Mutable

Life insists

on patience

but once I have arrived

at a destination

how can I be content

to wait outside?

 

My heart falters mid-air

clips the rim of the wastebasket

and falls to the floor

with an unsettling squelch.

She will leave a stain no doubt.

But isn’t that what we all want

to leave something behind

when we are gone

and haven’t the impulse

to make anything new?

 

I watch her sputter and turn.

Everything hurts,

your absence,

my disenfranchised life,

even the crescents

at the ends of my fingertips

from scraping so long

at the same intractable walls.

 

I am afraid of my life,

afraid of my heart 

because even on the outside

she has a knack for drawing me in.

The butterflies in my stomach

are made of wire.

They jab and tangle.

They perforate my insides

whenever they spread

their amature wings.

 

I don’t want to die

voluntarily incarcerated.

I don’t want to go

another moment

without knowing you.

The road between us

has yet to intersect but still

I love knowing that you are out there

savoring and scavenging

under the same mutable vault as I.

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Someday

It is only in my dreams

that we mean something to each other.

In reality we have never spoken.

I immortalize these words for my own sake,

in the hopes that their weight

will create a gravity sufficient

to draw you closer.

 

Someday I believe that we will meet on a street

where love runs deeper than cobblestones

and you will cross over to me

as often as it takes to be at my side.

Someday must happen soon

for I have drifted too long at sea

and fear that I might have

grown too foreign for domestic use.

 

The sight of you makes my feathers itch.

I pluck them delicately like the strings on a harp

and in their melancholy refrain

you can just hear my heart going off

like fireworks in the distance.

 

I could fashion a constellation

of our silhouettes as they congeal and contort

on the stark canvas of our outermost walls.

We would be spectacular together,

the way art is spectacular

when shaped by a singular instinct.

 

The stars, taken in their totality,

are not sufficient to encapsulate my wish

only your words have the power to shift continents,

whether to draw them near or push them apart.

Perhaps you too are a poet?

Summon me, I will answer.

 

I sit quietly thinking you into being on a bus.

Strangers side by side in rows

embroidered into their virtual lives

and vacant on the outside.

The seat beside me is empty:

it is an extension of myself,

my strangely glorified isolation.

If it were you there beside me

my whole life would be transformed in an instant

and I along with it.

 

My old skin has gotten too tight

and whenever I move my bones knock together.

My womb is deceased but her guile remains intact.

I can’t quite imagine what has taken her place.

It could be that I am filled up like a balloon,

only the air is not air but vestiges of a life

we could have together.

Someday when you have come to love me

I will grow another heart the size of your fist

and that heart will be more than enough to fill me.

Wordle #182

You belong to the ether,
to memories eclipsed in saudade.
I cannot recover the incline of our journey
or the bittersweet implications
of your infinite meanings.
–
We were coruscant in our brevity,
a glitch in a continuum without fault.
I do not seek you out,
your extravagance, your fishnet tidings.
Time has rendered me lenient
and all that we were
is now alien and diffuse.
–
Whenever I see a field of tulips
I think of you,
how wild, how cultivated you were
as I remake you again and again
with varying inflections.

–

A very quick write before bed!

Wordle #113 and #114

My hesitations imbue me like a dream,
the mythical fugitive-atrabilious.
I am a tenement singed
by a foreign climate
and fingers steeped in elderberry wine.
I have known only the obstructions
random and superfluous.
I follow your gaze,
the terrible lengths, the proverbial extractions
and I wonder if I too possess
a certain gravity,
a gravity that incites shadows
instead of men,
a license to surrender
and in surrendering, be.
–
I fumble with a tube of mascara,
blackening the elemental eye
with its translucent cliches.
I paint my lips cerise-
a crude and uninspired Bacchanalia-
my face flounders from sight.
I prefer puddles, to oceans laboriously deep,
cheap mondegreen cocktails
to bald-faced tonics.
I want to be loved
to feel my heart heaving
until all the blood has gone
from my body.
I chase silverfish
from a stack of old books
vetted like cadavers
I reach inside those weeping sheaths
rancid with misfortune
and pull with all my might.
–
For
https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2016/06/13/wordle-113-june-13th-2016/
and
https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2016/06/20/wordle-114-june-20th-2016/

Swan

Ray Caesar

I am the slick void

Of an unsought retreat

My lips form a horizon

The red litmus

Of a fractured sun stalling

Clouds bate with honey

And hold in tempest

*

I speak of the spirit only

For my flesh

Is mystically detached

My roots prey

In black water

Unseen and unsound

*

Truth lies adjacent

To humiliation

As soon as I stand upright

The ground splits beneath

Am I strong enough to face

Perpetual uncertainty?

