Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you'll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant *****.

Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

Watch out for games, the actor's part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
******* on your own child-bed.

Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes),
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won't be heard
and none of your running will end.

Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Special person,
if I were you I'd pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you'll root
and the real green thing will come.

Let go. Let go.
Oh special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon.
 Jul 2014 Gwen Whitmoore
Jane Doe
Jesus,
with all this wine wine wine
the water bill's overdue.

Violet-stained hands don't
wash away no sins.

Baptism don't come from a
faucet that don't run.

And we ran out, baby

there's not a drop to drink.
ink
On the last day,
in nervous & incoherent scribbles,
clinging to the lines of a
crumpled & stolen piece
of office memo pad paper,
I confessed:

I can no longer tell whether
people have distinct faces.
Focus escapes me.
How, despite looking,
seeing has become impossible.
Their eyes all melt in the dark,
into a blurry array of blue & violet,
(the way fresh oil paint smears under thumbs,
as if the painter himself felt betrayed
& then submitted the canvas to some frantic violence).
The same panic consumes me,
now that the others all begin to appear the same.

I was perhaps,
born with too thin of a shell.
Sometimes, I feel
like one of those dolls from the old country,
You know, the ones that sleep inside one another,
with their faces painted
(mechanically these days.
all the authenticity has been stripped away
just for the sake of appealing to the masses).
Maybe I too crack easily,
(I shatter at the slightest touch.)
I thought once that there was beauty in fragility
but I alone held such a belief.

Just as those figurines,
I too reduce continually in size,
Always shrinking by half,
In the hope that if I am just small enough,
No one will see my emptiness.
In the end, I think I hardly even exist:
I hardly even bother the dust settling around me
& if anything,
that internal void takes up more space
than I have ever wished.

I’m disenchanted by those idiot boxes
& their flavors of the month.
Whether it costs you a penny or a fortune,
I’ve somehow always felt Truth
had to be more than whatever they are selling,
Good God, something in this life must have value.
I need to know this.
So I’ve been out looking for it,
But we are at war,
The people are always at war,
because peace is for the birds,
(or so they say)
Yet I always step on land mines,
By now, they’ve blown off my hands
& also my feet.
So, I can no longer touch,
& I, sure as hell,
cannot run.

You know, my lungs just may burst.
Patience tastes like a barb-wire
in the back of my mouth.

No matter those sprawling views,
& the ever static landscapes,
I am starting to forget what
it feels like to have a home,
(as if before, I truly knew that,
I don’t think I did
but you know,
the mind has ways
of making things feel
softer in retrospect.)

In this way,
I miss what I’ve never had.
I am still so eager to taste
the fruit of a tree,
I’m coming to understand,
grows nowhere.
& so I’m going to rest my bones
Along with the other dead idealists:
somewhere between complacency &
blood that runs ice-cold.

(Do you think that dreams can rot ?
Or do they only ever petrify?)
 Jun 2014 Gwen Whitmoore
Jane Doe
We were nomads
under a great dome of foreign stars
on a hemisphere of dead grass.

Spinning in wide, looping orbits
around one another and everyone else,

so the points of light blended into
tilt-a-whirl trails
lurching sick circles overhead.

You said: look for anything;
anything extraordinary;
any signs of a pattern.
Anything.

But I was only looking for you darling
darting in and out of my equilibrium.
Search for anything,

any logic in our tides.

So that if we stop our spinning
and stand in the hush of our
naked souls,

I could open my eyes on yours
and lay my pack at your feet.
 May 2014 Gwen Whitmoore
Hayleigh
This was not love making.
This was sin
and the devil victoriously
danced between the sheets.
The women sit amongst one another,
speaking of hands and plans,
whilst I myself remain anchored to a chair,
using my own to tug on what remains of my thinning hair.
This is why I lick the back of my teeth
and this is why I cannot speak.

I am above wondering
what a life contains:
the moments of swallowed words,
lost dreams and particles of dust,
gutted & compacted
lightly calicified in my spine.
My mind, captive since that time
when my flesh was still peachlike
& ******.
How it flies forth,
How I lie back.

The charade progresses,
I swallow.
Still hollow, with the hallows of being.
Those hands the women revere,
dizzy my head.
Open your brain my love,
have just one more to sip,
I like how you close your
eyes & tremble those lips

She murmured: mind yourself,
what matters always rots,
what they insist I need
can never hit the spot

Leaning against cold stone,
and licking backs of glass,
I’m hungry for love as
she splinters my fleshy mass

These things that they’re selling,
on big billboards, in glances,
only ever half as full,
as these drunken romances
In the space
of a moment,
your hands unclasp
and I unfold.

All of this time,
I have dreamt
of lost vultures,
awaiting dusk.

I did not starve
on memories
of flesh: those long
fever dreams.

Through the tempest,
the mind slept
but surely now,
this body knows

What it is, hunger,
and how bones
****** dry, taste
only of dust
Next page