Into the Stars

Relationship

Taken pieces disintegrate in your lips
dissolve like broken promises
like trust quickly given and unearned.

These pieces are salty and sweet
salty like the reality of your deception
making you crave the sugary coat it donned.

Your brother told me you were
but I didn't believe him. I refused. I denied it
said he didn't know anything about you,

but he knew you better than I ever will.
He listened to you unbiasedly, and unashamed
years of silent listening as he judged you unfit.

I wish I would have listened to him laughing,
saying it was a bad idea, saying not to,
but instead I took his dare.

You are the one mistake I regret more
than my first smoke, my first glance,
and my first romance. I cheated.

RAINDROPS

Rapping on my roof drips
And drops little lifegiving grains
Into the soil below. I love it
Now, after learning all it
Does for us, all it creates,
Revives, and supports.
Oh, if only I could be as
Productive as the rain
Steeping our world in life.

That first poem bites at me, man. I love this: These pieces are salty and sweet - and that contradiction of emotions with tone, with word choice, with the poem itself as a narrative all kind of pour everywhere at once. Ahh <3

Raindrops - so I love the expression "lifegiving grains" that is so brilliant :3 The "steeping" too is a rich choice and the simplicity really packs a punch!

The Silver Beast

Have you heard of the silver beast
haunting all the shadows?
He wanders the hills of the east.
To him adventure goes.

Tell me, have you heard him crying
they say he lost his life.
A dark day surely was his dying
The world wrenched for his strife.

The shot that took him shaking out
came from a blood rifle.
He stumbled fort with silent doubt
he'd meet his last trifle.

Have you heard of the silver beast
haunting all the shadows?
He wanders the hills of the east.
To him adventure goes.

The wound was deep and it did seep
a trail of blood laid thick
but still he kept his mind to creep
and to the wound did lick

But more than a scar would it bear
as he lost his last bout,
And on his grave would he then swear
what killed him was devout.

Have you heard of the silver beast
haunting all the shadows?
He wanders the hills of the east.
To him adventure goes.

The rifleman's aim was true they claim
because of life well prayed.
Deep from home his claim did lay
but he followed as he played

And then one day before him came
the proof of all his faith.
The silver beast who always claimed
he'd drop on Death the Eighth!

Have you heard of the silver beast
haunting all the shadows?
He wanders the hills of the east.
To him adventure goes.

My Throat is an Example of Igneous Rock

It claws at my throat
like a porcupine sleeping
it's spines aimed to stab me
every time I swallow.

I dread the dripping
the coughing, the noise of it all
but there's nothing for it.
I have to eat, to drink, to breathe
but it hurts, and stabs, and scratches.

They call it scratching because it's like
a two year old taking nails
Not fingernails, the house building kind,
and dragging them along your throat.

It goes away, a dull ache, a weak throb
a little itchy, as in freshly-itched burning,
not the I-Need-To-Itch tickle.

Think sandpaper glued to the back of your tongue
or as what your throat is made out of instead of muscle
and sometimes it chips apart and lodges elsewhere
crawls under a fold here, or digs into a socket there.

You can't reach back and sooth it like a cut
or a scratch. Scratches you can lotion, rub, cool.
This, the only comfort you have are cough drops
and medicine, like more cough drops
because the medicine tastes like someone
ground up ear-wax and boiled it down with tree-bark,
over-steeped tea, nail gunk, lint, and mucus.

The taste of it clings to the injured location
a tiny bug on the screen that is your throat
and for the next 24 hours, until you have to take the next one
each time you swallow, a little bit dislodges
from your screen-sandpaper throat to remind you of the taste.

Lord forbid you need to work.
Or worse, you have children,
or pets

I'm not sure which is worse,
having to do stuff while sick
or being sick in the first place.

