[x]

Southern Belle - 2I want to sing you songs on the low notes
for hours. Comb your hair behind your ear,
gentle and lingering. Slip into your eyes-
anything. You are

a ripple spreading across me. You are refracted light;
slickness of an abalone's back. The soft pearl.
Idle thought of my afternoon- always, always

I imagine. And Bourbon's not so far:
nineteen hours through a day,
then I could see you. Will we ripen
on touch?

AlterI stopped dreaming the color of my wedding dress
years ago

the picket fence around a small square home

the soft surety of a kiss
every evening. One morning it was

one leg in the left and one leg
in the right

you know? Things change. These days
I dream simpler: Waking up

laying next to another warm body, at least
a little in love.

systemhe said that one day I,
who have grown accustomed
to accumulating moons,
drawn like moths
to my Venus-brightness,
would meet my match.

he told me I would be
captured by the brilliance
of a star,
a Betelgeuse, a behemoth:
supergiant turned supernova turned
supermassive black hole.

he informed me, peeking out
from under my gravity,
his erratic elliptical orbit,
that one day I would be
swallowed up

and that it would be poetic justice.

RieslingSparsely stardusted skies give way to another greycloud day
The color of sheetmetal, dishwater, old dreams dying
Thirty hours and fifty-three minutes away a woman bakes bread
I can feel the warmth of her kitchen, taste the Riesling
All the way here
Here in my small dusty apartment the lights are on
But I'm not home

Ghost CountryAs I fall into the future
An unease, as if happening to someone else
My parallel, my doppelganger, my misty dream
A ghost traveler channeling me
Parasitic co-option

The world is changing, metastasizing
A liquid, a solid, a gas and back
Tiny black bugs scramble on the surface
Scrapping and digging and burning
Everything-must-go apocalyptic fire sale

The other self asks why
To speak is to lie
How does dominion over all things work?
Do we actually hear what we say?
In the ghost country, can we write poetry?

The Neanderthals were bested
Dumb animals of every stripe rubbed out
Civilizations rose and fell in tidal fashion
Comedy

PixieI never had enough faith in you,
my best postmodern pixie friend,
who presses herself against my shoulder
killing her fall with leaning.
You taught me something new
about anxiety today:

   how to wake
up when it's morning, how to miss
dactylic illness with the parched
indelicacy of a crinkled sun.
In the eternal rendition you say
your name is always in the vocative
   case, and only vocative:

says the girl
who taught a smaller girl to sing,
a girl of thirteen, with the same
nimble character we shared, the same
calderical eyes we shared.

   The girl's voice
tumb

Happy Birthday"This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we'll tell them that we love them, and we'll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight..." ~ Barack Obama

Next year I will wrap you presents
and you will not understand the need for bows,
but will reach towards them for days
in anticipation.

I will fret my wardrobe decision: do I dress you
for photographs or in a pattern that will hide
your smudgy fingerprints? Or maybe the floral one
your grandmother, your father's mother,
will su

Poem for a MotherWhen I was four
I'd follow you into the bathroom
on sticky feet,

press my little bird hands
into the back pockets of your jeans
while you were washing dishes
at the sink,

babbling on: Mommy, Mommy,
I love you.

Then there was the youth
who played Simon Says
to your aerobic routine.

I took jumps to your steps,
laughing as I tripped,
I wanted to go
where you went

I practiced to be
who you were.

The world split sideways
and I stumbled out
a teen traumatized
by the gory birth.

I'd've sworn you did it to me:
the red plague of my face,
the heartache,
the inexplicable serrating rage,

I beat at you as an extension
of self.

After Late Nights with You that Last Well into theI have never peeled an orange. I watch you do this
often. Eyes slim with sleep, the sun forms slits

on the wall and you cross your leg over your knee
across the table with your body tilted away from me.

The harvest moon is angry in your hands.
You make it twirl and jump and dance, and dance.

You smile. You have made a fool of the moon.
Tall puppeteer, it is too bright and too soon in

the morning for me to make these haughty metaphors.
You stop your jilted juggling and toss me a glance before

you gouge the orange with your fingers and
dirty fingernails. Elephant skin falls then

darkly to the floor, the limp heart lies unbeating

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

Heading HomeBitter-boned, I break and crumble to dust
My pockets full of keys to places that no longer exist
An oystershell ashtray full of butts and ashes beside me
Testify to dreams of green hedges and white picket fences

A tapping on the door, a rapping on the wall
Ghosts always like this hour just before dawn
A bird screeches and I wake again to the stinging day
And shufflestep towards home from a thousand worlds away

