[x]

Memory1.
I will take one flower a day.
I do not know their names
but they are brighter than anything

else I found under the sheets
of conifers. The clotted colours
sit dubious, dew collecting on stems

I hate to fracture. I love
the tenuous ease, an entire plant
ascending from thin soil. An excavation

uncovers roots like fishbones
with their message, an infinitesimal
howl. In frantic pulse of tattoo they plea:

"Remembering is destroying"
But still,
I wallow.

2
One quiescent shriek of warning before
the compulsion of alveolar
collapse [my lungs, my thorax,
undone and tightening]
My breath is a bomb.

I am e

blood poisoningOnce you've had a baby you don't care about
people contemplating your cervix. It's waiting
for the call. Or the letter because your new phone
doesn't have voicemail. Mostly normal.

It's as good as these things get.

There was a shift change when I had my daughter
so the night nurses leaned on the wall in the back of
the cheerful room and the day nurses touched my arm,
the inside of my knee, everyone laughing and cheering
and yelling PUSH

and then there was you.

And a lot of blood, I could feel it rushing away from
my body, my host of hosts, my living flesh, the
quick stitches, the pressure worse than the contractions,
my long,

whispers in the grave.You whispered about the long-dead-lost
and the long-lost-dead, buried six feet
below the sour mud. Each word trickled
down my spine like ice chips insinuating
themselves in the tiny, tenuous crevices
where bone meets muscle.

I wanted to stop your full, sweet lips
from moving, halt those perfect white
teeth in place so I could pretend your
candy mouth wasn't as sour as the corpse-
filled mud, wasn't as filthy and corrupt.

But they didn't stop, and I wondered what
long-dead-lost and long-lost-dead, what
pale fleshed corpses rested six feet
below your memories - and I wondered if
I would weep the same ghastly tears.

stratawe can climb, vertically
through the region, the continent
a vast terrain like a length of dark cloth laid upon the clay
and when the lost sky comes against us
we can traverse a new path.
but it's hard for me to locate your many strata
within the shifting contour lines
i know only the crawl and fold of the tide
the foam and spit of the wave
and the gravity of rainwater.
to study you
is to be drunk with obscurity
i want your phenomena and your substance
to know your structure like the cap of ice on a
winter lake knows its shape
and how a portion of light strikes a harsh shadow
on the rocky outcrop
i have unfastened you

so

Islands of LoomExpository love handles discriminate the prosperous curvature of mated torsos, declined
Minimal beats on the rise
Torrential directories impoverished in the lucid inlay of motor functions risen where they manifest, assigned

Bad TickerThe heart can only take so much radio talk
before a life explodes into static
and the Voltzwagon lurches through a store front.
Where were you when this or that basilica fell
under these or those imperial boots?
I was at the hair salon or the butcher's shop
when my cell phone rang like the evening gong.
I was getting a massage when the newscaster
bit off his tongue and the senator from Wyoming
went into a slack-jawed reverie.
Madam Barbarossa's thumbs froze up
on my buttocks and the butcher quartered himself.
God forbid that your infant daughter's hands
are on the steering wheel when it happens
or that your granddad is

TrickoletThe ambiguities he hides
between the ever-changing lines

of poetry; our romance rides
the ambiguities. He hides

emotion he creates decides
the meaning but never defines

the ambiguities he hides
between the ever-changing lines.

Gravity and YouYou saunter (no other
word would describe
the lilt of your gait quite
so eloquently) toward
me, smiling. You tilt
your head in question:

"What are you doing?" The question
remains unanswered. You ask another:
"Why are you upside down?" I tilt
my head toward you. "Describe
'upside down.'" You lean toward
me: "you." I beam "Not quite!"

"Not-" (I interrupt) "Quite!
Not at all, in fact. Your question
is invalid." You seem to lean toward
cuffing me, but you repeat the other
question, your first. So I describe
why I am laying, on a dock with a tilt,

my head limp over the edge: "The tilt
and the view flipped around cannot quite

SOMETHINGWhat smoky poltergeist has lit out

across the dusty plains of my mind

and left no footprint?

A contrarian alchemist turning

my gold into lead and taking with it

all my illusions of clarity

Those wizards and sorcerers hawking

their false incantations and last right lies

I sense another curve in my future

Something just up ahead

JulyJuly was a month of a capella nights,
Red heliotrope scores and blanched
Methadone eyes.

