Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
e fields Jul 2019
Huddled by the bypass entrance
The sun glared at the Earth's
Asphalt facade, walloping it accordingly

Cameras sat patiently on the
Sign-beams like congregant birds
Waiting to snitch on someone
Behaving out of turn
Those adoring paparazzi
Admonishing, admonishing

Wannabe-rapper-wannabe came crawling
Out of the watering hole
Still parched yet gasping for air
Looking like he'd been swimming,
Looking like he'd been up against a current
That traveled generations wide

"Spare change, anyone,
Spare a quarter, help
Little old me?"
Tsk. - Doors locking
Tsk. - Glass shimmying

"I'm not out here for fun, man"
The whimpering stray
*****-slapping the open air
"Well, ******* all, any way"

The drone of throttled engines
Rubber to road and fleet vanishing
He's melting, on the wing of the onramp
He is being drunk whole
"Man, ******* all, any way"
An echo's trace as the ghost ships depart.
e fields Jul 2019
Gesundheit;
Just looked back over the letters I never sent
There were so many of them
I can always start but seldom finish
Not just innuendo, trust me,
I wish that it were
That would be a better problem to have

Grandfather ambled about,
In some strokes standing as still as a
Clock and waiting for me to
Wind him. I didn't just then,
Too rusted. Peered through the blinds,
Some light spilled in, I sunk further
Under the covers like Nosferatu,
Dracula, accurate.
Demon.

Eventually he left me to
My slumber again but the
Tranquility was disturbed,
****** left the lid to the coffin
Wide open.
Later I shifted about,
Slinking around different eaves,
Trying to disappear
From the frames of any
Francophilic voyeurs,
I can never find them
Though I know they're always there

Later still returning to the
Origin point of that morning
Finding grandmother now occupying
That plot where I bury and unseal and bury again
She asked if she should leave
But I assured her I'd tell her
Were that ever the case
Though I surely wouldn't:

She's sensitive like I am,
She knows all the signs from her youth abroad
Her mother alternating between
Stints of fox and hare in as
Many rapid cycles
of the phases of the moon
Tareyton smoke drifting over
The damp gardens of tea leaves
She read for prophecies always
Served to keep her steady until
They walled her up in a mattress room
Some of us aren't designed for this place
The coveted excuse of genes,
These weaknesses are inherited traits

A return call from the doctor
Too distracted to find a pen
e fields Mar 2019
They are all the Stonehenge slabs waiting
to topple over, granite foundation
of the cosmic cardhouse.
Expressionless: blank stares
Like the ceiling of the sky with
wall-to-wall cloudless gray
Warmed over with a vague upset -
The sun still tries its damnedest
Underneath the folds somewhere

Some of the grim flock re-picturing
bedspreads they snuck under with
lovers passed on long-since
(Stop, dash, as good as dead
Dash, stop, resume again)
They felt trapped,
they motioned Your Honor for bust-out.
New apartments, new partners,
new town centers eventually
seemed all the same and they
were stricken apathetic:
dead end

New installations of municipal plotting
erected in a Cold War mindframe,
Brutalism put to shame.
Rising above an alma mater
Those who stayed pass by,
Itinerants late-stage en-route
To spiritual tent cities to remain.
Rising above the rest of town
Squinting producing the pitched
Concrete walls, the barbed wire vein
Circulating among borders
Teeth of ******* razorblades.

Another life they’d never graduate
Now all that’s left is ponzi schemes,
billiard hellscapes accented with
deep-discount tobacco flames,
greasy spoons caddy-cornering
shuttered gas stations with their
mummified attendants left
moaning with desire from
beneath the boards:
Broken glass glints on felled horizons
of the ever-present post-industrial plains
What a waste slog on what a waste
What a waste slog on what a waste
Your Honor we request another stay
Your Honor we request another stay
e fields Mar 2019
Train baring down on the ex-lover
Like a shell casing: silver coffin.
He hasn’t told her yet, still he
Summoned her here. And so
Onto the old meeting-place.

Careless gestures, there follows a
Long walk. Down the trail that
Speaks clearer left undisturbed.
After all, the nature of things.
The light bright though lacking luster
Refracted through the tangled cords
Of ivy, tree limbs -

A festival of dead leaves.
Warmed mud envelops soles
Engorging them like bloodrush
As a half-loving couple trek on.
It feels like autumn when spring comes

As winter is bowing out again.
He feels that way two, three
Times a year; wishing it remained
Taunting circularity, he plods on.
No escape.
Selfish desire
e fields Mar 2019
Sunkissed girls on the strand
Pastel-clad chirp-chirping; little birds
Cigarette smoldering in hand
From the watcher, below-deck
They adorn the walls of his compartment
In tabloid form.

Tying off the garbage bags,
Plastic encasements framing
Neutral-tone collages of consumption,
Needless consumption. Frivolity. Waste.
Oh, the **** that these tourists throw away.

Towards winter the cheering, the chatter,
The hollering - all dying down as the
Shifting economies of hot light convey
The end of one cycle. Cease all motion
Regathering strength to start all over,
Come back burning brighter, compelling
Renewed faith.

For now, it seems, this may last forever
Gathering up the trash for disposal
Keeping little trinkets as reminders,
Taping to the walls with favorite posters
Closing down, a sign slung up:
Closed for Winter.
Come whatever
May
e fields Nov 2018
I'd love to love you, but -
How the static used to glimmer
On our in-betweens

You run behind the high buildings
Sleeping off dreams in a stranger's backseat
You walk toe to toe on fountain edges
While the weathered green children,
Stately lions and long-dead Greeks
Spout water to the sky,
Not theirs but channeled as if
Marbled sentences carried out permanently

You look to the happy pairings
Entangled arm in arm like *****
Scuttling up the many streets
Living advertisements for human harmony
You see yourself and me similarly arranged
Then cloud coverage as always
Shadows strike out the flight of fancy
My ghost, the first to leave
You turn your head to sunspots
Silently bereaved
Make it like you haven't seen

You go back to your old haunts
And you ply rationale with drinks
Just as your idols taught you
That's just like you
That's just like me
You will be the death of me; I will be the culpable one.
Next page