Now

 

©2026  Steve King

All Rights Reserved

 

 

So now it seems the words alone remain,

Like shallow graves to serve all memory,

While stars that did once blazon every path,

Now linger low and stir dark dreams in me.

 

 A Shadow Follows

 

By Steve King

© 2024  All rights reserved

 

 

There is a shadow close to me,

Sometimes in dreams,

Sometimes upon broad day.

Sometimes it looms in dark relief,

At others, all in gentler moods of gray.

 

There lives a specter deep inside,

Its job, I guess, to ponder me.

But I am too much innocent,

And can’t imagine what it needs to see.

 

I am a shadow too, of sorts,

But cannot look beyond

To know with any certainty,

What other shades may hide.

Here, thoughts are sheltered,

Hopes collide,

And every future me abides.

 

I’ll take great care which me to choose,

But have not yet resolved.

I wonder what the specter knows

Of my unmastered ‘heres’ and ‘nows’,

Or of the thoughts that gather me,

Or how this finish must evolve.

 

I know there soon will be a time,

When I and every shadow meet,

When ages are immersed as one,

And every longing lies undone.

But then is then, and now is—

What? 

Just filled with shadow play.

Dark winds must keen,

The far stars shine,

And every life shall hew its time,

Though soon ahead, or close behind,

The shadows swallow all designs.

Such As We

  

Such As We 

 

©2024 Steve King

All rights reserved

 

 

Recount my name for anyone who might remember me.

My pleasures gathered from afar, though not all agonies.

 

I seize my memories as dreams; desires as things of old,

But I remember every touch and promises gone cold.

 

And just to feel this hand again undoes one ancient pain,

Though well I know a second hence, I lose you once again.

 

I won’t retrace forgotten paths that left you far from me,

But I’ll embrace all moments now that once held such as we.

Alias

 

Steve King ©2024

All rights reserved

 

 

I know you only as an alias,

Some stranger’s voice that bundles every dream.

When speak you must, I must be listening;

When you will sigh, I tend to that desire,

A strangeness, far from old imaginings

Which once could promise comfort, conjure ease.

 

Prisoning dreams may flee, yet steal their times,

Let rush rough sands through every passing hour.

Each hollowed moment turns eternity,

While aspiration levels to the core,

Like feathers falling slowly from the sun.

 

The broken measure comes to me,

A voice once meant to nurture old repose:

Withheld too long to keep its meaning plain,

Too soon for answers I’ve not yet composed.

 

I must imagine true, or must deny

This alias, forever alibi.

Roomful

 

©Steve King 2024

All rights reserved.

 

(A reworking of a prior post)

I am in a room

That is filling with their words,

Each sound rising as if it were anew,

Separate still,

Ever out of sorts.

 

I know them even now,

Before they ring complete,

Imagining the fair call to come,

Every first and last, 

And visions set to fall between:

How these airs must slip their way,

Now free from all obscure and beaten shores.

 

Perhaps no one may know them in my way,

The way that I have heard them told,

The way that I do feel them call

In this dark room.

 

But each such knowing must suffice

As well as any other knowing may,

As fair as theirs might serve for mine,

Were I inclined to hear them say.

Were my own words destined to stay.

 

Here, the search for every solace;

Grappling for the soul of  every song;

Shrinking only from the silence.

Well we know the keenest word,

May never chime for long.

 

Extolling and abjuring, as we do,

Loosing all desire to condole,

Mirages set to lure the disappeared,

And even all the restless dead.

Enough to fill a world we would say,

If gaining respite only for the day.

Crafted for the one, ready then for each,

For those who suffer raptures, ofttimes near,

That yet must hover, ever out of reach.

 

With hopes that every sudden word

Might serve for any song:

The voice of a small hope, somewhere

Beneath this noise, this stir,

This teasing, always on the evening air.

 

As if there really were a song

For every word that spawns

In small dark rooms.

 

As if the touch of just these jumbling dreams,

Might fare enough to carry us along.

The Ship From Delos

 By Steve King

©2023 All Rights Reserved

 

White moon

Upon the broken sea.

Winds course, and then they go.

Go and rise again to sing,

As if to hie the vagrant tides,

Force each flagging sail,

Pause to gather voice again,

Tiring soon, it seems again,

Of all the age-old hymns.

