The Day It Became a Circle

By Hugh Cook

Travel is a bridge builder opening minds and souls to new experience and possibly a deeper understanding of the world. Cook's exceptional poetry collection reminds even jaded passengers that the journey can be just as important as the destination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Afterworld Books
• Release date: Jan 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386787228

Book preview

Home, Part One

I Am Only a 35mm Vision

The disposed film holds like a bubble

The grainy lives we try to lead:

A sun damaged, drug addled pose

We hold in hopes of bringing back

Our father’s shirts.

The twice X-rayed lens

Sees even through the bag of powder,

And the rectangular, green gems

Are a pathetic chemical curse

Prescribed in hopes of making us into you.

Even my face is indistinguishable

through the lava lamp in my room,

Warm, and dark, and trapped in someone else’s

Silvery, float and fall past.

The only part of our lives

Is captured in the smoke

Drifting like an off-white lie

From the mouth of the blond face,

Caught hanging from a tire swing

In a farm that is not ours to play home in.

Her Eyes and Her Sea

Waves lighten men to churning children,

When we see a white sash

Sliding over silk,

Pearls explode down the stair wave.

Rising with the wide curls and seagrass,

arresting eyes scoured,

Each one a puzzle with a piece missing,

and pouring through these holes was milk-light.

I want these eyes

To see more than me,

To come, and curl up in my pupils.

Raining Joshua Tree

The birds did fly, embracing night

One by one, feathered stars of dusk.

Seik, Tlingit risen, floats into my arms

Soul is cosmic, body is political.

Clouds crawl the sky,

Bright silver fish scales lit

By desert sun. I smell petrichoral

Lichen and charred wood,

Paper embers woven into words

And stories, danced by our fire

In viscous, red-limbed trembles,

And smoked kisses.

Gnosis

Ashes on my mouth alter my word,

Hands entwined with jasmine’s branch,

Trees burdened with flooding fruit.

Only crazy with no God and no Devil,

Tattooing smoke and rushing wine,

I had smashed the bones of the empty sky.

Eros: Sore Rose

I’m soothed by memories inside,

Turning the tattooed skin of once

Around, feasting beyond words.

Loving you outside time and space,

I met you, pressing myself

Into your mask,

And whispered my only prayer

Inside of you.

Far From a Shop

Men and women push carts.

There are no shops for miles.

On one I see a corner turning,

Swinging helpless, like a pinwheel.

A thick