2020 And with the silver sieve of end-stopped lines and closing chapters, the wise ones sink their hands,  though shaky, deep beneath the current, filtering for value in the river’s spitting whorls. Beyond the frothing rapids of the years a Further Shore, and wiser still are those who know not to attempt to bribe the ferryman for passage, who yearn  repining with their pockets full of pebble gems they know, though good , will never buy their ticket, seal their habitation where the dryads dance.  Content instead to wait their summons, they stand in spray of river water by the dock, the ferry lost (or veiled , they hope) in fog, while others sit on mossy rocks reclining, sucking on the riverweed, eager to mock  the hopeful ones with tickets ashed upon their heads. 

A Pilgrim's Confession Wrong turns and double-backs abound, but every time, my Guide, you lead me blind and faltering, through fear, if not directly to the chosen path, near.  So if the vilest danger lurking in  this pilgrim's navigation of the dividends is not the straying from a destination pre- ordained, might it not therefore be the slow intrusion of a comfort in  this seeming inability to find?— the subtle but parasitic draining of  all expectation that there’s such  a thing as far-off holy lands to merit pilgrimage at all?

Death by Triteness This house of representatives,  suspended in the filmy thick of everyday mid-morning, holds white-knuckled to its stagnancy. Grown putrid with routine, a white clay discuss masquerading as a plate— a sprouting thrust of metal-work, that given time  and space for repetition, has come to represent a breakfast fork—  and standing like the minute-hand beside an aromatic cylinder  of steaming clay, one has to ask:  ‘Is this the world as it is or as we’ve named and parceled it?’ A pressing question, surely, but one  quite difficult in answering with certainty, as it is blood and dust that masquerades as man that plays the role of world-definer.

7 Grades of Desire The slow digress—your adolescent eyes from twenty algebra equations yesterday put off—as strolling down the hall a polar force of magnetism, navy leggings, pulls them helpless from the (X+7). How I’d like to help you solve this prepubescent problem that perplexes you. Let's break it down and say that X, in mathematic's purest objectivity ,  (and maybe this is all a hunch,  but isn’t that the surest form of truth?)  is equal to the clack and click of pebbles we collect to try and plug the leaky dam, the subtle drip we down-deep know. And closer to the source of things are you than all the leathered, coarse practitioners of parceling the this from that, psychologists content to say that you are but another sexual awakening. "And what," they claim , " the horny adolescent feels, and that which flips the seeker through his manuscripts or heaven’s thick expanse, must be understood as flowers from a di...

Stability          The game ends when the tower falls. - Jenga rulebook Discontent with in-betweens,  perhaps it is a subconscious need  for empathy that slides him out of bed at 6:15, slides his feet across the tile floor to pull a chair beneath the lunette window. Taut air  and fickle light sit blue and discontent for twenty passing minutes,  stuck languishing between the dark and day, but strangely he is reassured. This happened yesterday, he tells himself, tomorrow it will be the same, and faith in time's unshakable resiliency, a shaky faith, but nonetheless the stuff he's building with, slides one more Jenga sliver in  the quaking tower of halves and in- betweens he now inhabits, half- believing somehow it will stand, half- expecting otherwise, praying it will hold just long enough for him to grope the long way upwards, puzzle out the footing for the scramble...

Book of Life Like most in-print anthologies,  expect this one to be  chock-full of unknown names,  beneath each one a too-thin line of qualifications, and, like others, self-published by the editor.