Sonnet: Divorce

I perched inside your willow heart

A solitary vulture, dread with appetite

Your decay an intractable work of art

A diamond hard-pressed in anthracite

=

Our love is a fire that resists kindling

A quarry depleted by strip mining

A smokeless blue flame dwindling

For us it seems there’s no silver lining

=

I castigate these wayward tears

Clutched with unexpected remorse

And drenched in the salt of my fears

That widowing word echoing, divorce

=

Spirit enervated with habitual lament

I recall the hours abused and misspent

=

This is my first sonnet so forgive me if it’s a disaster. I am actually just happy I produced something this form gave me a hard time.  Don’t worry about the content while influenced by my pain it is fictional.

 

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Tin

Your lips have the taste of tin

Chill and equally unyielding

I slip through the rift

In your embrace sinking

Into metaphoric winter

Is your heart really so bereft?

Do I no longer have a place there?

=

Our photographs age prematurely

Last year suddenly unrecognizable

Distant, time erects walls between

While our inertia gives way to petrification

Perhaps we are the walls that fear concedes?

=

Voices intermittent and fragile

Like a transistor radio, we now

Communicate on a visceral

Level speaking through the bowels

Fueled purely by a survival of the

Fittest mentality, more reflexive

Than reflective in our agitation

=

I regard you now with a rising

Suspicion the kind that soils hearts

With preemptive misdeeds, you

Have guilty hands the kind that

Betrayal breeds and that cowardice

Assuages with pitiable excuses of

Drunkenness. How easily you

Replace, how stubbornly I hold on,

Hostage in the aftermath

Heliotrope

I undressed your letters today

The sly purple hearts clustered

In the margins like heliotropes

The scented letters leaning

Coquettishly to the right

I remembered the way

You loved me with

Such meticulous

Attention to

Detail

=

Hopefully I can write more today writer’s block

Ethos

I woke to the thunder

Of your poetry gripping

My heart, to the birth

Of your genius and the

Storms of revolution

Rearranging my deciduous

Thought patterns in

Accordance with your

Seasonal evolutions

 =

Through you I am

Continuously resurrected

Rapt in your confessionals

My life a thief, I unfold vicariously

Through your revelations of self

 =

Wherever I go I carry your language

Deep in my heart, the ink from

Your pen my life’s blood,  the

Horizontal veins in your notebook

Corresponding with the lines

On my palms

=

Like a weather vane your poems

Determine the directions my

Life blows, everything

I have learned about life

I have learned through the

Translation of your ethos

=

I would like to the thank everyone at Promising Poet’s Cafe and my readers. Congrats to everyone whether or not you won, having read everyone’s poems I can say every one of you is deserving of an award. Fantastic work all =) I would like to nominate: Sherrie Theriault

http://sherrietheriault.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/a-year-for-me-2/

Bad Intentions

A nefarious well of secrets

Her mouth opens and

Closes like a trap door

Tongue, a butcher’s hook

Heart stems excoriated

And strung up inside.

Trapped between

Her teeth, residue

Of the men who

Love her worked

Over like cud

=

It’s too late to rewrite

Her bad intentions

Too late to translate

Them in a language

Of tolerance. She’s

Been indulged her

Entire life, her villainy

Nurtured as virtue

Those screams

Welling in her throat

Do not belong to her

She is the devil’s own

Mistress, she embodies

The serpent’s dreams

=

I am still having issues with my internet and so I am sorry that I’ve not been able to respond to all my comments or return visits.

Meniscus

I don’t think his lips

Ever dipped below

The meniscus, that

Lazy smile, chronic

Often contagious

=

He dripped from the

Walls a sanguine pool

Luxuriating in an air

Of incense, his eyes

Drooped inexplicably

Downward as though

Made of melting wax

The fire still imprinted

In the iris, those blushing

Reds like sunburn or

Smudged lipstick

=

He was as skinny as

The strings on his guitar

Long and completely

Strait except for his nose

Which favored artistic

Interpretation by refusing

To subjugate to any linear

Constrictions to me

Indecently beautiful like

All anarchistic renderings

=

He was absolutely brilliant

A shaman perhaps for

The drugs really did

Seem to lift the veil

From his third eye

He understood life

And humanity on

A psionic level, I

Really believed

He could rearrange

The constellations

With just a puff

Of that sweet

Smelling smoke

=

I struggled to write today. This about a guy I knew in high school he was into drugs but his mind was remarkable.

