The Secret
What hopeful insanity makes us leap
from our beds with promise in our smile,
thinking there’s a harvest we can reap
in a world that loves us without guile?
Tall tales we tell ourselves, and phantoms sought,
titillate and haunt us to our ruin.
But we resurrect them, still not taught
failure’s lessons showing our undoing.
Memory’s a blank slate, all forgotten –
what not got before we’re now expecting,
blinded to the kind of game we’re caught in,
bonded to new schemes, our dreams projecting.
What explains this phenomenon, so odd?
Life is faith and worshipped, is our God.
Hold Me
Let me lay my body down by yours,
silent till my shaking mind has joined me,
jonesing for the medicine that cures.
Melt with love the crime that has enjoined me.
Shatter memory’s mirror, rescue me
from the frozen tundra that I stand in,
snowblind in mind’s blizzard misery,
burning in the cold of my abandon.
When this surge suppressed breaks in a flood,
salty river running down your breast,
I’ll merge in the murmur of your blood,
beyond all good and bad, lost in love’s rest,
Silent at the pivot point and stilled,
emptied of all wanting, I’ll be filled.
Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in magazines including Amsterdam Quarterly, Mud Season Review, The Pettigru Review, Still: The Journal, The Coachella Review, and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, (Rabbit House Press, 2020), political poetry for a post-truth world. He resides in Lexington, Kentucky, and can be found at mikewilsonwriter.com
Grand Little Things 