[x]

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.

a shut in placeMeg's world is a world of uneven earth and blue skies, surface rock cracked and blown about by howling wind. She runs through wasteland, stumbles with purpose towards a wooden desk in the distance. She runs and runs, dirt and stones scuffing Mary Janes, but the writing desk is a finish line she can't reach.

"Why a writing desk?" her friend Alex says when she tells him about the dream. He emphasizes the question with a hand, waving the sandwich he's holding towards her before taking a bite.

She's left out details: how she is smaller, younger, a smooth-faced child with little hands dressed in her Sunday best instead of the twenty-one-year-old

orthography and the right to remain silenti know just how i left you,
and i pray to god,
the same one you do each day,
that you're still as
sore,
stubborn,
and stuck
as you were
when you fled
like floodwater
to georgia.

the pile of unread books
still sit on the righthand side
of the coffee table.

i think,
but i can't be sure.

maybe they're on the left;
or even worse,
maybe they're on the shelf
over your television.

i don't know how fast
you've been sitting here
or how long you've been moving,
but i have places to go
and people to be,
warming the ache
like ringworm
in my stomach.

it's times like these
i pray to the god,
the same one you do each day,
th

list for ninth october1) your lover is dead and
you burn the eggs. grease
streaks the stove. you
sit, stand, switch off
the burner. sit.
the birds chirp. sit.

2) your lover is dead and
the birds are hungry:
the blue-jay funereal
blue, mockingbird
sick ocean grey.
you shore yourself
against the bare mattress,
empty mason jars, your
mother's phone calls,
bestsellers commended
by desk receptionists.
the author's name
dwarfs the title,
that means it's good.
that means it's popular.
you spill tea
and soak its pages
and sit. sit.

3) your lover is dead and
the tea is cold.
the leaves have settled
in rorschach patterns.

the tea

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.

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

For Those Who LivedWalking dim-lit places
in a minds-eye nation
I can but imagine; those who lived

Gnarled hands, their cracked and broken skin
Adorned with scars and jagged nails
Still flecked with darkened blood – the gore of viscera
Stripped from prey

Ruddy children
Hardly less weathered and sparse than their elders
Make play with stick and stone and bits of bone
To shunt aside the thoughts of hunger
– a long three days
Their mothers scrape and chew those last-meal pelts
For cord and comfort at the coming winter

One crippled clansman sits, a watchman on a knoll
Spies the weary band afar, rejoicing in their load
His herald'

You Slept Through The Alarm Again - Little AubadeIf, perhaps, you had turned at that moment
and your hair had caught in your fingers,
the straw being fed into the spindle, struck
by the high, thin light of first waking, the whorl
of a single line descendent from the sun, born
watery from the gap below one velveteen curtain,
all of it staining over gold and dusty and slow,
the edge of your mouth might have met the edge
of my mouth, narrow gaps both without attention
opening—if, perhaps you had turned again,
your hand could have met the curve of my neck,
your canvas rough fingers tying knots of my hair
and I would have sighed, thick spreading in your ear
like the light it

the contortionisti hold her up like an offering.
salted slug spasms,
foam dribbles.
i want to stub out the face
like a cigarette.
suspended in the amber
of this awfulness,
still as a mosquito.

the worst is the sound,
the staccato choking, perfumed
by whiskey and bile.
when i open the door for
them, black suits, yellow bands.
like wasps, they ask, they
drone in unison.
what happened?

i am ashamed because
i am not crying.

mosaics.sometimes unique
is not loud;
or bright, alive and raging,
possessed of a hunger for the atypical,
up front and too close,
or thrice-pierced and drenched
in the rebellions
particular to the latest generation.

sometimes it is a girl with
mouse brown hair and eyes
the color of weak tea,
who stands with her schoolbooks clutched
to her chest, in uniform shades of grey-blue
like the midmorning autumn sky

who has a wide mouth prone to nervous smiles,

pale lips and pale cheeks
and words that don't always come out
the way she means

who holds the universe
in the intricacies of her fingerprints
and laughs in treble clef notes
and u

plainlook

see how the brittle grass bends
as though bowing at the knee
and the wooden fencepost
with its halo of rusted iron
stands
still longing for the lost days
when it too
could move with the wind

surely our old gods slumber
in the womb of this land

where clouds ceaselessly tumble
toward a stark horizon
and the dirt roads
are sewn
on an altar of earth

and there
in the distance
a brown sparrow
pauses
his tail feathers braced against
the bitter autumn frost
his mirrored eye flashing
with the steady hymn
of sorrow

for a friendThe sky is captured in his eyes, clear and blue.
The weather etched smile is honest.
The slender face says sixty; it lies.
It is that and half again.

