“The Cleaving at Devil’s Kitchen”


In Tasman’s throat where the dolerite yawns,
A cleft like a curse, where the sea’s teeth gnaw—
The Devil’s Kitchen, carved by wrath,
Where salt and sorrow share a path.


They say the cliffs remember screams,
Of seals and sharks in tangled dreams,
Of pirates’ bones and devils fed,
Of shrieks that echo from the dead.


The Southern Ocean stirs the ***,
A spectral broth in basalt caught,
Each wave a ladle, each gust a spell,
Each echo tolling like a bell.


Some say the cliffs were cleaved by kin,
Of lines once lost, now drawn within,
And here, where nature rends the stone,
The lore of rupture finds its throne.


A trench of memory, deep and wide,
Where ancestors and ghosts collide,
The wind recites a generation’s name,
Then hurls it back from whence it came.


So if you walk the cliffside track,
And feel the sea wind at your back,
Know this chasm holds more than foam—
It’s where the broken find their home.







.

Once a starling choir at dawn’s first light
Wove borrowed lore of multitudes in flight
Each mirrored trill a surge of many souls
Naming the air in shared, harmonious might

Now I stand alone—a hermit lyrebird
My lone lament is all that’s heard
No flocking wings to quell my cry
Or crack of broken twigs beneath my feat
Then solid silence seals my defeat

Yet in these plumes both communed rifts abide
I bear the lore of countless hearts allied
For one lone note that trembles to be free—
A joint chorus and a hermit’s melody

“A Recipe for Disaster”

Take one part overconfidence,
two parts sleepless ambition,
a pinch of untested theory,
and a generous pour of
“what could possibly go wrong.”

Fold in the wrong crowd
at the right time, stir with a bent spoon
under flickering light, and season with
whispers you shouldn’t have heard.

Bake at the heat of the moment until the
edges burn and the center collapses.

Serve immediately —
while it’s still smoking,
before anyone realises
you’ve set the table for chaos.




.

“avidly displaced avian”

Once I was starling voice at dawn,
A flock of chimed echoes on my tongue,
Wheezing whistles on choralled lawn,
Each verse a mimic so sweetly sung.

Now I’m a lyrebird lost in the brush,
Framing my solos in shadowed boughs,
With heart unfolding in trembling rush,
A lonesome lilting with hidden vows.

With cheeslets and flummox in my beak,
I sift the flock’s bright feathers from my core,
Icarus maps afresh a path unique,
A broken wing that yearns to soar.

There’s no rewind on a mimic’s mind,
No true home in borrowed refrains,
Yet in these feathers a quiet find,
A voice that’s raised beyond the chains.




.

"eye of the beholder"

Inside the iris, a soft glitch—
not failure, a doorbell. Dust
rings the bell of the pupil: enter,
bring whatever light you carry.
Every eye is a darkroom,
every blink a shutter fall.

You call my freckle a dead pixel;
I map it as a star that never learned
to quiet itself. Same speck, two skies.
Your lens likes the hard-edged truth,
mine drags its finger through the wet paint.
Neither of us is wrong. That’s the mercy.

We look at the chipped mug. You see fracture,
a hairline future of split mornings.
I see a riverbed, mineral and patient,
a place to wash the tongue of the day.
Some images refuse to choose between
wound and water. That’s where I drink.

When the frame tilts, colours misbehave:
violet stepping out of its lane, green
ghosting the edge of a leaf like rumour.
Chromatic aberration, the textbook says.
I call it the soul trying out new shoes,
refusing to walk heel-to-toe for anyone.

In your gaze, the city is all scaffolds,
angles knitting themselves into verdicts.
In mine, windows fog and write back.
Compression noise makes lace out of smoke,
JPEG artefacts blessing the brickwork
with reasons to be looked at twice.

Trust the blur, the image said,
and I do: not as surrender,
but as consent to the many versions.
Your blur is a fog I can swim. Mine is
a veil with fingerprints on it,
names smudged into revelation.

The child squints, invents a coastline
in the static of a late-night TV.
The elder polishes the cataract’s cathedral,
letting light arrive as it decides.
We inherit a thousand ways to see;
we choose which ghosts to feed.

Beauty is not a verdict but a verb,
rendering itself at different speeds.
In one eye, the face is chorus.
In another, it is a single bell.
We meet in the middle distance—
and call that distance human.

So, here: stand with me at the mirror
where mercy pixelates into ghost.
Let our grayscale longing lift its chin,
let nostalgia host our clumsy data,
and in the soft glitch near the iris,
find the world we’ve each been making.



.

"A Clash of Crowns"


David bled into battle with teeth on edge,
a lion howling hymns from broken stone.
Wine-slick from victory, still on the ledge—
he danced half-naked, fever in his bone.

He loved without measure, ruled with a flare,
his wrath was quick, his mercy slow to end.
The harp cut deep in temple air,
his God a storm, his sin a friend.

Solomon, silver-veiled in scented halls,
spoke slow as rivers carve a path through rock.
He listened. Weighed. Where passion falls,
he built with mind, not blood nor shock.

No shout escaped his ivory mouth,
his kingdom stitched by threads of calm.
While David stormed from north to south,
Solomon ruled with wisdom's balm.

David, wild with want, tore love apart—
Uriah’s blood still cries beneath the gate.
His psalms bore thunder from a bruisèd heart,
a soul at war with prophetic fate.

