[x]

PluckingPlucking

The table between us is a moon.
But the air is heavy. It lies
on us, muffled heat stilling
our breaths. You drop your fork,
but I still won't look at you. Even angels
would crawl if they were here.

"Why can't we be friends?"

I am thinking of a Flemish tapestry
I once saw in a white stone house,
walls dense and prickly with roses:
a line of stiff scarlet soldiers,
a rearing horse. The soldiers' thick fingers
grope at the blank cream cloth,
seeking purchase, gravity.

"What are you feeling?"

"I want to be a Flemish soldier,"
I tell you. Only my fingers
would constantly pluck at the expanse,
searching for the thread
that will unra

Ryan's PoemHow many times did you save me
from myself?

The quiver girl,
strung tight and shaking,

self-nursed at the end
of a whiskey bottle;

your ever-night,
shuddering off to sleep

a sick bat wrapped up
beneath your bed,
half rabid;

half intelligible-
if you were lucky.

Good nights I curled up
against your broad shoulders,
smiling
as you palmed a bowl,

taking in air
to request records
and savory things
to eat - and then,

I nested on top of your pillow
as much
as any girlfriend

yet never quite
a lover.

I was hard on the heart, Darling, wasn't I?

Never yours
and now

we never speak.

with thanks to salingerAudio version.
it's on those cold mornings
when you are nothing but indrawn breath
swirling and knitted up inside too-big
skin and weightless bones--
when the horizon arches up against
the half-thawed tendrils of sunrise
and smiles
with golden teeth,
and smiling, begs--
it's on those cold mornings
when leaving is easiest.
the car will be cold, and you will
shiver, and the engine,
much too loud,
will smack of blasphemy
but you will find peace in the steady roll
of tarmac and the yellowing light
spilling across it,
with dust motes kicked up and carried
like fish in the undertow.
when you come to that first
crossroads, it will shock you:
the way the decision hangs there
trembling and desperate--
but there are no right answers and you will not
hesitate. and each successive choice
will be made of its own accord,
and you will roll the windows down,
and draw down the scent of ear

Bad Mouth Habitsi.
I carry God around in my lip like he's chew,
spitting his name out in poems like potholes,
I make everything a simile
for the hold he has on me.

ii.
When it comes to men,
I've the appetite of a Roman housewife,
I take, I taste, I tear,
swallow and then then toss up
for the next course.

iii.
I don't kiss anyone so dearly
as the glass pipe bridged between lips
and fist.

iv.
Jameson, you're an Irish Lad,
a young ram of bucking proportions,
I let you rattle around my mouth
til I herd you in
and down.

v.
Sometimes there's nothing so sweet
as the jack-hammer of angry words
or the steel trap clamp of silence.

I exercise m

dead1.

i hear these words
and something happens
in the yard;

it doesn't fit
a poem
or planet.

i see it squeeze
into the slits
beneath your shirt.

i feel it fly the smooth
of you
from off your back. it turns

and hides behind the acres,
stock frontiers
of jagged rooftops,

kept far and safe
and free
of me.

2.

the squirrel
has left the limb
as light would leave
a photograph.

i’m staring into its absence
and some new kind of animal is made;
one where
only
its reversal is alive.

it doesn't move or breathe.

the park is wintered over, and i don’t go.
the poppies
are all gone.
and when they do come back, they never chan

unfolded letter having something to do with shame

hello again.

i was here, just now, and i thought of waiting.
but you won't come.
and even as i say these words, i know they must remain unborn
like busy blood the coffers keep.

these sounds are ways i cannot be, i don't believe,
i'm not alive.
but i'll arrange them, anyway, one by one
to be eaten by your oval minion
or blindly forwarded like propaganda.

i am always without you and without myself.
i offer this ambassador, but he only sees the stain of things
and not even this; just their emblems, their saltless confederacy
of coincidence.

i've wondered if you're searching nights
for dark clad summoners, or silhouettes &#

nirvanafeigning euphoria
on the outskirts of joliet,
i saw You between red glowing streams:
weaving the horizon like a tapestry,
recycling gold beads from a pale morning sari,
dyeing blue-violet fever, shivers

leaking from my head down my arms,
resting in my belly beside You—mixing veins in the night,
embellishing the road with thoughts
of creation: You spin a thread and it unwinds,
fraying at the ends where the cars break the asphalt

and i convulse,
spinning out of control—You doe-eyed like the kid
who crashed his mother's car and dies heavy beneath
that semi, stuck in the pitch dark, oil blearing opalescent
under the gaping taillig

caring for p(o)etsscribbling down vicious verses on
tissue napkins while seated at
the corner of a sidewalk cafe is
about as romantic, raw and
honest a p(o)et
-outside of the four corners of your bedpost-
can get

if you've got that person dreading over
drafts and dreams on end
-of you, for you-
consider yourself a new owner
it is now time to
tame this p(o)et's perverse mane
you've got your hands on
a fragile purebred
which can be very tricky for
first timers

Southern Belle - 4Ray of scattered light -
a flicker pearls
crests momentarily
hovers above the water
escaping - a flash of orange -
lands back into the mirage

