Sensitivity

From your heart, a wine that sobers

An overtone of musk and a sweetness,

Almost piteous, that lowers my knees

And my ribs as if they were only strings.

–

There is a look in your eyes

That suggests diamonds have

Cut away your valuables,

The look of a thief apprising

Treasures he cannot possibly comprehend.

–

There is a miser in your hands

And he does not touch me tenderly.

His breath is icy, his accouterments bald-faced.

I know that he does not desire me

But still his bare knuckles drag

Over my impatient flesh

As if to silence and indeed he does silence.

–

The moon has a crude look

Like wadded up bits of paper mache.

Tonight she is uneclipsed and her scars

Are showing like embers in a furnace.

I pray to her as we feast, indulging

On intimacies, wholly inadequate.

–

I have 2 parties this weekend so I am not sure if I will pull off a poem a day and I may not be available for comment. Please forgive any delays.

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Drawing to a Close | OctPoWriMo Day 29

Your death took a long time

Too long, all things being relative.

Dying seems so Zen in the movies

But all that was ever borne

From your cracked lips was agony.

I’ve no idea where you went

When the moment finally came

Or even what you believed in

(if you’d ever considered such things).

–

I wasn’t even there when it happened

But I know it wasn’t beautiful

A man’s suffering never is and a man’s tears

Are always heart-breaking for they are never

Spilled carelessly but come from a well

So deep as to be seldom retrievable.

It was my mother who decided,

Who stole the umbilicus from

Your surrendering frame.

–

There’s no shame in asking to die

For you were so riddled with disease,

With sufferings inconceivable in nature.

Our hospitals are filled with corpses,

Empty folds of flesh and bones

Like barbed-wire fences, wrapped

Ferociously around an invisible tenet.

It ought to be considered murder

To stitch the soul into an empty sack

And leave it trapped there

Beyond any justifiable definition of mercy.

*

This was written about a step uncle who died of multiple types of cancer. My mom took care of him in her home until he needed to go into hospital. She told me the pain never stopped, he just screamed and screamed.

Poetry Prompt 28 – Will You Accept This Challenge?

For this challenge we were asked to read our favorite poem and I wasn’t sure if she meant a poem I had written or a poem written by someone else. So I went with someone else (I have many favorites btw), that someone else being Jim Carroll. The poem is simply titled Poem as are many of his poems. Jim Carroll’s poems are hard to find online and are too difficult for me to format so this time you will have to listen muhahaha.

Listen Here

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0mQMcamd9sk

And then a poem from me using the word cues in the prompt

Recovery

An inauspicious moon pulls the veil

Over her pale face and in her obfuscation

The wolves skulk off, steady paws

Plowing the raving earth for bones.

–

Your smile, hangs sanguine

On the cusp of imaginings.

Optimism has lost its buoyancy

And with each knock I slip

Deeper into the house

Afraid of what lies behind

That once confident threshold.

–

Now I retreat, innards gone,

Cavities re-stuffed with

My own pessimistic blather.

Pandora’s box sits on

The edge of the kitchen table,

The contents rushing out

In a vast and terrible parade.

–

I catch the sun’s beaming face

Through a chink in the blinds,

Those glimpses weaving within me

A positively ravenous curiosity.

I unpack myself and

In the midst of my turmoil

Head out into uncertain streets.

Poetry Prompt 27 – Whimsical

A blood orange sun parses mischievous clouds

From the quaint to the curious, we rally

In rows of two with plaited fists and quizzical smiles.

Landscapes slide underneath our Mary Janes

Some real, some imagined but each

With a particular nuance and scent.

A waggish smile compliments your skewered brow

And in being young I am inclined to believe.

–

A swollen apple lopes across an unkempt yard.

Chameleon, liar, mendicant I weave stories

From luxuries both sought and endured.

I traverse stories wrapped in skeins of flesh.

The child in me is no longer whimsical

But once she was and in my memories

I sometimes return to her makeshift dreams,

To her hopes uncluttered by impossibles.

My normality burns, the cocked smile

Churning moonlight into honey.

I face my delirium and she faces me.