Cadencetandem seeker on the terminal trail
displaced dust drifts toward orbit unconditional
wayward wicker heart
woven for a deeper art
splitting stars in half
keeps heaven's hemispheres
searching

lurching
large above our petty fears
cocking the hammer on coming years
as of yet
unspent
soon full-swept
unkempt and
all caring
weathering the wearing
burdens on our backs
bereft of wings-breadth
left
breathless

deathless
clawing at the dirt
wishing to be weightless

but
occasionally the earth
spins back to us
recombining feet with footsteps
warm and known

the
forward paths cleft
by theft of innocence
but brightly lit by evid

novemberthe sun is a dim pearl
beneath a blanket of gray
hung low from the heavens;

i'm your yellow tremor
paled by the cold, aching
for a proper sunrise.

love poemsi write you
more poems
in the winter
when we've

grown sick
of each other
cramped
in heat, sweating

you taste
like avarice
and me

[cracked
like the garden
and temperate
beneath soil
we'll grow
when the sun
listens]

on being a woman'what's a pretty lady
like you doin' smokin' cigarettes?'

'if i fucked you
for every time i've
heard
that
one,
you wouldn't think i was such
a lady anymore,
and what's a clever fella like you
doing minding my business for me,
anyway'

i am not a lady-
i do not curve my appetites,
i do not curve through the waist and hips,
i please for my own pleasure,
i soak in my own sweat,
i fuck for my own glory.

tiddly tum, hidden harems and come,
i am the singular player in my play,
i am the prologue, intermission, and final act
every love i have known has been fueled by
my own fury, every discovery dug up by my own
destiny, ev

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Southern Belle - 7Out of the Sahara,
my eye: the tiger

Gleam, you are a blanched lantern
on the Savannah

I was on the prowl
until you came to my domain

Ivory, I shall hunt
and harvest you

Writhe on my belly
until I am close

Listen, Anasazi laughs
his black spider joke;

I laugh as we begin
to weave.

Southern Belle - 6She is the Roman
I wait upon

her pale skin
olive'd, pressed dark

beneath my thumb;
a black print

against her father's brow-

I am oppressed
by her presence.

After a Blue Sundayi.
The week slips hard
rolling in upon itself
to pull me under;
hardly a victim, more so:
a participant lacking
ii.
I clutch at taupe walls,
boring walls that do much more
for occupying
a hangover than breaking
the monotony
iii.
The after-break, break:
realizing my solitude
undoes me quicker
than your infidelity;
than her scent on your body

Southern Belle - 5I have been accused
of bedding muses in a line;
tucking them deep in the soil, and then:
a whole season
to sample their fruit She was
sweet and salty,
a queen with a Euphrates mouth;
o, she was long and sultry soot
and soot, rolling upon us, the depths
braved for a taste And I
would cross the Red Sea again,
skin a black flag in the sun
for my efforts
for the single harvest to drink
To be the simple harvester
of her keep

SiestaWhite hot stick
Spanish afternoon

All the store windows
Shuttered to sleep

You Need A New MusePoets, if your muse smells like eggnog, boiled eggs, fresh eggs,
or any sort of egg at all: get a new muse. If your muse makes sounds-
chomping or mewing, smacking, or worse, slurping - when she eats
animal crackers: you need a new muse. If she’s that sloppy gal that
downs a pint and hollers, “Freebird” at the bar, you know where I’m going with this:
you need a new muse. And trust me, pudding, when your muse misquotes
Bill Cosby while eating jello, you're going to wish you had gotten yourself
that new muse.
If she begins to insist on beginning debates with “irregardless,”
you won't need a dictionary to tell that you need a new muse. Even brings
to question your rhyme scheme or does not know how to tell you
she set the table in iambic pentameter, seriously, you need
a new muse. If you can’t get her to write you letters, but can’t break her
from sending four-page texts, then it’s time to call in a new muse. If she doesn’t know
t

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Jukai II

by `vespera, Nov 15, 2012, 9:38:28 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

You are a soft rustle of promise
across the calm Pacific and
wasted sun of the Sonoran

and the sad truth is: I don't know
if I can wait for you

Jukai IIby `vespera

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Written last month. May end up scrapping? Not sure.

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~daretwodream Jan 14, 2013

I like it beaucoup!

`vespera Jan 14, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

aw thanks

~WaKip Nov 23, 2012 Writer

Please don't scrap it. It was short(Which is like...awesome. I hate when things get too long. I don't have time to sit down and read forever, ya know?), but profound. I managed to get an interpretation from it. It felt like it was about a long distance romance...which can be so hard, as said by the "I don't know if I can wait for you".

~XTRQS Nov 18, 2012

Lovely.

`vespera Nov 19, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

~gogocherryrose Nov 16, 2012

i love it

`vespera Nov 19, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

*glossolalias Nov 16, 2012

this is really beautiful.

`vespera Nov 19, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

*IAmPoetry Nov 15, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

I need to dedicate this to someone. So much meaning here.

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Jukai II

Jukai IIby `vespera

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