[x]

earth circuitAnd when the sun sinks, the earth's skin crawls:

I.
I wonder if this awkward creature would notice me the way I notice him.
He's so tragic at his throne
I stare after him longingly.
And yet,
He never realizes that I'm the one
Who forever basks in his brilliant beams.
If only he knew how much brighter he could burn
[with me]
He'd light up the universe.

II.
I heard him speak of thirst, once.
The quenching lust of the stars had run dry.
So that night, I brought along a jar of acid.
(And how it gleamed in his glow).
I handed it to him, wrapped in taffeta ribbons,
screaming
I wish curdling joy
On my gurgling boy

(it is not a dream if it is everyday)i no longer have the gall
to write letters to my universe.
it’s stony quiet,
all around.
it’s possum eyes in headlights,
abandoned chandeliers
frozen
in Victrola dust.

some tireless pamphleteer
has wrecked this room
with motorized felicity!
there must be
at least
one bill for every breath,
paper
mountains
of indifference.

and now, i see
you are the same.
you’re no magic
planet. i will
get up,
some time tomorrow,
mid morning, when the bugs have died,
and drive to work
and i won’t think
there’s anything
that ever came
before that sun.

and there,
i’ll trade in shibboleths
and type in pointy let

it's your call, starlingmy sister is going to be a cyborg
and i hope she stays gentle. i heard
that cochlear implants

can sometimes become commanders
the same way that learning commands
formative love. i hope she

stays humble and continues
to make my tinctures in the endearing
way she does,

dissolutions gentle
enough to flood underground tunnels
with flute-song.

she takes my wrist by force
and she decrees that all knowledge
happens in a snow-felled wood

at sunset. it's like the natural life
inside her yearns still
for that brackish obliteration,

and maybe when she's a cyborg
it will detach itself from its carbon
sequestration and fly out to its avalon,

and,

dead1.

i hear these words
and something happens
in the yard;

it doesn't fit
a poem
or planet.

i see it squeeze
into the slits
beneath your shirt.

i feel it fly the smooth
of you
from off your back. it turns

and hides behind the acres,
stock frontiers
of jagged rooftops,

kept far and safe
and free
of me.

2.

the squirrel
has left the limb
as light would leave
a photograph.

i’m staring into its absence
and some new kind of animal is made;
one where
only
its reversal is alive.

it doesn't move or breathe.

the park is wintered over, and i don’t go.
the poppies
are all gone.
and when they do come back, they never chan

Harvest MoonThree a.m. moonlight
across lazy dust motes; a
tree scrapes the window.
Your arm weighs on my hip like
whispered promises of love.

tree, fiddler crabIt took days to hollow out the soft parts
of the trunk, dig out the tree-flesh and sap,
polish the raw wood so that when he sat,
there would be no splinters. He carved his name
into the side, like a blessing, a declaration
of good fortune, and stowed his forest inside.

Whale Songs of the PacificListen, the girls swallowed by whales are the ones that grow up lucky.

Listen, no one will warn you about the little boys with the magpie eyes and the fists swinging splinters of glass. No one will warn you that their smiles are sweeter than their words are sweeter than their souls are sweeter than their intentions. No one will warn you of the sheer weight of the world.

Listen, sometimes girls are fragile. Sometimes girls are frothy. Sometimes girls let boys nuzzle "I love you"s into their necks and sometimes girls drink the wine of believing them.

Listen, sometimes the boys really are sweet, and little girls' tart puckered mouths can't ta

Under DreadThe winter, the whole winter
is sitting on my head, nesting its fingers
in the little hairs over my ears.
Its friend, the great and unnamed doubt,
is leaning against my collarbone
in a most familiar fashion,
and I fall in and out of balance

irregularly irregularly.

I have a beauty waiting, warm, willing
on speed dial, but the phone--
where did I leave the phone again?
Beauty is as elusive as
the car keys, which, I swear,
were just in that pocket. I

had my hand on them. The whole winter
keeps coursing its little nails
up and down my neck and taking
all my breath away.
There was a dream I had that
I almost remember, almost r

if only, if only.i.
we drove nowhere
and we spoke a language
that nobody understood
underneath a foreign sky
blanketed in the scent of pine.

ii.
you told me
my eyes were like envelopes—
because they were always
opening
closing
fluttering to the sound
of breaking seals
and ink stained fingertips.

iii.
i told you
we should run away
to a new land
with new faces
because
i was enamored
with people i had never encountered
and places i had never gone.

iv.
you laughed at me
and said that
if i didn't spend
so much time with my head
buried in world maps
i would realize
that i was living on one.