Knobby hands sun baked and brown
peek out from ragged gloves.
They seem part of the old split locust post
where they are resting;
one of the row of soldiers
that keep watch on their field and its occupants.

The smile broadens as I approach.
I help stretch the wire.
His archaic dialect fills the road
with cows and snow and the yankees
that his grandparents saw marching.
The hours pass pulled by the mule
he plowed with as a boy.

He mentions his wife
they'd been marri

a long awaited return.It was raining when we landed.
A shock
to our sun-drenched systems,
stumbling with snatched-
away sleep.

Another bus, another train
whirring upon endless tracks.
We run, we flee through foreign streets –
disdainful eyes stare on,
watching fugitive

outsiders -
desperate for a taste
of home.

Splinter helixEMBRYO
a derelict building shifts its swollen form
wire cage elevators moving carefully as it swallows
nestled in a womb of fragile concrete fibres
the child of paint and pastel colours stirs
searching blindly for that energetic outside world
it stretches its delicate arms like an earthquake
SAPLING
Tell me where you come from, what you remember
of the black ground. Talk in riddles only your kind
understands, talk in flowers, talk in thorny branches.
You crack the foundations in starlike patterns, and
you stretch the heart of you for the concrete above,
longing to carry the sky as a bed for the Sun.
GENERATION
the twisting fles

The Thin HoursI.

Those of us here in this skeleton time,
this time of the year when the nights are thin
and dark, and dark with anxiety, peeling
as layers of an oyster shell, brittle and effaced
and somehow iridescent.
When the bell tolls out the time the sound is thin
and reaches into fractured air and softly
seeks the spaces between the atoms and
misses the vital Os and CO2s in a lasting,
failed pinball. The bell sound dies in
some space between midnight and thereafter,
and each tock tock of slipping cogs is
a repeat and not a moving on.
The air is filled with each dull sound,
each tock a repeat and a repeat again. And the
slip betwee

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Penguins can't flyIn the clutching darkness
he is incubated from the chaos of the colony
and the commotion of the clamorous crèche:
he waits, safe for now to suck the yolk out of his navel.

Finally he stretches awake,
chipping at his shell-bound bloodwomb
until a blushed beak pierces the crust with earthquake cracks,
the husk is tentatively pushed away,
and all hell breaks loose.

To the chagrin of parents the world over,
Pingu has been born.

Head bowed to hold up the clear heavens,
the south slopes are brightly lit as the ozone hole steadily grows.
His apricot feet skid frantically ("nug nug!")
over this guano-stained patch of the Antarctic

When I am an old woman...Pt. 1

Behind every arthritic bump, knobble, and two dratted patellae
Which have acquired the alarming tendency to suddenly give way,
We all agree: this year, staying in is the new going out.
All that remains is to drag the tinkering, tripping trolley back from Tesco's,
Thwocking brambles along with way with a hand-crafted stick
And humming merrily, only half in tune, because we're cushioned in sherry.

Behind every hangover lies an uncomplicated space;
A hole between the ears, a perm disastrously awry,
Bifocals lost in the crease of an ever-sagging armchair.
The old should have no regrets.
In the star-eaten blanket of sky a voice

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Old haunts

by ~square-nine, Jan 6, 2012, 6:37:15 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Numb fingers fumble at coppers
and a dodgy purple lighter which is unfit for purpose.

Giant splodges of stars
as if God - in a frolic of youthful exuberance –
went wild with a paintbrush.

Granite delicately held by shape and contour alone.
Slotted together: a melee of ankles, hips, spontaneous larynx.

Careless hopes, dreams wide, menthol cigarettes.
Thoughts all quiet.

Old hauntsby ~square-nine

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Written for HammeredPoetry #6 [link]

An extraordinary moment in one which is very ordinary indeed.

Edit: Wow, I got a DD! Thank you all so much for your kind comments, favourites, and of course to lightningmonkey for the feature.