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Best Poems From
TOMMY STROLLER
(30.6.48)
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1.
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Danish Winter Haiku
Haiku 1
Summer is so short
A white skirt left on the beach
Winter is so long
Haiku 2
The ice flowers
on the window pane
A flute plays
and the rising moon
Haiku 3
The seagull on its perch pole
Above the water
Naked we slowly enter
Haiku 4
The small whales leap and dive
in the sound
The sauna sweat
on our bodies
Tommy Stroller
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2.
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Between Africa and Europe II
Who is this woman?
She is the movement between Africa and Europe.
She is beauty and sight watching each other.
She is the mirror of everything - as in a kaleidoscope.
She is partial yet she is full.
She is the tentacles and she is the small fish being drawn in.
Whatever she wishes for is mesmerized inside her.
She makes the world into a toy for herself then throws it away once the amusement wears thin.
She loves the surface but expresses the depths.
She is the dark core of passion with a light touch.
She puts all things in order in order to forget them.
She has the intelligence of the sea, eroding and shifting all solid forms while making the beach of our dreams.
She creates the glittering things that pull us forward, but she is also our fall once they are past.
She is too young to be sad and too old to be blindly happy or free.
She is the first blood of womanhood and the last dropp of innocence.
She has come when she has gone.
She is change.
Tommy Stroller
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3.
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The End Of The Road
We took our small rusting car
Over the quiet Prescelli foothills.
We had no destination
Except sleep and departure,
We merely kept faith
With the high crumbling spine
Of the quartz ridgetop,
Our route meandering
Through high tenantless villages,
The black glaze of rooftops
Slating the rain
Raw into broken gutters,
The tarmac giving out
Under it's strain.
We motored on west,
Now through great Gandalf forests
Always west, refusing
Every turn that threatened
To re-turn us home.
In a crease of the land
Lay a kind of battlefield - no more
Than leftovers from the
Foresters' pickings - a tangle
Of grass, mudworn tracks and
Ancient roots. Some people
Might have believed this was a holiday
But we came to find our end.
Why else camp
In that wet forest of leavings
At the back end of the season?
We were driven by
Our fate: attraction
Had nothing to do with it.
The night slid into the valley
Like a monstrous belly
Blunting the grim remainders
Of the light. The rain
Sparked and slithered over
The brown canvas whilst we
Hungrily devoured our reasons
To be missing.
Your voice rose with the wind
And began a storm of its own,
Slandering back and forth the
Broken and torn flag of our love
Until I would finally admit
The confirmation of our end.
Admitting nothing
Agreeing nothing
Seeing nothing
You broke free and crashed
Into the darkness.
As if your escape could cancel
My own, you ran across my outer night
And fell into your separate camp,
To which all of God's elements
Gladly joined you.
For once, after your battering,
I was calm in my preset decision:
Tomorrow was
Fin fine finale
Goodbye and goddam farewell.
So
I came for you, calling in the
Intestine dark, where sky & mud
Converged. It was only your
Hot panting breath
That betrayed you - sound
And vision lost, I touched
An arm, gripped a hand, wiped
Rain and mingled tears
On scalding cheeks.
I swung the whole weight of you,
The live carcass, out of
That temporary grave, the tender
Mud squirming between my fists.
Somehow I wrenched you
Back to our canvassed
Make-believe home.
In the darkness inside
You left out your anger,
You huddled like a small kitten for my warmth
Once I'd removed and stored
In their sphagetti mess
Your invisible clothes.
And all you could say the whole
Waking night
Over & over
Was: 'you came for me, why?
'Oh why did you come?
'You came to bring me back:
'The first time you've carried
'Me home.' But I couldn't tell you
That I'd called to save you
Only in the certainty of my going:
Love pretending in its leaving
To embrace what love no longer held.
We slept in a branching of the
Wind and slowly woke
To the nursing of the grey dawn.
I hung for hours there
Watching the drip drip drip
Of our life together
Falling away
Like dew from sun kissed rigging.
We tried following the sun's
Rise - a makeshift rambling crew
Rumple-eyed and sightless staring,
Packing the still damp tent.
We came with leaking baggage
To our ghost vehicle, looking
Incongrously misplaced, calm,
In the sullen forest surround.
But God decided to stall us
One last time; maybe he needed
One last achievement, a mark
Of our mutual learning,
Our mutual respect.
That previous night we'd rolled
The car so carelessly
Down the sloping track to
The field, but going up
In reverse the wheels slid,
Spinning tirelessly
On the mis-accumulations of the night's
Storm. Each took their turn
In the hopeless attempt at pilotage
Of a foiled escape, neither could
Make their way beyond halfway
To freedom. It was
A metaphor for our
Every past move.
And so we were forced
To do this last one thing together:
To haul the forest's humble gifts
Of root and branch, of grass and broom,
Of buried waystones
And build the stubborn track of our departing.
Tommy Stroller
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4.
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A Very Personal History
Bodies have histories
Eyes lie to one another
Even in mirrors
But history remains dug
Deep into every cell
Bodies strain to forget themselves
To join in dances too young for them
But the music of the song
Is in the piano notes of the genes
And we endlessly respond
Endlessly play the game,
And dance the dance,
Biology and memory conspiring
To deny themselves
Through each other
Tommy Stroller
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