–

I take you in doses, sugar, analgesic.

Wherever you walk the ground opens

And drinks of my sorrow, planting flowers

Where there was only dirt and manure.

There is always you, always love,

Always the impulse to riffle

Through my belongings and pass them on,

Discrete treasures dipped in metaphors and blood.

Photo Challenge #84 and Looping Around and Wordle #222

“Image “Somewhere in Between” by Anne Worner copyright CC BY-SA 2.0”

She gathers her demons from the elements

From the winds foaming with petrichor

To the invisible lanes of turbulent seas.

She is silk-wrapped and deliberate,

The ground beneath his uncultured theories.

The daughter he never quite managed

Despite hourly affirmations.

The bottle can steal a man, as surely as a kiss.

–

The gears in his head never stop turning

And he has not forgotten her,

The lilt of her God-given ability,

The 6 pound baby buddied

With a coalition of stuffed bears.

How he loved her then

When the luxury of words did not suffice.

How he loves her now

Though she scarcely has time to speak.

If only he hadn’t sold his soul

That his current sobriety

Would not be soldiered in such isolation.

–

The trees in the park stoop, ape-like

By the water’s edge and he with his hands

Full of crumbs sits alone scattering

The remainders of an unpalatable lunch.

She approaches from a grove of lavender

“I am sorry I am late…work…you know how it is.”

She takes a seat beside him, her eyes reflecting

The greys of a plummeting sky.

“I can’t stay…the director is a real tyrant

But he’s good…the movie…you’ll see it I hope…”

–

Today was tough. I tried both painting and poetry but I am still feeling blocked creatively. I have some very big decisions to make in the next few days and there aren’t any easy answers. I feel the risk of failure is exceedingly high whichever route I take and I am trying not to fall into a pit of despair before I have even made the effort. I also apologize for being slow with reading blogs, my daughter’s birthday is this week first party we have ever had at home and there will be 20 kids, so I am all kinds of crazy. My birthday comes shortly after hers, then father’s day, then another birthday and did I forget Halloween which is right after my daughter’s birthday yikes! She is having a Halloween-themed disco. Disco is not quite the same in Sweden, it is synonymous with dance I think. I don’t expect to see a bunch of 8 year olds in polyester bell bottoms but who knows.

The OctPoWriMo challenge for today featured this image which I also incorporated in my little story poem.

Wordle #84 and 2 Lies and 1 Truth and Childhood Favorite

My heart grows like acanthus

Vertical, enduring, wild even in captivity.

I brush my auburn hair back

And lift my head high.

My smile is a flare,

My tumultuous eyes

Two rival seas pawing the horizon.

The sun may shine brighter

But unlike the sun I do not elapse

Behind the might of transitory nimbus.

I am strong and haunted

Just as a woman ought to be.

–

A dollhouse is no haven,

The universe is my home

And nothing less could contain me,

For I have so many roles.

We are all accountable

For the state of our lives,

No one else can rescue or fix

For we are not broken,

Imperfect yes but in those birthmarks

Our sacred power.

I am precisely as intended

Though some may regard me as loathsome,

Though some may fear my will.

I am myself. I am a woman.

*

I was given the challenge to write an empowerment poem. This was tough, I am sitting here listening to Maya Angelou now she knows how to write an empowerment poem!

I am combining two challenges in a simple way “2 lies and 1 truth” and “Your Childhood Favorite” Leave your guesses in the comments =)

1. My favorite childhood toy was a My Little Pony named Rosebud. She was light yellow with light pink hair and light pink eyes. I watched My Little Ponies everyday as a child and collected them. In fact I still have a sizable collection which I have since passed on to my own daughter.

2. My favorite childhood toy wasn’t so much as a toy rather it was a small music box given to me by my mom on my birthday. I loved music as a kid and it was a way to distract myself from the terrible things happening around me. The music box is now in the drawer by my bed.

3. My favorite childhood toy was a stuffed bunny my grandmother gave me when I was born. Originally the bunny had a white dress and held a carrot but those were lost and so I came to think of the bunny as male. My uncle ripped off one of the legs and my grandma sewed it back with heavy black threads. I still have the bunny in a box where I keep treasured items.

