[x]

.vesta.

It is time. We feel the pull of summer along our spines
as we head into hibernation. Bed is short respite for our leaden limbs,
our singed hair. The air aches with the wait of it, where the embers
click and sing like crickets. Snippets of sound from the underground.
"This," someone says, wide-eyed with awe, "is what the insides
of the earth look like" - the world beneath, struck through with
dragons' teeth, pocked with open sores. The slit smile of the crater
in a slack jaw. Our scarred skies are littered with lights, many
mechanical suns spun into the ceiling, glinting like electric sequins.

And in the middle of it all, where our

FloodThe sun came out this week
after a full year of rain,
my lips puckered,
fingers pruned like
the skin around old-woman
ankles.

I wrung my hair of salt
and old sea lions,
until it was dry and limp,
let water spill out my ears
until the floor was wet.

You came in with the mop
and limped about a mess
of ocean
the water-weak floor groaning,
cleaned up a life of liquid.

In your yellow bucket
the year looked miniature
and muddy,
not nearly half as deep
as it had fell.

Emotion The noise is unbearable. It runs through your body and cracks your soul; the sound of fear. It's high pitched, like a scream from a horror movie. Primal. We've evolved in such a way that such a sound sends terror pulsing through us. It's a chain reaction.
Your muscles clench; that's the sound of your wife dying. All the worst thoughts pulse through your head; your mind serves only to exacerbate your horror. Eventually, you can't hear the screaming anymore, not over the sound of your heartbeat. The perfect engine in your chest pumps faster and faster; th

the cricket and sailour.there lives a man in a desert
with cracked skull and lips.

he is broken and feeble hands;
his back where the deer-antlers
roam to graze.

with the winter winds he is

calm. the sea foam swelling around
his ankles feel like honey, and he is
dragged. dragged through the sand,
dragged until he is salt. salt in a

swollen geography.

the clouds give way to bitter ships.

The Post*
The blue mail-satchel bumps and sways, brings them in,
rigid with the weight of promise;

envelopes, dessert-colored, a delicacy,
the brittle folds filled with scent,
a creme transfer over time, to me.

I open each with the reverence
of seashells and oceanic loves.

I cut apart the shore that separates us
with a letter-opener, the sound of water.

You have arrived
before your body.

I settle into my pulse
and the resounding ambiance of my privacy
while your words touch my lips.
*

I.
We stand in our reamed maze of consent--
faces, throats thrumming
on parallel shoulders;

a doorway, at dusk;
a barefoot dance sung over by bird

the sons of flint and pitchthe sons of flint and pitch

remember me
as i want to be remembered--
fallen down with the knee-tide
over my forelock, drowned in little water,
but mostly as a man
not afraid to die:

remember me my children
if you have ever remembered
wave or
tenor, if your voices have sung for me though you did not know
you sang for me:

remember, we struck a spark!
for such brittle foolish longing is not
what wets our torches or deadens our wood
but show me a good man, raise him up high on a pedestal,

and I will show you
something worth burning out for.

The Long Shot        A flame licked at the end of a cigarette. The silver lighter clicked shut, and Old Man Morrison sat back in his chair. His hair was grey, his face lined with years and miles, his eyes wrinkled and keen. He took a drag from his cigarette, pulled it from his mouth with a deft motion of his fingers, blew the smoke out in a cloud before his face.
        "So you're the deserter, then," he prompted. "How'd you get that name, huh? Run out on some of your friends in the war?"
        The man across the table from him was

TuesdayYou write the words so no one will understand, it is
Tuesday again, always Tuesday, even when it
is Friday and the school across the street shrieks with excitement, the
walls have ears and you say it is Tuesday and carefully write a list
of what you have and have not allowed yourself, because
it is always Tuesday and the walls shake their heads,
and trace the lines of your notes, shorter every week, but not
every day because it is not Tuesday and you can write what you
need, the walls do not have ears.

You do not use the phone because the words have slipped from your grasp,
the subtle difference between careful and controlled, th

Dressed To KillDeath need not appear in funeral wear
no drapes of gothic silk should
shroud that impish frame -
folds and furls about her curl
the shade of coal,
the shape of pain.

She little cares
if these threads be spun from silver sun
or lilac moon, his blushing colour drained,
her kiss shall fall from spider lips
dewy - crystalline.

So dressed in shuddering scenes of life
a blooming flower - a dying flame,
she treads the patterned tiles of fate
to still the blood
within our veins.

ElegyThat ever-circling hawk you see is death.
It never leaves your sight; is air its home?
Alas, it mastered air so it may hunt.
It may come down so fast and steep one day
that none could see it dive, yet you are gone.
Today you are too big, you are too strong.
But you will shrink, you will become a mouse.

