pre-tense-ia

So, I'm going to try to update this and everything, but no promises.


1
God is a child and we are extensions
fingers, toes
curling growing lengthening
limbs of a child boy man who
trips
whistles with great gusts of breath
that puff out from rounded, red cheeks and
swirl into galaxies
into things we call
fate, chance

the things we hold without grasping
taste without touching

maybe

love?

when asked to define love
God
spreads his fingers and toes and
digs into the air like sand
or silt,
scratching at the surface of the face
(moon earth you?)
says

Here
it is here

and he opens his mouth
moves his tongue
words or teething

and it is there






2

he curls like a seashell
or conch;

his limbs whisper into mine
shallow and quiet.

I can hear him
breathing in my ear.

sometimes, he is the ocean

others,
he is nothing

Nice post-secular offering.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzNzCiZwk28

Kylan

I don't believe~

you
when you send me down to the corner store and I watch the windows
as my feet carry through each crack of every pavement and you disappear
into dark behind curtains or him or the simple blackness of my eyes not seeing forever and ever

you are gone
even if it is for five minutes,
you are gone
and I forget, I think.

I don't believe
summer autumn winter exist
because I can see flowers budding
trees reaching out with their clumsy pink and rosy fingers
tea soaked and cut plum

tell me
how are they dried out and dead
when I pluck their branches
and they sing?

I cannot be expected to believe
that I had blue eyes
that my hands were small
or my smile was wide?--

my skin cracks with each hand shake
and my bones
ache
and ache
something like the pressure of a faucet or a current or an ocean
pushing each rib into my small, shrivelled stomach. (replaced, soon, past? I don't believe that either. it does not have a name and it is not real)

I believe in the firmness
of ground
but only when I'm walking on it
or stooping close to find my handprints and footprints
from another age of wet cement
although those
I do not remember those, that name is my name but another's
and I cannot believe

I believe in heat
rain
that everything is in vain
because there is no futurepresentpast
but only
foot, tread, rhythm
the coldness of air where the small of my back is exposed by a too short shirt and my neck
cold in spring air
curved like a turtle or an instrument,
aged, croaking notes out as its churlish bow
is bent

I can speak
and believe
but only as long as the sounds last

in between sheets--
grass
or sky
glass, maybe? Glass, panes, or

pains?
painted glass aches settling into cracked bone
as I lay in bed.
bed sheets?

bed sheets-- I live in dreams
or wakefulness
a conglomeration of things that some people call reality
but I think of more as the type of thing you see in puddles
storefront reflections
the disturbed current of small streams.

an in between?

regardless, reality is strung along behind us;
not woven, sewn,
knit but

disorganized and
hole ridden

more bedraggled spiderwebs
caught in the corners of a room,
sometimes catching the light
or making it dark.

I walk along its borders
precariously, like tipping china to the floor
in an artful manner, I suppose--

but I don't have spindly spider feet;
reality's slickness
wipes me from its face--

at this point
I find it better not to bother

a rare coherence
settles into the fibers of my woven skin--
gentle touch of light to stone
carved face
or just autumnal grace?

we are
--angelic?

brought to sea smooth hands
i might curl, soak,
loosen and spread like almost tangible fingers of the sun
or dust motes
reflecting like the moon reflects
like the face of a clock
but

timeless--

drenched in salt
I might taste like wine
or dark;

I might breathe out
honey

or light.

Spoiler

It's been a while since I've written anything that isn't like OMG IM SO DEPRESSED so I thought I'd give it a try, lol.

Oh my heavens, I am loving your last two so much I can hardly imagine it. Keep updating this because you love me. xD

if I could, I would write solar systems in the lines of your palms;
you get lost so easily

so softly, like the murmurs
of closed doors in quiet hallways
and I want you to know what it’s like to
know
who and where and what you are
because feet tend to fumble while
edging past doors or broken locks--

we all have that need to repair broken things
no matter how much it might hurt us (and sometimes we forget that people are not broken, merely waylaid or lost--they just need a roadmap and a light, not a back to walk on or a memory to eat up);
I don’t want you caught in the fibers
of decaying wooden floors-- I want the universe to be a part of you,
the strings tying your organs to your bones or your breath to your chest
because I have been disconnected for so long
so forgotten, so forgetting (and it’s so hard to breathe when there’s no room for breath, each time I forget someone’s name or which streets to take back home, I swear a little bit of me is filled up with sadness, unavoidable and inexcusable)--

I used to sleep curled up next to the sun;
eventually I forgot what water tastes like
or how words feel and in the fifth week,
I lost the pencil tattoos memories traced in my skin
through the haze of dark nights, early mornings,
the bottoms of teacups
where the honest still rests and
sings slow, heavy notes onto the kitchen table.

