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a love like ours is neolithic.



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Sat Apr 02, 2011 5:39 am
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Uraziel says...



Table of Contents
a love like ours is neolithic: the interplay of dreams, realities, plans and all the novel things about the most ancient of games
by Uraziel (c) 2011


    i. Homeruns
    ii. Subsides
    iii. Love Song
    iv. Curbed
    v. Sunshine and Blind Studies
    vi. Forms
    o. Distilled Poem #1
    oo. Help!
    vii. Flowers & Folios
    viii. Flacid
    ix. built in a day
    x. Canopy
    xi. Progressive
    xii. Last
    xiii. sung in a whisper during the sermon and between deep breaths
    xiv. neurosis neurosis neurosis
    xv. Letters to California #1
    xvi. Yamanaka
    xvii. poem about bikes
    xviii. fish in the sea
    xix. halogen
    xx. grass generation
    xxi. kohl
    xxii. Crises
    xxiii. passion is
    xxiv. Cushions

Spoiler! :
Uhhh. Yeah. Hi. First post. Thanks to someone who likes to help.


-
1. Homeruns

We sit in the car listening
to Mach 5, our skin yellow
with lamplight. You recline
on the passenger seat and kiss
smoke, even though you had said,
thirty minutes prior to the flick
of the lighter, as we pulled out
of the driveway to your house,
that you were trying to quit.
But you are handwaving it again;
you try so hard to be the night.

Maybe you see the skunks too.

Their sunken eyes are wild
with the night.
They clamor in the outfield,
clearing the dust on third base
after their curfews and before
their bedtimes and under the moon.
Later, tentatively,
we will join them,
climbing on top of the stone fixture
with the school's full name on it,
bending our spines to watch
the square shadows of
the high wired fences dance.

I will say something like
"many girls told me I love you",
and maybe it will mean something to me.

You will laugh
and show me what it means, and
I will complain of the taste of cigarettes,
but only in my head.
Last edited by Uraziel on Mon Apr 25, 2011 6:26 am, edited 5 times in total.
  





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Sat Apr 02, 2011 5:43 am
MeanMrMustard says...



Welcome Uraziel. Interesting.
  





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Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:11 am
Button says...



I'm okay with this too.

You have a new lurker.
  





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Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:37 am
Navita says...



Oh, lovely.

Most on YWS will well you I leap up and down for double meanings, dualities. Clearly, you know how to handle them very effectively; the double-meaning created by the enjambment in almost every line affirms this. You leave off on a particular word that could be read two ways, and then supplement the rest in the following line; I love it when writers know exactly when to cut a line -- something I have been hoping to master in my own poems. The tone is likewise controlled, quiet without being transparent; it still has weight. The way that 'Maybe you see the skunks too' dares to break out of the silence is great.

Ending could be revised to twist something a little more sharper in us, but all in all, a good start. Do continue!



Navita
  





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Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:58 am
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Uraziel says...



Spoiler! :
Oh, hello! Thank you. Enjambment is like my number one enemy. It's a challenge I have to face every day. And wonderful, I'll be sure to pop into your projects as well, guys. :D


2. Subsides

Before beginning on a poem, look at
the lead pencil, how it's circumsized to a tip, gray
like the scrap steel in the smith's shack down at Old Town,
when you were still afraid of ghosts but unafraid of
your reflection.

There's a party next door, you think, catching ten
minute sighs from beyond the window. You look out and just
see the night, anchored by the warmth of lights from houses shoulder to shoulder.
Dollhouses. You'd like to think there're words you can tease out, phrases
you can play with, your neighborhood like a toy city, anthropomorphic lego
creatures speaking verse, something about Barbie being
beyond your ken, but

you lose your train of thought and
begin to write your heart out
in instant messages.
  





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Sun Apr 03, 2011 10:54 pm
Uraziel says...



3. Love Song

A corduroy pocket,
the trenches
in which red
lines are dragged,
you say, and
it becomes
the truth.

A trickle, captured
from the vitreous,
tangled in gravity,
like two tails
of smoke, or a split end
for want of a wishbone.

