not even the rain

I feel like I'm just running over the same things over and over again.

monotone
He wakes up tired these days, like
the hours he spends dreaming are only
another excuse for his body to sink
into the slow fog of exhaustion. He gives up
talking, because the words only bounce off
the walls to drill into his ears, and the only
music he plays is an old CD of classical tunes
he finds makes the world just a little less
gray. And every morning the sun rises there's
another weight that's found its way to his
shoulders and more worries come to scuttle
and snap like terriers at his knees, and always
there is a faint sound of water at the back of
his head like some fountain drying up or
some river wasting away, and always the
longing looks to the phone he wishes he
could pick up and always those words,
that will never be enough.

future imperfect
Perhaps one day I will stop thinking
of you in terms of wild, fierce-eyed beasts
who could tear me to pieces the very moment
my hand reached out and I said Hi; stop
picturing you as broad strokes of oil paint
on some rough-hewn canvas that in no
way fit with the watercolors of my dreams.

And maybe one day I won't need to write
these ridiculous things down, or worry about
how dark it should be out and how the
dawn through the window is too kind, and
too early.

I need to find you first.

Hey, hey, that crazy typography was a good idea.

And, Jesus,

monotone
He wakes up tired these days, like
the hours he spends dreaming are only
another excuse for his body to sink
into the slow fog of exhaustion. He gives up
talking, because the words only bounce off
the walls to drill into his ears, and the only
music he plays is an old CD of classical tunes
he finds makes the world just a little less
gray. And every morning the sun rises there's
another weight that's found its way to his
shoulders and more worries come to scuttle
and snap like terriers at his knees, and always
there is a faint sound of water at the back of
his head like some fountain drying up or
some river wasting away, and always the
longing looks to the phone he wishes he
could pick up and always those words,
that will never be enough.

...you got him down to a T.

Possibly this is the way telescopic series could have gone in a parallel universe. Alternatively, I need to stop watching sci-fi TV series.

On the Sculpting of Salt
They say his love died, and he very slowly, very
surely, went mad. But no one

really knows how this story starts, though
it must have involved flowers woven into crowns,
and hands held over bridges with
water running under. He must have built
altars to the lesser gods of her eyes, and she
smiled softly at all the epithets he piled like
myrrh at her feet, then taken his hand
to run barefoot under the appletree branches.

Maybe. It is, in the end, of little import.

In the end—it is all anyone
remembers—she is lying on some white
hospital bed and he comes to her only
in time to watch the color in her lips fade,
and he did not avert his eyes, save
to blink the tears away, and that

was the truest show of love, or so they say.

She must have been lovely, is commonly
agreed; she must have seen
something in him that shone, and with
it illuminated Time, what little of it she had
stored up in the words that he spoke and the
blue walls of the little child's room at his house
he'd been painting, that he thought
she'd never noticed; and

with her gone he had very little--
a headful of empty hymns and something
that maybe resembled a heart. And he was
mad, they say, and so

he went then to the stars
and burnt them up, one by one, one by
one; because surely,
he thought, somewhere there would be one
like his heart, and at the center of it there
would be her, waiting for him with a
whole new world in her arms.

4:35pm, Saturday
I am sitting in a room with maybe
one hundred and fifty other people, all
of us listening to a recap on
total mechanical energy as found in simple
harmonic motion, and I can feel
myself itching to
sketch the boy sitting four seats over, one
row down; not because he is particularly
charming, or handsome, but simply because
there is something intriguing in the
sloping
angle of his left cheekbone,
and while the newly-minted PhD drones on and on I
attempt to distract my hands, writing this
sad excuse of a poem on the Notes app.
of my phone.

*like* There are probably at least 150 fellow students that will never know I captured their likenesses on paper. I wonder if I've ever been a victim.

I absolutely love your last one. It is my favorite so far out of all of them.

Mmm, Jagged. Jutt. It's been a while. We must chat more.

I'm coming here to give you the "partly before halfway marker NaPo" bump reminder kick in the face, to spark the creativity along. I've watched your writing Jutt, and it's intriguing. There's much to see in your writing, and then much not seen. Various styles, various attempts, reaching out, drawing within, and lost. Lost yes, lost, frightfully lost and scared of being revealed. And that's what NaPo whispers. It's either a menace or an annoyance; only in completion successfully is it defeated. Seen as fun, it is the Pandora's Box we don't realize we've opened until we come to realize we ARE the Abyss and the Abyss is a hungry, hungry bitch. And we can feed it anything we throw, but does that conquer it? Are we growing? What is growing as well? Hope does not appear simply at the end; no, it is never a completion based award. Self introspection and chaos. You must experience all of the pains of the world to evolve.

