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!
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
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.
***Under the Responsibility of S.P.E.W.*** (Sadistic Perplexion of Everyone's Wits)
Medieval Lit! Come here to find out who Chaucer plagiarized and translated - and why and how it worked in the late 1300s.
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
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.
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.
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