But I want you to steep well,
swirl constellations in with your drinks
and sip them like milk and honey and fleshy biblical figs (but rather than wither, grow, spread, eat the world with your hungry eyes and thirsty fingers)--
I want you to peel open the surface of the earth
and pick the bones of it
remark on how thin and fragile it is,
how very like a person

-- to arrange tea leaves into constellations
and give them names.
and as I curl and wither
in my bed of drying, collapsing sun,
I want you to show me how the world turns
how stars are born,
all the rivers you drank,
the lights you birthed.

I want you to breathe out the names of each constellation you tamed
so that I might breathe them in;

exhale honey, figs,
a prayer as a star goes out.

in making dough,
we might add flo(w)ur,
rainwater
the eggs that still keep warm next to mother
and are taken while she is away,
feeding, preening, wondering
when spring will end because
the grain always seems golden at this time of year
despite just budding;

in allowing bread to rise
we might raise children,
maybe to be angels or gods or biblical deities
that Father forgot to mention,
too busy with his brimstone and fire
like the ash that falls out of his pipe
while suckling on tobacco, too busy to remember the little things
with their little hands and little feet;

we might also raise a child
who pulls on cat tails
knots streams with stones and soaks
their pantlegs to the knees,
who drenches their wings in the rain
or splatters them with mud, even plucking one from their back
wondering aloud why turkeys talk such nonsense;

we forgive them because we must--
they spread butter on bread with such an elegance,
an obvious misunderstanding of the world
when things were never simpler
but everything is bright and old
and falling to brilliant little pieces—

they might call it “decay” in those books
you read every so often,
when the porch needs sitting
and the sun needs setting,
but things don’t decay--
they change, like dawn changes or dark changes
or the way people change as they become more and more sad throughout life because they know how much things can hurt and how rarely they work out--

regardless, it’s less rot;
more the slow wear of sea against stone.

rocks become shells, glittering and ocean-noised
and the children that we raise
seem to be the ones
picking them up. (maybe they can hear more than the ocean roaring; I’ve always wondered what the ocean says in between yawns)

we might raise children
to our shoulders—let them peek over
crowds with the wisdom of an adult
or rather, the appropriateness of one.
they speak in small sentences with small mouths,
reminiscent of flowers blooming (something delicate and bright, mind you,
daffodils or narcissus, rather than roses)
and we pretend to understand everything that they say because
some things are just so, so far beyond us
(Father also forgot to say
to preach with your mouths closed--
children know best. fragile and strong, thin and weathered, they can stand in a storm and soak up nothing but knowledge, forgetting the bite of wind altogether when they can hear it singing to them, because it sings the loveliest songs in the world-- mind you, Father isn’t perfect, he never has been since He took up drinking but sometimes it gets even the best of us. he forgets things like this, especially when they’re so small limbed and delicate)

we might murmur lullabies at them while they sleep
but they know nothing of those;
they hear only the love or tenderness or sadness with which you sing
and they dream of it,
and dream, and
dream.

you might cry over them
as you see their wings fall from their shoulders;
they are sad, unknowledgeable creatures after a couple of years
but the pieces of them shine,
and sometimes, whisper in between the yawns.

Leaving the country and going to be without internet pretty much 'til Monday, so no updates but I'll post stuff I write while I'm away.

quick last one before I go:


in posing as a nautilus
he is a sun; a son, star
the quiet murmurs of ocean
in the darkest part of night--

his chest is a cave in which to sleep
a shelter in which breath tunnels through veins
or wind? he is the tempest,
the hurricane pealing as a bell,
pealing or peeling back landscape
picking apart houses, hillsides,
like the bones of a corpse

and he is the storm, the tide
as it bemoans lost love for the moon--
in his pain, he throws himself
against the cliffside and he shatters;

in posing as an ocean
he furls, curls like fingers of water
clinging to shore; in reflecting
he is the sun, stars, moon and sky
the wind whistling through his bones
and breath--

he is the softness with which we sleep
dreams brought to flesh
curled as a nautilus or a shell,
heavy with soft, unspoken words,
hours of quiet murmurs.

sometimes
I wonder if I sketch eyes because
I need to be watched--

other times,
I wonder if I do it
because I already feel that I am

You are everywhere.

