Poems - JP Melville

Blood On The Snow August 2019 jp More here on our love and our war… and duel Untruths… truth’s shadows crossing all our words in colours we only dream we understand… So…. On a soft summer’s day… We rise with impressions, because either you or I… Have no way to listen or ever to know how… Detail, like a flower smelled, a bee seen, a cut on our skin with razor pain… Maybe might be how or even why I love you… Let me go from how this world was made for being here Let me fly to where we all will go All the strangers we have met We see in their eyes the sparkle glean and suffering Where time has no place Here Or In my your heart To listen how We dream beyond this pool Whether rich or poor or soul… Shadows in our minds cross these forests skies whose air we breathe Can we listen or do we Neither rich nor poor nor knowing how Because no measure in the swirling haze of morning’s dawn From burning black blue to...

The Birth of Language jp melville There are languages without words living inside each of us. They have some names like hope, dream, wish, desire. Though if the words were born one day we would not recognize them because words we do not speak are languages we do not know. If we hear them, we fear them and we are likely to take up arms against them burning the prophets who sound so strange hacking down those others we call savages or barbarians. Still, funny that for all our efforts against the voices we hear but do not understand languages we have never known come into this world growing up among us like children who surprise us with the simple things they say.

Alberta Hull Ottawa 1994 - 2019 jp melville Hull, across the river from Ottawa, between the Alexandria bridge and the Champlain bridge, sitting by the river, on a rock, on the river bank. An old man walks past me, his eyes searching the sand and gravel and then looking off to the distance downstream, he kicks a can and ambles on. My entire time here has been spent leaving; I will miss nothing. In fact, since I left Thailand, Benin, Kosovo… so many places, that's been years and years an eternity it seems, much of everything has been, or has felt, a distance removed. I watch the busses and cars roll along over the bridges and on the road on the far bank and I see toys filled with animated manikins. I see the tall apartment buildings and I know that inside them people laugh and weep and worry and watch television and apply cosmetics. I am unmoved. A seagull takes off from the wharf and f...

Swimming in a Day or Two october 2002 jp melville Heat of the night inside this house, The walls and ceiling exuding the temper of the day’s sun, Which beat on the concrete roof for twelve grueling hours, And I move slowly, Padding across the tiled floors, Drifting in a narcotic sweat, Desperate for something, Bed, Oblivion. My daughter, Olivia, not three years old, Perspired from her brow and back, Spread arms wide on her mattress, Sunk heavily far away in her first hour of sleep. Her brother, Ben, likewise, I removed his shirt, A whisper of relief from his skin, Air brushed across his moist back. Over by the wall I reached and clicked the switch Of the ceiling fan from zero to low speed And watched it ache into rotation, The blades lethargic, unwilling, Forced semblance of movement, Then I closed the contact for the air conditioner, Dull roar groaning under compression, Cooled...