Three Poems by Walter Ruhlmann

Three Times Thirteen – Black Balloon, The Kills

Quarter pounders,
a full plate of coleslaw, soda
chips, crisps, chocolate coated biscuits,
snickers, Mars bars, sauces, saucers of gluttony.
The food you eat is not the one that will sustain the corpse you bear.

The grey veil covering the sky is your worst enemies in the mourning.
He was a chef, an artist, gardener, she wrote it.
Did he believe in God more than he
ever believed in you? You
will never know it.




Four Times Thirteen – Here Comes the Rain Again, Eurythmics

Spring is late and you wait for the blooming trees and the carnival flowers
sowed in the borders and the beds, but the pouring rain washed them away.

The light dark prince sang about the snow that sometimes falls in April,
it fell as a love symbol earlier, just to cover slightly the side-walks
and the roads,
the lawn in the garden, the stains on your skin and the many secrets
kept inside your head.

That rain is like those tears, you held them back as much as you could,
especially when the sixteenth window appeared before your eyes and you
dared passing through it despite your former spite and scorn for what it
meant.

Seven windows prior to it, the ninth showed up.
That one is like your end, for what it also meant for you.
The Christian name you bear since you were born, the many times it
brought you down, before you worked it into the most charismatic part of
your narcissist self.

Twelve panes following the latter, reminiscences of this day you learnt
so many troubling secrets, sour to you, encumbering words that had not
been spat yet. All those hidden snakes like so many epiphanies for the
letters and photographs and the unsaid you thought your clan was
sheltered from.

Still Spring is late and the black blanket above your head keeps making
that landscape you now dread the tomb in which some parts of your father
will rest for ever.




Five Times Thirteen – Desire, Anna Calvi

Maybe the sound of the keyboard tapping in my head had an effect which
was like a block of rock on a rail road. Derailing totally, loosing it
all and feeling charming invincible, almighty, fit and able.

Maybe I'm wrong but I believe no one can fight feelings coming from
one's depths, from the moistest part of one self, the bottom of the
well, some signs of well being being eradicated, slashed, erased by
desire – a whore of a pressure that pushes against you and won't leave
you at rest.

Maybe his smile, maybe his hair, maybe the will to go back to my late
teens and forget about the leprechaun telling me what to do, where to
go, why exist, when to eat..........

Maybe that frustrated desire of a son of mine, of a younger brother who
have never existed and will never turn up for the sake of them, for the
safety of myself.

Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing. Walter is the author of several poetry chapbooks and e-books in French and English and has published poetry, fiction and non-fiction in various printed and electronic publications world wide. Nominated for Pushcart Prize once. His latest collection Maore was published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2013.        His blog http://http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr/