The Long Ride Home: the 99 poems of MB Quivid

By MB Quivid

The Long Ride Home is a book of 99 poems in 3 parts: For Me, For You, For Us. This is for us, the myriad beings of the universe. This is for you, all those I’ve come across in my life. This is for me and my spirit who belong to the myriad beings of the universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Aug 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781778295904

Book preview

Part I:   For Me

April May June

April May June

away in moving images

circling in my mind

and I am far away in transition:

slowly I breakdown

to be extinct;

a cessation of movement

in spring and summer

Childhood

a last will to three years given by birds coming from wire bells

          pecking away inside ground fog of smoke through doors

neighbour friend and enemy she took to running under wheels laughing

          no more in pain at her brother who bent to choke on sand

flesh and bones took one eye to his face under the sun with a cow

          chasing red children lose with much humourless life by the sewage

they kept chants to an asylum bed open marked with truth the man who

          walked on his knees used to say and sits with God staring wide

we followed a beetle song one summer long of mosquito bites and tales

          of the dead till we never forget listening to every sound in the dark

school yards gone out of scratching reach like myths in his name

          with money and friends catching fireflies waiting for recess bells

that day awakened to the bald and lipless in pink dress of barefoot

          dirt beyond her leaving without crying first for something

that nightmare of a childhood is now a dream too wonderful to imagine

          the dream that metamorphosed by waking to die one more day

                    or live another nightmare

Wood

there inside this girl I must stand

and be wood to stand lying

down where my head could rest

under trees drunk with water

bent back weak as stars fading within

an eye          a baal          a woman

with no skin left on her face but the tundra wind

my horizon is her body receding

by the hair wafting

to the inner blue off shore

Haiku

of one summer daze

shelled white in iceberg and rain

still as a child’s sleep

  Highcoo

a mind sunk to the bottom of such nights

too wide and awake to screech among the bats of ruins

like nothing beautiful except the way it flies

The Marriage

darting from water to air to water to air

I’ve been here too long too wrong

the belief that one day I would be sane

stripped me naked and left me wild

I was then to be removed from the world

and shaped into a civil institution where I happily disintegrated

till death did me apart and now I pronounce you

       life and men

              fire and tree

                     sun and the sea

                            love and the dead

                                   god and hell

                                          now the eternity

After Midnight

waiting for the water to boil

at some a.m. hour

it’s always during the waiting

when every nerve, every cell

senses the intensity

of every passing millisecond

and I am left recalling

a life of waiting

waiting for the water to boil

at some a.m. hour

Blink

heaviness on my head

even the sky weighs down

so that the air is too heavy to breathe

too thick to move in

one inanimate object

staring at another

waiting for the soup to cook

waiting for the fade-out

the blink of an eye

wavering between bright and dull