And maybe the clay is naked
in the scored earth, the strata
older than story. And maybe
the collard green sky is
a dead sea draped over clouds
which are a carpet of anemones.
And maybe the commission is audible,
spoken as it is against the wind: it is
red lines in the bark, long grass, Sundays,
and knees of pollen.
  





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Tue Apr 05, 2011 2:45 am
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Uraziel says...



4. Curbed

Brought into this world in a coldwarm bed
with whites in my eyes, a railroad for a spine;
and the world smelled of pine.

Brought into this world, a lost reality that
my fingers let tumble into a gutter, a cistern where now
it squirrels away hours gazing after ghosts of tires.

Raised in composite language in a composite wilderness,
where tin and shanty tectonics diverted the rain
and watered our hair, a crucifix like a checkmark for

every house, glassy humidity on china skin and
a fanny pack of words made for stuttering. Raised where
they shaved the hills and bent the earth, in concrete as

sudden as kool-aid, in writing on bathroom doors, (scribbled
dhiarettic manifestos) lists of loves and lisps, in bathtubs and thinking
boats (galleons and triremes and steam behemoths, a historical

monologue), in crumpled papers, in poetry like
the breathlessness of sidewalks. Pulling into a curb,
rank with red paint, dead years like objects in shoulder mirrors.

Pulling into the clarity of dragged feet, yellow buses, every brick
and face, every glass pane in the library (windows like honeycombs),
every fragment of memory, like a handful of pennies, a running fountain.

Pulling out, in the sanctuary
of bus stops, I thought balance
and found it.
  





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Tue Apr 05, 2011 3:42 am
Hannah says...



That was absolutely GORGEOUS. I love that.
you can message me with anything: questions, review requests, rants
are you a green room knight yet?
have you read this week's Squills?
  





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Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:32 am
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Uraziel says...



Spoiler! :
I wanted to call this one "Listomania". I wanted to. But I stopped myself. Also, I don't know how to be brief.


She & Him wrote:Quietly took to the dark of the day and the hiss of the summer night
The heat of the breeze was a cell block wall and when I looked you were out of sight


5. Sunshine and Blind Studies

1. Awareness is texture underneath the shoe,
sea smell, vocal winds and the kleptomania of
elevator hallways, pocketing light like business
cards for their illiterate palettes. I was an Epicurean,
sampling quarry-rock air, the damp of mauve clouds, sand
that could be glass that could be broken in an egg on
the horizon, veiny watercolors, rays penciled in, and
the critic was unimpressed. He wanted to know about
San Diego, fair weather and the soul of photography.

2. There was a girl, like a fairy, some dust-winged other,
stood between the worlds, ankle deep in a language of
lurid moans, before there were words, cages, before choosing.
God, if you had heard her sing. There were zephyrs,
and she made them into dervishes, and she sang in triolets,
sang of intelligence, beauty, symmetry. And those that heard
curled their digits and forgot the water and peroxide,
the olive oil and the canvas knife, the white, white bandages
and the yawning face in the mirror. They would end their days
starry-nighting in a sanatorium. She would just smile, walk to
the library. I'd see her again on Thursday.

3. Conversation of women, like a postscript in the wind,
the shape of it, like running prints of nothing, like dust
off a beaten rug, and the rug is my heart. Like wire, like
a snare, (the drum and the trap), binding voices, lining them
up, catching and throwing and eating voices. And watch:
the transit of heat, clocking their stops, limping slow
heat, splashing on the murmured pavement, on pointed
shadows mimicking no one at all.
  





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Wed Apr 06, 2011 4:16 am
Hannah says...



2. There was a girl, like a fairy, some dust-winged other,
stood between the worlds, ankle deep in a language of
lurid moans, before there were words, cages, before choosing.
God, if you had heard her sing. There were zephyrs,
and she made them into dervishes, and she sang in triolets,
sang of intelligence, beauty, symmetry. And those that heard
curled their digits and forgot the water and peroxide,
the olive oil and the canvas knife, the white, white bandages
and the yawning face in the mirror. They would end their days
starry-nighting in a sanatorium. She would just smile, walk to
the library. I'd see her again on Thursday.


