[x]

WantsI want the time to write about
the beauty, the newness in nature

I want to share with you. I want to
catch each individual snowflake

with shutter snaps and take them home
to decorate the windows. I want to watch

the river don its icy finger-gloves, to consider
lines and angles shifting, indifferent, softening

under winter's lofty load. I want to snowshoe
on some not-too-frigid night with a full moon

illuminating night to noon-like with blue-
white light or when there is no moon, only

innumerable stars, impeccably brilliant,
impossibly far away against the ebony

of New England midnights- I want to know you
see these things tha

intersectionMy father's hair is gray now.
I'm not sure if it was the elevator
or that realization that caused
the lurch in my belly.

There's a little plastic container
on the bathroom counter, housing
blue, yellow, beige pills, designed
to slow the body's inevitable breakdown.

There are lines around my father's eyes now -
I feel his loneliness echoed in my chest,
in the mirror as I prepare for bed.

A blurry, half-remembered moment,
smudged with time, of sitting on his strong
shoulders, laughing in the sun,
so sure that he would always be able
to hold me up to touch the sky.

We live this half-baked life now,
circling each other, moments

wrists that roarmama says
pull down your sleeves
they'll see, they'll see
but no-one's even looking

i say mama
tigers are proud and strong
and tigers show their stripes
so today i'm a tiger

and who says
i can't be a tiger
when razors made me fierce
and secrets kept me lonely

who says
i can't tiger-roar
when everything unsaid
ripped my throat raw

i made my stripes
with tiger-claws and tiger-teeth
so damned if i'm not a tiger
and damned if i won't roar

mama, i'm a tiger
mama, hear me roar

ForwordI have not become stronger
in the broken places.

Bones ache of age
of misuse
of disuse
and each cracking joint
is an audible reminder
of missteps
of misjudgments
of paths walked too long
and of steps
that should have been,
but were never taken.

Bent fingers jut
from palms of sandpaper,
calloused and crinkled,
they cannot grip
with that same eager desperation
of a child seeking comfort.

Black becomes gray
at the gates
of troubled temples and
dreams,
once saliently sweet,
decay on the tongue
like the sound
of necessary words produced,
but never employed.

I have not become stronger in the broken places

AtlantisOur ships float close under sunlit skies,
hovering above Atlantis.
We claimed the ocean miles as our own,
an underwater district which we would call home.

Drown.
Suffocate with Neptune,
as heavens burst through violet haze.
Your gaze,
splits the nebula, infinite space,
and explosions in a faraway place.

And when the sun should close its eyes,
you'll sail afar.
To climb electric vines,
and lay in the arms of the storm.

scar-crossed(my fingers are colder than the solemn blue
buried in her eyes. so much dead beauty,

like an ocean without waves).

she is fading and i cling to her,
and in this tiny little moment
between breaths

we barely even exist.

ExhaustionExhaustion

I wake, swollen with noon heat.
Half dressed, I stumble,
elbows and toes catching
on the clawed feet of chairs,
the blunt holes of open cupboards.
I sometimes forget my name.
In the kitchen, I pepper the rice
instead of salt. Black flecks surface
in the boiling water,
sea turtles migrating.
If I knew where you went,
I would follow. But all you left behind
was an old sweater, an empty notebook,
an exhaustion,
complete and infinite
as the space around a closed fist.

Dog Days of SummerThe city is a raw, open carcass.
I rip into it with my teeth,
tools and weapons alike.
We are bred from our surroundings;
I was born in August,
the son of Sirius and Sol.

Let me tell you what it is to be brought low:
it is a streamlined form of hatred,
to awake in unrelenting heat,
shoved down among vulgarities, drifting
as their glares catch you at every corner.
Is he a threat?
You can watch them drag their ribs through the dust
while you greedily tear into your scraps
behind cooking temple-blocks
(not the scraps they threw at you,
but the ones you fought for).
You're vicious by nature,
but wary by choice.

Asphalt ignites with my stride
as

overflowi tried to show you
all the broken bones
in the cupboard

all the cobwebs
underneath the staircase

all the schisms
and chasms
and chinks in my
a(r)mour

but
your finger touched my lips
in a curious sort of way
and you said
shh, darling,
don't say a word

none of that matters
anymore

so i tried
to shut away the
ghosts
but now they're out
and about
and coming for me

and i can't escape them
with my heart so chipped
and faded.

