an aestival whisper

Thanks to Kylan for this brilliant little idea.

Summer thread--- this will be changing, probably quite a bit providing I can overcome my present writer's block. Verbal abuse/critiques are warmly welcomed.


These were terrible times,
the winding of a clock,
a nonstop click tock ticking off
the ways that I could live,
the ways that my bones could bend
before they slowly start to break
and it is a wonder that I am not all fractures yet,
it is a wonder that I have muscles to carry these sore feet on,
what with the wired fingers you took
to the sides of my stomach,
how you ripped it open to an anorexia of faith--
I cannot help but wonder how it feels to be full,
to have your hands raised and flexed to the heavens
like a blind man trying to see God's face,
but you have stripped me of my clothes, of my limbs, of the hands I want so badly.

These were the times, the hours of the day
that seemed to eat on another and I swear,
I swear to God that I can taste them
when I run the tip of my tongue over my teeth,
there are the minutes and the seconds,
crushed into a powder that I swear I inhaled,
something to keep the edge off my wrists,
the noose off my neck but I swear,
I swear to God, there's something squirming in my heart
that leers openly into my veins like some parasite
that doesn't know how to eat yet,
doesn't know how to do anything except shine it's
shitty little teeth and nip and choke and
plug up my cobweb of blood like it were bone,
like my entire body were calcifying all the time.

I am vapour thin and porous,
a fishnet of ideals, of literature
washed up on a foreign shore and I collect
the wet pages with hands as wrinkled
as the salty sentences and I will learn
Spanish this summer;
they call me bonita in the markets and I
watch where I keep my money;

there are fishmarkets in the morning and fruit markets
in the afternoons, bonitas and swift hands and swifter mouths
and then slow, gaping mouths of mackerel,
choked on oxygen and the deep songs of los pescadores
as they heave up their catch--

they, the fisherman, are like great collectors with
their hooks and tools, pull in glittering scales like coins
with their corded arms and hungry families at home who chirp like
little birds. I can smell lumpy lemons and oranges that taste like Saturn
and Jupiter and sometimes even the sun, and we sprinkle citrus on our fish and
they taste like mercury and a gasp of gills--

I went and watched los pescadores
tie and knot and cast their nets as the tide curled around their
fists and the fish writhed like an obscene god of the sea
and slipped loose of their noose,
slipped and swam with their spiralled fins and small glass teeth--
and the boats came into the harbor like
long lost prisoners. the men were tired stewards
with early morning sweat on their tanned brows.

I sleep with the lull of tide under a heavy harbor
and dig words up from the sand like shells
and fossils and the spider carcass of a sandcastle buried by the tide--
they are spanglish and broken into marketplace bonitas and
the rolled r in pescadores and the mesa of a looong, flat "a",
something that I can pronounce.

I am sitting in the tidepools with my quiet sounds
and sewing fishnets for selling--
I am taken by the tide and dissolving in the texture
of a starfish, an estrella de mar,
into the crag of a cliffside, jagged and bleak in the dusk.
reedy fingers wound round string,
I pull and thread and knot and pinch words together in
a tight tongue; each morning, los pescadores greet me with a smile.

Reserving space for review.

Hey. I just wanted to say. You amaze me. That is all.

I have plucked my eyes from their sockets
like overgrown, sharp leaved weeds,
and jarred them with my heart, left
them in the sun to dry;

they peer about them and like prisms
collect all the spiderspun spectrums and churn
into irises that widen and stretch with the day.
my heart broadens, stretches its veins out
to soak up the heat;
they are both tired, so, so tired.

they wrinkle, just as raisins do,
and they do not make wine as they slumber in the dusk
but flatten and melt into rotten wood,
green and blue and red and yellow and purple and orange;
my pupils are like little seeds, scrunched up
into little balls of the absence of light and my
heart looks like a dried tomato, wrinkled and dusty and wet.

quietly, they wither.

do you think jesus saw us?

I would take anyone's ghost,
anyone's skeleton to my mouth;
bones churn through black and white
and everything is grayscale in
open books, people arguing back and forth and forth
and back, never explaining why it matters in the first place
and they call me a hedonist when I live
and a masochist when I love.

is he even watching?

