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deep time
Looking Out From Stony Island
Carve out my tongueI will taste your wind Slice off my earsI will hear your waves Gouge out my eyesI will see your red sun setting Tear off my fingertips I will touch your stones For I do not need the presence of your solemn grandeur as it perishes along a silent lakeshore In the ashes of our ancestors inside […]
Scene From a Shaker Cemetery
The unmarkedtombstones leavean impression The elemental needto tell someonethat you were hereThe same reason the cave people in Lascaux wrote on wallsThe eternal battle betweensimplicity and pride the primal urge to leave a markon the earth, and the spiritualquest to disappear entirely George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications […]
Out of Nothing
My love for you is gravitationally balancedbut unstable. A system of huge swirling whirlpools endlessly recycled as repulsive forces that expand with constant acceleration, like starlight created from radiationMy love for you is finite and ambiguous Unbounded and forever, decreasing with time, as the universe evolves, it weakens. Simplest of all known universes, my heart for you pounds with the pulse of […]
Humpbacks 2
Before the finneddinosaurs of the icydepths were disappointed bythe steamships of men, they casttheir ballads into the velvet abyss, waiting as mothers do with untamed hearts, big as school buses George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 […]
The Persistence of Memory
Before the finneddinosaurs of the frozen deepwere interrupted by the warships of man they cast their love balladsinto the vast abyss, waiting,with hearts as wild and big as schoolbuses, for their own answer. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at […]
The Last Days of Summer
God is the original face before I was born. The lost part of my brain, drifting across beginninglesslifetimes, bobbing in the embryonic fluid. God is tortoise tracks and prayers bya beachside grave and the last daysof summer. Why the universe is so hot,crowded, and noisy, yet arrives quietly each lonely evening, on my doorstep, a bouquet of suffocating tulips. George […]
Replaced
Most of my water escaped long ago too,and which one of us was reallydesigned to withstand the pressure? Slowly filtered through solid rock,the remains are all that remains: pyrite and calcite and Uranium.Armored fish patrolling the depths,consuming the soft, fleshy parts, anddisappearing into the crystal lattice. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. […]
Messiahs
Between colors and worlds,as old as fish dying on the hot sands,because the gods are jealous and concernedabout us, we are stuck to a diamond-shaped rockof slate, just like any savior who cameby ship and went. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat […]
Before Words
By the time it is written down it hasalready passed. Even the animals,the brute beasts of the fields, dumband blind to the ways of poetry in books, feel it in the soul of their hoovesand the simple sensations of their tonguestouching the grass, or a pig rolling in the mud, as birds sing for no reason but […]