RAPOETICS REPRINT: Time Out of Joint by Steve De France

 

Time Out of Joint

Now without warning winds change direction
as birds lose the ability to fly in the following vacuum.
You see, there is no consequential providence
in the fall of any sparrow

or is there any pleasure left in day or night.

Things seem wrong.

Time out of joint! But there is no
Hamlet here to set the universe right!
He was—-after all—only a fiction
with a penchant for being a day late

and a dollar short.

Who here can say
the dreams that come after death
are any more oppressive
than this morning’s dream of
a broken stove, a flat tire,
or a thickness of the blood
or the knowing—that death is already here.
Who can say this thing we call reality

is not but one of death’s dreams?

Are we not already dead?
Alive or dead?

What traveler has returned to say it isn’t so?

Ophelia was too weak for love
deprived love—or any kind of love

A wild ache for love where there was no love.

Our readiness to bear time’s decay,
to watch in disgust
as we come apart a piece at a time
a crumbling tooth here,
an arthritic bone there,
a cancer on a frightened face,
a tightness in the chest,
a mind shattered like shards of glass.
It must be a dream
And we put up with this dream
Because what if what follows
our dream is worse? So we put
up with all kinds of bizarre shit

because we are afraid.

You see, there is no consequential providence
in the fall of any sparrow
or is there any pleasure left in day or night.

 

Steve De France is a widely published poet, playwright and essayist both in America and in Great Britain. His work has appeared in literary publications in America, England, Canada, France, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, India, Australia, and New Zealand. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry in both 2002, 2003 & 2006. Recently, his work has appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Mid-American Poetry Review, Ambit, Atlantic, Clean Sheets, Poetry Bay, The Yellow Medicine Review and The Sun. In England he won a Reader’s Award in Orbis Magazine for his poem “Hawks.” In the United States he won the Josh Samuels’ Annual Poetry Competition (2003) for his poem: “The Man Who Loved Mermaids.” His play THE KILLER had it’s world premier at the GARAGE THEATER in Long Beach, California (Sept-October 2006). He has received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Chapman University for his writing. Most recently his poem “Gregor’s Wings” has been nominated for The Best of The Net by Poetic Diversity.

Copyright © 2015 by Steve De France

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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