So Jutt, what of you writing? You are a curious one. And I'm going to take a different stance with you and do something different. I hate single poem reviews. They're so trivial and annoying. To the greater view of your writing in NaPo!

How do you dissect the contents of a rock's stomach, Jagged?
Is it scalded and melted in lava and dropped from a helicopter over a volcano in Hawaii or the Aegean? Do you wander through France's past and ask its greatest writers and artists how to crack it open like an egg, or do you examine it like the Crown Jewels of England when the Angles and Normans practiced family inter-relations?
The words of word and word in words that appear to you in your dreams, are they communicated or rushed away before they can be seen; like the squiggly nightmares of Lovecraft and mutterings of Cthulhu, ever watching and disappearing when your vision can't hope to write as they wander out of sight?
Do you fear ghosts Jagged, ghosts of what you may be and will become when the world turns itself upon you and everything you have done was just one thought, to a thought, and a trivial waste of time?
Can you sing Jagged, like Nightingale's in Romance poetry, or are you wise and wary to old naive ways? Did you know naive was once a preferable state of mind? Ah yes, just like pathetique, yet for all of irony, the spell check cannot realize it is a word, merely seeing it as wrong.
Jagged, the road ahead is something to not take for granted. Jagged there is no key. Jagged your eyes see much, but you do not trust them. Jagged you are alive. Write about this; write about the life in yourself.
Jagged you once wondered if arabesque is a word to use in a poem as you struggled to pen a poem and then wrote it as a poem; don't you love metaphors for metaphors as words write poems for us? What is the artist if the pen and paper or keys and screen could think for themselves?
Jagged, do you have a sense of home or are you a transplant that died many years ago when you realized the world didn't give a damn for actual charity, just how it made itself feel; Jagged why don't you write about those years?
The mind searches between layers and layers, and raises blankets, and one day you will wake in France and look out a window and, what? Will you ask yourself "How do you dissect the contents of a rock's stomach?" Do it Jutt, the rock will never leave.

Mmm. I believe this will have some resonance. Maybe not. Maybe so? Some of these will do well, others not. Nonetheless, continue writing for NaPo.

I'm falling terribly behind on my schedule, and it's still all very meh. Ah well.

marco polo
you say you want to see the world, and
i suppose i can't blame you for that. i
just want you to know that for me no country
will ever amount to anything as long as i am with
you, and were I a cartographer I would make a map
of you, plunging into the trenches of your ribcage
or rising along the jut of your knees and elbows like
mountains, or sinking in your eyes in search of
ancient deep-sea animals, and on the insides of
your wrists i would write stay here
(and on your lips would be letters, here be dragons,
here be monsters, and do not stop).

Expatriation
Tell me--how the fish looked like,
lying in the mud with
their gills to the air and through some
miracle of evolution still alive and merely
crawling their way above the water,while I
stood on the bridge and leaned over
in the warmth of a quiet evening,
and how there was a hand in mine
that was warm as well, and gentle, and
how years later as I was asked to write
about an important, defining memory
this was it: the fish in the mud with their
lungs full of sky, the way the flowers of my
name live and die and go on;

how when I first arrived to a country I
I would spend years breathing there was
no luggage in tow, because we'd
stopped for a night in a city many say is beautiful
and that I then found grey, tedious and
slow, and it all got stolen;
how the night after that the jetlag was
burning itself into my eyes and
I stared up at the ceiling in the dark
and the faint outline of the fan hovered like
the wings of some large bat ready to swoop down
and eat me whole.

Tell me why I am most at peace sitting in a
dark room while outside snow falls, and
why the happiest moment of my life
was on a little sailboat, all alone in the middle
of the ocean, with salt thick on my tongue and
the waves rolling and the wind steady and slow,
because I do not know.

metronome
that night she cried herself to sleep, and in the morning
she woke up late; past the thickness of lingering sleep
she could feel this awful feeling inside of her, like she'd
just missed something terribly, terribly important,

and so she opened up the little box that was her
chest and tore off all the little imperfect things that
kept beating out of sync so she could fix it all into
silver and steel and clockwork so that from now on she
would always be on time, and it worked so well she

never cried again.

Prelude & Fugue No. 18
I was born in the war, she says, and
everybody laughs at her.

