Tapestry: Circling the Square
Poetry Written By: Thomas A. E. Hesketh
About the Author: THOMAS A. E. HESKETH was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on a cusp, in the last half of the last century of the last millennium; none of it his fault. He enjoys poetry because of its verbal range, except the caesuras, and chess because it is non-verbal, except the regicide.
[A note first, before beginning, to set the stage without a play, for this will be (our) secret, if at all, because so much depends on frankness, being candid in a hamlet, if not Teutonic or overly Latin, Chinese, as if one (or two) could shed the mantel of the past, our stars, our names, our ethnicity, DNA, or ourselves, meaning the singular multidimensional bi-self, inner and outer, overtly mask encrusted spirits of tangential typology; inner Tibetan demons or Western psychological quirks, favorite emerging from exotic, at times self-absorbed and after hours, expansive as our last exhale; gods of our own design, bound to our blindness, as Homer to the cosmos; mute as Easter Island heads, driven by tides and currents drawn by many moons, each cycle, memory of the gyre of time incising its scars on fresh meat, bloodless, but for the tears welling inside, whelping souls crying to justice deaf to rumors she cannot see; lost light of suns exhausted amid the universe of lost suns, kindred leaves of grass decayed under ice sheets, now released as permafrost melts, elements set loose, and condemned for mere being, innocent of intent, barred from the garden; measured by metrics splayed from kingly cubits; colored by rainbows left by tornadoes; iced by full on ages; numb to the Waste Land of prophets and poets; divided by Da Vinci’s dividers; touched, if at all, one finger forward from Michelangelo’s palette; no metaphor spared in the quest for more, more purpose; rejecting myth in triumph of reason; affirming false facts in true belief; emerging no less quixotic than a windmill’s turn; searching again for truth on the floodplain of centuries left by war; random as a word in the dictionary to a dog gnawing on a graveyard bone; ordered, in turn, by Samuel Johnson’s pet mark: the semicolon; as if progress came frmrdngmrksbtwnwrds/lnbrks in their turn, too; so, thought bubbles burst as aneurisms, undeserved, coincidental, often (our) deadly universe dissolved to dimness and dried to dust, dark as a womb; with only the desperation of (our) vastness of need; save me from myself, the cry is heard, meaning: you save me, I cannot help me; who, what, when, where, why, and (w)how – for it too, was a “w” word, etymologically speaking; xenophobic rejection of all other ones and objects prohibits as insane a straightforward call for aid; yell not into that good darkness; leave the niceties of tomorrow to another life; add one to one, but zero is the land of today; with that preface, I address this missive; but, can you be trusted, at last?]
Visual Art Piece By: Chiara Di Martino
About the Artist: Chiara Di Martino was born on January 17 1987 in Rome, Italy, where she spent also most of her life. Her passions have always been Poetry, Literature and Art. Growing up, she put her dream to be an artist or writer on hold, choosing instead to become a Psychologist. In 2015, she moved to San Francisco to study English. Along the way, she decided to open herself-up to follow her old dream, joining City College’s Design Department.
Forum Literary Magazine 