I really love your poem about the silver beast. Rhyming poetry is tough to pull off, if you have many stanzas. I feel like this is more like a ballad and it's so harsh--but gives me a strong impression. <3

Yes, I was playing with a ballad style. I didn't stick to like an abab structure, but I did do the alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter stanzas. I just ended up doing abab cbcb ... rather than straight abab. And some of them are slants... I'm happy you caught that <333

Morose 5 Lines

Deceased
end of being
collapsing endless sleep
loss eclipsed with empty returns
Ended

Cinquain

You Were Mine

In private, I tooled away at your edges
trimmed you, molded you,
added clay to your nose and reworked you

I smashed you into pieces,
reglued you back together in a new shape
and changed your mass like pumpkin carving

I was arm deep in your residue
that which I took off, and reapplied
I'd peel you from my skin
a layer of gray that was my skin

down the drain you'd swirl
and I'd mourn my waste
I'd bluejay cry at all that
which would never again
attach to your cheeks

But you were defiant
resilient, resistant to change
You'd crack and fold, and break
tell me that I had you wrong

and we'd start over again
a couple who breaks up
and rejoins, a faited marriage
and divorce ever ensuing

We were friends with divorce councilors
because they smelled fresh meat
each time we'd fight publically at parties
and they'd bet over how long we would stay wed.

You and me,
we needed firing,
and I sat worrying
for hours over the temperature
the ventilation
the cooling
your neighbors were too near
your innards were not stuffed enough

Maybe you would burst to spite me
or your nose would fall off
like the famous sculptures missing
arms and legs and heads.

I presented you last week
the HANDS OFF time
and I stare at you
for imperfections, for weakness
for cracks and marring

but you've already been fired
you're on display for them now
and we are divorced as child and mother
not husband and wife.

Oy, I love your first stanza and the one that starts "we were friends with divorce councilor." So biting and yeah. I would say it's pretty, but uh. That's probably not quite the reaction you were going for.

The Day Will Come When You Don't Know Me

You were my ever,
my bolder, support,
a brick wall to lean.
Then ants crawled in you,
wiggled through your skull

pull memory
away to show
seventh grade year.
I'm not Gladace

Once you peaked
out to say
"I miss you"

broken
mind you're

gone

Diminished Hexaverse

Broken Memories of Happy Times

You are the rickety walls and old paint
that peels with a little dampness, rain
the old steps untrodden, weedy
and foggy windows, drafty.
You used to warm me through,
soft carpet beneath
my toes and old
cigar smoke.
Memory
lost

Creating Art

We were so close when we first met
like lovers whisked away in those few months
of everything being about everyone. Always
being on the phone with that sweet someone, you.
The midnight whispers of "No, you first" which dissolve
into sleeping on the phone because we both
refused to hang up.

I thought it would last forever, but the longer
we stayed together, the more I saw your faults.
I felt your cracks beneath my fingers, your cranky bones
your old scars, the trauma of your childhood
bubbling out in physical form in this gouge
just below your knee. Your mother hit you
hard enough that you scraped it on the porch.

You laughed at me when you touched mine back,
fingers ghosting over when I lost my first teddy bear
a pimply scar on my forehead, and you showed off,
Held up a hand with three scratches, white as snow
deep as the Great Divide, and angry with the hate
of your first cat. You relished in it, and I mystified at you.

But that too faded as you shared the pain
and it was too much for my feeble back.
I bore you away, tossed you out into the rain
and gaped at you waiting on my curb to take you in.

You wrestled with your bags,
taunted me with stones on my window at night,
showed up at the bar, the store, work, wherever
I happened to be, you would rear up and claim my attention.

I almost wanted a restraining order, but no.
There was one way through this relationship, just one.

And so we met again, me equipped with the fire
of an angry crazed lover, you with the ice of gods,
and we boiled ourselves out, waxing deep into the night
waning our differences apart, producing you
new to this world again, not just an idea
but formulated, settled. No longer my lover.

You are my child, cradled and swaddled,
carved free from that old abusive body
and here we stand, alone, with you
of mine to show the world.

The Interview Call

I grind my feet into the carpet as my jaw flaps
filling the air with buzzing bees and helicopter whirls.

Swelling through my lips like puke comes words
I hardly graced with thought or tethered to one another
simply time would do the work, and practice.

I am a speaker by nature, but just to receive and give information
to humans or dogs or computers, occasionally to the air,
but not to this, this thing, that listens and responds.

It's unnatural, like feeding coins into a machine
that gives you nothing in return, no sticker, no slap-hand
that sticks to everything and leaves prints for ghost hunters to wonder over
in the dead of the night as they investigate my remains

No, it bids my heart to race, and takes bets on when I die
and my mouth censors itself so they are none the wiser.