Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
ERR Feb 2012
I must have been facing east
That afternoon, he said
The gold splashed her features
In an alchemist’s deification
Illuminating and delicate, I swam in her soft intricacy
Tumbling evermore as she turned
Lifted, but left standing to eventually
Wander west in wonder
Bitter rays choking oceanic marbles
Set to savor retrospective
ERR Jan 2012
One is in the truest sense
Distraught
When passion
Is present
Where talent
Is not
ERR Jan 2012
Like
The taste of blood
First high
Hope restored
Her night terrors
Daily routes
Puppy
Scars
Mint and chocolate
Suffocating
The children’s faces
Rock bottom
Real love
Coltrane’s solo
Thirsty roots of a depression tree
Snapping bone
My worst mistake
Our conversations
Antidote is poetry
Mortality
Snow
So many strangers
Permanent pains
The color green
Choosing life instead of
Counting trains in an empty station
A million fibers in
An ugly sweater
You will never be forgotten
ERR Jan 2012
You asked me once, jokingly
Which one of us was the reacher
And which was the settler
Well baby, you’re a reach like luna
Before America and space sixty nined
Or Arm was strong
The Harvard to my underachiever
You’re the explorer staking a claim
I’m the protagonist
In a Lee Child novel
I reach and I love you for it because
You were Midas to my life
And if I could bottle and sell what you do to me
I would be fat and rich
Something in your gorgeous double helix
Makes me walk a little straighter
And speak a little louder
They say darkness is the
Absence, not the opposite of light
And you noon my shadow like none other
The heavens to a dreamer
You’re unattainable but that’s the point
I could reach for you
For the rest of my life
And I believe
I will
ERR Jan 2012
Every day, she says
I think about that happening
And I want to shoot myself in the face
Don’t you
Dare
Mention that again
She wakes from the remembering, empty
And attempts to rouse a heavy husband
Who doesn’t budge
She downs the stairs
Empties a bottle
Fills an ashtray
And moderates sensation

Some thoughts
Can’t be contained
ERR Jan 2012
I met a lover, once
In a diner where the mud was strong
Everyone was honey, and heart attacks were delicious
He gave her a bag filled with
Her favorites, and drizzles of lexicon
(She was the only script he ever burned)
Not a word was returned
But her chatoyant glazzies watered
And he swore for
A moment
She loved him back
Disproportionate, I thought, to the months he'd spent
Planning a tribute for her origin day
Less than I spent on his remembered name
As it trickled down a dampened page
Runny, like he hated his eggs (a shame)
I sipped my mud and wondered
Why do men love rope
ERR Jan 2012
Together they lamented a generation with newspaper vision
In a mesh perspective, young and old
I have a bad habit of falling
In love
Everywhere I go, said young
Is that jazz on your record player?
I do believe it is becoming my most passionate affair of all
Each
Skiddly-doo bahp, *** dum walk, deedly-dee
And keyed swung run
Are like wild spirals of fireworks, tie dyed tentacles swirling about
Hugging my weightless all-ear, a train for fractal tracks on-spot created
I hear their hoof beats, and I think zebras
He told old how he intended to learn
To morph his pain to bop
And achieve the wordless cohesion of sardine schools
Through plucked coiled steel, if it cost him all his years
He knew the notes, but now he would conjure color
And shade them through his pineal prism
Until his dancing phalanges could spill coral reefs and sunsets
Old told him how music had saved his life
And in the war he was permitted to leave his truck
To press on black and white, tamed but untrained
The Japan grand was lame, but officers smiled
Some night, he said, when you're smashed and uninhibited
Gather your tools and let your inner self become a melody
When you manage to break your gates in sobriety
You will be an artist
Listen to the wind
Beauty is improvised
He handed young his authored book, which carefully he'd signed
Never lose it friend; your greatest gift is your appetite
They sat in his office while the record spun a standard
Fuzzy magic rang out forever, it seemed
Like signals to space or whale songs through the depths
Most listeners are scared to lose control
Ashes piled as the fire died
But young knew his never would
Him and jazz had fallen in love
That night, he knew he'd lived
Next page