Solomon dreamed in columns, golden rimmed,
a poet too, though less of flame than light.
His wisdom bled the edges—soft, untrimmed—
he knew when not to fight.

David died with dust upon his brow,
a king who burned too bright to last.
His son looked on and wondered how
a crown sat fast could be so vast.













.

"And So We Plant"

When the road is dark and hollow,
we still plant, still we follow.
Lantern seeds in broken ground,
light will answer, when it's found.

Every truth we dare to share,
every hand that will not bear,
every kindness, small yet strong—
is the root that rights the wrong.

The future waits in quiet hands,
not in thrones or far‑off lands;
it grows in choices, fierce and bright,
that guard the flame and guard the light.

And so we plant, and so we rise,
under watchful, shadowed skies;
and so we plant, and so we stay,
till night has bowed to break of day.





.

"Untethered"

shelves of faces wheel past our names
we dissolve on blinking glass—
silent exits logged but never traced
by the circuits that once claimed us

our missteps vanish in tangled code,
no pardon queued;
the platform shrugs in empty bits,
leaving apologies half-typed and gone

perhaps erasure spills relief:
we unhook from worn-out errors,
drop the weight of old regrets
that bruised our shoulders for years

light on our feet, we step beyond the frame
into roads uncharted,
laughter stirred by fresh horizons—
ready at last for what comes next






.

Echoes  

In the attic’s haze,
I press a withered
leaf against pale glass—

a lullaby drifts
from a cracked music box,
uncertain and warm.

That first star
hangs low in autumn’s gold,
a distant pulse I once chased.

Snapshots: rustling acorns,
my mother’s soft hum,
childhood laughter echoing walls.



Across  

At midday,
sunlight fractures through
the café’s plate-glass wall—

a leaf pirouettes
along the pavement’s
cracked seams,
circling without end.

A passerby whistles
that same old lullaby
into the city’s iron hum.

Snapshots: neon sign flicker,
tile-mosaic floor,
a pixel-bright star
blinking in my phone.



Time  

One dawn to come,
I’ll cradle a seedling leaf
in a child’s small palm—

hum that same lullaby
until it settles like dew
in their dreams.

Above us,
a star remapped
in fresh constellations
glimmers with promise.

Snapshots: sapling rings,
bedtime lantern glow,
newborn laughter
scattering daylight.







.

A raw and redemptive,
a jagged lullaby wrapped
in grit and grace.

Confronting primal origins
of beauty, tracing how chaos,
trauma, and history's rough edges
are not just background noise,

but the very instruments
in life’s symphony.
Pain isn’t just a prelude to joy—
it’s part of the composition.

This poem, insistent:
what is beautiful isn’t
in spite of the brokenness,
but because of it.

That’s where its power hits hardest—
where rock and roll meets requiem,
and we stand, animal, mostly human,
made whole through noise and nerve.





.

“Sun Between Us”

We met in the hush between semesters,
your hoodie up against the fluorescent cold.
I was Endymion—sleepless in a dream
you hadn’t meant to share.

You, Selene with earbuds in,
moonlit glow from your cracked phone screen,
texted back too fast and never what I meant to hear.

Helios was your morning shift—
his gold-flecked smile at the café,
the one who always got your order right,
who kissed with daylight precision.

I asked if you ever missed the dark.
You said you liked it
but needed the sun to feel real again.

Still, you’d find me
between the blinds at midnight,
pulling me in with your gravity
then vanishing at dawn.

I wrote you poems you left unread.
You sent me playlists I played to sleep.
We loved in pieces—
like sky through city scaffolding.

And though I knew
I’d lose you to a brighter orbit,
I stayed still— a moonshadow boy
waiting to glow again in your reflected fire.

"Echoes Between the Hours"

The day unwinds its tethered threads,
pulling time through quiet hands.
Each moment lingers just long enough
to whisper its name before fading.

Shadows stretch along the walls,
soft reminders of where light once stood,
and the air streams—low, expectant—
its breath heavy with something unsaid.

The soil stirs, not from footsteps,
but from the weight of pause.
Roots stretch deeper, seeking
waters below the earth's silence.

A single crow arcs across the sky,
its call dissolving into distance,
its flight a question unanswered—
a curve that never quite resolves.

And in this fleeting space,
where hours turn and fold like tides,
what remains are the hands reaching outward,
what lingers is the ache— waiting, still.



.

They tell us to hold steady,
keep the ground firm,
but the ground itself shifts—
silent adjustments beneath
the weight of old decisions.

Change rolls in like the tide,
deliberate, insistent;
some brace against the swell, while
others dive into its forward pull.

Neither stillness nor
movement alone can hold us—
we are in the in-between,
where each choice sends
ripples across the surface
and every hesitation
writes itself into tomorrow.

The street moves beneath us,
shifting without command,
we say we walk freely,
but the road has already been carved.
Someone chose its shape
long before our steps left their weight.

A voice rises, measured, cautious,
another shouts before listening—
the argument swells, ripples outward,
each side gripping their claim
like dry earth clinging to rain.

What if the road is neither theirs nor ours?
What if we pull too hard,
and the thread between us frays?

This world tilts in fractions,
some lean into history,
others push toward tomorrow—
the balance flickers,
a candle resisting the wind.

*** plants


🪴
hapless indulgences
animated silences
            quiver
🪴
hankered imagination
ambiguous synapses
quibble            
🪴
each way you turn
each thought you churn
new lessons learn
🪴
potted flower plants
line your driveway
mind you don't crush them
🪴














© Frederick Kesner