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Paul Sohar

The March Featured Poet is Paul Sohar

Please feel free to email Paul at: sohar.paul@gmail.com

pual

A TOUR WITHOUT VIRGIL

a noisy, sweat-beaten tour
of faraway Quiet House,
taken with someone
who’s someone else;

we only think words are
what shape our lips
and pictures we see
put a glow in our eyes,

but words here flee fast
like stock quotes on TV,
because the lips you watch
belong to someone else;

the eyes that watch you
are busy painting pictures
for a gallery of private parts,
naked hearts and hair in pain,

and soon the pictures overlap
in waves, the garden hangs on
the wall and the wall walks
behind you, your shadow holds it

for an umbrella, and inside it
locked up is your private 10th
Circle; in the din of brittle ghosts
crashing into solid make-believe

your lips too go crazy and let
the word madhouse slip out,
but the denizens can only hear
themselves, if they listen at all.

And what if your tour guide can't find
the way out and says there's no outside
it had all collapsed into this place
condensed into this black hole universe

NIGHT IN THE OLD TOWN

A night in the old town quickly blooms
into a day-old beard and its mouth
into a chuckle when the night
tries to answer a worried question,

a deep and slow chuckle like an empty
barrel rolling down on the stone steps
of a vaulted cellar where the old
town is hidden from daylight view,

that’s why the night is forever here,
in the dim depths night-colored walls
hold sightless windows whose light
was put out by bleeding thumbs;

to get lost here is to become a witch
bereft of magic, because this jilted
bride of the night bears a bastard
child who refuses to be born,

and she wanders forever lost inside
the churning chuckle of the cellar,
it’s there that she has to find a word, combing
the beard of the night with her naked fingers.

THE VAMPIRE QUEEN

The darkness is her sultry nightdress,
her crown a glowing scream,
she rules the night with a pale blue fist
embracing your bare throat.

With the long sharp nails of her scream
she rips off your mantle and your shirt
and sends lascivious beads of sweat
chasing one another on your chest,

but you don’t know you’re naked
until she impales your helpless aorta
on her fangs, letting life squirt out of you
in the drunken spasms of immortality.

Paul Sohar has been writing and publishing in every genre, including seventeen volumes of translations. His own poetry: “Homing Poems” (Iniquity Press, 2006), “The Wayward Orchard” (Wordrunner Press Prize winner, 2011) and now “In Sun’s Shadow” (Ragged Sky Press, 2020). Prose works: “True Tales of a Fictitious Spy” (Inequity Press, 2019) and a collection of one-act plays from One Act Depot (Saskatoon, Canada, 2014). Magazine publications: Agni, The Horror Zine, Rattle, Rhino, Seneca Review, and others.