You were everywhere until I
decided I could no longer stand to think of you
and now you are nowhere,
nothing--

You cried broken pottery,
cracked porcelain and cement
(when I dashed them against the wall, too angry to hear you had gone from somewhere to everywhere because everywhere was not here)--
the spiderwebs crawled poetry in the pavement towards my porch--

they tried to eat their way into my house
but were stopped by the broken backed stairs you fashioned from the oak
that grew like a sturdy, young child in our yard
(on salted dead-plant earth of all thing, like the bones of you could grow something too, though I'd be too jealous to let it)

the stairs slouch now, rot like an old song
like your body, bones, the shape of your face in memories
when I can't quite make out the details anymore and it's more terrifying than anything else--

sometimes at night when there's only the wind or clock
to say anything, I think I can hear them cracking and bending
sighing

--

I say you are nothing because that's what I often tell myself
when I'm falling asleep and it's dark
and I can't feel your soft limbed body curled against my own.

nothingnothingnothing

sometimes I think I almost believe it
but then I dream of you
and the details are all there
and the stairs are cracking
your voice, throaty, oaken, heavy

something,
everywhere,
always

in cast iron I might find
a new place to live--

open stove, pouring rain
the kind of flood
that makes you wonder how long skin
takes to rot, to peel off in pollution
or bird shit.

I can live as a skeleton
bloated, bulimic,
water weighted and white.

my skin is pressed thin
as flowers living in books--
each spring dries me further,
cracks at the wrinkled parts of my elbows, knees,
the softness lying in the palms of my hands.

Sarah splays my hands out wide in her own,
tracing with her eyes.
Lifeline. Injury. Lovelessbrokennessreparationandhereiswhereitends.

Tragic, isn't it?
she draws maps and then folds my fingers into a soft fist.
Hold it here. Feel free to forget, if it makes you feel better.

Sometimes it's better not to know.

she picks yellow flowers and tucks them in
my hair like suns, like flashlights that
make everywhere but where it shines that much darker.

we go back to her house and I find new cracks
in her bathroom mirror. (thin skin or reflection, ask me and I don't know)

she lights candles.

For the ghosts, she says. Sometimes ghosts crawl under the door.

they smell of smoke, oak, ash, sage she burns throughout the house.

I go to her room and find her sleeping under a net,
feathered and twined and laced.
I wonder how many fish she's caught in her dreams--
if in slapping her hands with their tails
they change the lines of her palms.

I asked and she said she only dreams of spring.

Rain falls into his open hands:
crescent moon, open mouth, song streaming through flat topped trees
like heaven haven hope.

He is thirsty.

He’s never seen the sea and he thinks that fish
are like little stars, shining underneath something like sand.
They squirm like his little sister in her sleep
when it’s too cold without blankets but the smoke in their home
leaves them choking while they dream;
if she had a tail, maybe she could drink oceans
and ripple and swim too, like the sand gnats
that leap across stretches of sand to skin and climb each person like a dune.

He wonders, and wets cracked lips.

It is raining and they place buckets outside.
They rattle like the bones of old people rattle,
unsteady in their skin, like they could fall, winded,
a wounded animal whose horns are large and spread.

He has gentle bones, he thinks.

They sing when he runs and they sharpen
as he carries wood to their fire
but they are gentle as the slope of valleys. He watches it rain
and he thinks that maybe his bones are like that--
watery. Fluid, almost, maybe like a sea;
sis mother says they’re like deserts or plains
but broken into waves, like craggy dunes that disappear with the moon.

He spreads out his arm like branches from a tree
and lies flat in the dust that is turning to mud. He is like a desert or a plain, he thinks.
His chest rises, falls, breaks into waves and the rain hits him,
falls through his dry open mouth and he is rain, he thinks.

He could drink a sea dry.