LossKneel. Lick the salt. Pray.

There is a hole here, I say,
pressing to my breastbone.
No doctor can diagnose it.
There is no test to check
how deep you've been ingrained
in my woodwork, pumping muscles
and spitting valves.

And no scalpel can erase this.
The emptiness of unfriendship.
Cold eyes glinting black
where once they glimmered.

This is a flimsy half-light
coming from my cigarette.
Nothing good will come for years.

Kneel. Lick the salt. Pray.
You're gone.

2.23.2013When you come home
for the second time,
nettle-scent on your shirt
and a moon gasping
as it sets,
I am ready. This time.
Ready for the door
that slams but never
opens; I hear you
ghost-stepping in the hall
under the blushing
silence of the night.
It has been seven years
since the skull-gray twist
of your smile across
the pavement, and you waited
till now to come to me.
The leaves inhale the breeze,
exhale as they settle.
They move when you do,
and lately you are restless.

breaddoctors pure as angels, white as chefs
peruse menus on clipboards,

their exhaustion mouthed in metric
from a graveyard shift cuisine

measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
adhering to rules, to rules, to rules-

hospital smocks' mocking exposure
to cold air and latex

the way fatigue sets in when
bilious walls deaden,

bringing on the drone of
fluorescent blood-suckers

as a hypo plunges deep into
a fat vein, pliant and compliant,

to siphon me through the
emptiness outside the box-

a distant voice is counting backwards...
I smell bread baking

rising from the riverit's one of the drowned days; those that drag
like hooks through a river,
turning dead things
belly-up on your shores. listen.

i am listening. to name it lover,
this ripening ache stretched
between us; to know
what it is you carry. you
are a deep silence gardened
by ghosts; hanging
from the hinges of a sprawled
elsewhere. (they are here
still, pacing the long brim
of your memory around
to the long brim of mine.)

i too have been drowning.
if not by one stone,
then another. the autumn quiet
of the body
in bed. this language named skin,
beast, temple, home. underwater,
you open your mouth; amniotic
void of unspeaking, horiz

DaddyThere was a metal door
between his office and me
and sometimes I'd drive

cars into it. It was a garage,
before. Then, filled with
communion wafers,

hidden in desk drawers
like buried treasure,
sacraments for nosy girls.

When outside he finds
the holy departed, he
calls me for a plastic bag.

He picks up my cat,
wracked with rigor mortis
Daddy gives no eulogy.

But calmly he hands us an offering,
repeating the Psalm,
"Why don't we get some ice cream?"

you gave me your wordand I buried it in concrete
in the night, it rises,
follows me down the hall,

sits in shape behind the curtain
a shadow detached from the hip,

you said, after all, I'd won
for all the winning
you killed something in me

you killed something in me
and it is stirring in the dark.

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optimum exposureCinco de Mayo, the city is drowning

in tequila and the first rainfall

in months, and she is home on the couch,

cupping a book like an injured baby bird,

pen and notebook just within reach and

and she wishes someone would

take a secret photo

of this moment:

tired eyelashes

and fingers like piano wire, the arc

of peacock-green, the whole of her

a poem, incorrectly translated.

The desert drenched in the sleepy

sweat of creosote and cedar, and

she doesn't miss the street scene, she

knows her heart as cryptozoological creature:

they have theorized its existence,

but it always shies just out of view

of the lens.

museIt's not a heart you're hunting,
but breath and tongue
loosening verse in wind-rush:

Neruda, Levis, and Rich
cherry-blossom sweet
under a gibbous heart

and when the words
become just marks with ink
steal me
one temperate curve at a time,

taste the color where the chin tips back,
peacock blue then plum, emulsified,
until I desaturate completely.

