**by Anthony Seliquini
This booklet gathers six poems from the years immediately after I returned from the U.S. Army and began trying to understand the man I’d become.
They are not arranged as a diary, exactly, but as a sequence of afterimages: love remembered, hope renewed, vision distorted, power judged, and the self forced to ask what part it had played in its own unfolding. I was still 21 years old when I arrived in Des Moines, Iowa.
Some of these poems are romantic. Some are philosophical. One is political. One is a winter-night self-audit. Together, they mark a period when I was still young, newly returned, emotionally overfull, and already trying to turn memory, grief, longing, and moral pressure into language.**
Blind Love
I wake to an empty morning
Every breath is a sigh;
The wind is but a cry
Of an echo of defeat—
For I’d finished last
The light in my eyes is
But a shadow of the past
A lurid reflection of a sun
That once brought me day
My face is gray and pallid
As if formed from clay
And then I see her,
In my mind’s eye
My image of an angel.
I can only smile as I think of her,
My one true love, pure and free as a white-winged dove
When we were together
We’d watch the sun rise in baby blue skies
You were so quick to smile
We’d sit there a while
And I’d lose myself in you
I’ll always remember
You taught me we’re young no matter how old
To look for our rainbow and our pot of gold
You were there by my side
My friend and my guide
My love, I’ll never forget you
I can still feel your heat
Paradise was so sweet
For that’s what we’d shared
I can still taste your lips
We were quoting the scripts
From some tragic play
I can still hear your voice
Oh I made the wrong choice
When I let you leave
I can still smell your scent
But not where you went.
I still love you
With her shining face still bright in mind
I laugh to myself and feel for my cane
Such are the follies of one so blind
Who walks so sadly through unseen rain
Faithfully, Patiently
Oh, baby, I’m thinking of you
A fount for feelings so deep so true
Finding each other was a feat of fate
Let’s go, together, it’s never too late
So much more than a pretty face
Or willing body and warm embrace
Draped in rags or dressed in lace
You set an example of quiet grace
When I reach out to you with my mind
It’s no surprise that I come to find
That though miles lie between you and I
The distance means nothing…
Faithfully, patiently
Close your eyes and walk with me
We’ll visit paradise and call it home
Build our house in the pleasure dome
Tenderly, lovingly
Hold my hand and walk with me
We’ll visit paradise and call it home
Build our house in the pleasure dome
Oh, you know I love you so
And will always miss your perfect kiss
Your tender touch means so much
To me, the man your love set free
Don’t you cry over the heart you stole
‘Coz you filled the hole inside my soul
There’s no one, babe, who I need more
I’ll always be rich no matter how poor
When I search within that special place
I find your darling, smiling face
And though miles lie between you and I
The distance means nothing…
Faithfully, patiently
Close your eyes and walk with me
We’ll visit paradise and call it home
Build our house in the pleasure dome
Tenderly, lovingly
Hold my hand and walk with me
We’ll visit paradise and call it home
Build our house in the pleasure dome
We’ll dance in the misty moonlight
Lie in the dew-damp grass
We’ll stare at the stars not in the skies
But the stars within each other’s eyes.
Darling, I love you.
Inevitable Veritable Vestige
I am a man, shrouded…
But by what, I don’t know.
In love with love, with its mystery and thrill,
Sometimes I wonder if it’s from my heart or my will.
I think of her, too far, far away…
In a room with one light, as is mine.
And wonder: are there
More differences, or
More similarities, between
The two of us—
Who we are—
How we live—
What we aspire to be?
And all through the day…
And all through the night…
Through hours both sleeping and awake,
I remember her letter, and how her hand was shaking…
And wonder if that isn’t mine doing the same.
One more similarity.
Not voiced.
Just known.
But one thing I do see,
And I don’t know whether to
Embrace it or turn it away.
For although I recognize its grace,
I am not yet found.
If she can find me, perhaps I can find myself.
And maybe that is love.
But the sun will shine on me
Like it always does…
And the night will creep…
I will be like the sun. I will shine,
And only hope to be able to share
My warmth with her.
Umbral Silhouette
The image-inspired prophecy: sight undoing, sight undone.
The image inspired prophecy, one obscuring the sun.