Rock BottomThey say a rolling stone gathers no moss,
so when I shudder to a halt
The rocks in my feet continue to grind.
I feel the sand in my lungs
and the regretful mist silting in my heart
as the waves come back in
reaching eagerly for my legs, spooling, churning
over me. Rooted in my misery.
I know the rocks in my feet will help me drown.

lovesong for sailorboyRead aloud and explained (somewhat) here.
i have always loved words as you love the sea
but i have grown to hate
prepositions
because i have always had words
about you
with you
to you--
but never for you.
words for everything
except you.
but i have words for this, so
i'll take them
one by one.
about.
the ocean was your first love and
i could always see it in your eyes.
most would call them blue--just
blue
like a swell over a sandbar
blue like the spring sky over a poppy field.
but i don't think anyone
got as close as i did and they're not blue
not shorebound and
safe--
they're gray like the steelbellied sea itself
like the horizon at dawn as it
encircles you
hems you into an impossibly vast canvas
like a demarcation line
or a promise.
one you always chased.
with.
maybe i had a streak of ocea

Serendipity and SnowfallI am la vie en rose,
a newborn with as many mini bones in my body as possibilities.
Lovelily,
I am potential waiting to be tapped into.
I am a spectrum of light,
serenity in the symmetry of a snowflake.

I come veiled in lace from everlasting love's womb with my budding,
fresh,
goose-flesh tucked tenderly underneath.
I spread my spirit wide,
outstretching my feather-tips &,
supplicated by twizzles,
I catch my ballerina's foot & fly.
In these fleeting,
finite moments of ubermensch suspension in multiple salchows comes clairvoyance,
a kindness beyond the absolution of mundane minds.

With the key to perfection being repetition,
I pray you

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Mindoro - 2I was two thousand miles of cornfields away from us,
hours from Mindoro, that shitty fold-out, your daddy's car
and a keystone night
when you sauntered in,
eyes blazing from a teenage drunk,
and your arms bare
hanging like battle axes.

I was home in the vineyards,
I had grape bunches on my eyelids, the taste of the sea on my tongue,
a sticky salt, a thing to suckle at like taffy.
I was already making my bed beneath the redwoods,
I had their needles in my hair
and their scent pressed against my spine.
I had given up your dusty road, your endless Wisconsin skies,
the taste of my tongue against your chest,
a sixteen sodium chlorid

Arachnidsevery morning there are spiders in the shower
fat like bagpipes

i spit water at them with the facet until they ball
like saggy balloons with eight strings
they swim down the drain

i think
it would be so easy to go like that
a bloated fitfull
prune'd, in
idle hate

Sean - 6I hate your girlfriend,
I hate your perfect hip bone,
mostly, for how your hip bone connects to
my rib bones, hooking them like easy prey,
how the bruises between my thighs
won’t seem to go away, they stay
somewhat misty like the haze on top of the beach.

Today was cloudy. Tomorrow will probably be cloudy, too,
your bones will keep mine hooked
like salmon or some lesser fish,
their line leading to your night-time words,
like hungry greedy fish, I’m left here gaping
stung by your skin in my lip.

I drank my water in with vodka and juice
like a river or your saliva,
these are the things I breathe
as if I cou

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Acquittal

by `vespera, Sep 17, 2012, 10:30:56 AM
Literature / Poetry / Romantic / Post-Teen (Mature) / Free Verse

Won't you leave me? I will love you
more than if you stay, transfixed

to the point of reference, our bodies
melding a sad, soft sublime, the back

spine of a little universe blown out
like a crafter's hot glass, the growing

moment, the wonder, the expansion
before a chill.

Acquittalby `vespera

Literature / Poetry / Romantic / Post-Teen (Mature) / Free Verse

Published at The Neglected Ratio 1/23/13

sent me the perfect title for this.

And so it is
Just like you said it should be
We'll both forget the breeze
Most of the time
And so it is
The colder water
The blower's daughter
The pupil in denial

I can't take my eyes off of you
I can't take my eyes off you
I can't take my eyes off of you
I can't take my eyes off you
I can't take my eyes off you
I can't take my eyes...

Did I say that I loathe you?
Did I say that I want to
Leave it all behind?

I can't take my mind off of you
I can't take my mind off you
I can't take my mind off of you
I can't take my mind off you
I can't take my mind off you
I can't take my mind...
My mind...my mind...
'Til I find somebody new

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~Flummoxative Feb 12, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

"the back
spine of a little universe blown out
like a crafter's hot glass, the growing
moment, the wonder, the expansion
before a chill." ...

And I love Damien Rice.

`vespera Feb 18, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Such a great song.

*riparii Jan 25, 2013

"I will love you more than if you stay..."
one of those lines that fits perfect the first
time you try it on.
Love the whole thing. The close is lucious.

`vespera Jan 25, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

(I almost didn't put this up on dA or out for publication as I thought it was too plain.

saves the day, again.)

*riparii Jan 25, 2013

She did the right thing, again. As usual.

`vespera Jan 29, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

I don't know if I'd say USUAL with Rachel in the same sentence.

*riparii Jan 29, 2013

Point taken.

=Wordeea Jan 24, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

daw. the blower's daughter

perfect for your words ...
(pupil-in-denial used to be my dA name

)

`vespera Jan 25, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

(why the change?)

=Wordeea Jan 25, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

i outgrew it. i was no longer in denial

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Acquittal

Acquittalby `vespera

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