I churn through crematoriums and wish
the walkers well-- the ashes buzz
like they were still alight and fall into
a manuscripture,
"what would you do if you were to die tonight?"
and they have white collars round their throats
like halos choking them in a quiet embrace
as they tell the cryers "it'll be alright, because the gates
are cleaned by slaves every morning"

has he any reason to anyways?

we are simply still waters in a silent movie,
and the snake cannot see us,
and the skeletons taste salty as they are thrown to the sea.

Wow. I like the imagery you put in my head. It was very good. The only thing that I saw that was wrong was cryers should be spelt criers and gray scale should have a space or be spelt greyscale. Other than that I have nothing but love for your poem. Very well written. Keep up the good work!!

Is it possible for me to love you even more than I already do?

Why, yes. Yes it is.

Ummm. I've been warned to give good reviews or else I may get a talking to. So. You're fantastic, I love your imagery, I love your ideas, I love your Jesus poem.

Where do you come up with this stuff? It's fantastic. Your summer thread excites me.

Spoiler

Thank you, jags.

There are lilies on the table; they smell like deep summer, like the girl in my bed, Sarah. I wake into stagnant hair, a touch of humidity and in the shallow afternoon sweat has curled itself into the nape of my neck. Sarah sleeps like she hasn't for years, quiet lips closed into quiet dreams that I wish I could know, ones that I hope I am in-- and her skin is paler than I remember, like the belly of some morning martin that sits outside our window and wonders why she has not yet woken. I don't mind.

Sarah has scars along her back. Still sleeping where I left her, she is curled in the middle of the bed where I held her with those lines against my chest like splinters of birch trees in dusk, and she is perfect; her muscles are soft as she breathes and they flutter like the feathers of the martin as he sings. Through the broken birch lines, I can see dawn-- but it is far past dawn now; the sun shoulders its way through the shutters as if offended at being taken from my room and it lays across her face. I can just barely see the lines. It looks at the scars beside her eyes and I swear, it shudders.

Her lips quiver in her sleep and I hope now that she is not dreaming of me, not at all. We have enough hours in the day already for her to cry her beautiful tears and now she is back at home with the way things used to be, I am sure of it as her eyes tighten away from the nest of scars about them. Her body stretches and lengthens and then pulls back into itself again like a harp string being plucked or the fall of a fruit from a tree, still unripe in dreams. With hesitation, I brush her shoulder and trace her neck and pull her face up to mine as her eyes open and she flinches away and the sun streaks her face like scars newer, brighter.

Spoiler

This is more a catharsis of imagery than anything else. My mind appears to be hellbent on not producing anything lucid.

always- everywhere,
things that we wish we do not know
carouse our memories and pull at the veins in our wrists
red and purple and black and blue and cold;
each is a petal in the recesses of our brain
and the circular maze in which we live has no corners:
we have no place to secret our secrets away and they
glance upon our fingers like the morning light that doesn't like
the taste of our lips and the dusk that is ubiquitous, anonymous,
hiding from us in the shadows of our skin like some forgotten disease
or tick or parasite pooling itself into our organs--

in my grayscale world, these colors hurt my teeth and
I cannot eat, must close my eyes
and tongues and ears and nose and hold my
breath to count to twenty-four and
in the country they have sayings that make
my ears go back and forth like
some rusty rocking chair and my hands are like
a porch for holding musty fruit and tall grass
plucked with little girl hands to be spun like silk
"my doll is much too small for me, ma"
and the crows eat at my fields
the patches of iris and white and

the country is a black place with
fire underground in some occult embrace
with splintered giants and there is blood spilt
upon the floor, autumn in the burn and crisp of flesh,
crawling like there is a nest of spiders gorging
on the way that your muscles ripple in
the middle of the night, the small murmurs
echoed back from dreams when it is most quiet and
they say that spiders can lay two thousand eggs at a time
and I wonder how it feels to absorb two thousand pulses,
four thousand, six thousand, eight thousand eight legged pulses,
how the squirm and click and clack of legs feels on your organs--
the country is a black place and the oaks crackle and churn
and collapse into groaning beasts, defeated and forgotten
and blocking the road.

