daniel s. boroughs | four poems

Collegiate Seminar

Hovering in the naked river
I am clothed and face down
The dangling rays of the heated bulb above
Soak up icy water speckled on my back
I will turn over in moments
Not so hurried to breathe
The bottom is illuminated
I’ve read the books of my time
And their bleakness does not suffice
No wind chills my hairs
The season is a devastating heartbeat
In a vat of comfort, blood to be exact

The confidence left to round out my veins
And talk a modern dance
……….< babble and nicety, curtsy and cleverness >
hops down to a gurgle

I’m sure she looks to him as more than a token
I feel the bottom
The soil all coins through my fingers
It was a place to float not reach
And I was doing exactly how water speaks
In silent tones as it sifts ground

Shepherd

Each shepherd eye moves in different directions
To keep a line of sight on the flock
Which spreads unevenly across the land
His feet are unsettled for the first time in years
He can’t seem to get comfortable
The standing for hours on end
The dew seeping in his sandals and wetting his soles
For the first time he feels out of place
Out of alignment with the rest of his mind
Which is now stirring on fortune,
A completeness found in the landscape
To have provided the world with wisdom all these years
And to have it split
Each in the direction of their choosing
But non inextricably linked with his footing
A thankless task though selfless
And to tow that line can burn his hands to rawness
Where he must let it go, let it go, let it go
No more dragging bodies, dead or alive
No more because the saints have strayed from this earth

Walk Out

And you’ve cottoned on
In your windowless room
And the parrots peck at your eyes
Set on paradise
Because they drew you a picture
That seemed not too far away
A photo-op moment
That really dwindles over time
When you stick to keepin’ on
Because the sails of the sea
Scrape the insides of your stomach
And you can’t remember how to float
It was the first thing you learned after touching water
Instead the disgusted from the outside looking in
Cheer for a re-awakening of her spirit
Now entrenched and embittered

So the eyes and the insides are sore
You are beating heavy from within
Against the confinement
Paradise stretches on even further
Into the chores
Until you drop your broom and walk out

The god clearing

In the god clearing,
The smoke fog paints faces with a shady light
That remarks to aging features
The essence of why we age in the first place.
The drool of sink water clams up the palms
From an open-faced look on life
To an honest rub, fingers inward and scraping
For the feel of such a massage
Revitalizes a personal faith in god’s clearing

Exhausted by the heat
The fiery temples slowly settling on the sides
Of sleepless drained eyes
Give grace in ounces to the god clearing
Which is similar to a faceless land mass, trepid in its existence
Yet solid, mature, and there
Atop it risk, no bliss and vice
This giving is unrepentant and like a lung
Unrefined in its breathing
Heaves until heart pops
While the god clearing keeps the silhouette of the man in me
Trucking upward until body breaks

Daniel S. Boroughs about Daniel S. Boroughs

Birth Date: June 5, 1984. Birthplace: Manhattan, NY. Residence: New London, CT. Little Known Fact Now Made Public: One lung, One love.

I usually dig music and peruse cyberspace constantly in search for the root of sound. I am interested in many sounds that are able to pass through us on a daily basis in a rhythmical, compositional, and textural sense. Under the blurry confines we call music, I search and search to keep the high alive within me.

I keep my left hand busy with the pen and struggle to express all I need to within time’s constraints. In short bursts, insights written down come to me like pangs of back pain.

I always consider myself in training and never a professional when writing. but I leave the read with this:

I am an artist.
I go to work.
That is my job.
What do you do?

sincerely,

daniel s. boroughs