Penny

Your voice comes at length

Like the shifting of tectonic plates

A menacing growl, resonating

Within the heart’s tremulous chambers

It collects both echoes and shadows

Building up a deadly momentum

=

All your words are postmortem

I wait locked into the refrains

Of winter, through the senseless

Repetitions of the chorus, wet

With expectation and still

My words never pass your lips

Perhaps the gravel lodged inside

Your throat wears away all

Sentimentality?

=

Daggers form underneath your

Tongue, metal splinters lodging

Between my ribs, you never

Miss your target, that distinctive

Red bulls-eye, centered left

My mouth suffers the taste

Of pennies as your unsettled

Words force their way back up

=

(at last I get these posts up man my internet is a pain)

Venus de Milo

The marble encasing her

Artist’s spirit is forged

From compressed

Moonlight and the

Salt of men’s desires

She is Neptune’s

Obdurate daughter

The Goddess of Love

=

The horizon ignites

Between her breasts

The hollow where

Her heart lies is

Shaped like a

Keyhole through

Which the sunrise

Can be glimpsed

In all its infamous

Fury, the adversarial

Flames of the sphinx

=

Her eyes being

The stars submit

Darkness, generate

The luminance

Of constellations

Emboldened with

Myth, her lips

Draw in the

Sentient, manifest

Breathless sensuality

Carousel

I stooped in your heart

Like a leper infecting

You with creeping shades

Of black, a terminal necrosis

Summoning a symptomatic

Doom, the warning signs

Were apparent from the start

Yet you persisted in seeing

Beyond the disease,

Viewing me in a series

Of over-idealized still frames

I wanted to see myself

Through the same forgiving

Lens but the mirror revealed

My delusions, that priestly

Face judging all a virtual

Confessional booth

=

You were beautiful prior

To infection, a paradigm honed

In immaculate perfection

My love a disfigurement

What you’ve become shaped

In my hands, grips me

With fear and loathing

A carnival of secrets, carousel

Horses frozen in terror

Lips peeled back in a scream

Mute fits of hysteria, provoked

By those chilling lidless eyes

That is the ellipse we’re locked into

=

I didn’t mean to corrupt you

There was no deliberation

Yet this guilt picks up

Circular momentum

Comes in waves like

Heart beats driven by

A delirious requiem

We are working ourselves

Steadily into the ground

=

This is from yesterday my internet has been down since last night it works for a few seconds at a time maybe a few minutes if I am lucky

Pin-up

Without any premeditation on her part

She’s worked out a way to be desirable

To every man simultaneously and

If women do not hate her outright

Then they keep a shrine of her inside

Their handbags and apply her with

Makeup hoping to embody her

Through imitation but what they

Don’t understand is that her beauty

Stems beyond physicality, she

Isn’t the woman men lust she is

The woman they fall in love with

=

She’s a commodity in very short

Supply these days, it’s not that

She’s negligent it’s a matter of demand

And there’s not enough of her to go around

She’s worked out a way to be indispensable

Despite her perpetual motion, despite

That no one can affix her to any single

Point in recordable history, she transcends

Those boundaries, I have known her forever

In the expanse of three years I can’t imagine

Her not existing even if it’s only in the residual

=

When present she has a way

Of consuming one’s attention

Chaining all the men in the room

To her ankles, in her presence

I have the benefit of perfect anonymity

I could walk naked across the floor

Cloaked entirely in her shadow

I am completely invincible

=

She pursued me, pursues me still

I have always been a person remembered

Even when words are not exchanged

As I understand it I have a touch of unreality

My friend says looking at me is like

Looking into a very old photograph

I am of the ether, apparently I have the ability

To possess people by passing through them

=

I don’t know how we are friends as I go

Through extraordinary pains not to be seen

She caught me inside the periphery and

Extracts me very carefully bit by bit

Into the light, conjuring words between

My pursed lips, surrounding my exits

=

She knows all my tricks so she invites

Herself and never gives me the time

To form any plausible excuse, it’s

Not that I wish to escape her its

The world I have objections with

But she won’t let me leave, she keeps

Me grounded and despite myself

I must admit that I enjoy her being there

Like a holiday or a love affair she

Comes to me in waves of celebration

=

This is about my best friend gorgeous girl and if not for her unflagging persistence I would’ve disappeared I think completely. I am very anti-social it takes a force of nature to draw me out and she is a force of nature.