Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
I laid my body on the tall grass.
She wrapped me in a rustle of green.
I closed my eyes in the shadow of a tall pine,
curling up so the pain wouldn’t spill beyond my heart.

Consciousness sinks into nothingness.
I feel the particles of my “self”
breaking into a million molecules.
I flow through the grass and seep into the earth.

Now my body puts down roots,
nestling against the pine that weeps with resin.
My emotions pass through the trunk of the tree.

The thread of memories is a long earthworm,
crawling through the empty
corridors where once blood pulsed.
White bones remain still,
slowly dissolving into the vessel of eternal life:
Earth, water, air, lost particles of light,
and my longing for the final union.

Doubts hollow a chamber,
soft and warm – my new home.
When my dream ends,
I will dwell in it.

Now I am the pine.
My needles, bark, and resin
radiate invisible light
for this space, for this world.

Yes, I was once human.
so judge. It’s in the past now. judge. I have built a new self right now. judge. I know myself. judge. your eyes are your eyes, but they cannot strip me nor hurt me. you are a witness, but never my truth.
Lake view from
Beech canopy.

Legs, arms, enwrap
Broad trunk and
Ascend unlike any bird since
Dodo.

Sun through beaten
Coppered leaf-set.

Fair Day
With tall grass,
Bedded moss beneath

My seat of rooted
Contemplation
We play on the corner till the streetlights thin
and stars pinprick a corkboard sky.

Dinner is anytime: bologna on white;
Kool-Aid cut thin with tap.

No hurry home unless for the news -we don’t.
We want what’s coming, not what’s been.

Paper fortune tellers flutter open / close.
She writes the answers first.

Lift one flap: your dog dies. Another: a prince.
Another: best party in town, no dress required.

He lifts a flap: her name-
“meant for you,” her sister whispers.

Then rain- blue-lined paper caves;
ink loosens, futures wash mid-fold.

At This Street & That Road, a drunk witch
swears Saturn and Jupiter will make us rich.

She forgets conjunctions come every twenty years.
Lunch money turns to lottery slips.

Rounding the corner, the futures
sign their names where ours should go.
I tumbled
deep into
the garden’s
throat in
a dream,
  where scent
was thick
enough to
breathe
like water.
When i
tried
to lift my
body out,
roses
clutched
at me
tendrils
looping
my wrists,
stems
curling
my ankles,
petals
cupping
my heart.
Some
amputated
their roots
from the soil,
'howling'
refusing to
snap me off
  themselves.
My love
flows steady,
like the
  ocean’s tide,
  splashing at
  the shores of
  your heart
  in sadness.
   It is as sharp as
    a whale’s teeth,
  as certain as the
    thorns on a rose,
   and as dark as
    tree bark.
Verse

See the crone that comes
through the thorn-walk and the breaks,
with a ribbon for the coffin key
and a dead-scroll curled with snakes,

she will never die.
she will never die.
roll her bones through the catacombs--
she hasn't the grace to die.

Inverse

My eyes were tired, so I set them soft
in the cotton-bedded heart of a pale red box;
deep under the earth with the coldsong quick,
was nothing--and nothing--I reveled in it.

Verse

Hear the crone who lies
with a dead tongue, poison-sweet,
words chopped blind with a kitchen knife
tourniquet-wrapped and awfully neat.

her teeth in the flesh
her teeth in the flesh
slips gangrene dreams through the finest screens
making rot-milk sold as fresh.

Inverse

My soul was sick, so I intertwined
its feminine face with androgyne,
to speak itself twice in a language of thorns
to bleed--to bear--where vermilion's born.

Verse

Bury the crone who's filled
with a paste of hate in her hollow bones,
a candle kept in the bag of her gut
to wax the devil a hag-head stone.

she will never die.
she will never die.
resurrected, insane, infected,
she hasn't the grace to die.
__
Note
from you
yesterday.
right-leaning hand,
halfway to escape;
mail from the grave- so you.
map to cash, rules to live by.
I burned it all; fed your gray urn.
Come spring, I’ll quarter you to far woods,
so you can’t find all your pieces again.
this is an etheree form poem inspired by Shay Caroline Simmons poem- https://hellopoetry.com/poem/5141950/sky-earth-sky/
Next page