Float

Cannot perceive
my own breathing
nor the rhythm it accompanies,
the pump
and the pumping
of liquid life
that goes on
no thanks to me.
My soul
has piggybacked
on this
entity
of impermanence,
and proves its own
alien motive:
to ride the raft
out to open waters
with hope
of thumbing-on beyond,
when this soul's housing
becomes
ghostless.

Lifted Footfall

(To W. G. Sebald)

To gain
some kind of solace
from like-minded
loners —
that is what literature
is to me.
I read
that the professor
died on an east anglian
roadway
(probably under rain)
last december
when I was completing
austerlitz
like an e-mail
from
post-war darkness.
He walked at times
in my own night
those difficulties of his
those event-lines
now truly part
of all time
timeless
infinitely
ended.
Remote
north sea air
chilled a bit today
just a bit more alone.
Overexposed
but pitch-black stubborn
my siege walks.

^

Biography

L. Ward Abel is a life long poet, spoken-word performer and composer of music who lives in rural Georgia, USA, between the wilderness and distant jet roar. His poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in White Pelican Review, OpenWide (UK), Poetry Super Highway (as a featured poet of the week), Ink Pot, Verse Libre Quarterly, Muse Apprentice Guild, Versal (Netherlands), Dead Drunk Dublin (Ireland), Poems Niederngasse (Switzerland), and SubtleTea, among many other publications. His chapbook, Peach Box and Verge, has just been published by Little Poem Press.