https://www.patreon.com/posts/sutured-to-flame-63535182
Today I put up a live video on my Patreon account. It is a poetry reading. It is free to view. All my content is free to view.
PUBLISH
My poem Paper was accepted for publication at Spillwords Press. I will let you know when it is officially published. Reccomendations for where I might try to publish going forward would be most welcome.
Consent
Dismantle me with your prescient grin.
Say something that only I will understand,
something that connects us without as within.
I want to swallow your moans
while drowning myself on top of you,
to find in your insatiable appetite
a depth of self which is equally infinite.
I want to conceal you inside
of the most vulnerable parts of my body
to work you into a state of synesthesia
so profound that our souls overlap.
I am warm and generous,
fill me with your distress.
Let loose your torrents in me
and take of my consent
all that is in my power to give.
Dear Self
I first want to start out by congratulating you for surviving childhood. There were many years when survival comprised the totality of your existence. It might not be much conciliation when you reflect back on your life, as it was, and realize that huge chunks of your childhood are missing but somehow despite everything you came out on the other side stronger. It can be difficult sometimes to recognize the strength within yourself when at the most vulnerable points in your life you were preyed upon by the people you trusted most but you’re clever/industrious/wicked creative. You found ways to protect yourself. You created force fields. You turned inward. You built an entire world out of nothing. A world that allowed you some semblance of safety and joy.
What I am about to say to you now won’t make much sense given all the effort it took you to create that world but here goes. I need you to tear down those walls. I need you to deconstruct that world and join “the world”. I am not going to lie to you. There are monsters out here. Monsters in the guise of men. Monsters are in the minority though and you already have plenty of practice slaying monsters. You are ready. The world needs you because it is people like you who are capable of doing the impossible. The thing is you were always stronger than your father emotionally/mentally. You broke the cycle. You stood up to him. If you stay locked inside your fortress you will become weaker and predators prey on weakness. The fortress makes you more visible to the wrong sort of people, to the monsters. Monsters love dark hiding places. You are in hiding. It’s time to switch from survival mode to living mode. That world you created for yourself was made for a child. It doesn’t suit you anymore. It’s cramped. It’s dank. It’s boring as fuck. It’s full of bad memories. Every morning you wake in that cocoon that you call sanctuary and you relive a little bit of that horror. A horror that has seeped into the walls. When you built your fortress you didn’t add any windows because, at the time, the sight of your own life was itself, trauma. If you had built windows then you would be able to see just how much your life has changed. While you’ve been growing up I have been out here building a new life, from scratch. Thing is, if you’re not here with me, how can I possibly know what you want? I think I have done a decent job, in any case, it’s a start.
If you are still feeling trapped. It’s not for a lack of options/free will. It’s because you are still crammed into that smelly shell of yours. A shell which is so tight it is cutting off your circulation and making it harder to breathe. Those feelings you are feeling which you take to be proof of an ongoing war are actually just claustrophobia and atrophy. There is a solution for those painful/uncomfortable feelings. Get naked. Go outside. You’ll feel better. The abusers in your life created a script for you, an identity. Have you read that script? It’s shit. Write a new one. Create a life worth living in.
Real
Beneath my ear
your pulse is a choir,
an ascension of larks
in the gilded light of dawn.
In the halo of your grin
I can taste my redemption.
I lift my hands
and take you into my arms
piece by piece.
The spaces between us
are stitched together
with shadows.
The pressed ash
of dreams left too long
amongst the stars.
For you I could be made real.
–
I apologize for being late. I was out of town. Quick 5 minute write!
Lovesick
I run my fingers through
your multifarious constellations.
The moon surrenders
to the will of your wolfish grin
and I follow madly into the night.
Unaware of the complexities
of our destiny, shared or not.
My heart is taunt with your resonance.
Each night without warning
I raise my pale face to meet yours
and expel the air from my lungs
in one long, lovesick moan.
Inside of your lacustrine eyes
I submit to lustration,
to your pretty mouth
as it falls against mine
again and again.
I want to feel your reckless pulse
like a branding iron between
my palpitating thighs.
I want to spread you out
like a sheet and tuck myself
into your circuitous margins.
I don’t need a sign
so long as my instincts
remain intact.
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.
Hunger and Editor Sought
Your lips pour into my crevices,
tongues converging at the seams
lucid as the portraits suspended
on the surface of a lake and supple
like the threads of a convalescing flame.
The air between us is inconsolable.
I take whatever I can forage from your lungs
but the deprivation leaves us both delirious.
Moored against you, I am drowning in the heat
of our molecules in soulful compression.
This must be how prayers come into being,
two disparate phenomena unraveling heart to heart
under an implacable and ever darkening mask.
Hunger is delicate, it doubles over itself,
it beseeches and is never laid to rest for long.
–
Last night and this morning I wrote three poems which I decided to submit to various magazines, somehow I managed to just get in another for my blog. Hopefully you will see those other poems sooner or later. I find I never know which poems to choose, which one fits best in the magazine that I am considering, which poem is good enough, the whole thing baffles me really.
For my 2nd book it seems that I will be in need of an editor. I have a tendency to read a poem as I intended it and miss simple mistakes so a second set of eyes would be extremely beneficial. Grammatically speaking I struggle with commas, semi-colons, and colon placement.
Avant-Garde
Your eyes are so dark
that I cannot distinguish
the pupil from the iris.
Sometimes I lie down inside of them
wearing nothing but the body I came in.
Is it the sea which rages inside of me
or is it only your pulse compressed?
I have erected your monolith,
I have taken it into myself and desecrated it
while screaming nonsense at a sky
which was too dry and too flat to belong to heaven.
We met face to face in an airport,
the distance between us only as wide
as our clothes were thick.
Night after night I watched you
quietly rearranging the stars
knowing, all the while, that our lives couldn’t fit together
without a foundation of some kind.
It’s not your blood that drowns my sorrows
but your laughter and it’s not your shadow that eclipse me
but your hands and only in the best possible ways.
I have come to know your name
as intimately as my own heart.
I have shaped it in my mouth
I have chewed it bloody,
I have tied it in knots
using only my tongue
and my teeth as a ballast.
Love used to be an act of invention
now it is only the reiteration of our breath.
We no longer need an excuse to touch
and as your smile edges closer to mine
I recognize in myself an awkwardness
that time and familiarity have yet to extinguish.
Everything we do is inaugural, avant-garde,
essential to the distillation of our tears.
Nothing loved can ever become habit.
Fragments
Were I to gather my thoughts
just as they appear you would
not recognize the portrait.
I am a reflection of the voyeur.
My selves are not selves at all,
they are fragments
of a more substantial being.
A fragment can assimilate
any number of designations.
Make of me what you will.
Each teardrop is a star quilted
in unparalleled darkness,
I unstitch them one by one
but they go up in smoke
before ever reaching my lips.
I shed my second skin
and settle into the pauses
of your sacred architecture.
My derelict bones are dry enough to burn.
Will you furnish me when vacant?
Can you love me knowing
that I am temporary and inexact?
All that spills through my fingers is lost
for I have not the composure
to bend down and recover it.
My fingers stumble down
the length of your sternum.
If you were truly a fish
I would have emptied you
before consumption.
I drink your flesh by the inch
and when I have planted your root
as deep as it can go, I will fall upon it
again and again until I am grounded.
It is the act of loving which makes us whole.
–
really hard to write today, very stuck
mindlovemisery 