:thumb487158155:Dark With Certaintyi'm under such
heavy water
that nothing above
can pull me out
the failed, severed
arms of evolution
feed the crabs
and lampreys below
i am the spirit
of dark water
my fins cut it
like wings
i offer only
this one-way portal
an infinity's rows
of everything-teeth
so, as the earth slowly
shakes you out
of your trees, holes
and stick piles
as dry land tilts
and heaves you in
our dark, sleepless salts
absorb you
warm blood billows
a cloudy exhaust
trailing down
into the deep
from the jaws and gills
of an alien machine
it dyes this ocean
dark with certainty
i am night's eyes, calculating
two black stars
circling your world,
your land
and the boat
that your foot hangs from
lazily venturing
a small wake
into my world
GraffitiHe took me on a cigarette run to the train tracks
in his not-girlfriend’s car.
I slipped past the growth he trampled
toward the underbelly of the bridge.
He asked me if I was wearing shorts
and I wasn’t.
From the struts, he hurled rocks like punctuation
to a breathless, incessant combustion.
—“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
But I guess that makes me a hypocrite.
They echoed like gunfire
across graffiti-covered walls,
charting out adolescence,
and ricocheting off my ribs.
When I put my arm around him,
he felt like a landmine.
He was the train that rumbled by
and he said we were lucky it was on the other side.
Were we?
When I saw his eyes like
orphanages—I wanted to kiss him.
I didn’t.
We just sat there and waited for another train.
:thumb487467015::thumb487611605:On fading memories 2-
I have the feeling I wrote this.
Many years ago.
Many days ago.
Many scoldings ago.
-
Didn´t she lament that she had forget a date
for her arthritis therapy?
-
Oh, but slip behind you
the date of your appointment
and she´ll
bemoan oan oan oan on
about the direction your life is steering on
-
A grandmother:
a pile of stench, dead bladders and
fungused skin.
Everyday her daughter
forces her to write her name
one, two, three-
exlodes when the maid reveals
she did not take the eleven o ´clock pills
-
Explodes when
the son forgets to live
like everybody else
should do
ought to do
must do
-
Sometimes
my language native begins to fizzle
slip by hands my
simmer
a sentence lighted out
like a day crumbling
a schedule´s blurry
-
I must be convinced
that I scribbled this
once before
if not more times
-
A photograph
a reaping of times
greenhoused
for better burdens
rests aside her Chopra pamphlets
-
Red flu walks from the nose to the teeth
following a class of frustrated
:thumb487707416:RoseBut there, where none would notice –
A flower is thriving.
I do but say naught.
As long as I remain silent she’s belonging to me.
The apple of my eye saw her first,
Everything that comes after – is sweet blasphemy.
Scoring her leaves –
Want to see if she’ll scream.
Cause her ache, too, is all mine.
I saw her
Now I’ve become a little prettier.
As long as I stay silent
She
Is
Me
:thumb487762814:
:thumb487378903:On Desire and Incorporeality.I am newly
and acutely
aware of my skin,
because more than anything
I want to be free of it.
Each of its borders
rises in bumps;
this pressing want
this goose-skinned lust-
What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey, that's a pretty good idea. I'll give you the moon, Mary.
(You’re waiting for the full moon
for to better see our faces
as you and I run anxious tongues over coarse lips
preparing them to dance,
even the fireflies dulled
by celestial graces.
But I’m pleading for a crescent moon,
ripe to be picked
from the sky.)
Gut me then
with its sharpened edge
and from this skin
let me slip;
I want to leak into the fucking water supply
to get to where you are.
Never mind this flesh
that everybody knows
so
well;
disregard this body
to grace your lips just once-
:thumb486972299::thumb487320729:
:thumb486926883:Desire for Poetic LineageI wish I could write poetry
That summered in Long Island
Within horseshoe distance of Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Astors.
I wish my pages were tinted with wood smoke
Trailing back from the 20th Century Limited racing to Boston.
I wish its shoes were muddied
From wintering in the Berkshires with Hawthorne.
I wish it bore the paint splatters of
A night spent in Saint-Remy-de-Provence.
I wish it knew the hungered, soulless eyes
Of kids in Carolina cotton gins and Pennsylvania coal breakers.
I wish it had helped fix the propeller shafts at Kill Devil Hills.
I wish my binding was kindled with Spurgeon's fire, then kept alight
With Screwtape's missives to his apprentice.
I wish my words had dared the trials of Stanley and Livingstone.
I wish my poem aspired to treasonous courage in defiance of the Crown
To pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness.
DanceDance with me, long-limbed, light-limned
Seeming sheen streams through the seams
Falling sun, Fall’s angled run
Forever fly high bright-eyed sky
equinoxthese days Autumn stands with crossed arms
and a hunched back, branches bending to braid
her auburn hair, toes curled around dry leaves
and withered roots.
she's tried to call me a few times,
tried to water the traces left over from
last year,
thinks a reconciliation can happen out of
stems and petals.