our porch is fire scorched and missing nails and there are spiderwebs in the corners
that my circular maze does not have. it squeaks under my feet like
a nest of fieldmice gathered to survive the cold and eat the little food we have left
and the grass is taller this year, taller than me and my eyes weep
over the crunch of wither and dry; the soil is tattooed
with it on a stranger's arms in a sanskrit language of ant feet and
the carcasses of beetles and I find myself flayed among them
like some broken shell with lacy wings praying
to occult gods and a casting, a closing of the eyes
that see only the way my daughter has broken her doll,
head torn off, the way that dusk haunts me with
the tearing of a mountain lion's throat and our screams
are one and the same and I am perched atop a peak and
the prey that I have sought kicks its last life into my stomach
and it breathes its last blood into my mouth, limp boned and breaking and

shattered, they told me, like a vase thrown against the wall
"but it was a windshield" and they don't listen to me moving my lips under this film
of grim reapers leering where only the audience can see them
and they monitor my heartbeat without hearing my heart
and I have a daughter, somewhere, a daughter
with an uncertain birth certificate who used to cry at night,
trying to sound out the letters of a father without knowing the name
and she is ten now, a decade of daughterly tears
and wondering if her eyes will stay as blue as they are
and she will not know because my breath needs saving
and they will not listen and the film plays over and over again
and I am breathing my last blood into a broken doll
with vacant eyes that I hope will not be hers because my
path was a broken one lost in the woods with splintered giants
and I have dragged her into the dirt of my
life like a slave.

I am manic, I am manic
and I fear that I am dying.

your words are really powerful, anyone can feel it.
There isn't ryhiming but it doesn't it, there is a armony in the poem.

Okay, you are just really good. Your imagery is great, the work is good... never stop writing!

I've been unable to write anything of worth recently, for which I apologize. This is an unedited excerpt from a word war.


My grandchildren visit like
spring, nimble and lithe and
running like my legs cannot.
They bask in the sun and sleep
in the grass like small animals
bathing and their hair turns golden
in the sun; freckles sprout like the pale
spots of a robin's egg
that the smallest found last week.
My hair is silver, my skin
withered and dried from the sun.
They do not know
what it feels like to be a snake
unable to shed its old skin.

another little part from my ww.



I am decrepit like the house on the corner
that cannot sell. The floorboards creak
like my early morning bones,
and the porch sags like my skin;
each scratch of paint is a
sunspot scar on my face.
But, I am trapped in my own house,
a prisoner of aching and creaking,
unable to stretch my limber muscles
as they used to and I creeak creeak in my chair,
rocking back and forth like the pulse of a womb
that I have long forgotten.

Paper breath, dry as empty eyes
rustled like the early morning mice
who found that they could eat the walls
of a broken home and taste memories,
like lemongrass and worn clothing
and broken skinned fruits that
fell on the floor while a ghost made dinner--

I exhale with each chop of the knife
and each heave from this bag of bones
breaks my tendons into the tripwire pulp
of a plum, black and blue and never quite
the ripe purple that we think it should be.
My insides bruise like them,
black and blue and spotted with orange like
some grainy disease, wrist thin slices of life served chilled,
melting like the quiet way
table violets melt into gray, spring all sprung
and winter wrung and summer
withering--

I am measured and
planted and strung up with my body
curled up in hands big enough
to wrap around my waist;
and examination, a press of palms
to my fibrous bones
and a watering of my dried skin crackling
in the windows and passerby eyes--
they think that they
want to keep the carpets and walls
and the chandelier that
keeps dust like I keep memories
in my boxes, but

mice chew at the corners and they are
frayed as my shoelaces, frayed
as my fingers wrapped in Gordian knots,
thrashing .
They murmur sweet nothings
to the creaks of the floorboard,
forgiven of their sins and forgiven of their
limbs, forgotten in the patter of their feet
across my dreams.

They have tasted the sounds from the
quietest part of the night and the
echoes of each sleep spoken word
that I may mutter in my nightmares--
they know what it is like to lose a child
and a home and country because I have told them
with my blankets
twisted round my neck-- even in my sleep, now.
Even in my sleep.