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.
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Canary word: Present
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137,435 Literary Works • 672,020 Reviews
Oh my god. I cannot even express how much I love these. So beautiful.
Spoiler
I eat apple cores. I always have, figure I always will-- mother used to tell me there's cyanide in the seeds, maybe arsenic, that'd they kill me as soon as I touched them with my teeth; but, curious as I am, I soon learned that apple seeds are apple seeds and nothing more, unless you ate bushels and bushels of them. There were traces, little seeds of cyanide in the seeds of the apples, but, we all carry a little darkness inside us, right? Nothing to be scared of. But, he still gives me mistrustful looks when I finish my apple and turn it over so eat it from bottom to top, lastly pulling the stem from between my lips.
Autumn apples have always been my favorite; there's an apple fair in the town next from mine every year, a place that I've always grown up wanting to live before I realized that I am far too alive for a small town as quiet as that one. Reality hit the day I read the sign as we drove in: 7774 people, a number halved and halved and halved again from my city, which is already too small, too familiar, too easy to not get lost in. The drive is nice, though; sometimes, as we pass the old highway, lined with barns and cows, huddled together like mother and child, I can see the apple orchards tucked back in the hills and wonder if I like apples for their taste, or their texture, or just the plain and simple ideas of trees and fall, childhoods spent eating the pies and crisps and cakes that my grandmother made from these, sitting at picnic tables, wondering if there was any more.
Sometimes, I settle on the color; it's the color that draws me in, streaks of green and red and yellow like sunsets and autumn trees and dried grass and the crunch it makes when you wander through it. They taste like that; the hills they came from, the soil they fell into, the hands that picked them-- the great wooden crates that splinter my fingers when I read them sideways, like woody books in a library with a title that didn't quite fit in the width. As I nurse all my sharp little wounds, I am handed apples and they press on the little dots of palmed blood in a nice weight, another streak of red with the green and the yellow, and I consider not eating them because I am on them, in them, soaking in like the tree soaked water into its stem, the soil soaked itself into the tree, the sun into the leaves.
I am from loneliness.
I am from a mistaken
motherhood, a child broken
to splintered stars in each pupil.
I pierce the ends of her fingers
like a needle, sew myself
into her skin and pattern
and wrinkle and age
as she does.
I am tattooed into her breast
and her chest and
rest in the broken cave
that parts the cages of her ribs--
I am hibernating, only sleeping,
only sleeping.
She clings to each bone,
growing and stretching, and
I watch my muscles turn white,
and ache with it.
you are a bathroom mirror ghost,
steam lunged and open mouthed,
wondering where all the years went,
how many lovers are carved
into the lines of my face.
you linger as the fog rises
and choke on the dry air.
O________________O
That is my face. Because... oh my god.... these are so good. KEEP ON WRITING
something inconsequential
paws at the rivered bones
in your throat--
you choke on it.
it trips your tongue and
lies across your language,
languid, sprawled,
creek boned and watery.
you chew the ends
of its words,
gristly pronouns and
sour sentences,
childlike. it can't say five lettered words
has fingers that do not flex;
they erode and eat the breath from
others' lungs.
you ask the waitress with ocean eyes
for a toothpick and spit out the fat--
they remind you
of the splinters in your
palms, pale scars,
etched from each chapter of every book,
a paragraph and a half of driftwood
thrown back to the ocean.
your scars are the eaten glyphs
hiding under the bark,
creased broken lifelines that the tent woman
told you won't last long, not at all.
her hands shook on yours
and pulled back to her chest like the tide,
curled and furled and
sallow like shells.
you spit splinters,
woody, wormy words
and they eat at your lips.
your river mouth teeths at the
things that you have to say, like an ocean,
and your river bones break
and choke
and drown.
You sweep
small splintered palms
across Milky Way dust.
They are dark and
cratered,
coated in things unseen,
bright pollutants,
little words like
“I always thought they were planes.”
the yellows of the eggs are eyes,
Banana bread is win. This poem is not. xD
staring wide as they are whisked and
flipped into another home.
flour blooms scattered white petals
on the sides of wood
like homespun hearths, warm with
mother’s hands working;
it clings to my skin like an ethnicity,
imprinted into pores like childhoods
and traumas and old smells that cling to
the sides of nasal cavities, decades,
dozens of years later—
the spine of the fork crushes bananas
into lumpy gold, impure and
blackened and bruised,
stringy with white copper. it comes
out warped and bent, but it is a baking fork,
and each steel scratch is another batch,
another lick of the fingers.
the oven is a metronome
ticking off Celsius seconds until
it is done;
its stomach is fiery and warm,
and the bread is browned,
but not yet burnt.
Spoiler
I need you hopeless--
cold blood color careens
beneath the reach of light,
somewhere tip-toeing underground
like a sightless mole with shovelled paws;
still-- still,
they said,
still as a prairie
with a darkening sky,
still as a sleeping newborn
just drive to life,
motionless as fear,
heavy as the flood on its way--
it roars,
closed mouthed and teeth grit.
"I was supposed to die,
seven times,
and each day scars my wrist.
I miss the taste of it,
but they need me, they need me."
it was me but it didn't matter--
we cough quiet,
close mouthed,
sob self consciously
because you must, you must
rest;
your open eyes cede
to soil and I--
I need you hopeless and still.
i.
she needs me to tell her she's beautiful
because he won't.