Last year it was adoption; she'd lower her
voice and whisper My parents are not my
parents, and look over her shoulder like she
expected someone to come after her for saying it.
She had her father's chin and her mother's feet, but
I never told her that, because

you see, there was something about her hands that
was more bird than girl, and her skin sometimes
seemed transparent, blue veins skittering like the
fragile lines along stained glass windows and
dragonfly wings.

The year before that she said Here's a
secret: I'm deaf. I've been reading your lips all
along. There was something of willows,
in how she bent her neck then; and the kids,
they laughed at that too, and for a moment there I
almost believed her, as she didn’t flinch and just
walked off, her eyes closed and her heart tucked away.

I can see ghosts, she says, every other week-end,
and flicks the flashlight off. In the darkness her hands
move and follow the rhythm of her words. This is
no longer Lisa's room; the branches tapping at the windows
become dry bones and the floorboards suddenly hold
secrets. We reach for one another, and the other girls whisper
She lies so well, and giggle a bit desperately as the stairs
whine under someone's foot and the door creaks open.

I love this weather, she says, sitting under my window
soaked and half-drowned in rainwater. I pull it up and let her in, and
she shakes herself like a tired puppy after a romp in the mud.
How's the war going, I ask, and she smiles at me through the
the shrapnel glinting inside her eyes, sadly. You know
how it goes, she says. Lots of collateral.

She's dripping all over my floor, so I get her a
towel. Will your parents mind, she asks, and I shake my
head, no. Say my name, she asks, and I do, and she
says, Again, and Again, and Again, and I'm trying
to keep my voice steady while she cries, and shake
my head again, very gently, when she asks if
maybe I could please kiss her.

Succession
You are made king at seventeen. There are
garlands in the streets when you ride through,
but in the privacy of your castles you learn, for
the first time, why your mother insisted
you learn how to lie. There are girls paraded
in front of you, and old men whispering behind
closed doors of conspiracies and good old times.
There is a new taste to the sound of your name,
that you are not entirely used to. In the
hall stands your father, carved out of rough
stone; there is a curl to his lips that follows
you when you walk past, and a disdain in
the smooth unseeing eyes that weighs heavier
than the ill-fitted crown that slips from your brow.
Ten years from now you will have it taken
down; but right now this is all very new, and you
think you still need something that will remain solid,
and normal, and true.

[removed for 'sent to poetry contest' reasons]

I don't even know anymore.

Abyss of the Birds
There's a boy sitting on the shore with great
white antlers in his hands and stuttering little
thoughts bouncing about the inside of his head and
waves crashing with a spray of water and foam
over the smooth stones in front of him.

There's a boy sitting on the shore: his shirt's blue
and so are his shoes, and the sky is bleeding into
the seams and fabric of his jeans until they're all
some hazy shade between navy and grey. This
must be a dream, he thinks. The waves hang
suspended mid-fall. The antlers are heavy in his
hands, white and bone and very, very dead.

Dreams should not be forgotten, he thinks, but
they are anyway. He blinks, once, and the waters
slam down against the rocks. He blinks, again, and
they still, washed-out flowers blooming out from the
spray. The light catches over the curve of them.
They are windows, but he can't see through.

There's a boy on the shore, who's bringing up
his hands. There's bone in them, dead cartilage
with cracked grooves running across the length.
They're raised now above his head, and there's only
air and hair and skin and only a thin layer of flesh
and bone that prevents them from becoming part
of him. There are antlers in his hands, and they
end in sharp points, that drag across the sky.

It's pink now. The sky, that is; the grey is
washing away. His shirt's still blue. His hands
are turning to bone, or are they already? They
are bridges between bone and body and sky,
and like foam over smooth stones they are
shifting, very gentle, between a million shades of
white and grey. There are no mirrors in this dream,

but he wonders, nevertheless, what color it is
that would meet his eyes were he to see them
reflected to himself. This is a dream. He wants
to know how it is that he looks, when nobody else
is watching. He closes his eyes, and feels the waters
finally fall, and spread, and rise.

High tide. The sky is bleeding pink and the blue is
washing off, and the water laps at his feet, the water
reaches its hands for the sleeves of his shirt and tugs
until he is no longer sitting. Stones roll under his shoes,
and then those too are gone. He is weightless;
he is drowning, weighed down by bones that
will never be his. The points still scrape at the sky, before
they sink. He is dreaming. The waves are windows, the
waves are mirrors; he will learn, in time, that
they only go one way.