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 Dec 2012 AntoinetteBrandt
Tilly

●^●                                                             ­         
  *Wishes waiting for fulfilment                  
of commercial, Family, or      
Shining Light. May it 
    bring Joy, Comfort,
    & Peace to each,
  You & Yours  
this night.
Surrounded
 by the warmth   
  of "Love to all"
          beneath a mistletoe
                              moon, sharing
                                                  a candlemas 
                                                         night

­                                                          x
Day 23,
of the Advent
for Yule-Tired Man
I keep collecting books I know
I'll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never head.
"Please make me," says some wistful tome,
"A wee bit of yourself."
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.

And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"
"some day," I say, "I will."
So book by book they plead and sigh;
I pick and dip and scan;
Then put them back, distrest that I
Am such a busy man.

Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne,
my Gibbon and Defoe;
To savour Swift I'll never learn,
Montaigne I may not know.
On Bacon I will never sup,
For Shakespeare I've no time;
Because I'm busy making up
These jingly bits of rhyme.

Chekov is caviare to me,
While Stendhal makes me snore;
Poor Proust is not my cup of tea,
And Balzac is a bore.
I have their books, I love their names,
And yet alas! they head,
With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James,
My Roster of Unread.

I think it would be very well
If I commit a crime,
And get put in a prison cell
And not allowed to rhyme;
Yet given all these worthy books
According to my need,
I now caress with loving looks,
But never, never read.
With my whole body I taste these peaches,
I touch them and smell them.  Who speaks?

I absorb them as the Angevine
Absorbs Anjou.  I see them as a lover sees,

As a young lover sees the first buds of spring
And as the black Spaniard plays his guitar.

Who speaks?  But it must be that I,
That animal, that Russian, that exile, for whom

The bells of the chapel pullulate sounds at
Heart.  The peaches are large and round,

Ah! and red; and they have peach fuzz, ah!
They are full of juice and the skin is soft.

They are full of the colors of my village
And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace.

The room is quiet where they are.
The windows are open.  The sunlight fills

The curtains.  Even the drifting of the curtains,
Slight as it is, disturbs me.  I did not know

That such ferocities could tear
One self from another, as these peaches do.
This is the fleeing breath that we will remember forever. Our final days that tasted so bittersweet as they flooded from our lips like our laughter that filled a  small house on late nights. Right now we are young and we are full of promise. Full of all existence and every being: all connected. Brimming with the life we were gifted and the individuality that shaped our lives into adventures worth living. Tomorrow we will still be seventeen and we will still have our part time jobs, exes to cry over, and classes to wake up for. But tomorrow is also infinite, and we will continue to persevere in committing our respective existences to the preservation of hope. Of what we have in our hearts that burns like our bonfires, like when our eyes first met, like when we ripped off our clothes and jumped into black water. These may be the best days of our lives, but I weep for the souls that endure their days in that state of mind. Each second of your actuality is an opportunity to shape tomorrow, today, RIGHT NOW as the summit of your life. This is beyond  a call to action. This is a call upon your passion. An appeal to all that you embody and every imminent prospect you contain. In this moment there is no matter more considerable than you, because we are pushing on the same path in peace for peace.
Is there a word
in the english language
for the moment
you finally realize
there's no turning
back and things
are going to change?
Swollen, it's not him.

I can't.

Watching a grown man
weep in front of a
church full of
hypocrites
is the hardest thing to do.
Sometimes it really
isn't worth it
and I can't be mad
about it anymore.
She, a cavernous champagne glass,
he, a weary pony, who ate the neighbor's grass--
her name Ms. Wesson,
his name Mr. Smith,
they died on a slow Tuesday--
and stop looking Wesson clan,
if looking for a lesson.

Mid-afternoon
midst a love bent 69
Mr. Smith and Ms. Wesson
committed ******-suicide--
Mr. Smith turned from a man
back into a stain,
Ms. Wesson turned from a woman
back into a chain.

And the artist-in-neighborhood did rejoice,
subject matter for a painting to hang above
his licorice-colored memorial of a prisoner dove.

And the police did gossip,
was it love? was it *******?
What a fine piece of *** that could be living.

And it took the families two weeks to find out,
they wiped their feet on dead leaves,
daydreamt open caskets and planted juniper seeds.

Talk of another woman, talk of another man,
but God himself would tell you,
they were simply bored of each other's drugs,
they were simply bored of each other's barrels,
so, they barred each other from being,
and headed west on erosion's dime.
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