Holding the mirror of her dreams in the palm of her hand,
Reflecting a kingdom—a castle built from sand—and
Demolished by a flood from a crack in black skies
That torrent of tears poured from her hazel eyes.
My heart did bear to hearken there,
Ere that baleful glare dare to darken.
Her soul so fair bid my love to flare,
And share with her my love of life.
I felt my mind yield to her shadow,
Transparent against that dark field.
But my spirit, yet free, did see she
Ceased to be sealed in such secrecy,
And knelt before her own, whereupon the two
Became one, and spawned a new sun.
A heart and mind united, two souls
Bonded and grounded in truth.
More than merely momentarily momentous,
More than a brief passing of passion,
A pithy, yet perfectly planned pair of promises
Were made from moral mortal mortar.
Realizing the future: the image-inspiring prophecy.
That suggestion of heaven, the image inspired prophecy.
The King
Three servants cared for their king
Who lay still on his bed.
The sweat of sickness was wet with a slickness
That reflected brightly upon his head.
They gave him water, they gave him food;
And into the hearth they added wood.
But the chill in the air was not from the cold
But from the old king whose own soul he had sold.
The king coughed weakly, spit glistened on his chin.
“My loyal servants, come listen!
I may now be dying, but I am not yet dead!
For gold and for silver much blood has been shed.
My soul is no more, my heart—it is stone.
My strength is but enough to lament what I’ve sown.”
The servants clasped his hands, one wiped his king’s face.
One said, “We are here, my Lord—we hear you, your grace.”
“So close to death, but still not too late—
To tell you how I’ve been fooled by fate!
This kingdom is built upon the sweat of slaves—
Whose masters were naught more than selfish knaves.
They worked for the whip, lived for the chain—
Suffered the sun and the pouring rain.
While the nobles, in inherited splendor,
Toasted with wine, enjoyed their meat tender.
And my father and I, as his father before him
Watched with a smile, over our own cup’s rim,
While our conquests abroad only brought in more slaves
To toil ‘til their rest in unmarked graves.
“Yes, this is our legacy, the Realm of the Damned
Whose king is but a reflection of how it shall end.
As King I led my kingdom to greatness,
But I failed to bring its people along.
And that, you see, has been its weakness—
That was where I’d done great wrong.”
A cough shook the king, and his veins grew taut.
He choked out a sentence, his one final thought.
“All people are born free! Let it be as it ought.”
Reflect
Footfalls echo off the asphalt.
The moon is hidden behind clouds so thick
Even they are invisible.
The stars beyond shine unseen, oblivious to the
Activity beneath their celestial realm.
Birds are disturbed by noises barely heard by their sources,
And express their dismay by flying frantically around
Their perches until returning to their rest moments later,
The recent intrusions already forgotten.
Black ice invites peril to the unwary, and the
White snow-covered land seems to glow of its own accord.
The font of every sound reveals itself to the
Discerning observer, and even time itself
Slows to a deathly cadence.
The wind is surrealistic, profoundly tangible to my ears,
Wounding them with its harsh bite and bellow.
My mind wanders beyond the limits of my body,
Traveling the realms through time,
Bringing back with it images from my past:
The scents and sensations of experience,
Where innocence tarnished and guilt
Took its first breath of air and exhaled foulness,
To eventually be cleansed by someone’s forgiveness
And another’s forgetfulness.
Someone’s smile and another’s tears.
Both helped birth new hopes and new fears.
Laughter and pain, the proud and insane.
Where are the tears when you cry in the rain?
Six shots and five beers, the tumultuous cheers,
Inmates in prison who might once have been peers.
Didactic commissars, stools to their own rules,
Just like the liar who feeds his own fire
While fighting the blaze; and amazed by the haze
In the maze of his ways wanders lost in his own wonder.
When will you take that step that will trigger the mine?
When the tell-tale click gives you a moment
Of eternity to appraise your life and
Decide if you played it or it played you?
Note on “Blind Love”
“Blind Love” was probably written between March and June of 2000, during my early Des Moines period, when I was still working at The Spaghetti Works with my late friend and old roommate Bill Kirkman.
I remember it as an exercise, but it came out of a live emotional field: recent relationship anguish, grief, memory, and the strange way lost love can make the past more vivid than the present. The blindness in the poem is not merely symbolic. By the end, we understand he is actually blind, and the cane is real inside the poem’s scenario.
