[x]

The Death of VenusIf there lived in the world a man
as rugged and as strong as I,
who could forbear with me yet go against,
who took to the black woods and the silver hills
mostly unafraid--
who savored salt and the lay of fur
with fingertips of dirt and weather,
whose lips rolled words like smoke, like fog-
I would creep into his arms in the prologue of the night,
air sweet with the scent of new-cut hay,
alive with the nightjar's call.

Own SkinI bought myself a Moleskine
to emulate Picasso, Hemingway
was never seen without his
in canal-side cafes, Spanish bull rings.
My fingers grease its ebon spine
over and over in tactile search
for some hidden leak of creative essence

I found Dante's house
down an old narrow street
alongside a crowd of German tourists
I did not enter only stared
at his stones, the exterior.

The hotel room is filled
with the buzz of the alleyway below,
restaurant kitchens' backdoors opening
for cooks, waitstaff, rubbish bags and oaths,
effusive shoppers admiring new pashmina
scarves haggled from vendors
in the adjacent market square.

I close t

Desolateif you are parched tonight,
the pale of your lips cracked
with thirst for that which
will not claim you;

if you hunger -
the deep and shallow collapsing
into slivered vibrations;

if blindness rejects you, says
no, watch now.
this is the way of it;

if you are breathing the world
into cinders, inhaling each poison
on purpose, striving
toward an apocalypse
because that is chaos
we can categorize,

then you may understand.

leavetakingi.
the world is brighter where
dregs of strangers' revels remain --
i keep this half-light for my own.

ii.
i'll stay until the wind sighs a scotch-and-smoke
cliché, til the Muscadet's slipped from the lip
of my wayward
hello.(i know you're there before you do.)
iii.
your night is told in
patchouli-pulse wanders; mine,
in whorls of liqueur-breath. come
close and i'll find the warp
through the weft, the trails telling tales
in synaesthesia --
Platinum Blonde's been 'round and gone.

iv.
(-- closer, find syllables strewn
in an exhale's wake; stolen from my throat-
ful of careless farewells, spin and sway

Drown MondaysThe best way I found
to catch my seven-twenty train
is to miss the seven-o-five, be late
and grow a glut of yin
from the corpses of yangs

drown mondays to breathe tuesdays

but I nibbled cake and kept it too;
I caught the seven-o-five
and the hands fell off the clock,
fell off my wristwatch

Of Half-Filled WordsShe is not a flutterbird.
Her fingers are skittish,
her smile is not.
Do not fear that you will
drive it away.

Sadness is her fumbling limb.
It is unwanted, yet
necessary.

When it is January
she will tell you,
"I am still struggling.
And I am becoming so many people
all at once.

A conglomeration of beauty that
I have managed to mangle.
Please, do not be sad for me."

Sometimes her sorrow is
meant for you. But mostly her.

Those specks and spots
of ocean storm lulls
reveal her truths:
ones she does not want
to extract from herself.

Her heart is not a rabbit.

When it beats
faster, faster, faster,
you need not
run harder

Birth of PoetryI tangled my fingers in the curls of the universe,
pulled. The earth fell out: round, warm, spinning.

Awkward and shy, she wondered how she got here; how
a rock that got wet and grew moss could be significant.

So I scooped her up in my fingers, breathed her scent:

(lilies and oceans and ozone and forests and fish and birds
and whales and rain and the empty elegance in wolf howls)

death and life. I found chaos
and knew beauty.

the hanged manThis little red book you call the human body:
take it up and shake it. Shake the flaking pages
out of it, shake it from endpaper to endpaper
until the last of the phrases are gone; shake it
until it's aching and empty, the soul of a bird.

I will give you new words.

Rooibos TeaBreathe deep the chai haze—

Picasso's djinn,
a muse of eggshells and grandma's lace tablecloths,
cradles the tea kettle to her chest
and abandons Latin words and names—
flotsam and jetsam dribbling
irrelevant among the little red tea leaves;
the driftwood of genus and species bumping
against the shores of the South African scrublands.

She hovers orange and indigo,
a quavering flame of dreams
and drained tea dregs—
divination with a soft-spiced voice
at the bottom of the mug,
never quite gone—

a flock of Van Gogh crows
frozen in their hayfields.

to Yellow Plumto Yellow Plum (in blue
china bowl):


     afternoon's slit of sun slips
     between thick curtains
     & woos you to ripeness.

     it chooses you
     not for flecks of honey-russet
     held low in your seam of shadows,
     nor your symmetry & swell;
     but because

     you slink in shade, sink
     behind green pear & clementine

     & cannot hide
     from each spear of light
     that ricochets
     through--

even now
     nested warm
     against these lips

     even now:
     a tea-stain stone
     hugging close
     the trashbin floor.

hypergraphiashe writes in the empty spaces between the words
between the world,
world-weary fingers and toes and pengrips, knives
letter-opener swords, typewriter machetes

arm-wrestling with fate and the universe on a piece of paper,
computer screens painting faces with colors
stained-glass hyphenated hue-tint-shade glory
she waits.

she is patient.
she's their patient, doctors and nurses
emergency room, operating room, clinical study
stethoscope children

they wish fervently to cut her open.
her insides will be beautiful, they say,
beautiful and pink and full of words.
unwords, she says.

she writes on her skin, on napkins and paper bags
i

stefanshe stood on your dock
in black pearls,
and nothing more -

wet feet
and the asian dream.

you loved her
but

when the snow fell
on the dock,
the following winter

you couldn't
remember why.

