Anastasya Shepherd

Amazon Red Bubble Society6

Category: Poetry

  • Lavender Roses

    Symbolizing enchantment and splendor, these blooms are meant for royalty. One of the rarest colors, lavender roses are often a sign of love at first sight and carry an air of regality. It’s truly the perfect rose for a budding romance. [Sarah Dimarco, Veranda – poshness-aspiring magazine – March 22, 2021]

    When I was young and trusting I was told to seek and I’ll find
    My lavender roses would wait just ’round the bend.
    Around the bend I went all out in body and mind
    But roads bent and twisted and would always end in dead-end.

    I went for unaffordable and always got it for free.
    I stood on words and principles in unsustainable poses.
    They gave me what I wanted and I screamed that I disagree.
    And all that I had left to me were pure lavender roses.

    My road to salvation went south while heading North.
    A thousand bipasses appear when the straight path closes.
    While finding my direction I only tied up in knots,
    My body cut and bleeding from the thorns on lavender roses.

    I made my own way into the middle of the deep dark wood.
    I found a crystal coffin where the perfect place of repose is.
    My peace is on my terms and I have now done what I could
    But all that I have left to give are broken lavender roses.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Circus

    It fascinates us by taking life to bizzare extremes,
    by emphasizing the kinship between nightmares and dreams.
    Beauty and ugliness morphing and dancing, figure and ground,
    like in the faces and vase illusion, flipping around.

    Fear and joy swing and sway, push and jam,
    knock us and jerk us.
    Life only sometimes is a cabaret, old chum –
    sometimes it’s circus.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Observation

    Nothing makes us worse than pathetic attempts to prove that we are intrinsically better than someone else.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • London

    The difference between art and ornamentation is provocation. If it provokes thoughts, feelings, actions, opposition – anything but indifference – it is art. (Me, personal communication)

    London is art.

    I wander around the city,
    from pillar to post,
    from juxtaposition to juxtaposition.

    It has a lot of pillars and posts –
    old and contemporary,
    pretentions and utilitarian,
    faux Greek and real concrete.

    I peel it layer by layer:
    Shiny facades concealing ruins,
    ruins prepared to be reorganised,
    rebuilt, repurposed,
    reabsorbed into nostalgia for the past
    or hope for the future.

    Only dead cities are immutable –
    monuments to past hopes of individual success
    and current delusions of national grandeur.
    Gravestones.

    Living cities have to consist of ruins,
    it is a process of recreation,
    flux and flow of people and things,
    moving between loss and hope,
    provoking innovation and outrage.

    London is art.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Teenrager Years

    Curiouser and curiouser,
    down the rabbit hole
    furiouser and furiouser,
    losing your mind and soul,
    filling your lungs with panic,
    nameless, lost in the wood,
    swapping depressed for manic,
    hoody for riding hood.
    Barely understood
    tears form bleeding tears.
    Fight through the turgid wood
    of your teenrager years.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Empty space

    Your voice lulls me to sleep.
    Your snoring fails to keep me up.
    Your moving in bed does not wake me.
    But when you get up in the night
    your absence screams in my ears,
    it prods and pokes at me
    and I wake up with a start,
    finding a loud, obnoxious empty space
    interfering with my sleep.
    I don’t lose sleep over you –
    I loose sleep over the empty space
    where you should be.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Cobbled together

    Today the sky is low overhead.
    It’s paved with clouds – small and hard;
    It presses down, hue and weight of lead.
    You feel hemmed in an empty prison yard.

    Today the sea is cold and oily-still,
    reflecting cobbled sky – grey shades on grey.
    Today the pain is harder to conceal,
    as heavy blankness saps your strength away.

    Today it’s hard to leave the past behind
    you try ignoring sky and sea in vain.
    They press too tight, you panic, deaf and blind.
    It’s hard to move, but harder – to remain.

    You trudge through empty, foggy, silent streets
    the road is uphill. The hill is high.
    One foot in front of other, body leads.
    Insensibly, you walk into the sky

    And on you walk, along the cobbled sky,
    the sea above reflecting endless plain.
    To see the world anew. To say good-bye.
    To greet the sun that burns support away.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Of Rainbows and Fairness

    We long for answers. For a way to clear
    the shadows of doubt from the mind.
    We want uncertainty to disappear,
    confusion and complexity – unwind

    onto the straight and narrow – a pier
    above the murky waters of the mind.
    The only way to go. Nothing queer.
    No thread of Ariadne to unwind.

    We wish for clear weather, warm and dry,
    but clear thinking quickly makes it clear
    as wind sweeps all the clouds from the sky
    the rainbows will also disappear.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • The march of evolution

    The grand evolutionary procession:
      striding elephants,
      lumbering rhinoceri,
      stalking lions,
      gliding giraffes…
    We walk tall next to them, leading our children, hand in hand.

    Most of the ones on display are better adapted than us,
      a lot are bigger,
      a lot are stronger,
      a lot are faster,
      a lot are more vicious,
    but none are as dangerous.

    What is it that separates us from the rest?
      Some of them use tools
      some of them have complex language,
      some of them sacrifice themselves for others
      some of them murder the members of their own tribe…
    Each specific characteristic is shared.

    But in no other species do all these traits combine
    to form our unique capacity
      for self-serving
      self-indulgent
      self-destroying
      self-delusion.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in
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