Two poems by Ray Malone

Borrowed Form 1

Today she’s dead, or was that yesterday. A deep sigh. To signify sadness, or the lack of it. Your hand

trying to find where your heart is. Hope is. The place she was, no longer a place. Where the cloud was, the blue. Nothing

to do. No sign of a source for the stillness, the deep silence of the trees, the sudden absence of traffic. In the street. Your feet

feel the floor. Some way beneath, the earth. Easing towards you.

Borrowed Form 24

You say you no longer remember the place, the lip where you last stared down. To where the sea raged. Wrong. It merely

shuffled in. Then ebbed again. The swell, then wait. The suck. There where the grains let themselves be grains. Be ground. Be

rubbed to nothings. But the sound. The subtle edge of immensity. Drawing in, and again. Away. The sudden, slow, gathering in

of breath. Resting there. The rage remembered. Wrong. The silent stare.

Ray Malone is an Irish writer and artist living in Berlin, Germany, working on a series of projects exploring the lyric potential of minimal forms based on various musical and/or literary modes/models.