Writing Prompt #130 “Collage 9″ and Photo Prompt OctPoWriMo

We never went to Paris

The French cafe around the corner

Was the closest we ever

Came to foreign skies.

For my birthday you bought me

A key chain of the Eiffel tower,

A promise more incredulous than a ring.

When one is in love everything

Is so poignant and precious.

A daydream is more real

Than the caricatures one favors

In their everyday life.

–

When one is in love greatness is possible.

A violin cradled may as well be a heart

For does it not contain the same sweet music?

How improbable our love, how immense.

I thought and still think that it will never end.

You left for reasons I cannot fathom.

I never knew shackles like these

When we were together, this loss so like banishment.

I thought we were more than this that our love

Above all others held a place in the heavens.

–

I hate you a little less each day.

Memories may fail when spoken

But they remain even in death.

When I find you missing my eyes well up.

I am the universe unfinished,

A fracture walled off and forgotten.

How can I entertain your cruelty

When I saw no inkling of it?

If only you had been, in some small way,

Then may be I could arrest my feelings.

–

For the sake of the other challenge I had to add an extra image which changed the direction of my poem.

Public Domain Pictures

A Drop in the Ocean

I am the universe playing tricks on itself.

I am the microcosm and the macrocosm.

When faced with my former enormity

I am but a snag in the fabric and yet

Within I still contain the entire tapestry.

On days like these when all I can do

Is contemplate my smallness

I forget my value and in forgetting, dim

Inadvertently my vision of the whole.

–

For energy there can only be life.

What is murder to the rain likewise

Necessitates it. We are but seeds,

Potentialities sheathed in a porous husk.

What lurks underneath no one knows.

The need to be born is apparent in all of us.

We want to know, to return to our nature

But it is in our nature to explore. In the end

The game, the pieces, and the strategy

Are none other than the player himself.

–

I may come back to the other challenge 2 lies and a truth but I only just revealed a tremendous amount about myself and so it wouldn’t be so easy to lie to you now lol

Poetry Prompt 21 – Overwhelm

Her eyes are spades

Harvesting, fractures of obsidian

Bloodless, shapeless

Without mourning.

They bury deeper

What they cannot find

And taste whatever they can.

Of what use could a soul be?

–

Fingers like worms inundating,

A flood of untapped

And untethered insight.

A swamp of infinitesimal desires

Notices, delays, cumbersome meetings

And then without warning, loss.

–

A miasma, this love that cannot be.

A miasma, this rage that does not cease.

I will not surrender to the flesh

To defenseless musings, to engulfment

Of what use could a heart be?

Didn’t end up with a ballad in the end though I did read the description and I did have my rhyming dictionary ready to go. This is a work of fiction. The contradictory vocabulary in the poem “a swamp of infinitesimal desires” is to indicate the denial and resistance of the male character even though he has already been caught. To indicate how all these seemingly small, seemingly innocuous things are building and building into something ultimately inescapable.

Poetry Prompt 20 – Love Poetry and Wordle #221

Breathe deeply, count silently

Do not let them hear you,

Those stars which pry

Endearments from the belly.

My heart rings like tinnitus

There is nothing for it,

Intimacy requires a depth

Seldom sought for lack of energy.

Anything can be a weapon

But love should never be used as such.

With enough practice

I might really become someone,

Though who or what I cannot say.

–

To think of all the graves

I have inadvertently walked over

Of all those subterranean tenets

Picking worms from their crevices.

Their salubrious fluids, their flesh,

Food for the enigmatic mother.

One day I too shall lie down

In flame and become as dust

Intangible once cast out

But until I die I will cherish

Life, however, impossible it becomes.

–

There need not be a reason

To love and perhaps it is

Better not to have one

For there exists too many

Expectations as is.

One must develop a fondness

For uncertainty if he is ever to know.

When you come I will run

Into your arms and in that warmth

A transformation is certain

To take place for it is a miracle

To find someone with whom

You can share yourself

However, prolific or insufficient

Those selves prove to be.