Realism, modified

On the night after Patrick met Patrick, to joust with their gladsome épées, Felix awoke (and rushed toward the coffee-pot, because his body believed the sunrise to be imminent) at 3:04 am.

O fortunate Felix, who can re-read Caelica as the sparrows sleep and the airplanes murmur sweet nothings! O happy city, in which haikus are crowed at the drop of dawn!

Triptych

  

Amateurs, and that kindest way of placing nominations shuttle fractal sheaves:

happenstance engraves this false calculus of random yesterwish dorming obsolescence, propone dank mate,

film-thicket resorting to an act of art, oaf's hope halted, granary leaves lot tumble resultant,

staking a silent claim upon adventure's brilliant chill, the stilted brink of wisdom hereabouts.

*

Celebrities of halcyon. Interrupt clipped. Stripes of passion lash the gibbous socket.

Settles for a middling finish, the brash bend build, behind the jacobins of scarlet mien, laurelled in folly, hoisted to an adequate prominence.

*

End this focus upon a tined might, primly tinted along the fasted dwelt, shrined whim lacustrine shakes pretty paucity of teem, lank parcels of triumph.

Form points to an apex serenest of heft, loft and light: elations verily, unto the sixty-fourth forced passage

where our pet cataclysms jostle beneath a fresh blue heaven, vying for space and grace, quaint chambers of domestic radiance.

POETRY  BY THOMAS DEFREITAS

call it what you will

Beneath Branches

An Urban Prelude

Realism, modified

Triptych


call it what you will

1

leaf-life blighted by the smoke
from a passing bus

2

treble tolls of bleak dismay
drab rodomontade

3

the morning of the poem
jazzy drops of rain

4

and the dulcet bumblebees
murmuring their gripes

5

lemon-scented buttercups
lisp their odes to spring

6

canopied boulangeries
rambunctious churches

An Urban Prelude

  

And summer beckons, hectic streams of bliss:
Austere aesthetes, forsake your shelvish delvings.

Sun-glare and life-thrust, bees and fire-flowers,
Asphalt earth practices its warp and shimmer --

Language captures its prey, its lively prize:
Dangerous promise of her fierce black eyes.

Beneath Branches

  

Mystic of the mesotherm,
watcher of north wind darkening day,
he walks beneath arching branches;
a folly of leaves paves his path :
trees blush,
as if his will brought boorish gusts to bear upon this place
and rendered it repentant, rougissant --
his hope hastened hither the tempers of wuther and whack,
of botherbuss and bluster :
declamations of the light's decline.

Thomas DeFreitas was born in 1969 in Boston. He graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1987, and attended the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) in 1989 and 1990.  He lived in East Boston for over thirty years. He currently resides in Chelsea.
Other work on this site by the same poet.