Teapot Poems - October. battles won, lost and won againThursday Words)


October – battles won, lost and won again

1. earl gray, imperial

Autumn riches,

Leaves and gray and gold,

Sunny afternoons ending

Quick to shout you past

The end of summers past,

The beginning of years to come.


Pour the water in, Earl Gray again,

(Imperial this time. Bergamot.)


You entered by defeat,

Uninterested in the battles ongoing,

Heavy set to

Never be

Someone else’s soldier.

Beneath: that vanity –

A vanity of undoing

What others begin,

What might be consumed,

What’s often left to rust,

To disintegrate

Through winter’s gentle

Fooling freeze.


Breathe in the steam, scented:

A wealth to be had

By tasting.


You were wrong, of course:

We are always in someone else’s

War, people you’ve never seen

Yet carry within, a little -

Distant women and men

From centuries gone

Mixed within your blood, within your heart,

Latent in your mind, present

In your dreams,

Fearful of your love,

Hopeful for your defeat and some,

Only wanting to feel, still,

Despite their own dissolving.


Leave the sugar for someone else –

You want the scent tea-clean.


But you learned,

Late but you did,

And rolled an unending

Round of heavy-firing

Artillery onto their mean-made

Theatre, into their stale-made planes,

A multiple charge from places

Held too close to be seen

By anyone, even you,

And killed reluctant no more,

And killed again until a certain

Gusto – mild and only there,

On the edge but there –

Removed the last pause,

And turned you into

Someone else’s

Soldier, after all.


Take the warm cup,

(Imperial, bergamot,)

Savor the victory

Only for the length of a cup of tea.

For even war

Pauses.

But not for love –

The fairless war you lost

In remaining someone else’s

Soldier, in your own battlefield

Of fear: did you win anything at all?

Don’t answer.

Pour yourself another cup.

2. i didn’t mean to say goodbye

Nothing else,

No scene or word or clever phrase,

No dish – caviar or

Ceci beans – no cat or dog,

Or child or man,

Or dream in the night or the day,

Not even first snows, days at the beach, no moment

Has looked into me that way -

Your look, that way.


Eyes that wouldn’t waver in fire or flood;

Eyes of colors changing, blue, black, green;

Eyes unmoved, unmoving, unturning, that don’t shy,

Don’t hope but remove by seeing every dream and

Sadness hidden, I thought, inside

My undeclared-oh-so-loud fears

That so-well defined what I would not do, or will,

Deciding only in safer spaces understood.

I feel it still, missing, still.

And such a battle I fought

And won and lost and won

And didn’t know that such-a-war

Leaves ghosts behind that

Wander outside those safer lines,

That bounded all-in-the-meantime:

Safe, I said, though the word to wrap, get,

Must belong to the world of those ghosts, yet,

And yet.

Withhold larger dreams that lead to other places,

Withheld that tear, that laugh unforced,

Without those mornings and days and nights and looks

That come from places beneath your unwavered eyes

And mine, wavering still in every mirrored look, in every

Instagram, sigh,

Only a little – you can’t tell unless you let

The ghosts pause from their wander, free enough to say:

We do not haunt the other side of night or day,

For day -

And night - have no sides, are not at war,

And do not battle: such divides are made

And held by real things passed, that

More ghost-like than we, haunt love

Viciously, hurtfully, taunting

Hope into despair, the real to fantasy, divide

The night from itself and the day, invent the nigh

That sponsors conquest not of need but of goodbye,

Goodbye, goodbye.    

3. honey sum, in a teapot

I’ve become something else,

Though I can’t know what the else,

Or the thing, or the some,

Or exactly how long ago it was

When what I held, changed from

Any bitter else, to a certain sweeter sum -

The thing I hold, tea it should be,

The I that will be given,

Or even what has become

Or when that change occurred

Or if a change at all and not a recurred

Returning to a same form

Once held - both what’s within

And what I give: the return of a norm

To a something already there, an un-form,

Latent, that both what I am

And what I hold, tend, to want,

Tend toward, a tending uniform

That whatever I, I am, steps into

So easily - an I returned that I’ve been to,

That drips easily from my spout

Into the cup, darkly flavored

It was, I think, yet since I doubt

What I am, was, what is within, what is without,

I merely sense the sweetness new,

Battle-shy of warring with myself so merely

Let all I have drip freely away, a turnabout,

Yes, though a bit of a guess, if the tea

In the cup came from what I am, this me,

Alone or if what I’ve been is still what I’ve become 

Like the two of them, mixed again, she and he,

Much like before, only their flavor now honey-some,

A drop, a spoonful, has replaced the bittersome

Drink that used to fill their cups

From the top, squeezing love so clear

To the bottom, from me, here, to them: a honey-summed.