A singing of nerves hewn to a cry:
Fine-tuned and skinned
To carpal ascension,

The quivers of a quaver
Due to crescendo.

I hovered, wing-like, on the husk
Of schizocarp dreams,
But sprang forth undone
By chorus and synchrony.

eucalyptusthey tell me i am writing confessional
poetry and i tell them, no, i am not,
i am writing my world.

i did not burrow in guilt's throat
and choose to spell out the softness,
no, i screamed out my soul and it was then
that i remembered how i used to pray.

i wanted to tell stories
but instead i sat and wrote:

about rain, and sorrow,
and the greek gods,
and pain, and the greek gods,
over and over, and dionysus, dionysus:

i plunged and dived dolphin-beaked.

*

i want you know
that death is a responsibility
and saltwater immersion
a fierce talent we cannot escape

so this is a confession for you:

i am not selfish
i am self only

Happiness and How To Find It

Today happiness has gone down 35 points,
While sadness is up 43 points,
Which is a record high for this year.

Today the president announced a bold new initiative
In order to generate happiness,
He's shipping in 100,000 puppies in from overseas.
Projections indicate that those puppies could
boost happiness by as much as 30%.

President: "America needs happiness. When you
Want happiness, you don't sit around and wait for it."

The national party of Life Fulfillment issued a statement
Today claiming that the president should be
Placing an emphasis on long term happiness,
And that this is only a temporary fix,
As those puppies will o

MouseMouse is in the wall.
He listens for your breathing.
Mouse is in the wall.
Whiskers on the outside of your inside,
he feels for signs of loss.
Homes in empty spaces,
halls between our thoughts.

Mouse is in the wall.
He listens for the cracks,
the notches and the secrets.
A tiny nose vibrates,
an eager tail explores.
Mouse is in the wall.
He writes his unseen stories,
surrounding you like dust.

The money breaks.
The high-rise falls.
The ground thunders.
The skies fault.
Mouse does not flinch.
This is meaningless to him.

Mouse is in the wall.
If you listen, you can see,
if you focus, you can hear.
The blank spaces crawl

The Long Forgotten CountryAll forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me
Now, here on this spot, I stand with my robust soul.
                         Whitman

A Light in the Darkness
In the morning, as she cast her net for
      Great handfuls of mud to build an island,
      They say she smiled, and that
      Her hair twisted itself into a forest.
And as she carved our bodies from the trees,
She christened this halcyon world w

PyrePyre

If our luck holds,
we will find ourselves
spread across three county lines,
charred knucklebones among corn,
in the whistle of swamp reeds, your hip
planted in loam and awaiting its flesh
of April snow, my skull home
to the golden Orb Weaver, asleep.
There are cinders in your witchlike eyes,
there are Lyre snakes in the crook
of your arms, and I would name your heart
Strawberry Leaves.

I raise the window,
shout the silent goddamns of our distance

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La LunaThe orb hangs low,

Lethargic.

Her portal is

Closed.

The moon is not

My friend

Tonight;

Rather,

A courtesan

Set to

Betray.

I prepare for

Numbered

Days.

Phoenixes and SparrowsYou,
my darling,
are a phoenix

risen

from dust
and ash
of the past

with fire
and ire
and wrath

brandishing
priceless
plumes

of

vermillion
and copper
and gold

the sheer breadth
of wingspan

the sudden
feathered
flash;

Alas…

Never stray you far

from the
tenuous
tethers

that bind
you to
my side

for fear of
the descent,

the fall from
grace and sky.

While I,
a simple
sparrow,

choose to live
with arms
flung wide

embracing
unruly
currents

I opt to live my life

while you
in all your
glory

still choose
to hide

on the
coat-tails
of my

clipped
wings.

Why?

A Shallow Grave If You WillBury me beneath an inky blanket
Of velvet river-bottom silt,
Or in some strange and succulent soil,
To decay as jasmine wilts.

Trellis my grave with rose-blush
Or in flinty gravel lay me down,
Beneath the rubble of the ancient ruins
Upon some bleak unholy ground,

Clad in cream damask,
With gold coins upon blind eyes
Or naked as a newborn
Revealing all the time-worn lines,

Bury me gently here,
Or lay me down roughly there,
Just make my grave a shallow one
That the sky might hear my prayers.