v.
i remember
it rained that day
and the tea went cold
but the

It starts with a flash-bang and a Majulahi.
June's hauled her here again and
she's tapping at my classroom window,
A gazillion tiny fingers rapping in succession
(When she said "invitation" I didn't realise she meant
soaking half the country, the spike in umbrella prices has
nothing to do with me)
What's worse than an impatient child
is one with the whole atmosphere as her battering ram
when she tries to say something the urgency brims over
and one million exclamation marks
is beginning to sound like static frazzling
out on the pavements

ii.
She is without choice: when Cloud mother tips her out
she must go, and go she will
caught in an obtuse cycle, fought over

Reversed Singularity? but of time, i do digress
& my intentions have been writ
in sumerian, and dreamt; but

here to live obsolete:
swift swing, precarious pang
with my heart's guiltless intention
--fingernails scratch & fit

your name; tasting still
succulence, feeling still
tyranny of will, being still
drowned cortex-deep, hearing still

--the wisp of a faltered laughter
sheltered & swaying & playing

amongst the dead, the horned
honoured and torn, formed
long and forlorn'd--

oh time, my bittersweet demise
dying is no longer a sacred art
and is sincerity in its purest form
cloaked with fault & artless bourne

Liquid Cityhere, at the bottom - lovers.
there are lovers disassembling
themselveslost in and to the
desperate motion in
of - waves.

- did you think the continents
moved themselves? see them slip,

in an open sleep. less go, come.
come and, and - again. trembling

here, at the bottom - their eyes
are lightless. hollow bodies left
restless,

the sea does not sleep.

in the seams(a) when I was young I was a robin that stole the eggs from another's nest.
fitted upon my stare there was a warning –
personal's too personal for me, well i
would not use wings if i had 'em.

a child of rye with a silhouette spoiled by the sun, I was, I am.

and sometimes I see some vengeful sparrows still under my fingernails;
their glistening beaks snap melodies that rib a hundred bird-bone cages,
so light you could blow 'em away with a twist of your lungs.

and there are still words jailed between my teeth and my tongue and I do not speak of,
do not think of
them,
but they rattle between bone and flesh and I
drown them s

the shut-in

where are these keyholes to the Equinox? the stars huddle
like alien nettle,
a gray chime of wrens scaling tree limbs and middays,
jittery
fruit;

Darwin has no lines for me
to speak
of.

i've sheetrocked the blistering ivies and blossoms.
i've glassed out daubers and frightening mollusks
pillowing through mud honey and minute old ruins.

intimate with my quiet desk, my paper hoard
i'm still a coward; the envelopes, Obama glass, the dozen unused spiral
diaries are menacing concoctions, minotaurs of lost dimensions.

i used to sleep in creek-beds.

Let the Sparrows InI.

Blackbirds are resting on the power lines,
Their silhouettes form the notation to
A dawn song set on the sheet music of
Telephone poles contrasted by the sun.

Curled leaves are land mines littered
On the lawn where imprints of twigs
And a nurturing robin's tracks collect.

Branchlets and leaflets stem from
Porch step railings and mailboxes;
The numbers read even on the
East side of the asphalt:

Seven-seven-thirty-six.
The engraved letters on
The siding reads, "Davis."
This house is home to family

So let the sparrows in.

The house,
With its branching hallways
And
Overhanging décor
And
Furniture rooted to the floor

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windstorms and labwork

by `thetaoofchaos, Dec 21, 2012, 8:34:41 AM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

afflatus, inflatus, my morning globe,
as lithe as your impermanence.
and home! dread homes! are rabbit dugs,
spoonholed piles of mexican brick
where nothing ever touches down,
nothing here alive receives
the plains’ poor offering of gypsy light,
the ugly wind that meets the mudline.

[metaphors]
1. a mottled fence
2. and how these storms hold faceless teeth
that slat their eyes through butter-wood
then purge their guts on wintered florets
4. some freshly headless nativities,
their polyethylene skirts upturned
from violent sacks
5. and knowing i’m a souless
speck

i lick at what is manifest
beneath your hair
each poison tab
a colour
acid
fire
or lake
a brothel
and religious studies

i know, i know you never mean
to murder
or complete
me

but do not say “live for yourself”.
i’ve come online to see the god
that came before me.

we are so poorly married
like bookend spines of Plath and Hughes
up on the shelf
are somehow
synonymous
with love.

i’m left to my device too well,
belonging like the secret bedrock
or saplings, stoned,
hung over streams
which do not bend into your wake.

my phlebotomist believes
in what she takes,
lords in her tubes

so i am something, yet,
perhaps in tiny pieces.
i say to them:
you lay like art,
you can almost live
in words.