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Bernard Chan Poem
Each day dawns laden with secrets.
The morning dews are crystal balls,
each holding a secret trailer of
a fragment of day.
The birds, chirping incessantly,
gossip among themselves about the
delightful things you’ll find at
the weekend market.
In the crevice between the sun's
virginal light and last night's shadows,
an old friend waits for a
scheduled chance encounter,
bearing a gift of forgotten memories.
Fresh brew drips into the carafe of your
old coffee machine, tapping out
a Morse code of the new
thoughts and feelings that will percolate
into your brain in the hours to come.
And the curtains billow with echoes
of the laughs to be laughed.
The day is waiting to confess
its plans for you.
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2017
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Bernard Chan Poem
The photos stopped
when you were 10 or 11.
Around that time, you started refusing to
have your pictures taken.
A few candid shots are all I’ve
managed since then.
In them, the look on your face is growing inward,
as a cocoon slowly encloses you in a
translucent mystery,
turning you into a dark silhouette
as you start to construct your
own parallel universe,
in a tug of war with a thousand things
you are just starting to learn the meaning of,
morphing into what the world will know,
what I will, with any luck,
recognize only with squinted eyes
when the cocoon reopens.
For now, I can’t see you.
All I can do is wait.
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2018
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Bernard Chan Poem
Through the water they glide,
an immense mosaic of millions of silvery fish
on their migratory run,
obeying a call immemorial,
a mystery of aquatic unison
choreographed by instinct primordial.
They billow,
a grainy smoke cloud
in which light drowns.
A ruffling,
like an enormous bedspread
being shaken out in slow motion
by an invisible giant.
They turn into a mesh,
glistening, spinning around, tightening,
a net woven with fish for catching water.
They stretch,
a submerged galaxy
unspooling into a braided rope
in a blue universe.
They bank,
and silver ripples across the shoal,
a wheat field touched by a soaking breeze.
Then they move on,
flashing by,
like underwater rain falling sideways.
Before the predators get to them,
my eyes are feasting.
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2017
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Bernard Chan Poem
Like ballerinas airdropped from on high,
Snowflakes pirouette to damask the air,
Tutued geometries dimpling the sky,
Veil our stinging eyes with arabesque fair.
Downy fields we walk, where aureoles tide,
And white breaths upon your face softly flare.
As my swooning kiss to your frail smile dips,
A wayward prism alights upon your lips.
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2018
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Bernard Chan Poem
Quartet of phone wires,
Tall birds grouped higher or low,
Mozart or Chopin?
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2019
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Bernard Chan Poem
In the end, we were there-not there,
two present absentees
sharing an apartment vacated by a relationship
and the worst kind of loneliness -- feeling solitary next to someone --
partners in the crime of abetting mutual misery,
though neither of us can really be linked
to the crime scene, can we?
We’ve got each other’s alibi.
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2019
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Bernard Chan Poem
The Eiffel Tower gives up its power,
When seductive Paris we travel through.
Mayfair is oft-huddled in a shower,
Tahitian lagoons lose their dreamy blue.
Little awe Greek islands inspire in me,
The romance of the Taj Mahal does pall,
An aurora’s magic I’m slow to see,
Each place we go I feel I’ve seen it all.
The eye no Saharan sky can excite,
Few vistas thrill on a hot air balloon.
The Arctic presents no breathtaking sight,
In Rio I’m hardly over the moon.
The loveliest scene pales next to your face,
And no glimpse of paradise can amaze.
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2017
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Bernard Chan Poem
The evening
is soigné in outfits of rumpled elegance
at the tables and on the bar stools,
resplendent with a necklace
of glistening notes from the piano
in the corner,
rouged by the blushes imprisoned
in our wine glasses.
Let's stay for a while then,
until the blushes have flown to our cheeks,
the patrons are back on the streets
or between the sheets,
the pianist has played the last song,
and the night is done,
or waiting to begin,
its shyness shed.
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2018
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Bernard Chan Poem
My mind
is the Internet.
Yours,
Google.
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2018
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Bernard Chan Poem
His hand is strafing the castellation on his trumpet, the valves moving up down up down like deranged pistons under the random machine gun fire of his fingers. Each note is a projectile that concusses the air, chases the one before it, nudges it from behind, bleeds into it, and is itself tailgated by the next one, all the way down the line in unrelenting succession, until all the distinct notes fuse, compacted into a single, furious, careening soundscape that leaves the ear always half a beat behind, struggling to catch up, out of breath, high on an overdose of heard adrenalin.
sounds supersonic
air graffitied with contrails of soaring notes
solo flight
Still they come, the notes, jostling and pouring from the bell of the trumpet glinting in the small cone of spotlight, the man’s puffed cheeks like a magician’s hat from which all kinds of disparate, crazy things - playing cards, rabbits, ribbons, doves - appear and instantly cohere into a hyperventilating sonic dream. You’re caught off guard by every note: you never heard it coming, then you hear it, and you’re snatched by it and all its brethren, and carried into the kinetic night.
ears beguiled
vibrations collide, collude, segue
harmony
Copyright © Bernard Chan | Year Posted 2017
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