Until the ship at last comes in.

 

He wakes to breaking seas,

The usual clamor. 

He’d had enough of dreams,

Enough of friends,

And a surfeit of life;

Cared not for his every care,

Had passed the threshold

Of his every grief,

Sung of all he might desire.

 

He could not yield,

Dared not yield to friends,

Would not begin again.

 

For where better? 

And with what better men?

 

Like the winds,

And every old sunrise,

His days had come and gone.

He bade them, fond,

And girt his heart,

To augur no surprise.

Narcissus

Narcissus 

 

©2022 Steve King

All rights reserved

 

 

Do you think Narcissus knew

Every shadow in his pool

As he knelt to ponder love?

 

Did he fathom new and strange

In the darker eddies there,

That pressed the corners of his frame? 

 

As echoes of his dreams unwound

He mourned the beauty love had found.

Bitter tears rained all around,  

To fall as flowers on the dying ground.

 

Surprise

©Steve King 2022

All rights reserved

 

 

i

 

Today I am surprised

That I am surprised today.

It seems I breathed an unfamiliar word,

That gathered to me, measuring the air.

A strange tongue speaking yet in stranger ones,

Wilder music to cling upon me,

Like clouds and gales upon the passive season,

Giving every name to light and dark,

And unthought visions in between.

It whispered, too, of strange desire,

Summoned old regrets,

Almost as friendly spirits after all,

That never would take flight.

All fillips to some new imagining,

And every kind of sudden thing

That once might stream the dreaming night,

But now would dance upon my busy light.

 

Leaves called in chorus,

Knee deep grasses hissed their harmonies,

Alive to me, they seemed,

Or moving with what I would take as life:

Sentinels for the far keening voice,

That distant one I must at last attend,

Each breeze now a most solemn fanfare,

Heard, unheard, now heard again,

Every falling echo leaving note,

Another prelude rising to its place,

Each gathered voice, insistent marriage

Of worship and command.

 

 

ii

 

I plumb this new world

And yet dare hope for more.

Greedy are the senses,

Filling now with my submerged intents,

Spawned from the uncertain depths

To take their turn beneath the light,

Untethered now and finally free

To fly at last from all untended hopes.

 

 

iii

 

All desire, then,

Alive with heavy mystery,

A presence come to harrow memory,

Revealing to my new regard

That which I once had labored to forget,

Or never truly knew—

Or knew, but in that street-smart kind of way

That answered with sly ease

At every call to meaning I had heard:

The reservoir of constant joke,

The turns of small evasion,

Shades of sundry casual and well-intended lies,

The measure of equivocation,

And the easy acquiescence to all things

That fair weather conviction

Might manage to evoke,

As near to truth as lies might ever be.

And yet I knew they sang some truth of me.

 

True.

Yet not so.

Not so sure

As the unyielding reach

Of every lingered love,

Whose hold would never loose

The shades of sudden and unsettled dreams.

 

Ever and unyielding,

Sure, before, hereafter,

Always and invincible,

Though not invincible

Old lovers.

 

 

 

iv

 

Captive,

A fractal specter,

Whole in these my fragments, if at all,

Fragile as a dreamless sleep,

That bears no weight of beauty.

I moved as if a stranger,

Lost upon the once known paths,

Always walking, ever waiting,

Subject now to all emergent things.

 

The old joys of the clamorous street,

These are not for me.

Not now.

Their common music resonates,

Distant and discordant,

Without time or right of place.

The old epiphanies abate.

I tire, feel the world tire,

Relentless in its hurtle,

Ever apace,

Lugging its old life

And the weight of all the new surprise,

All one and the many,

Each rupture and each union,

Confusions and the graces,

Every dread and death’s head,

The things that bloom in faintest light,

To trace for me the flow of surging dreams,

Whose bounds must bear the death of every tide,

Where every fate at last is satisfied,

The settling place of cold desire,

And shock of new surprise.

Caesura for the hum of grasses,

Subtlest harmony of breeze.

 

I am the shadow of these things.

A stubborn thing.

I am.

Still well alive in every word

Old or unfamiliar.

Alive yet in these living dreams

That any unsought word might bring.

Mindful of a sometime peace,

For restless shades that will not ease.