The Walls of Deir El-BahriThough my tongue takes a sibilant turn
Against the roof of your mouth
As you serpentine your way
Between my eager thighs,

You are still my Ra, my Sun-God, my scepter,
My holiest of holies.

Yet you, I must warn, whom I keep as lover
Are a tryst condemned, forever, as a lie.

Still Senenmut, with you, I build temples,

And hold that these muted mysteries
Shall remain yours and mine,
Enshrined in colonnades,
Immortal blooming in trellised gardens:

Deir el Bahari,
Like you, my holiest of holies.

And when the last ellipses of our life
On the silted banks of the Nile
Have resigned to dust
Your pledge of duty

And, fo

Traffic PatternsTraffic patterns
And infidelity.

Electric lines.

State police
And sympathy.

Construction flags
And the devil.

!INSANITY!

Head-on-collisions
And candied contusions

All along the watchtowers
And the contours of shoulders.

Red lights
And body damage.

Bruises and
Key carvings.

These are, after all,
What milestones

Are made of.

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Submitted: June 14, 2011
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We Are Not All Roses

by ~UltimateOutlaw, Jun 14, 2011, 8:52:47 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

(A Tribute to Divorcees)

So in the end your blushing bride
turns out to be but a rose.

A thorned and fragile flower,
fast to fade beneath the gaze of
a sultry sun that is not her own--

Dying daily despite all the sweet
water you plaintively pour upon
her pale but pestilent petals.

She was not the once and
never again of your life--

She was but a rose.

So in the end the blossom of your
love sunk her gnarled roots

into the silt of a strange and
foreign flood plain. Somewhere
sultry and luscious and so far away--

well perhaps the Rhine was simply a
better suited terrain for her
sickly and silk-skinned ways?

She was only your now and
never your always and forever--

she was ut a rose.

Now this death has dwindled down
into a dull and decaying ache so
try to remember this when next my
hair is clenched in your fists--

Not all women are frail flowers.

Some of us are statues of sirens
etched eternally in the tried
and tempered steel of trust.

Some of us are strong and
some of us are free.
Some. Some like me

Some--

But not she.

She was only a ruse.
She was only but a rose.

We Are Not All Rosesby ~UltimateOutlaw

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Once in a while, after almost 3 years, living with a divorced man starts to wear on you with all their bloody negativity and pessimism about the prospect of relationships not deteriorating into dust with the drop of a hat.

Duh. If you love someone enough you just keep it alive. It's not like God suddenly smites your relationship with divine fury and it disintegrates...

And it's ALWAYS the moments when you are both purely blissfully happy when the paranoia sets it.

I think it's I-want-to-give-you-an-engagement-ring-but-I-don't-want-what-happened-last-time-to-happen-again Syndrome. Personally.

~Lottie-Girl May 15, 2012 Student General Artist

A powerful poem.

=DailyLitDeviations May 9, 2012

Your wonderful literary work has been chosen to be featured by =DailyLitDeviations in a news article that can be found here: [link]

Be sure to check out the other artists featured and show your support by

ing the News Article.

^Kaz-D May 6, 2012 Hobbyist Photographer

Beautiful

^Kaz-D May 6, 2012 Hobbyist Photographer

Beautiful work

`thetaoofchaos Dec 10, 2011 Hobbyist Writer

Dying daily despite all the sweet
water you plaintively pour upon
her pale but pestilent petals.

strong alliteration.

i saw one typo: "she was ut a rose." i assume you meant either "just a rose" or maybe "not a rose". probably the latter?

try to remember this when next my
hair is clenched in your fists--

that scene definitely evokes . . .

lovely, as always.

`YouInventedMe Sep 5, 2011 Writer

terrifically strong close

~Eefera Jul 6, 2011

You my dear, are a poetic genius. This is awesome.

~chadwood Jul 1, 2011 Writer

I've seen relationships fall apart and you're right... it doesn't happen in one night, in one fell swoop, and it's rarely one or the other's fault, either.

Excellent read.

*Scarlettletters Jun 16, 2011 Professional Writer

You are featured here: [link]

~DownwardsSaint Jun 15, 2011

Yeah, you hit it on the head... doubly if it ended badly. I know it took me a while to get over that... but generally, we do.
Excellent piece and I hope he comes to his senses. You're quite a woman, Kate.

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