DroughtI see your godhead each morning. Early, before noontide. I am outside, sipping coffee, watching for rain. You are with a hose in hand, each drop a wasted revelation. You, with holy burst from spout, you with sage-wet brow. You avoid my eyes; focus instead on agastache, lavendula, alcea. Rivulets rise, severed artery blood-let in the red-clay dust. I open my palms skyward; receive the mist like a blessing. You, Water Deity in waterless summer, the hottest that I can remember. At night, the desert palms against your gate, anhydrous and thirsting. At night, the tricksters rise from your puddles and walk.

devastatei.
The trap has sprung.
We are in free-fall,
wordless between open hands.

ii.
I am caged by silence.
To not speak now
is to never speak again.

iii.
Our voices swell and falter.
Halfway to the bottom, we admit
there is a problem.

iv.
My body bends like the
spine of a book. Too much more
and I will crack.

v.
You say there is still
time. We look to the light;
see only eclipse.

edgebut it was not enough
to swallow the serpent & end the story here

leather-bound book & sky emptied
of light

a grave dug out, glass prism-prison,
chained to the edge, grass matted & dead

unlit, unholy, holding
an umbrella & still wet from the rain,

     two stars reach out
        to brush each other
            —flicks of light, soft as finger tips—
        & detonate

& a moon wishing, just once,
to shine its own perfect light.

wreck divingShe dreams out loud
breathless horizon stretched tight
across the ether
into a swollen, ripening moon.

The purl, endless backwards motion
the body sinks into itself
and rises again

threatening to shipwreck
against the gales

until the light
pushes into dark and it is

light again,
another breath sucks in and
for a moment, crushed against

her own cliffs, she imagines
a normal day
without the need for a stranger's hips,

reaches out her hand, not knowing
if there is anyone reaching back.

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Submitted: October 6, 2012
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[x]

Love Poem for a Man Who Doesn't Get Poetry

by *scatteredwords, Oct 6, 2012, 4:49:37 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

I buy milk as if it is the
most important
thing I have ever done; come home and
lay the bag on the floor
at your feet.

The meaning is lost
on you, a man

who is a snap of clean linen;
no, you prefer strait-line
talk, full-throttle motion.

Not wavering semaphore.

I feel silly with my quiet twist of metaphor,
Darling, Buttercup, My Angry Little Arsonist,
saying your name is the breath between
the waves, your heart
the hungry mouth of the bay.

There is a curve between the me and the you
We waited too long, hoping the pause
would not last forever, but just in case,
we hold hands in the dark.

I had forgotten how to give you
the space between my lines,

but then yesterday I found fragments
of a poem I had ripped up and
thrown in the trash
folded up in your jacket pocket

the truth is
I never expected to love you

and those words
were written for another man.

Love Poem for a Man Who Doesn't Get Poetryby *scatteredwords

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

And when it was finally time to write a love poem, words failed me.

you say the word,
you know I will find you
or if you need some time, I don't mind

I don't hold on to the
tail of your kite

I'm not like the girls that you've known
but I believe I'm worth coming home to

Feedback, please. Specifically:

1. The semaphore line seems a little lonely out there on its own. Would it benefit from another line there?
2. Line breaks?
3. Does the transition from stanza 5 to 6 feel awkward?

Given the feedback, I'm not going to scrap this like I originally threatened.

*riparii Apr 3, 2013

Ah, I wondered how I could have failed to fave this. I see that indeed I have.

*scatteredwords Apr 3, 2013

Comments like that from you make me giggle-happy.

*riparii Apr 3, 2013

Well done me, then.

*hazeltown Mar 22, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

this is amazing..

*scatteredwords Mar 24, 2013

Thank you.

=Wordeea Jan 30, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

i love this. it is fragile and mundane (in a good way) and well, life, but written in pretty words

very well done

*scatteredwords Jan 30, 2013

Thank you so much.

=StormBringer23 Nov 28, 2012

I know nothing of form, or style, or proper punctuation.

I know I love this.

*scatteredwords Nov 28, 2012

Thank you, dear!

=StormBringer23 Nov 29, 2012

"you say the word,
you know I will find you
or if you need some time, I don't mind

I don't hold on to the
tail of your kite

I'm not like the girls that you've known
but I believe I'm worth coming home to"

How could he not worship the ground you walk on?

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Love Poem for a Man Who Doesn't Get Poetry

Love Poem for a Man Who Doesn't Get Poetryby *scatteredwords

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