Poetry by David Bankson

Together

The world fogged its lights
and draped gray in our eyes
like shuddering clouds
above a darksome land.

The day
heard the city awaken
and broken
as the land fractured apart from front to back,
the reflection in your eyes
gray catbirds deep in a shadowed forest.

I forgot
you walked these grounds before,
the clouds in your wake,
the shaky yesterdays
hungry for your smile,

a darkness for two,
the growing fog
and you,
before I happened along.

Before that,
candles fizzled
into a sulphur wisp.

After all this time
we're stumbling here,
where a milk-and-water past
tolls.

I remember
you glowed like a phantom:
your fog to my smoke,
your eclipse to my night,
a fulcrum for a world of tomorrows.




The price of love

is the wave embracing the beach,
some left behind, more removed each time.
Time and again, whispers
of crest and sand.

At dawn, looking out at the waves,
I see a skyline that fuses foam to horizon
as a singular scar--murky, but implicit.
At dusk, the waves come clean
in low tide in its come-as-you-are bond.

I am unbottled by this whisper, this thunder,
this buildup-and-release. This edginess.
This steadiness. This incurable pounding thirst.

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David Bankson lives in Texas. He was finalist in the 2017 Concīs Pith of Prose and Poem contest, and his poetry and microfiction can be found in concis, (b)oink, {isacoustic*}, Artifact Nouveau, Riggwelter Press, Five 2 One Magazine, and others.