 

 

 

 

v

 

My thoughts may not for long forsake their times,

Though passing griefs might struggle to deny.

 

Those unfamiliar words unwind,

To frame these dreams of every kind,

All loves and shortfalls present now,

To measure, finally,

what the world endows.

 

 

A Certain Morning

©Steve King

All rights reserved

 

 

This window admits little light,

even as the sky is lifting blue.

These morning clouds appear too soon.

 

Day upon day,

measuring in moons

and a slow dark drift of stars,

all disappearing, while I try

to purge these eyes of everything

that would invent new dawns.

 

I called indeed at first

from the distant center of a dream,

dreamed that you had answered

through a dark cloud of your own.

I could not hold those meanings

in a heart’s uncertain light,

so all the while I prayed to wake alone.

 

Watching to night’s latter end,

I’ll not disturb the shadows, no;

nor any of the rising shades within

that must at once be mine and yours.

Or even you and me.

These mingle in a kind of drizzle grey just now,

not rich enough to pass for color,

nor for things found in a decent light of decent day.

 

I stir now with desire as to a perfect stranger,

just that way the perfect stranger knows,

stretched beyond the bounds

of new and old beginnings,

those with neither name nor place,

and of each recollection

whispering the deaths of easy ends,

for I am poor at heeding these

and shall not try again.

 

I seem but a dream, inviolate,

and would deny the moment.

Each thought retreats,

spent waves slipping dark sands,

lost to looming tides

and the refuge of the deep.

 

Yet some true measure must abide

to spin such shadows out of sight.

Some shall flee, while others keep;

all else that’s left defies the old commands.

What this may be, I render to your hands.

 

Release

©  Steve King

All rights reserved

Release.

A notion,

altogether.

Remembered,

the ways

I gently betrayed

some things and those moments,

the castaway times.

A strange flight from language

and every reply

that never made sense.

Awakened at last,

from old sweating dreams,

not quite memory,

but grown more real

with each new escape,

immersed in remains

of my clever refrains.

Still, daytimes I long

for night’s comforting chains.

Lark

©2020 Steve King

All rights reserved

The Lark is spinning in his songless height,

the awesome mountain winds pass where they will. 

My dreams are well enough to hold each night,

though every word that might have served is stilled.

The high cascades will hasten in descent,

the killing torrent, and the eddy’s foam,

and finding their true level, will be spent,

to gather once again in ocean home.

The peal of music that did pitch my heart

returns to play in memory sometimes;

but even while faint melodies restart,

I cannot these days conjugate their rhymes.

Adept false prophets prosper everywhere,

and every grace I’d own is second guessed;

now, always, peace must conjure with despair,

and paradise contend with wilderness.

Yet every moment brings a promising,

a new intention set to satisfy.

The shades of all regret must take to wing,

so never more to gather and deny.

And while I wait to hear my Lark descend,

each thought anticipates his choired throat.

Though bound to earth, my hopes ever intend

my soul to soar once more and greet his notes.

A new poem for https://dversepoets.com/

What Would I Do?

©2020 Steve King

All Rights Reserved

What would I do if favored wishes

Came like the rains to cover me?

What would I do?

Would I content to empty my soul

of blazened dreams, untested hopes?

Every desire within my grasp,

Real to my eyes, each waiting sense.

Spent to time and easy use,   

Mine no more.

What would I do?

A little something for Joy’s 55

Eternal

©2020 Steve King

All rights reserved

I have not found traces

Of anything eternal

By searching.

Nor held in my reflection

Any measure save my own.

Each gathered moment

Emptied of all others,

Touch of rumored spirits

Fickle as dying winds.

Found amid strange silence, 

Wondering at my place

In this peculiar dream.

Listening in emptiness

For what silence shall sing. 

And now is winter

by Steve King

© 2020 All rights reserved

And now is winter well begun,

every old hard dream.

Forgotten, that fair suite

that flew the distant airs of spring.

Morns, I chant the same old lies:

how each new increment of evening sun

promises of kindlier things to come;

how darkness is that salutary thing

where one might pause

and get forgetting done.

A new poem for Joy's 55

Actor

©  Steve King

All rights reserved

Light gone,

curtain down

echoes ringing

in high shadows—

still he hears them,

live things he’d command to follow

through the exit door

briefly into blinding light.

