Posts for June 26, 2017 (page 4)

Fill me up
one at a time
make sure not to pour too much
or too little 
you’re running out of time
to make things right

Paper arms and Paper legs
that is why you are doing this
don’t forget those eyes in
mirror cameras
screaming
don’t you dare be hungry
if you want to look pretty
and
be happy

Your own eyes become tainted
no longer sure of what beauty even is
yet all you know
is perhaps
if you become smaller
lose
just a little
more weight
you can discover hidden grace
under your never-ending rolls of sin
clinging on with contempt.

Soon you will fold like paper
mold like paper
smaller
sharper
it’s for the better
to become
just
like paper

easily folded

easily
wasted

you’ve finally made things right
But sadly
Paper eyes
tell
Paper lies
Twisted
just
not
right

She went to a wedding
where only the bride’s mother
was known to her, a stranger
to the souls who came to push
the teenagers’ canoe into
the backwater of their lives.
She wore a blue-laced dress
in a sea of denim and a city sway
amid a marriage party in camo.
She looked up from the girl’s
unexpected belly to see sparse
fields with thin cattle, two trucks
down on their axels, a hive body
on the front porch, somebody’s
baby in a shitty pamper, the distant
stack of the coal plant downstream
of the river.     The thrown garter
glanced off her shoulder, landed
in the dust, motes swirled around
like a medieval fair and all the fair
ladies seemed blanched.            After
a piece of the fallen cake, she heard
the mother’s voice rise as in prayer:
Kerstin keeps bees

A bird caught in a current
is suspended between earth and sky
the barn’s tin roof tile, half removed, bangs against the beams
I stand facing the cool wind
as it brings dark clouds over the horizon

A thunder clap in the distance mocks our silence
the field is still being cut
I’m bemused as to why the farmhand
is still driving the tractor in circles

A droplet of rain flicks me on the cheek
the farmhand rushes to tow
a payload of grass below the barn
I stood outside the shelter of the barn
arms crossed like a patient lover
waiting out the storm

1.

lo, what have we here,
a venus in my fly trap?
your tongue in my palm,
with passions feeding
upon the flames and
unspoken truths
in my tender hand…

2.

how carnal this cathedral;
a chocolaterium for the gods,
a soft universe trapped
in edible umber.

3.

via kiss weakness rushes
into knees and a talisman
awakens in want, needing
to make you its temple;
an unadulterated altar
of our quiet collusion.

4.

our conjoined cadences
are everything wished for;
to act shy salts the tongue –
a perfect waste of private
cosmos. to not be desperate
blocks the blessing… you
kiss me and i fall / unafraid,
into infinities unnumbered, into
flesh spiked wet, dark with desire.

we fall / unafraid because
the dawn always catches and
the empyreal is always waiting.

I emerge from deep woods
bend to touch ground
scuffed by hooves I follow
to the lake that carries
pale feathers and thin shadows  

Water, a blue-green throat
grave to some, portal to many
unskeins needle of pain
like listening to wings pulse air
mantric music and the sweet loom
of silence I ignore the palpable
impulse to break  

On the other side a figure in gray
emerges like danger in a painting
a yellow voice tests the air
his call falls to me like a wishbone.                      

~ Found poem composed/modified from words in the poem “The Voice is the Last We Forger to Remember” by Lee Sharkey

July 25, 1881  

On the day
my grandfather C. W.
was born, the date being
the 24th day after would be
assassin, Charles Jules Guiteau, shot
down President
James A. Garfield.
 
The President, on that day,
July 2nd asked, “May I trouble you,
doctor, about my chances?” Seeing,
how ,eager & cheerful his patient was, he
answered one chance in a hundred. Not
in the least excited, the President
revealed;  

“Then we will take that chance!”
 
He sent word to his wife
that he had been seriously hurt.
He also sent his love to her,
& she came to be with him on the second day  

& on the 80th day he died.

Backwards people,
that whole town
knew my people,
they were backwards. 
Quiet folks,  
their translucent green,
almost colorless eyes,
the stern faces
an exact replica of
the little yellow creek fish
their youngins scooped up
in old plastic Quick Stop cups
to use as bait in hopes of bigger catches.
The men never stayed. 
The women never left. 
And the children just ran 
around dirty and doing
what comes natural until
they too took their place in the stream.

Memory of a swing in summer
Is altogether more than mind flickers
In this aging brain. The gulp of 
Air, stomach twist, hair atwirl,
Sky reaching down to capture me
For the cloud cluster just beyond
My out-stretched toe.

The ride is part of me, while
I sit here watching little ones
discover that ancient thrill.

But will they on their sawdust track,
Resting on its creative modeled swing set, 
Ever know a tree, a branch, scratchy rope,
Blue patched sky and clouds hanging 
Just beyond the bravest toe?

We were always making shelters, you and I.
Bowers in summer, snow forts in winter, indoors
on that black flowered rug under the grand piano,
mothball-scented blanket tents in the basement,
sofa cushion barricades upstairs.

So were I to fashion a childhood ideogram
as Larry Levis imagines, a sibling coat of arms
just for us, roofed space would embrace mementos 
of our young-together years: a chokecherry tree,
mudpies emblazoned with hot-pink Pepto-Bismol
hued azalea petals (no match for that tincture in
official heraldic lists); faded chalk lines of infinite
hopscotch courts cross-hatching the field, and to tie
it all together, a diagonal crack in the enamel of my
left front tooth, a life-long souvenir from a fall down
the kitchen stairs when I was nine and you were five. 

A bend sinister.  An augury of something.  Not sure what. 
  

Where first men gurgled    heard roots
saw skeletons inside flesh  

Where warm grass women revolved
to panther music  

Where summer welled up from trapdoors of earth  

Where a world peeled     carpeted      sap-ridden    
turned days
      everywhere

~found poem based on words that accompanied a drawing that appeared on public Facebook page, author unknown