Phillip Ellis Poems

Will you forget that flesh in which I’ve dwelt,
which was my poem, although it was born before?
Will you forget this flesh, this head, this pelt,
this frame of bone: this form I so deplore?
...

Memories I have, bell-birds
ringing in the heat of the day
and a secluded spot, words
unable to drive away
...

Ten years gone, an ache remains,
a photo pinned upon the wall
barely leached by ten years of rains.
...

No joy shapes you,
no joy buoys you over seas
and waves, that seek to seize
and bear away, over disease
...

On a dreamlike summer evening,
I searched for the tablet
on which I'd write
my name, reaching
...

The waves are lovely and luminous tonight,
and the setting moons sink below
the sea's horizon. It seems, somehow,
strange that far and foreign I was born,
...

No yachts, here, passing,
a hundred, more or less,
or like a golden undertow,
the suckle of the ocean wave
...

Our gazes bumped in the street,
she looked at me the same way
a kookaburra once did,
black snake dangling, deciding
...

The evening that you left
on the northbound train, it rained
so hard that the ground shimmered
with the reflected streetlights.
...

Water lilies line the pool
wherein the still waters, jewel-like, lie,
and herons stand, watching pass
this nymph before they decide to fly
...