And those faces—

pastiche of regard

that he used as his mirror

while he preened;

strained to see them, sly,

all downstage posing, to be sure,

not watching, not the way they looked at him,

not rapt and bold and senseless;

not like poor Narcissus, no,

caught up cold within his fatal gaze,

not at all, oh no.

They never knew he watched.

He must not lose himself in their plain sight,

could not lose himself,

they could not see him seeing.

He was more clever than that, he thought.

They were but the mirror,

reflecting, quick, the flash

of all his emptied art.

And where then might he turn?

There was not space enough to be

in the midst of the new emptiness.

Surely not the exit door, not yet;

not that undiscriminating light;

not that undirected clamor

brooking no silence, no graceful stop.

How might he own all that—

The indifferent stares

that would not recognize nor linger?

How might he hold those emptied eyes,

command such casual vision

to all his well-tuned verities.

Where, oh where to turn?

If only there were mirrors cast within,

if only he might satisfy himself

without resort to any art,

without regifting his whole world at large;

if only he could see the way they saw,

simple and with clarity.

Just for the moment,

moments like this,

when lights were faded

to their shadow homes on high;

with every echo and alarm

yet resonant, reprising absent charms.

Window

by Steve King

© 2020 All rights reserved

I have a favored window.

It draws the light

in tones I wish to see.

It gathers birdsong

from the depths of dawn,

and spills my dreams

upon the evening lawn.

There may be other windows

I might use.

Even rooms without a view.

But here I’ll stay to celebrate,

and ever more to muse.

 A new poem for the 55
 versiscape-lifesentences.blogspot.com

Your speaking moves more than the air

by Steve King

© 2020 All rights reserved

Your speaking moves more than the air, it seems.

I am, with every murmur, shaken too,

transported always where your will requires,

my wishes, resonant at every turn,

attend the lingering strains of your desire.

Much stronger than the weight of loud command,

your musings will demand obedience.

You know that I am helpless to ignore,

and every instant, as I lie in wait,

my urgent station sighs aloud for more.

Suspended like a mote in dim moonlight,

my substance cedes to rapt imaginings,

and, shedding every motive of my own,

I fall upon the pleasures you might bring,

awash, enfolded, no bright charm deferred,

to search again the truth of all your words.


For Writers' Pantry #3 : Poets and Storytellers United 

Word

by Steve king

©2020

All rights reserved

I trace the word, it becomes real

I breathe it to the world

and it is me

as a wind

sounding to the vaults of the earth

to stir a light within my every sense

I say and it is so

embracing now the distant things

even to the sun

brings them now to me

and I will now possess one meaning more

Dark air excites

and the quelled leaves

and the grasses

Each stone on the mountain

pebbles in the valley

waters will not then be still

I cannot know and will not care

who else may feel or see or know

or who would scoff or smile sly

And do not shrink from declination

or designs of their desires

How may I shrink from a new truth

the truth’s effect

the truth’s intent

that keeps me for an object

the light of truth

the truth of light

that even lamps the catacomb

that shall inscribe the stars

As I Consider

by Steve King

All Rights Reserved

©2019

As I consider how I’ve sought for love

And found it so, only to seek again,

There comes that moment to deny all sense

When emptiness descends upon the heart

With doubt my spirit never would intend.

No peace may gather then, although one waits

For any hint of surety to rise,

And, caught upon the tides that gather life,

Those memories which pass for life revive.

And every station that my heart has known

Returns to claim a moment as before.

Though forfeit now, their beat is ever clear

To tell how dreams shall never sing as true,

How every hope that stalks the bright Abyss

Unearths old endgames posed once more as new,

And how old love forever shall conspire

To scatter embers out from phantom fire.

Widow

© 2019 Steve King

All rights reserved

So now I am that widow guy,

pressed in these thoughts like widow’s weeds,

come near to end of time, it seems;

so near to end of days, must seem to all.

There are yet days.

Time is not stilled,

nor are the dreams undone,

to hang like heavy husks

across the fallen backdrop

of an endless, empty night,

a million miles to see.

And memory,

a pretty picture now,

but strange, imperfect, an unfinished thought,

where every echo plays

without its grounding harmony,

songs of siren sorcery,

promise unfulfilled,

and choruses of silence

that linger, stranger still.


