I asked a woman to change her curls to forever straight,
and offered $50,000 (a sum on my mind that day after a
rough day trading), to maintain said style in perpetuity

she has accomodated me now for over a decade+, but
every every, every now and every then, She pulls me
closer than close, whispers 50K~ok!, and hits me with a
hip swaying pow, her physio~verbal cueball reminder,
that poets must always pay their debts, and even forever
too,
has its poetic limitations

Beneath the arch,
        among the branches,
      the maunder of her eyes
           finds noir in an afterimage,
every reflection is unique,
    explicit and indivisible,
        every reflection is her,
      there she looks close
       for gracefulness,
            in the essays of her skin
               and their brazen transparencies,
         she enters into her body fable,
      the shape of her resembles
           the tenor viol: where it widens,
                  where it narrows,
                where it digresses
              and monochromes,
           she reflects a fragile geography,
             a soft cargo, but
               an inkling of hurricane,
             rendering the fault lines
          beautiful and strong,
       in supplication tomorrow's explorer
will disturb the patterns
   until she's become her own lullaby

.C.'Blue is not my favorite
color.

Circles of sapphire
worn by /
11/lonely

women

Whose husband's memory
Failed with
yesterday's
sports scores.

Break my heart  with temptation.


I will love you no matter
what .


Caroline Shank
March 2. 2025

am i humbled
            as i cup hands to the drip
                                              machine
  of _wantinglessness

am i listening to the horsehair-plaster hard enough

to remember
her hematite cough
                     [ of love ]

strewing gun.mites across the room
like seeding the sky with flower-futures


concatenations of ****** dread
casket basket
            rumor of
            the next thing.

scab fingers
ring diggers

shun mirror
you skim new menisci
                     off of
                       the
    locals’ strange traditions
like parsing down handmedowns
                  into piles of
keep.              and.              get the **** away
from me.


       like the stories cryptids tell
             their children about us
  ( so that they don’t stray too far out of the
                           forest )

unapproving dissimulatiors
                yawp
                  and
concentrate
on etching
pathways for the unendeared
             amidst the
moon.trodden regicides
   of that which is loosed unto the
   aether


footholds, findless.
in pursuit of esper footfalls within the ambulatory shroud of
             that which becomes
                      instant .

a
wisp of the homepointed . a
flick of the
wrist-grab, willfully
a
  fissure
in
  fissured things.

the scramble-dark iris
the         way
that hipbones throw : music
        as wielded by sorceress,

wild in trembling macrodactyl      
                 prestidigitations
                               .








the grandmother of conifers keeps vigil ,
                        as always

sung longer lungs. bromide cut
sun sought - sight asunder
save for later slaughter

smug ****, of
var.
necromancies .
push-pin, him

he who swims,
he who begins
with pointing out the
wet opacities of the
        churning
        sky-sack
inside which, we are
tossing
like a baritone rumble-**** of dreamfood.


all garnet and dark, now.
all garnet and **** dark .

the land was a slumbering bird that had not yet opened
its eyes. the morning roared like a thunder

cloud and i gazed at the sky with her cornflower blues
and orchestral flutes, her dark bones whitening

in the yellow-threaded light. silence wrapped me like
a shawl, and love settled on my shoulders like

a bird. it was too early for the swallow to return
with its spring-tinted wings, the winter settled

in the nooks and crannies of the earth, sweet
as your mouth, crisp and cold as the ashen north.

and while you lay beside me, warm, nocturnal
and dreaming of the sea, i kissed your lips

and told you to hush, not because you had spoken but
because night had been so gentle to you that i

wanted to keep you wrapped in her star-scented arms.