poems by Bridget Richardson

Cupide and his lyste of arwes or The path to my degree

My first love forgot to love me back so I buried him and found another.

My second love imagined he were a Russian spy – he faked his death. In good fashion, I pretended to mourn and moved on before he could resurface.

I lost myself in a book or two – not even a good read and espionage would find me there.

Hawthorne – the fraud – chose death over longevity and forgot to haunt me. How perfectly unromantic.

William was an obsession and threatened to bind my next 40 years at least. Conscience bid me move forward – I left him in 1386 plagued by sorwe of losing another – and frolicked by the river with my swete fo on Seynt Valentynes day in the dede of October.

But my white hart has not been killed and I dream anoon –

If Degaré’s legs can make the body speke like Jenkins, this game will take flite ageyn.

 

***

Unignited

Desire courted Inspiration &
together they faded into irises,
gold, brown, &
green like the rows
of forsaken oak
in her vision of trees;
bowed deep against
wind currents,
their trunks shallow
wounds in gravel.
He suggested she stop
& she did.
A cool gaze left wrapped
in icy ashes, her eyes fall
on another chess match
with Passion she lacks
the strategy to win.

 

***

 Jellyfish and Paper
               for Josie

Watch insanity
develop silently, twisting in
on itself – a jellyfish
sputtering outwards
in hiccups
of halted breath.

why?

Can a jellyfish rein in the undertoe brought on by its own thoughts?
She could not reach out and harness it because
how could she catch the current?
How could she stop the wind, the rain, the waves, the ice cold
bitterness of eternal frost caught
in a world that wished it were
warm?

Search a forbidden voice –
paper and ink. Watch darkness flow –
distress in knowing no
matter how much is written, lungs fill
with life’s poison
at every exhale
the page has nothing
better to do than sit idly by while ink stings across it.

Each moon-rise – dreams become terrors
and darkness is not solitude.
Doomed characters cast reflections in a midnight pool of burnt salt
and it resembles her,
who forgot to write the hero.
She couldn’t scream for help
when her words were gone.
Surrounded in an embrace of twisting tentacles,
she was left to drift.

Watch the bubble escape
a book torn from her grasp.

 

 

Bridget Richardson is an extremely stressed ENMU graduate student working too many jobs.  Her hobbies include picking up strays and hosting scheduled crying sessions with herself on the weekend.