USA

Childhood Requiem


Maybe if I had read poems as a child,
Or had had my hair brushed soft and mild,
I could have escaped the heart of silence,
the silence of light,
the man of war plundering through thick broken night.
Or maybe if had I had had perfectly kept cries
to greet me dearly,beneath tear swept eyes,
maybe then we could have exchanged a few more words,
between the drawing of cards and swords.
Now is a new life,
and I stumble through it.
But I am not a man,
only an awkward boy who dreamed of better days that
never came.
Until all the hopes of my life passed me by and I
could no longer distinguish the different from the
same.
Going where other men fear to tread,
this is what you said,
distinguished the living from the dead.
But the fact still remains,
irrepressible and true,
that now that I'm older, and the dream ever more
distant,
the summers remind me of what I could have been,
to you.
And then suddenly the child of the secret returns to
me at night,
with open arms that fill the eyes with the silent
terror of sight.
The bottoms of children's feet could have never
imagined the sadness of so much sorrow,
before the time when we were lost and life held the
gentle promises of tomorrow.
Tucked away into the corners of a wandering Jews
archive,
I know there is a secret place inside where my name is
still alive.

Forgotten but not forsaken

As we speak, there are memories of my childhood which
are hiding themselves among the smell of all things
green.

Well beneath and tucked into the plush doom of summer
evenings,
the haunted echoes of adolescent dreams trace me
as I comb through the city streets looking to recover
the Psalm in my heart in the subtle gestures of
strangers I will never know.

Like eyelids closing before sleep,
the night descends upon me,
and I can feel that there is a tide which is slowly
turning in the night which will make the bones in my
heart struggle not to forget you.

If I were to ever become lost in the shadows of starry
night,
or suddenly discovered amongst the forgotten ruins of
broken hearted men searching to be found in the arms
of a new mother,
know,
that although I myself am living dead to the world,
and to our misfortune,
we have become like strangers to one another,
that I secretly wondered whether or not your heart
burned as wildly for salvation as mine did.

So when the novelty of dreams wears off into the
distant horizon of all that is forsaken but not
forgotten,
and it has been more than some time since the memory
of my name has been recalled by the silent voices
which seem to know the places in your heart where your
dreams have been kept alive,
know that the arms which have struggled so hard to
enclose you, have always remained, reaching.


 

Siberian Nights

Run child run,
the devils silently await you,
in the form of trusted voices,
between hammers and doors and bruises and chores,
you will be left with the unbearable sounds of echoes,
which they ensured would imperceptibly follow you
through the bruised coridoors of time,
descending and fading and reaching like an aching
dream which only eyes reveal.
A soft fury of resignation buried since 1976,
a centennial of blood soaked firecrackers in the
mischievous hands of a child who dared to ask:
Where was my fourth of July?

Where whispers blew like dandelions shredding from
effortless breath,
a single pubescent blow
unleashed the Indian summer which was my adolescence,
leaving me suspended in a world of restless dreaming,
where I wished only to wake to follow a smile,
to tell the world that I once existed,
that I was small and brilliant
with pushed around freckled eyes which stared
painfully into the heart of a world filled with
endless Siberian nights.

I have seen the starless night which lives in the
heart of man, and it has changed me.
Left to roam the night as a child of the secret,
where no music which can conquer the madness,
no wars which can be won,
can change the fact that there is more fear than love
in the hearts of men.

So then in silent corners I ask:
Will I trace the lines in my face which form the
pattern that reflects the shape of my life?
So that you know that you are not alone in this world
little child.

There are those who believe that in innocence all
dreams are possible.
That there are things in this world which need little
justification.
Flowers-rainbows-puppies-and-swings-ice-cream-dreams-marsh-mellows
and a nap amongst other things.

And while in youth the future dominates the mind
In convalescence, the past dominates whatever mind
life has not yet feasted upon.
Yet, who could possibly lull the day from its hypnotic
sleep,when futility is the cousin of sleep,
inevitably deflating the marching vigor of youth?

Deliver to me the swelling ghost of
the person I could have been,
which vanished from the dream
like an echoed silence which follows me after the
embarrased bliss of an unitended scream.

I have seen souls consumed by the thicket of an
unforgiving wilderness which dares you to ask the
question:
What greatness could possibly live in the hearts of
men underneath these blistering siberian skies?
Where children imperceptibly claw their way to
becoming monsters.
While those who look up to the sky,strangely and
confused, ask and dream about unimaginable heavens.
Never realizing that it is the Gods that have
something to learn about man underneath the menacing
beauty of such siberian skies.

We Were Once Related

I knew you once,
at a time in our lives when the moral eclipse of
manhood had not yet passed through the sunset of our
hearts.

Dark continent of discovery,
there are sorrows in the eyes of men which no muted
decibel of silence can deafen.

I am waiting for the hands of time to reverse the
aging flesh of convelescence and the madness and
beauty of adolescence to restore the healing dreams of
love back to my heart?

Will I be lead me into the intersection of will and
possibility"?
A place where conspiracy no longer passes for
intimacy?
Greeted as the boy who's soul knew how to beg?
I am the lost child who's call went unheeded in the
night.
Yet I am here,
and through some blind alleyway of chance have managed
to escape the haunted dominions of the mind.

Years later and today,
I live closely with those eyes of sorrow which no
muted decibel of silence can deafen.
Why you never heeded my call
I will never know.
Yet, I gave you my infancy.
And you refused to read the inscriptions of solitude
written into the pages of this lonely heart?

So, I remain the boy who waffles through the midnight
streets,
walking,
the boy who's swollen heart beats,
waiting,
wondering if the dreams I once had still live
somewhere inside of me,
or if those that I once knew and loved still think of
me.
I still think of you,
and wonder about how we were once related.

But now we are torn,
distant and gone,
yet I sometimes wonder if we are secretly tied to a
dance driven by silence that only we can understand.
But I'm not sure.
And I think of how we where bound to innocence once.
But we have long since been gone.
How did we mysteriously vanish
and who is it that still looks for us?

Dream kite who's soul lives
in a starless sky,
memories of your feverish adolescent possibilities
continue to attract
still thoughts in the night,
to leave me sometimes a beautiful loser,
forever a dark horse dreamer,
driven by that faint scent
of a promise in the air
which leads me by a road I have never known.
Forever chasing that string
which binds us back
to a place and time
where we were once related?
Bound by ties that carry me
away to you.
 

© All Copyright, David Shuster.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.