The World Of Dying Love

The long finger of blackness is holding its head for us.
Dingy bue is its shade,
comatose in movement, hazarding a slow swiftness,
it inches toward us.

Relief comes fitfully.
The dragon alone, an upstart
crowned with drunken spending,
has horse colours as ribbons with his eyes.
It cradles a breast of trembling bone.

Misercorde, Misercorde.
I dreamt I saw skeletal slackness
dangling;
the poverty of touch is a casket
with love in rumbling sockets.
Craziness is the passion of the engulfed,
dribbling pleasantly.

Presentations extended beyond and into themselves.
Slackness schemes with invalid awareness
in a brothel of hope.

Paul Cameron Brown

Paul Cameron Brown is a Canadian poet known for his extensive work in both poetry and art criticism. Born in western Canada, Brown has had a prolific career in writing, often intertwining themes of human experience and nature. His works have been showcased in various literary magazines and anthologies. With a style that is both reflective and evocative, he has gained recognition not only in Canada but also internationally.

Paul Cameron Brown

Investiture

Paul Cameron Brown, Simple Poetry

Pelée

Paul Cameron Brown, Simple Poetry

For Tom Thomson

Paul Cameron Brown, Simple Poetry

Fence Line

Paul Cameron Brown, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

At The Red Throat

    In youth, Death was
    a puny boy possessing but
    wormy hands & fleshless fingers
    as in Witch Hazel
    or Scrooge's Future Ghost
    - that insipid Evil One
    Hansel so easily outwitted
    in a gingerbread house.

    Time brought increased notoriety.
    Saucy times with a soupçon of respect
    for the artful dodger.
    Givens change, an armful of
    orange lilies, limp & loathsome,
    on a tombstone door
    before trumpets of rain.

    Graven images. Lifeless stone.
    Death became stone.
    Stone empty. The maggot emptiness
    burrowing into chiselled easel and
    the stone-cutter's savage magic.
    Just a bitty stone
    to herald a passing.

    Night-jars.
    Old straw-...

Paul Cameron Brown

Turncoat

    Sitting in the spendthrift dark
    lilting pennies away,
    deciphering fate ... .
    The bed, a warm reach past
    the pillow
    like personal mortality in the
    incest breath of life.

    Warm stuff of dreams -
    the calender with its days mesh &
    march like soldiers
    dearly departed
    (cindered and bludgeoned)
    or the old sea-faring chest
    where all men are sailors
    past light's corner.

    Sturdy trudgeons,
    clock bursts thru the room
    mindful of time and aching,
    decaying things.

    Hallow's Eve in movements of the curtains -
    a remembered Rembrandt,
    self-portrait of the old man
    standing alone in a clammy room,
    idling the seconds, with drab

Paul Cameron Brown

Swords And Roses

    Some lives have themes.
    Goldfish that stubbornly die;
    compatability only with distant lovers
    - flowers (but no sweet-breads)
    that wilt to the touch.

    Waiting. Charcoal-grey cat
    agreeably on a green linoleum table
    with light basking in....
    a tad playful,
    paws up,
    (classic boxer stance)
    but no one notices.
    Others oblique in their transparency,
    are unmindful of even the empty closet
    and greeting cards that smile hello.

    In the dark
    this room shimmers below
    life-raft status;
    chairs are buoys
    bobbing under waves
    of congealed fright.
    In the morning
    the first pigeons
    rifle over rooftops,
    mad flutterings like your eyes

Paul Cameron Brown

Cold Passion

        Some dead undid undid their bushy jaws,
        and bags of blood let out their flies.. .
                    ? Dylan Thomas

    The land is barren
    wears straw wisps
    as an unkempt man
    might razor stubble.

    The land is dry, a faded yellow
    in its barrenness.
    A sky broods from afar,
    a stalactite sun accounts merely a jot
    above that thin road into despair.

    Grass lies everywhere dead,
    faded tongues above an
    earth afflicted with scleroderma,
    deadliest of skin disturbances,
    forerunner of deeper pestilence.

    An erasing wind whips the fields
    further into bereavement;
    turns tiny bits of chaff to pursue themselves
    in a mad St. Vitus dance
    of cold...

Paul Cameron Brown

Offerings (A Movement In Four Parts)

The night is folly without the moon,
trees blank space against a frontal sky
where lattice work from a bled fish reveals
skeletal markings will not administer
the red jack of hearts to a mistress sea.

Most fickle, the ways of a cockroach
(I don't recommend them) to offerings
of white linen, cold squares atop
a stone diamonded floor.

Palaver shacks drone in ghostly light
communicating some message about eel runs
up the black river, the equivalent brush
of tombstones against dark nightsoil.

Tiny bars open as cubicles.
proverbial flashes of the coming evening,
haciendas to count every blessing.

The road to such places
snarls a dusty pleasure
and will heat thin blood
to boil in the daylight hours.

II

Swe...

Paul Cameron Brown

Knight-Errant

    A well-thumbed book
    like a well-thumbed life,
    "whilst you walk this earth"
    yet nothing is "afoot",
    as so many small boys
    throwing stones through the funeral parlour
    glass door.

    A cake-walk? Being alive and interacting
    across the face of the multitude is terrible
    algebra running into unfathomable sums.
    "Doing your sums", my grade school teacher
    used to say and I still am. Whippersnapper,
    learning lessons in a strange stamina
    sort of way.

    One of the multitude died last night &
    is now "resting" in a large, Victorian parlour.
    Even the walls grimace. I went by, caught a peek
    at the assemblage chasing thru rain to see his
    last hurrah. Look, "parlour" can be deadly s...

Paul Cameron Brown