*

There are too many pauses

In my composition

Quantum physics has made

Everything possible

And simultaneously indefinite

Today I am a hunchback

Tomorrow I’ll be a swan

Hope is always grandiose

*

Anyone who read yesterday’s post at Curious Flowers is aware that I have been diagnosed with PNES most likely related to some form of dissociative disorder. I still have to be evaluated for a dissociative disorder but it seems quite likely. I just received a response from my mom which was very sweet. A quote from her email “I look at you and see what I would like to be” I don’t think she means the PNES part of course.

Prayer

My thoughts drift

On the ether

Indigenous

But indistinguishable

From impediment

*

I stumble,

Bare feet scorched

Aloft celestial highways

Too many

Querulous prayers

One for the death

Of every

Beleaguered phantom

*

The stars

No longer incline

Toward my siren call

Helpless, heedless

My muse undresses

With the lights off

And in the presence

Of my beloved

I am

Unworthy

*

Writer’s block =(

Mudra

Survival propagates all existence

Inhale, exhale, devour, exclude

My purpose lies not in the plumage

In the masquerades of a subtle inquiry

But in the beak and talons

Of an intractable curiosity

I am not enlightened enough to say

That I live fully but I live by my design

*

Inky and indecisive my lips retreat

Into the asylum of inarticulate verbs

Beguiled by the scent of incense

I reposition my hands

Palms alabaster and rose

Like lotus blossoms

*

Heart a blackened canary perched

In starless holes of sophic exhaust

Colors mute and amorphous

Underneath a domesticated flesh

I abandon somatic concerns

*

The eyes summon scarlet and sea

A mechanical muse oiled for insertion

I know these verses, these doubts

The way they churn deep within the tracts

Of an invertebrate spine

I let them flow through me, unbroken

*

I don’t want to write of loneliness

Of those absences which elongate

Into chasms murky and fathomless

*

I don’t want to speak of genius

Of scantily clad memories

Rolled into the cylinder

Of a festering cigarette

*

I don’t want to turn another page

To calcify another sacrificial heart

With the sympathetic saline

Of a shared humanity

*

I just want to drift shapeless

On the periphery, noncommittal

Observing without accusation

*

A moment held selfishly

Underneath the tongue

Conversations with self

Too intimate for composition

=

Today I didn’t feel like writing or reading, I just wanted to be. I am in a quiet, mellow, and meditative mood

The Boy in the Red Vest

The Boy In the Red Vest by: Paul Cezanne

Temperance

Baring the brunt of your vicarious expectations

Adolescent dreams warp as late Autumn leaves

Come winter, a barren heart resolves to indifference

Must age nullify whimsy?

Must I too succumb

To the drudgery of a life merely tolerated?

Plague

Arrogance composes thee father,

A man is not man whose ambitions trample

Those who by hierarchy fall beneath

A man in not a man

Whose confidence depends upon appellation

A plague this name on a ravaged peasantry!

A plague this name on my moral integrity!

A dirty womb does not define me

I will not embellish this savage mantel

Disown me if you must!

Sylph

You are the North

The sylph in ether formed

Beyond my words

Beyond the reach of my hands

You drift, a gossamer cloud

On the verge of tempest

Pagan Phantasm

A pagan spirit

Yielding only to ardor

I am way too young

To survive your inferno

Way too mild to tame

Your nomadic heart

And even if I possessed

Such an unconquerable will

As to contain yours

I am content to let you

Wander as moonlight

Over the avenues

Of a transient flesh

=

I hope it’s okay I chose to do a few short ones this image inspired me haha

Submission for Right2Write