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Promised Land

by Alex Chambers

Fragile guardians
lined up with liquid guts and a blinding metal hats.
Transparent in intention,
their faces sloshing and bubbling,
ligaments beneath rolling like tides tugged by a savage moon.
Faded, tired eyes betray the belligerence
long fermented by the ghosts of
all those better places they dare not venture.
With their mouths the blocks are laid,
an insurmountable fortress of doubt
between deliverance and madness.

Outside those walls the lunatic raves
with laughing chants and glass raised to
names long past and misremembered;
those who were abandoned
as he desperately tried to reach
the clearing at the end of the rocky trail.
His insides dry, licked clean by liar lips
and exhaled again in useless sighs,
breath gathering in pitiful drops of condensation at his feet.
The drops conspire to form pools and the pools scheme to overflow,
an evolving, viscous river of sorrow
over which burnt bridges could be built again.

Beyond that river unsettlingly cheerful trees sing.
Delicate yellow and blue flowers bend towards warmth,
towards the flimsy vow of life.
An unending arms-race for height
drowning blood-brothers in umbra.
If the sun can create liars of lillys,
the wind spares only the inescapable.
The pylons are rotted, the planks brittle,
the bridge crumbles with the first gentle breeze.
The Promised Land, again, forever out of reach.

04/17/2008

Posted on 04/18/2008
Copyright © 2024 Alex Chambers

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Gabriel Ricard on 04/18/08 at 03:18 AM

Wonderful, wonderful language. It just keeps the image moving towards that great last line. There's a great focus in this, but it's also open enough to encompass some great added imagery to make it even stronger.

Posted by Charlie Morgan on 04/18/08 at 09:08 PM

...alex, what gabe said and ... several places i stopped reading to read again the line just read...and that's good, m'man...this is a heavy piece and tho' it's laced w/ some umbrage at 'bad' things o' life it is full of warm kinda references to feel sorta hopeful, still we reach, reach, curse, and continue reaching, eh? good write, charlie

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