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 th...

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 tha...

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), t...