Or death will grow till all your size and strength
are vain, and float mere inches overhead,
then take you with a twitch of its great beak.
It will take all you are, or nearly all.
The love you had for others and the love
they had for you cannot be caught or held
by talon or by beak, cannot be lost.

As death soars up again and

CharlatansThere was that unexpected duality to it, something of
a pan, flashing in salt marshes, broken up like old bones,
a war dream served with warmed nuts and Dewars,
drawled civility over upgraded seat assignments and
that Friday afternoon sense of having dodged the bullet.

Peopled canyons receded beyond lozenges of pitted glass
in that vertiginous sacrament we sometimes mocked,
mere hours since a proud dog-and-pony apparatus
went missing, sucked up barking into granite-clad commerce
and a sky gone gray in January's stolid transaction queue.

As long as they were talking in those soft syllables, those
Scotch-soaked whispers in clou

Night boatI'm late for the theatre. Luca guiding us
down still lanes, I recline, dip a hand;
cool, sunless flow. Bleached palaces
pass, lovely homes of merchant sires.
In a damp brume, the night is falling.
My departure was recorded by spies,
Luca says, off to alert their masters
the lord-in-exile has left his quarters.
Lanterns lit, we are crossing the city.
There's a monotony to these streets
I don't dislike, and it keeps off tourists.
I shall probably stay the winter over,
though the local girls (and boys) are
not to my taste. But from what future
have I tumbled? My modern heart
backwater-bound. Drinks aboard.
Tonight,

When God Sleeps.I. So it comes to this: pangea tearing itself raw
from our throats to pour into squares of newly open sky
where the stars grew aches and darkened lakewater
once bloomed into bruised winters. Somewhere
beyond the thick of snow, prayers are strung
on moon-rattled winds
and birds' teeth tear apart the poetry
of our hands. They will raise something beautiful
from these ruined words.

Continents shift slowly. They are
dirt-bound titans, these beasts;
rootless giants that mold themselves
to fit the vision we hold inside our heads. Oceans sigh
and their tides crawl ever upward.

II. Our shadows become umbilical
in certain light. Unknown children cas

A Small, Good ThingHer mother used to take her out for rides on the motorbike at night. The girl would cling to her mother's jacket, perched on the back of the seat. They used to ride around the island in the dark. It only took half an hour to go all the way around and back to their house. They'd ride by the sea, black as oil in the night, and by the rental houses and the pancake house and the fire house. The daughter would often stay up, if she happened to wake in the night, in the hope that she'd hear the garage door opening.

After the divorce, when the house on the island was sold and they moved to a place where the out-of-doors at night was no place for wo

.apollo.

Apollo, sleepcrawler, trawls the sky between day and night.
Behind him, the sun enters like a dreamer, shattered. Kite-
boned and obstinate, he soars toward time, dragging the raw
white eye of light, fixed inside beside the solar plexus.
[Just another dead weight.]

This, he knows, is important. There are few things you can learn
from a ball of burning gas and light eight minutes too late, but
from his aerial migrations he's made several notations on life.

One : to shoot stars, you must become bulletproof. Collect your
heirlooms in the hatch of the attic, patch the holes in your roof,

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Matthew

by ~Bkkprgirl, Sep 11, 2010, 9:46:12 AM
Literature / Poetry / Narrative / Free Verse

The silhouette in the back seat seems to say,
what's a few more miles per hour?
Jesus, there ain't any cops around at two AM.
The needle on that glowing green dial shivers, taunting.

After forty days of temptation in the desert,
I turned his breath bitter and blue from nicotine.

The illuminated cone of open road chokes the windshield
And he cranks the gas, feeling his back press against the seat.
A rush of lines and blue-grey pavement.

His fists were scarred, probably thought even Behemoth
was wary of his mirrored sunglasses.

And he thinks: bitch, you're gone,
You're all gone.
Bet you didn't say your prayers right.
He grips the cracked leather steering wheel
Cranks up the radio,
His feet brush crumpled cans
Of beer and Diet Coke
And he feels them holy.

I made him proud of that stain on the wall;
Made his fists bruised from scrubbing and scrubbing.

He stops when it gets light,
Wheels kicking up dust under the dead tree,
Bone-white, like fingers in the sun.
The dust scratches his lungs through the open window.
It glistens in the air, a black cloud

Like an oncoming storm, or the Fifth Plague.

He gets out, straightens his shirt,
Pops the trunk.
And walks away across the deep black earth,
A shovel in hand.

Matthewby ~Bkkprgirl

Literature / Poetry / Narrative / Free Verse

This is the first piece of poetry I've done since Sewanee, and I don't know how it turned out. It's creepier than a lot of the poems that I like to write. It's called Matthew because I wanted to heavily allude to the book of the bible in which Jesus is tempted in the desert. I wanted to re-imagine it in a modern setting, happening instead to some guy named Matthew.