I can't lie.
she is beautiful-- her legs slope like elms and
her shoulders turn into bell jars when she's still;
she reminds me of dried leaves in books
I kept from last spring.
but,
she is a moth
nestled
in gray summer.
wrapped in uncertainties,
more bandages
than anything else,
spools of thread
that brush her bell jar shoulders
ready to be sewn into memories and heartache
for someone that she doesn't know.
instead,
she wants ribbons
to tie
and
butterflies.
winter bites too cold,
freezes the rise of a breathy chest;
she shivers and learns how to hold hands to her
skin, another person's hands,
not mine.
ii.
he holds her like glass.
thick glass, not the delicate hand-shaped glass
from a pipe, but rugged brown and sand-cut.
she is bottle green and thin, but he does not know
and he cups her breast with a calloused palm.
she is shedding coldness
and unravelling-- no one has told her that she is beautiful,
not for a long time so
she casts a line for it--
a beautiful fisherman,
slippery as a fish
and thin as her line.
iii.
I am caught
and mute,
and mute,
and my hands are too soft to hold her,
and she cracks,
not cut from sand at all,
crackling between the spines of my books
and she does not know
that the words are mine.
*ugh*
rusting skin in the shower;
she forgets what she looks like
and startles in the mirror,
wide eyed, sleepless and pouched.
scraping the rust away,
she examines its dullness in the light,
wondering if this is where her insides have gone.
frowning at the metal encasing her body,
her scarab carapace, she creaks and cracks
and whirrs when she tries to sleep.
when the doctor asks her about her dreams,
she tells him that she doesn't have any
and she rusts her face with tears.
dusk is lonely
like a window watcher
who has forgotten how to close the blinds
and open the door--
the glass is cometed
and meteroed with curiosity,
gunpowdered with dust like the big books
that grandfather used to lick the tips of his fingers for;
he told you how to read people,
letters in the bite of their lip
and stories in the corners of their eyes,
and he said that war
is a seething mass of anthills and molehills
blessed into mountains,
that curl in and wriggle like earwigs,
scaled and black and shiny and writhing--
war sheds its carapace like a second skin,
a withered and rotting cocoon,
grieving, and he shows you picture
of a harvestman--
daddy long legs, no,
granddaddy long legs, and
he tells you that they scavenge
and they have a skull
on their back like a banner,
translucent legs, because war
has no name or face and
it spins its webs in a single night.
but dusk--
dusk is where you grew up on window sills
and you read people like you read your books,
balanced and crosslegged,
wondering how you were so numb--
if you should be crying.
a cellar spider spins its web in between the panes
and rattles lonely stories of strangers and
in your books, war rattles off a pop-pop-pop;
you think that you can see the
sorrow in those strangers' eyes,
though it may just be the
glass needing cleaning.
our footsteps crosshatch
and darken like sweet
slumbered through nights,
and I found the lips
of a bottle on mine last night
like some long lost lover
that found me again once you were gone--
they kissed me
with an amber echo and it told
me that you looked back when you left,
but I was too far gone to see.
I don't want to sleep, too scared
to dream of you and my little lovers,
whispering your name into my mouth.
i am a skeleton in a closet
hidden and wilfully forgotten,
tumbled into enjambed lines,
dry wood bones and memories
etched into the lines of each joint--
i am fossilized and kept and smoked like the cigarette
butt snuffed into the side of my skull.
Lucy visits me, scrapes her old fingers
like i am a cane waiting to be carved;
she has so much trouble walking,
and her tendons tremble with a quiet weariness,
bones brittle and gnarled and
just as dry as mine.
they locked the door,
broken locked and double
locked but she pries it open with her twisted teeth
and her wartime grief
and she stares in my eyes, lonely and forgotten
as her own.
i am haunting the house,
reminding the unspeakables and
unforgivables that they exist.
lucy has lungs full of smoke
and a cigarette scar on the inside of her wrist,
aged and silver like her hair.
she pries open the lock and
she talks, and she tells me
her secrets.
I haven't slept for days--
each bat of my eyes eats at my skull and churns
like a thicket of crickets--
and thunder caught in my stomach,
my skin cracks and curls and chars
away both lungs, cradled
in my nettled and torn hands. My soul is a bride,
still and quiet and tied inside, laying
against each and every knobby bone,
white as the marrow and sharply turned joints--
but the twisting twine unravels
into seeds and straw and
grasses that cry wither and dry
when I step on them, feet arched high as Ostia Antica--
they crackle like fire
even though it is yet dark.
I am yet dark.
But my skin is pale as the statues
that have fallen into sand and the seaport
is as wet as my filmy eyes--
the mirror is not kind,
the windows are not blind, but
I refuse to see the shakes
and the stutters of muscle
carved into each crowlined tremor
-- the groom waits, redfaced and featureless,
blooms in blackened hands and bone charred
and he has not forgotten, does not forget, will not forget
his vows.
~Thank you pengulove and jaggys
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.
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.
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.
Okay, you are just really good. Your imagery is great, the work is good... never stop writing!
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.
Spoiler
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.
Spoiler
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
Hey. I just wanted to say. You amaze me. That is all.
Reserving space for review.
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.