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Past Life Invisible
Poetry and Verse
Daniel Haskin is known as an artist, musician, composer, writer and poet. His second book of poetry and verse, “Past Life Invisible”, is an anthology of poems that explore the human condition. In this anthology Haskin writes about death, loss and longing, rediscovery, and love in the deepest sense.
From the Book
Ghosts
I
Poems are like ghosts
Drifting in the wind of night
Opening their mouths
Like a narrow lipless wound
All blessed and dark infectious
I swallow them whole
Giving them a source
A hand giving life
Illuminated
As the ringing bell
In my heart and in my hands
Offers warm refuge
II
A poem is a psalm
Peeling back god with its nails
An opiate dream
That casts its music
In my head and in my ears
It is like a flute
Piercing down my throat
Tearing the words from my soul
Dreaming of my death
Until I have lost
The incantation of its
Ideology
III
Poems have a deity
A human head that chatters
Biting each cruel vowel
Until it screams out
Within its own agony
A burning shameless
Disembodied light
That blinds my eyes slowly
Caressing my mouth
And testing my love
My pen bleeds for this
But my hand falters to write
This poetic line
Cancer Season
I am misspoken for
White as the hollow moon
And black as the morning birds
That rise and fall and spook
These false colors of autumn
My strange quiet season
Swarms my still deaf ears
Whispering it’s slow low words
Of love, love I can never requite
Scooped from winter’s marrow
My wounded story
Of bones and lilting fingers
Is my last evening of afterglow
Swimming through the hawthorns
That now die in dirt and stone
This will rest and pass out of me
Like a sick darkened mirror
That I hoist through this world
To the next, to my love
My insufficient angel
And the story that remains
Is the trembling hand that writes
And the tapping of the lapping river
As I ferry from here to there
Riding the infant moon
Like a plaything
Guitarist
In my dream
I’m gripping the neck
Tightly as a suicide would
Digging my dead hands and
Fingers, reopening the fissures
blood born from suspicious sex
The shape of it tells the story of
the women who loved the boy
Who traveled ravenously and
Naked, running the ragged
Rosewood and steely wire
With all the power of
A burning witch
That incinerates
His fingers follow
The patterns laid bare
These are the lines of a girl
Blue noxious in her lovemaking
Vengeance withheld in her sticky
Wrists, the curve of the thing long
And handsome if not for the roses
Of bruises and their blood flowing
Like a tumor spreading, reopening
Her hands in his hands praying
The dreams that have now torn
His mouth open, the songs of
Love and the crooked smile
Of the man who held her
Tight and artful and
Now infinite