Anastasya Shepherd

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Category: Poetry

  • Girls, horses, cracks…

    Pictures are more ambiguous than words
    and that is their attraction.

    If I say, ‘girls, horses, cracks in your window on the world,’
    it is just a phrase.
    Too trite.
    Too didactic.
    Too empty.
    I can pad it out a bit,
    but there is still too much me
    and too little you.

    But the picture invites you to enter.
    It has a smoky room with a warm glow of companionship,
    the mounting excitement of expectations,
    the exhilaration of the win,
    the emptiness of loss,
    unarticulated similarities between sex and betting,
    an articulated sense of defeat.
    It has voids to be filled and cracks to be expanded or patched up.
    Fill the void and there is no room for excitement.
    Patch up the cracks and your view through the window is obscured further.
    But the alternative is to remain cracked and unfulfilled…

    So much more in the picture:
    more feelings,
    more ideas,
    even more words.
    But also more work.
    Ambiguity gives you all that you are willing to put into it.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Border line

    Here you are,
    building and re-building your wall,
    on the border between the manageable stagnation within your mind
    and the beguiling chaos without.
    The wind of reality blows through the cracks,
    soft but incessant,
    frightening and alluring…
    – Knock, knock.
    – Who is there?
    – Life.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Still life before the storm

    As you travel through England, you gain a visceral understanding of space-time continuum, for you can see time affected and distorted by space and vice versa, as you move between villages and towns, between pasts and presents, through pools of frozen time into the rapids.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Simple logic

    If you spend enough time filling your space with junk, you inevitably run out of both.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Judgement

    Our ability to laugh is what separates us from animals. Our ability to laugh at ourselves is what separates us from gods.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Pushed to the side

    Derelict boats always make me pause. There is too great a contrast between an inescapably stationary object and its purpose – that of fast movement – encoded into its very shape.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Nature

    The idea of “natural” being equivalent to “good” was invented in the early 18th century by Romantics, people who made a career out of being unable to think straight.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Light and shadow

    Birds live in the light,
    clear and bright;
    freedom of flight.

    Fish live in the depths,
    swathed and complex;
    joy of orgasm.

    We live in-between,
    under the skin;
    over the chasm.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Windows

    I see the world through windows.
    My preconceptions form perceptions,
    creating a coherent picture,
    a picture in a frame.
    It irks me.
    The limitation to my field of vision
    is like an itch.
    I want to leave the frame,
    to stick my head beyond it into space,
    to see the world just outside it
    exciting, new – it has to be, I know;
    I also know it is not an option –
    the frame is in my head.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in
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