After TuesdayElizabeth,

I will not live like this anymore.

Not anymore.

There's a small Universe to the West,
that sits idle in Autumn,

I will be there.

Hinged on all sides,
by suicide maples
that fall from the trees like droplets of blood,

and that old Raven
(the blackbird that taught us Canasta
on the lawns by Cedars Lodge,)
he hovers quietly above me there, in the azure sky
like a guardian,

and those two shining moons Elizabeth,
the ones we happened upon
through the windowpanes,
between our screams and shouts last Tuesday night,
in this Universe, those moons weep misty vanillas
across a falling horizon and I am free,

yes, I will

SalemI.

the bright scarlet egg of dawn
nests in my head.

when it is time, it will crack my
skull like a shell
and be born.

II.

I have a witch's fingers and a
witch's eyes, rough pewter lenses
through which I see the world.

I have sabotaged their crops,
I have plagued their children,
I have eaten their livestock in the night
(so they say)
and I hear the whispers in the streets.

they will be willing to kill
for their conviction, though
I am not willing to die for it.

III.

I am no longer human.
I've been branded
with an ugly mark
of fear and desperation,

one terse syllable that cuts
like a switch.

IV.

a thin reddish line

The SiegeThe first mile is always the easiest.
—Kyle Lynn to me, circa 2006

Tell that to the ghosts,
men soaked in sand and blood spray,
storming the shores of Normandy.

First Infantry's sprint through coastal
trenches, up bluffs, under ruptured drays.
Tell that to the ghosts

huddled in half-channeled holes,
a captain's dash through shrapnel, gray
storm on the shores of Normandy.

A German boy adrift in the compost
of his legs, his elbows' grand flail.
Tell that to the ghosts

ripped in four by mortars posted
over Omaha. Dawn's evenly keeled decay
storming the shores of Normandy

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Drown MondaysThe best way I found
to catch my seven-twenty train
is to miss the seven-o-five, be late
and grow a glut of yin
from the corpses of yangs

drown mondays to breathe tuesdays

but I nibbled cake and kept it too;
I caught the seven-o-five
and the hands fell off the clock,
fell off my wristwatch

Red BoatRed boat in the harbour,
commercial trawler amidst the blue
like a gunshot-wound
on a cop's patrol shirt

TonesA frosty slush of mud, clammy
cough syrup with its copper-tang

the rumbling buzz of lawnmowers,
smeared sunscreen, white and greasy

the scent of an ashtray
old ghost of a smoker:

winter is insipid, dreary
summer is a brassy bore

I want the fresh wet buds of spring
nascent beneath my fingertips,

I want crisp breeze and dying leaves,
I want soft flames falling

Eternal ReturnRainwater pools
in the ruts in your driveway
grey and gravelly
winter is here again
wet and windy again
damp and clammy,
a recurring drainage issue
yet lovely still

pinned in your bedroom
above a booklamp, the headboard,
one slow-dried rose
coloured like chianti
an Nth anniversary token,
a keepsake, a memory,

twin bedside tables
cluttered with novels,
your handpainted pasta bowls
faded from a hundred
improvised pasta sauces,
from passata and capers,
ricotta and dolcetto

stains on the marble coasters,
deep red rings occluding
the florentine piazza
scene as sepia-toned
as it always was
and always will be

the familiar

CavingYou call me a beautiful
fool, a man in love
the perfect patsy through and through
deluded, wrongheaded, impossible

—your face, my pearl
so palely luminous

torchlight flickers, fails,
your budget batteries fizzle
into electrochemical obsolescence
beneath the advent
of natural phosphorescence:

this cave, this lava tube
full of glowworms
spinning their threads
for light happy midges
a weir of waiting mouths,
a silent lantern festival
a world far removed

from glow-in-the-dark
stickers, stars and streaking comets
stuck to the cracked ceiling
above my childhood bedroom

the furies are waiting
the furies are waiting

a m

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7.34mm

by ~pseudometry, Nov 22, 2011, 12:07:02 PM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

A simple measurement
can make a man
lose himself; a blurring, no more
than a grainy smudge

a scant 7.34mm long
this rice-grain, seven weeks old
with one hundred and twenty nine
heartbeats per minute

—all this, from a mere sesame-seed of a heart

7.34mmby ~pseudometry

Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

+

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-01-26

7.34mm by *pseudometry ( Suggested by `CrumpetsHarvey and Featured by $wreckling )

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

*Hfeather53 Sep 24, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Reply

~pseudometry Sep 25, 2012 Writer

Reply

Mood: Joy

*MagicClare Aug 30, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Beautiful! I read this aloud and found it most pleasing in aesthetic flow. Conceptually, of course, it is original and succinct in word selection. (no pun intended)

Reply

~pseudometry Aug 30, 2012 Writer

Why thank you, that's definitely a high compliment

Reply

*0hgravity Aug 19, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

this is a lovely little piece

every line counts and it all fits so well together.

Reply

~pseudometry Aug 20, 2012 Writer

Why thank you

Reply

*0hgravity Aug 20, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

welcome

Reply

~leaftherabbit Jul 24, 2012 Hobbyist Traditional Artist

beautiful

Reply

~pseudometry Jul 24, 2012 Writer

Why thank you

Reply

~leaftherabbit Jul 24, 2012 Hobbyist Traditional Artist

of course!

Reply