A new poem for Open Link Night at https://dversepoets.com/

I'd hoped that it might seem as one

by Steve King

©2018  All rights reserved

I’d hoped that it might seem as one,

that each new treasure of intent

would gather inward every charm,

alone to each new moment then,

without beginnings, without end.

The issue of unsettling dreams

would scuttle back beneath the lees,

the tolling of uncertainty

displaced by melodies begun.

Desires one never knew to spend

might seize such moments to contend.

Yet every doubt shall resurrect

to seed new dreams and break amends,

undoing all prospective notes,

to quell new dawns with clouded suns.

And all invention soon erased

by tides of tears that need not wait

for virgin moons to call them out,

far wishes glinting there, dark stars.

            The resting place of all appeal

            is quiet soon and battened fast,

each unrecounted mood abates

to where silence must congregate,

the words gone still to mend a peace,

and linger always out of reach.

And all that was important then

seems sunk to nothingness

again.


A new poem for the D'Verse Open Link Night
https://dversepoets.com/

I would be ready

I would be ready, should it come tonight.

I wait upon all ends, as do we each,

have swept my mind of all moveable fears,

and tried to pierce a veil of fair unknowns.

I am impatient with the magic now,

have slipped the tether of old ritual

and left to other arms the shield of faith,

to feel at last the depth in every night

and sense the murmur that a new felt wind

inflects upon old spirits who will hear.

I watch while every dusk enfolds the world

within an unknown realm, myself half-seen

and half-seeing, now here, now there, now gone,

alike some shallow isle whose trace appears

but briefly in the movement of great tides.

My visions cannot capture all I see,

nor words translate the things I come to know.

And while old mysteries will not abate,

I wait upon no supernality.

For only I attend upon these times,

alone to every instant, as must be;

and every hard-felt limit that is found

records at least an impulse to break free,

to try this darkness, sometimes kindle light,

’til rest shall fall, like mist upon the night.


A new poem for Imaginary Gardens
http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/

We tarried that first night

©2018 Steve King

All rights reserved

We tarried that first night upon the sands

and glimpsed of glinting waters that upheld

the sky and the unnumbered stars.

Stars so many I was blind to all.

Strange things I tried to say,

then silence so that none might come amiss.

There surely would be time for words

when dreams had come to pass,

just not quite then.

Never time for dreams;

nor for uncanny orisons,

which none inclined to hear.

And never time to understand

those spirits once so near to us,

that sang from everywhere.

Confusions reigned aplenty,

seeming without cause or cure

to ease my wonder at the way

we found our way from star-lit shores

and got ourselves to here.

I will not criticize

© 2018 Steve King

All rights reserved

I will not criticize for your half-truths.

Of our mean differences, say what you will

so it brings peace.  I shall not ask beyond

the looming limits of my disbelief.

The times have left us still, with only hope

to take the seat of dreams that would repair.

Subsume to silence, and I’ll join you there.

To See

©  Steve King  2017

All rights reserved

To see.

Such distractive sense.

The eye goes everywhere

there is a movement,

or that unsought touch,

or faint reflective answers

in another’s distant voice.

Always something here

to hold a moment and mind.

Yet still impossible to spy

the one who masquerades as me

in all that waiting world

where these fool scenes unwind.

Sonnet Six

© 2017 Steve King

All rights reserved

I don’t know what there is to write of love,

though others fill such pages quite with ease.

I can’t distill all meanings as I please,

describe sensations which are true enough

to colonize all realms of thought.  I pause

at each astonishment that visits me,

and every unsought thrill that comes to be,

and never work to wonder of their cause.

All sly analogies escape my care,

and each coquettish fancy that occurs

belies the feeling that ought only stir

in truest commerce with the heart’s affairs.

            In grand comparisons I will not delve,

            for love should seem like nothing save itself.

Small Soliloquy

©  2017 Steve King

All rights reserved

The blind view

and that hot rain—

each new storm

a sudden death,

soon again.

The recalculation

of every old move:

merely an echo,

a hard refrain.

The world will turn.

I cannot say

where true horizons fall.

Light to night,

night upon light,

every age must scribe its own,

though some stand everywhere alone.