13 missed calls: one for every day
she's been back in town.
her stance used to be wide; feet apart,
arms spread to the sides, smile aimed
towards the sky-
her smile aimed towards me.
i go to the park every day and see her hanging
upside down from the trees, scratches etched
all over her arms.
i trace the ones coating my own skin,
remembering the bark slicing me to
pieces-
i can't help but hope that she loses her grip,
loses it the same way i lost her
when Winter came along.
the way you talked to meyou used to pause
when you spoke,
letting the spaces between your letters
and words breathe and expand,
waiting for the right moment
to hit me with your voice again.
you were soft spoken,
the energy of your vocal chords
was water on the spine.
your notes floated and landed tenderly
on abandoned sheets and decrepit walls
and echoed endlessly in the halls of my brain
Forest fireWe were snaking up the I-84
through Deadman Pass
in the Blue Mountains
of northeastern Oregon,
where stories write themselves.
The trees are evergreen, you said,
defiant spruce and pine and fir
protruding from dirt and rocks,
exclamation points
following the death of everything else.
I recall a membrane of clouds
at the apex, a reminder of borders
that should never have been crossed,
as overanalyzed by a tired mind.
It may or may not have been there.
We penetrated the veil,
the first Chevy
to sputter onto the Moon,
monochrome and lifeless,
under a radiant crystal sky.
The fire had ravaged
the land to the bone
leaving us trapped
in the rib cage of the world.
Something else descended
into the desert below,
but it was no longer us.
TitleCream and Chrome Coupé
A story of the 1930's.
--------------------------
I was strolling in Manhattan on a brilliant sunny summer day. The sidewalks were crowded, the shops busy. Excitement filled the air. Then I saw it, coming down the avenue. If Christmas were here, I'd be hearing silver bells. It pulled into an empty parking space on the other side, a sweet cream and chrome coupé. A slim, athletic young man got out of the car and began to put change in the parking meter. I looked the scene over. I wanted one of those! One of each. Both the cream and chrome coupé and the slim, athletic young man. This could be life-changing for all concerned, but as another slim, athletic young man myself, I had hopes. I crossed the street.
Lancelot Price 2014 October 4
Risking life and limb since way back.
:thumb486749755:growing upI grew up on the back of a vegetable cart, counting the months of my life in seasonal vegetables, and counting the years in the objects I took on board to keep me company. Aged seven I remember perching on a sack of onions with my sock puppet and reading Alana’s book about a witch disguised as a pedlar woman. I flinched away from the crates of rubbery okra; green fibrous witches noses. When aunty stewed the witchy okra for our dinner it was unrecognisable. It looked like stars.
The ceaseless jolting of the cart against uneven terrain and the fresh air contrived to blur the words I read, stirring them into a bubbling green potion. Blinking fast to fight dry prickly eyes I read another page, then leaned back against the wooden flanks of the cart and realised through long heavy blinks that stars themselves were actually less-star-shaped than slices of okra. You couldn’t count their points, there were meant to be five, one two three four five. I couldn’t draw a pointy sta
Between the PinesLying on a rain-washed road at night;
my fingers splayed across state boundaries,
light brown skin turning amber in the soft glow of
the yellow lines painted thickly in tar.
I'm just a stranger in a town I've lived in all my life.
Oh I'm just a teen who thought he was
an adult on his sixteenth birthday, when all along he was
still just an impatient child at heart.
And you, friend; you tried to make me see
how fast the world was spinning,
how out-of-control I was getting;
losing my balance on a tight rope,
wobbling as I attempted to get across this
unsteady bridge called adolescence.
But you've always known exactly who you are,
what you could become; a street artist with
his sights set on Paris, New York;
never failing to dream big, never failing at
anything he hasn't tried at least once..
I was jealous then and maybe I still am, to be honest, friend.
I've always wanted your bravery like a pirate ship,
sailing straight into a storm.
I've always wanted your strength like northern evergre
drunk masterpiecesthe nights i spent
spinning ice in my drinks
have melted too,
and my memories are
watered down--
just Monets
hanging in place
of the things
i thought I knew.
Why I Was Never BaptisedWhen I was small
I didn’t believe in Santa Claus
but I did believe in a bearded man,
who wasn’t a man, and less so a woman,
who was really three people,
and one was a spirit
and one was a son of the other.
I didn’t know if he was very nice,
or how big he was,
but he felt like a box
and I was in the box,
and everyone said he loved me.
I learned to let words roll off my tongue
which had no meaning to me,
writ in an old, tired English
translated and retranslated so people like me
could form them,
and I was told to keep them in my box
because they were the only truth,
and not to question them.
To this day, I don’t know a place
where truth exists before questions, but
as I grew bigger the box grew smaller.
I was never baptized.
Some people are surprised to know,
and every time I have to explain
how I was taught that it was a choice;
a conscious declaration of devotion to the
truth-without-questions,
the man-with-three-faces,
one that would last the rest of my days,
a
Fast ForwardThe golden clock was ticking quickly now
Around my face a hue of bittersweet
A frown, a simple glare, was all I meet
My full red lips would make a silent vow
On paper do we write and cry, erase
The little lies that moved to be believed
Their goals a cause that we should have perceived
Our lives are placed on hold, one time and place
Alas! We dream and doubt and drown in dread
We panic, portals proof of lack of peace
And quickly came our quiet clock to see
Our fancy flown away, and found us fled
Our sighs so soft they sent a swirl that ceased
To trick the time outstretched beneath the tree
