Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 Mar 2017 Daniel Mashburn
Yule
dear Alice,*

roses, your lips flushed red
violets, I am blue
without you here
you're too far off the garden patch,
I've been looking by the bushes nearby
hoping I'll catch a black ribbon at sight
one last glance

I've been here underneath the trees,
but you're just fading,
the colors of the skies are melting
to blue, to orange...
with vibrant scarlet
then velvet of darkness of purple
I do hope the wonders of the land are doing you well

though as morning came,
I saw a pixie painting me in blue
a bob cat greeting me with its pearls
I'm glad to say
I'm moving ahead the meadow,
getting attached with her metal clutches
as she's getting near my flower bed
but I do admit
your dimples and flowy locks
could not compare
I still miss you

from Little Red
maybe the last letter,
take care, Alice | 170306 ; 12:46 PM
Waking up
in arms
that don't fit.

An unfamiliar room
that reeks
of alcohol and sweat.

Clothes scattered
along with
my inhibition.

Their fingerprints
now forever burned
into my skin.

A need
that consumes
absent of emotion.

This part of myself
I carelessly abandon
in bed sheets.
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
        17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go **** yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
        need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
        the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back
        it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
        joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday
        somebody goes on trial for ******.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
        I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
        in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle
        Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
        Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
        candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
        men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
        Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
        marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
        private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
        and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
        underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
        under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
        is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
        I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
        mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
        individual as his automobiles more so they're
        all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
        down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
        munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
        handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
        speeches were free everybody was angelic and
        sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
        cere you have no idea what a good thing the
        party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
        old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
        cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
        must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
        And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power
        mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
        garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'
        Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
        Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
        tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
        Him need ******* *******. Hah. Her make us
        all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
        the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes
        in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and
        psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

                                Berkeley, January 17, 1956
To:
To you,
Know that I will never be your dream
That my hands are just a little too small, you can barely feel them holding on
That this obstinate heart will always refuse to follow your melody and will try to find its own place in this symphony
That never will your world slow down because these feet were never made to settle beyond a frame

I am like rain in excess; I am not a need to be sought after
I am puddles to be jumped over and over and over
I often find myself in buckets tilted over drains
Because I always spill into houses who never wanted my pains

To you,
Know first that our love was, is, and will never be a fairytale
That maybe our happy endings are found in two different books
And characters whose names are just not written here yet

We have learned how to dream with our eyes open
Believing in the possibility of de ja vu but situated in today
We have studied how to make excuses for our stubborn selves
To fake ink in these pages of the stories we have written out of daydreams
Out of wanting but knowing we could not keep just yet

To you,
Maybe our forever is just for now
or maybe for now is simply the start of our forever
One step at a time, we'll get there;
whether there is found with you a breathe away
or at a bus stop with one bidding farewell,
I can never tell
I can however pour out to you all I hope we would be
But we will only know what can be in the time it will be
So I'd rather keep it to myself

But know that you are never forgotten
There are tears reserved only for the memories of you
Places I could never quite stand on again because
My silhouette would always fail to fill the spaces like you’d always do
Words on repeat that never lost the sound of all pain I knew like “almost”:
We almost made it,
You almost stayed,
I almost held on,
We almost fell,
You almost relapsed,
I almost let you,
We almost forgot that our love is not all that we have
That our hearts are never always right
That our love does not define the word itself
Know that I never doubted your love
But there is a love that came before them all
Written in the prologue by the writer up above

To you,
Thank you for loving that I will never be your dream
That my hands are just a little too small, but you can better hold on
That this stubborn heart will always refuse to follow your melody and have added its own beat to your symphony
That never will your world slow down because these unsettling feet have drawn you out

I am like rain in excess; I am not a need to be sought after yet you chose me still
You say I am puddles to be jumped into again and again and again
I often find myself in buckets tilted over flower pots
Because I finally spilled into a house who knew the worth of this "excess"

To you,
Thank you for loving the rain.
For saving me in buckets and closing the drains
I will never really know why I love you lover
Because all these could never find reason of its own
But maybe this little girl simply took after her Father
Who loved beyond the uncertainty and visions of the other

Thank you for pulling me down from skies
For reminding me that my soles were always meant to kiss these grounds
That dreams aren’t always the best,
That one day I’ll thank God for handling the rest

So I throw away my worries and cast my cares aside
I need not fret about being saved because though no prince was sent, the King came down himself
I was never formed as a half in search to be completed
But created as a whole with the option to love beyond the convenience
And out of all these choices,
I chose you to love you

To you,
I’ll be okay.
I am slowly remembering to not seek warmth in the created but in the Creator
I have found the praises He has always filled my heart to store
And have learned to shout them again
My home is not in your arms but wherever roof my Father settles me down
His love is too vast to be swallowed by this ocean of tears
That I have stopped forcing myself to settle for dreams
This heart may be longing for the sun it always found in the rubbing of our two hearts,
But He? He filled it with the universe- with stars and galaxies, with some I have yet to know what

To you,
How do you end this poem? Find satisfaction that these lines will justify memories that will never die and memories that are yet to be?
I. Don’t. Know.
So then listen to the silence that will come in between my stepping back and the applause
Because maybe, hopefully, saying nothing will tell you everything this compilation of carefully collected words could never hold

Darling, this is for you. And maybe me too.
 Feb 2015 Daniel Mashburn
Bella
maybe you spent too many days in the woods where the quiet lives maybe you never really got along with humans maybe you felt too many branches growing apart inside of you because your skin never sat right on your limbs and with tiny little silver saws you cut yourself open trying to find the pretty amber parts everyone said they saw but in the end it was just red sap and ants and rot and nothing more at all.
Next page