Manowar (by Stephan Anstey)

Manowar
by Stephan Anstey

i started life
in a tall blue glass cylinder

afraid of the air
above

boneless and frigid
i was the only

where there was water
and there was salt

i was alive. i said
nothing. But i hung

on the waves
undulating wildly.

Oh to be so raucous
and alone

again, when the glass shattered
it didn’t matter, that i was jelly

Fish swam past
my arms hanging beneath

imagining an end
to this constant hunger

dragging the threat
of a burning sting

I waited
just for you


* * *

Stephan Anstey is a poet and an artist. As an artist, he is focused on spiritual exploration and the celebration of the individual in mankind’s endless war against an increasingly invasive society. Anstey’s art is primarily a combination of poetry and digital collage, some of which is on display at local galleries. He lives an idyllic life in the historic mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts with his beautiful and beloved bride Ellen and their talented and wonderful children, Emily, a great saxophonist and a classics major at Boston University, and Cameron, an excellent trombonist, and physics and astronomy major also at Boston University.

Primary Source Material (by Stephan Anstey)

Primary Source Material
by Stephan Anstey

This is the truth: Suppose the Night were a pumpkin pie
hurriedly eaten – bit by bit – by little ants that spit
it out into tiny piles of goo. The days,
supposedly, were you on a yellow bulldozer, pushing

into giant piles all the ants and all the goo until

they were transformed so that you couldn’t
hardly tell which nights were which and what ant was what – even the
illusion of pie disappears like some sort of enormous
needle in a galaxy devoid of anything resembling
knowledge of the spirit.

Imagine, for a moment that the bodies of the ants dissolve
slowly in their own juices and the smell of pumpkin.

Hope means nothing to them. The night
is lost in the boundless piles you’ve made for
some unknown reason. You can’t separate
the parts from the whole, or even discern each from the
other anymore. Dreams are neither pie nor bulldozer nor ant
regurgitated, gurgitated, irritated, irradiated or interred.
You have determined the shape of all you see, and it means nothing.

* * *
Stephan Anstey is a poet and an artist. As an artist, he is focused on spiritual exploration and the celebration of the individual in mankind’s endless war against an increasingly invasive society. Anstey’s art is primarily a combination of poetry and digital collage, some of which is on display at local galleries. He lives an idyllic life in the historic mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts with his beautiful and beloved bride Ellen and their talented and wonderful children, Emily, a great saxophonist and a classics major at Boston University, and Cameron, an excellent trombonist, and physics and astronomy major also at Boston University.