The earlier images — the lost sun, the “mind’s eye,” the lurid reflection of a day-bringing light — prepare that literal reveal while also expressing how loss can invert reality. Poetically, its strongest achievement is that it turns grief into a full sensory architecture: breath, wind, light, face, heat, lips, voice, scent, cane, and rain all become part of one condition of perception.
Note on “Faithfully, Patiently”
“Faithfully, Patiently” was written in March 2000, about three months after I returned from the Army. I wrote it for Lindsay Meyer and sent it to her. It was composed as a poem, but I always heard it as something that might someday become a song; the whole piece felt melodic to me.
The phrase “between you and I” is intentionally preserved as written, because its sound and lyric movement matter more to me than grammatical correction. The “pleasure dome” is also intentional: an homage to both Rush’s “Xanadu” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”
In the sequence of this booklet, the poem answers the lonely walker of “Blind Love” by offering a hand, an inner sanctuary, and a dream-space where distance “means nothing.” Poetically, the poem’s merit is its restorative music: it uses refrain, repeated invitation, and soft lyric motion to transform physical distance into shared interior geography.
Note on “Inevitable Veritable Vestige”
“Inevitable Veritable Vestige” belongs to the same early post-military period and was written for Julia Kopitzke, whom I knew through online poetry forums. It is a poem of hesitation rather than certainty: a meditation on potential love, projection, recognition, and the hope that being found by another person might help one become visible to oneself. I think of it as a spoken inquiry, not a declaration.
The image of two distant rooms, each with one light, gives the poem its emotional architecture. Its central question is not simply “Do I love her?” but “Is this real, and what might love reveal if it is?” Poetically, the poem’s strength is that it makes hesitation itself into form: its pauses, fragments, and careful qualifications allow uncertainty to speak with dignity.
Note on “Umbral Silhouette”
“Umbral Silhouette” was written between March and June of 2000, a very prolific period for me across several kinds of literature. The poem was influenced by Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Mirror of Her Dreams, and it is one of my more deliberately ornate, spoken, alliterative pieces.
It begins with sight undone and an image that obscures the sun, then moves through mirror, sand-castle, flood, shadow, promise, and finally a truth-grounded union figured as “moral mortal mortar.” The poem’s central transformation is architectural: an image that begins as fragile prophecy learns how to build.
Poetically, its special power is rhetorical music: repeated prophecy-language, dense alliteration, and phrases like “moral mortal mortar” turn the act of speaking into a kind of verbal masonry.
Note on “The King”
“The King” is a political and moral parable about power, legacy, slavery, and regret. A dying king realizes too late that his kingdom’s greatness was built on coerced labor, inherited splendor, conquest, and unmarked graves.
The poem anticipates ideas I would later develop more formally in my Structural Civics work: that power must be judged not by grandeur, achievement, or spectacle, but by the human cost beneath it and by whether the people subject to it are free and brought along.
Poetically, the poem works because it accepts the clarity of parable: sickroom, confession, servants, slaves, nobles, graves, and final principle all move in a clean deathbed arc from physical decay to moral reckoning.
Note on “Reflect”
“Reflect” was written around 2002 and belongs to one of the most difficult periods of my life. It emerged after a traumatic anxiety event and a three-story fall into snow, during the first year of what became a three-year stimulant addiction.
The poem is built as a nocturnal walk: footfalls, hidden moon, unseen stars, black ice, glowing snow, wind, memory, guilt, intoxication, prison, self-deception, and finally the landmine-click question of whether you played life or life played you. “Stools to their own rules” is intentional, not a typo for “tools”; I wanted the contemptuous, grotesque force of that word.
The “tears in rain” idea is an homage to Rutger Hauer’s moment in Blade Runner. I once recorded myself reciting this poem slowly over Journey’s instrumental “Snow Theme,” from Dream, After Dream, and I plan to recreate that performance because the music and poem share the same structure: walk, observe, remember, tumble, stop.
Poetically, the poem’s force lies in its controlled escalation: it begins in crisp sensory observation, accelerates into rhymed memory-compression, and then stops at an agency question sharp enough to feel like a mine-click.