I couldn't stop reading this. This is absolutely great. I love how it's such a gorgeous description, then turns to something more scary, less beautiful, but wraps up so mundane. I don't know, something cool in a person who has such authority and experience to claim something mystical as mundane. Love the voice there. Thank you.
you can message me with anything: questions, review requests, rants
are you a green room knight yet?
have you read this week's Squills?
  





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Thu Apr 07, 2011 5:59 am
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Uraziel says...



6. Forms

Convention,
in a mode,
bohemian, skinned
from the ephemera like
a candidate for stew.

I discern still life
from the still
born, a moonshine
concocted for those poise-
instructed.

Her eyes
are wild as color
studies, my
Alcatraz. See
my stone face, after
an old fashion,
chiseled.

She calls me
monochrome-
magnon.

Forever clever,
I tease
wordplay from
the palest of epochs.

Forever decent,
I lay my tools to rest.
  





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Thu Apr 07, 2011 6:32 am
Uraziel says...



Bonus Track. A bit dumb.

Spoiler! :
Distilled Poem #1

I was a poet once, and I said

"I loved you seasonally
But you left me first in epitaphs
And now you love someone else
And now I love no one else"

I was a poet, and I said

"I loved you
But you are deaf
You could not hear my remorse code
And you have plastered your eyes blind"

I also said, in the short time I was a poet,

"I loved you
You are a bitch but I persist
You don't come home till Twelve AM
That's Ante Meridiem, whore"

But now that I'm old, and not a poet, now
that the mountain is broken and
the plow is tired, I say

"Heart soluble,
I flake apart
in the soft-serve alchemy
of present daymares."
  





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Thu Apr 07, 2011 7:13 am
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Uraziel says...



~
Spoiler! :
Help!

I'm stuck in a place between a place and a place!

A place where everyone has worn out the idea of me, not knowing what to make of my prolonged stay, and a place where everyone is just trying me out!

It is the place that a person goes to when there is no one else left to listen to all the many important things he has to say every hour on the hour until the end of time!

It is a city of singular architecture and singular economy and constructed of long, long skyscrapers like the measuring tape used to measure the yawns of gods!

And I am also standing in this long, long yawn, gazing out the window from the fortieth floor of my eternal damnation!

And I am standing there ten minutes later, leaning on a nondescript wall, telling jokes at the water cooler and realizing it can't quelch the fire!

And I am there in the long, long yawn, hand cupped over my mouth, other hand drumming the devil's tattoo on an elevator panel, hand that had hidden the yawn now dropping, forming a gun, now pulling a trigger, but it doesn't work because I'm STILL HERE IN THIS GODDAMN PLACE!

And let me tell you that it is a horrifying place where loneliness is no longer an ocean but a tunnel and a subway train in cahoots!

No longer an isolated spot on a cliff or a summit, but an early, damp morning, a bus stop and a bus driver who is also a mute and he smiles and beckons, as if saying "come ye, my children"!

No longer the shape of fingers making a gun, a bird, a sign, a fist!
No longer a superlative!
No longer an alternating current singsonging wavelengths!

But
a great divining rod
and pliant fingers purporting
a forceful tug, that same force
that brings you down until
your chin is scraping the mud, until
you're in a place
between a place
and a place.
  





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Fri Apr 08, 2011 4:25 am
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Uraziel says...



Spoiler! :
This is horrible.


7. Flowers & Folios

I owe my story to the girl sitting at the mouth of the slide
who turned to me and wondered aloud what French kissing was.

I didn't know then.
I remember sitting with
a stack of dead books

like bread crumbs
I would take eight years
to leave behind.

They were leaves
with round-trip tickets
commuting on the sidewalk.

She gave me a paragraph, like
a regret, or a dog-eared tip,
before returning to heaven.

I still have it, pinned to corkboard like a road map,
a manual on how to fly a plane if you have sepia eyes.
Last edited by Uraziel on Sat Apr 09, 2011 12:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
  





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Sat Apr 09, 2011 12:24 am
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Uraziel says...



8. Flaccid

Imminent clouds drain
to foreground, as we lose
the fluid afternoon.

Breath and unbuttoned blinds;
a sky diluted with the smoke of tertiaries.

Sun comes to
rest on the heads of this city,
on the crescent of bedsheet sound dampening

the gasps of the watermarked dusk.
  








Sometimes I'm terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.
— Poe