Three poems, by Derek O'Rourke

Apocalypse No

My shadow offends
those who judge
that Jerusalem is love
for every mistake
they contend
needs to be forgiven

and so this projection
travels on
through fog and cure (light)
shadows dispersed
as though by an enchantment
to live as reflections
in abandoned cities

impassable chasm

He encapsulated the
crepuscular imagination
between what he saw as his illumination
and their darkness.

He called this an impassable chasm.

For they were fed
in my imagined words
the food of dogs
(you would have to hear his pronunciation, crackles,)
and i believe he was sincere
in the putridness
of his mortifying destiny,
which, to conceal his shape-shifting,
was to become another murderer's shadow.

The Present

Begun in the middle
of a river,
and finding a foothold,
in a familiar footprint,
I pulled the transparent line down,
hooked the omega
before the abyss
preparing the moment to cast
onto the swiping, dark-blinking surface
of teeming life.

Water being the only way
to make sense
of the present.

It's chorus
of plops and gurgles
I can hear clearly
if my own silence
flows.

The breathing is all.

Back and forward, with a flick
of the watchless wrist,
in the timing,
I let go.

- Derek O'Rourke