Three Poems by Philip Byron Oakes

In Keeping

Immediately upon landing a letter in the script
conceding a voice allowing movies to mumble
laudanum dreams into the ear of an era on trial.
An often pleasurable incongruity of the lull into
thinking made thoughtful well beyond its final
resting place.  Steering the ungovernable to
shelter with a little sugar between the lines
launched to topple the chaos as the law takes
hold in the hinterlands of a salty day.  Just as
soon as lickety split in full possession of faculties
against their will to believe a favorite thought
behind as weight upon for ballast of the mind in
memoriam.  Rioting under the breath of a
confidante mumbling the better parts into
cohesion to more easily suppress the message
still seeping through by means of little birdies in
the protocol of hit and miss.  Putting the
commemorative at risk of oblivion in a blink at
stop signs of things to come screeching a step
ahead of their time.  Begrudgingly allowed to be
seen in certain versions of the light called one's
own for the occasion.  Put to rest wide awake
wielding but nonetheless frozen just as they
were in goading the larks into the choir of riff on
a raft of the aria's making.  More honestly
inexplicable as the traumas pass in an arc of
diminishing resonance over the goober fields
blossoming with assurances of tomorrow's
arrival.  No sooner than not then off on course
sounding as if without seeming approachable
from a distance maintained as conducive to the
room taken away from the picture at large.



Blind Spotting

A myopia in stages of seeing things that only
wish they were there to fade away.  A history
of the impetus settling into the routine for
the commute into fable, to fill a gap in the
fugue of the guru at the ready for the rain.
Grandiosity by omission performed in an
absence the mind seizes upon before there's
time to think.  To put it right where no one
knows it is.  The chrysalis pampered by myth,
surviving the loss of folkways through the
briars filling the gulf between father and child.
Nothing's grasp of what makes it just that and
little more than a name.  Akin but not of
persuasions pulled by mules to grand openings
of the shell in search of closure.  A frontier by
default made good.  Keeping ghosts afloat
through the scree of chickadee bones in the
song that bleeds the sky of twinkles in
the morning.



Speed Kills

Scrambling egged on to a hush
at the sound all around a hurry.
Bustle's bonnet in a headwind
blowing minds to sleep.  Serenity
as the savory in a sandwich of
time, killed eating the words
that make the machine go.
Filling balloons raising the
verbiage read as tea leaves,
binding the mumbles to clauses
in the will to live.  Keeping the
pace at bay to carve a breath
out of homecoming, into
the ho hum at the speed of light
lifting veils to reveal a pulse
lost looking, looking for the
door.

Philip Byron Oakes is a poet living in Austin, Texas.  His work has appeared in Blackbox Manifold, E Ration, Cordite Poetry Review, among other journals.  His third volume of poetry, ptyx and stone, (white sky ebooks) was released in 2013.  http://phili[byronoakes.blogspot.com/