By: Benjamin Rose
Chōka
Thinning gold hair
And ramshackle verses scrawled
Half-finished across
The pages of old notebooks
Conspire to disguise
Your noble spirit; although
The Latin tattoos
Are a bit grandiloquent,
And the deathless coil
Of old ho athanatos
Impresses no one
Save old theologians with
Coffeeshop habits
Of wrenching the young stranger’s
Arm in an effort
To find in the breathing mark
And the omicron
Kinder days marked by the Greek
Alphabet than those
Which confront us now. Something,
A something I know
Not what, was sown in the
Sinews of your brain
So fire would dance at the flick
Of your fingertips
And sear half-scriptures stolen
From the divine
On the slab of college-ruled
Prophecies if you
Chose...and for this fact alone
We endure one another.
Envoys
This insecure man,
Meditating on himself
In the mirror, looks
Back at me through leaden eyes
Cold and lifeless with disdain.
But clenched in his jaw,
A malignant smirk buries
Itself from scrutiny.
It is a sickening thing
To confront one’s own Shadow.
I exhaust myself.
What waste, what narcissism,
To drown in a sea
Of dirty glass, questioning
My worth, obscure as I am.
Benjamin Rose is a poet born and raised in the D.C. area. His work has appeared in The Dillydoun Review, The Button Eye Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Last Resort Literary Review. He studies creative writing, Arabic, and Islamic civilization at The Catholic University Of America.