Tears are a signature
Our mouths
Can’t quite sign
For goodbye lingers
In the corner of our eyes
Stumbling down our cheeks
Hands shake for words
To create in an embrace
That will swallow us whole
And for a moment
Feel full, overflowing
Healing
For seconds are fleeting
When goodbye has a home
Upon your tongue

The fluidity of words
Consecrating more than
A simple idea
Has slipped away

And what’s left are
Empty hands and
Silent mouths
Void of sophistication

One of the hardest challenges with writing
is the honesty in it.

Our whole lives we are taught to filter our thoughts,
make them psss through our minds before our mouths.

With writing, the whole point is to allow the words to come out unfiltered and raw.
We must enable them to come from the heart without passing through too much of our minds.

Daybreak some mouths open to eat
And some open to host only flies.
Some mouths open to gossip or speak  
Falsehood, vulgarity and evil or lies.

Some mouths open only to do both
Yet they accomplish nothing from it.
Some open to display a bad tooth
And emit an odor that smells like ****.

Some mouths open but say nothing
Coherent and productive and actual,
Yet will go poking in nearly everything
Saying something that isn't factual.

Daybreak, some mouths stay closed
Opting to be neutral and say the truth.
These mouths may be mute and bored,
The price of gold these mouths are worth.

©IvanBrooksPoetry
3/9/2018

I was strolling down the aisle
We were shopping there in style
With my daughter sitting smiling in the cart,
I was stretching out my hand
For the Martinelli's brand
When the apple of my eye gave me a start.

With the bottle in my grasp
I saw, coming toward us fast,
A high heeled damsel, scarfed and towing her caddie
And she smirked as I, condemned,
Stood up to comprehend
The reason, as my child said "Whisky Daddy?"

There was nothing I could say,
To make it seem another way,
To vanquish the conviction so compelling
It was the color you could tell
And the shape she knew so well,
The question that my daughter asked was telling.

Neil Stewart McLeod

Dead names scarred onto the mouths of trees,
teenagers as stripped as the bark,
fenced by the flutter of the leaves.
I once loved a girl who loved
to remember the old me.

There's a storm, scurrying across the saffron.
You'd have to ask if this would always go on;
the broken hair, grape jaw, leaky gums.
An embrace, tortured knuckle,
all before the Sun, the bodies buckle.

Incurable beauty explained by the hunting game:
Is there a God who molds the fumes,
escaping from my brain?
I don't want to think, that all my thoughts
are all just the same.

The body of a woman's neutral fineness embraces the chords of my steel guitar; laughing about all the points that I've been chasing after. Or just running away- no more for today. Christ, you slipped but lied too many times before, and while you plunge your wrists into your knives, I thought we had a second chance. But that was before, you throw sticks and stones and store your anger in the three fingers of the drink that clinks against our first date when I bought you a 25¢ ring. It was a children's vending machine, that brought me three years of happy things.

I don't want to be fake with you anymore. So go and find your Milky Way. I'm staying dumb, Britni I'm in trouble. All the stakes are different when you are chasing yesterday's killing.

And even the sound of the gunshots don't overcome the voice of the human tongue, in violence and war and all that's abhorred, even the smallest vesper or prayer a whisper of three little words can always be heard, even the faintest whisper can always be heard, as long as the voice that says it is honest and pure.

I was too tight to drive with your hands over my eyes, even in Inverness valley and South Santa Cruz, the wheelbarrow of berries I brought home for supper, ingested in each little bite we cut in half, was the best of the worst time that we ever had. And always we were. In love. In parking lots, playgrounds, at concerts, on airplanes, in bedrooms, custodian closets, laundry mats, and carrying our nap sacks, while we attempted to sleep and hide all night in the Shedd Aquarium. I just should have known better, it'd wouldn't be easy, with you I'm always wrestling sharks with a mirror, your pink sugar perfume from the chains on my wrists ******* across the room. While you didn't trust me I was always at home. Trust isn't love  unless it's enough, unless it's enough to quit drugs. It's symptoms are the same as that of great madnesses.