Two Poems of Unrequited Love and Loss

Two longer poems for you now, both on the theme of unrequited love and loss - but all with an element of Grievous Angel dark fantasy and sci-fi unease! We start with Freak Seeker by Joe Nazare and follow on with Loss by Ken Poyner...


Freak Seeker
by Joe Nazare

MrDark&Handsome didn’t abandon the chat room
When she confessed to her congenital defects,
Didn’t erase his own screen name
When she mentioned her extensive tattooing.
He actually wanted to see the skin scripture,
That insidious handiwork of her fanatical parents.
After cajoling a photo from her
He assured her he treasured her difference,
Promised to steal her away from her present situation.

So daring to hope there could be love
Even for the unseemly likes of her,
She arranged to meet the stranger in the flesh.
The rest is ignominious history.
All her lonely life she’d avoided bars
Yet ironically ended up encaged.
After the ill-fated assignation
He never showed her the world, but rather her to it,
Putting her misery on display for the price of a ticket.


* Joe Nazare has sold fiction/poetry/nonfiction into such markets as Damnation Books, Pseudopod, Shroud, Lovecraft eZine, Star*Line, and Butcher Knives & Body Counts: Essays on the Formula, Frights, & Fun of the Slasher Film.



Loss
by Ken Poyner

I mourn in the only way I suspect that I can:
An imitation of what I have seen before;
Sensory array low; claws loose; the base
Rolling about in a mathematically designed
Course which, to anyone without my processor capacity,
Appears random. I do not do this
Because it is my embedded response.
I do not do this because it comforts
The customers. We two workmates
Side by side were as close
To hebot and shebot as any pair
Of factory tooled service appliances can be.
My expectations of him still linger.
I sense the remains of his precision,
And I find myself embracing operating norms
That are only half my own, and still half his.
It will take countless cycles to adjust
To even the smallest idiosyncrasies burned
Into the unaccustomed firmware of another.
Loss lies in the unclocked timing of shared utilities.
In later models, this will be a sales feature.


* Norfolk (VA)-based Ken Poyner says "Every writer has a feel-good length, and for me a lot of my poetry edges around 40 lines. In fiction, I tend to expire at the 1700 word mark. But I do occasionally have shorter work. I've done mainstream poetry from 1974 through to now, and even early on did what some would call science fiction poetry. But I did start trying to develop a rocket-fixing theory for it, or a specific approach that I wanted to front for. Of late, my SF poetry has been in Analog, Asimov’s, Star*Line, Abyss and Apex, and several other places, including mostly mainstream magazines/sites such as Menacing Hedge and The Adirondack Review". His most recent collection is Constant Animals, 42 unruly fictions available in paperback and ebook via www.kpoyner.com & www.amazon.com