A new poem for Friday 55 with Joy Jones
http://versiscape-lifesentences.blogspot.com/ 

The Gathering

©  2017  Steve King

All rights reserved

He leaned so naturally,

bent to shadow by the moon.

He asked if I had a match.

‘I don’t smoke, myself,’ he said,

‘but I must look to my watch,

for the times are old.’

So soon, it gathers like a dream,

the waiting while his moon burns hot,

and all my world grows cold.

A poem for Joy Jones’ Friday 55

Adept

© 2017 Steve King

All rights reserved

I wish that there were fewer words,

or better weight to fill them up,

with sense alive to leap each pause,

and means to separate all ends from cause.

This randomness I’ve long endured,

and though it bears me with an ease,

I cannot help but mourn each blank,

adept, it seems, but never sure.

A new verse for Friday 55,

so graciously hosted by Hedgewitch.

Sonnet Five: I watch and wait

© 2017 Steve King

All rights reserved

I watch and wait patiently for the sun,

and moments of forgetting then begun;

this bitter starlight cannot now redeem

an interregnum of confining dreams.

Old spirits are fled far and leave no trace,

no outlines to impress on shadowed space,

and though my pausing will not urge reward,

I’ll hold to what I pray shall be restored.

An undertow of hope thus sets my course,

and I must drift upon the dawning force,

to gather each small blessing that abides,

and cling to meanings cast upon new tides.

Emergent then, as from a numbing sleep,

so once again to sing, again to weep.

A new poem for the Poetry Pantry
http://poetryblogroll.blogspot.com/

I am old now...

© Steve King 2017

All rights reserved

I am old now, often older than I seem,

with new strangeness and a certain sense

that springs not only from unfolding years.

But this is all of my own view,

some inner seeing that reflects

no proper light from anywhere,

nor even any scene

that some other might see true.

The mirror in the hall holds far out of my sight;

the window too, where in a lapse of careless ease,

I might again behold the sudden ghost,

more true to every age, anchored in the pane,

clinging on a slender veil of inconstant opacity,

its form playing a noiseless rhythm,

searching yet for convenient repose

and any field of uncontested peace.

I piece together puzzles made of clouds

that shudder, fly upon the least of winds;

stir worlds within the orb of the unblinking cocktail glass,

and watch as visions stream, each along its way;

savor every expectation,

and the pull of all intentions,

that the lingering claim of conscience

shall not long outlast.

In the reach of bottomless light

the world seems empty of all things

except the deepened treads of time,

a universe enforcing balance

of all things I might have sought

and everything the heart tried to deny,

with point enough to serve tendentious retrospect,

and the pull of all latent desire,

even moment by moment;

for though no certain future is assigned,

I’ll take my leave to wager a good bet,

thinking every new-lived instant

gives a life to each impatient hope,

and fortifies all gentle conjurings.

Somewhere distant I recall

the portrait I alone was meant to see,

itself enough to capture any age.

And there it is:  somewhat a stranger now,

as any onetime friend might sometime be;

its lines still not so fully formed,

somewhat in haste conceived;

the eyes with what might pass for surety,

the naive brow an unmarked map

that cannot not be so now.

And though I must approve faint shades,

and take on faith that these have shown me fair,

I yet must note each errant stroke

and smile at untoward slips of shadow

that a keener artist would have striven to repair.

There roams in the dark tower,

like condemned kings and captive partisans,

a mix of ill contented thoughts,

contending for a single crack of light,

or a strain of gaiety singing far upon midnight,

almost unknowing now the graces of such leisure,

but still not quite reduced

to settling for the moments that incline

to the inviting void,

which alone must mitigate all cares.

I wonder at all things unsaid,

and of comforts yet unmet,

and of late strangnesses

that reasoned contemplation cannot cure.

Unsettled loves are gathered in a distant dream,

removed from every heart,

a far mirage that fades on every dawn,

posing as the last sum of desire.

Now must I cease these wanderings.

Each glimpse unfolds, that others might ensue,

and every view will further lead

until the thread I clutch unwinds in whole,

that my next thought would drift on its own airs,

so soon to slip from every moor,

without the charms of once familiar light,

to dance with dreams that dress a darker night.


 A new poem for the dVerse open night link
 https://dversepoets.com/