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 Feb 2013 Haley Brown
tread
Half asleep on my walk to the bus stop,
The Texada clear-cut smiles like the gap-tooth of the Georgia Strait
and the 3 pops of melatonin ingested 11 hours ago still have me waning on the down-low like a somewhat solid ghost in a Labrador windstorm.

I send you paragraphs
And all of my heartbreaks make me worried I've finally scared you off
But logic trusts itself to you and says, 'Cabo San Lucas, tantrastic,'
I'm no stoic. Otherwise this poem would still be sleeping in alphabet.

It's only the middle of the week but it feels like it's been a month,
At least
At little
The weather is Hyde again,
But as of right now I don't really mind
I just wish you had sunk into my chest last night as we slept together,
Finding our mind within its memory foam,
I dreamed of you and wondered
If Mexico really existed.
5 days.
There is music almost everywhere
You can hear it in the breeze
Blowing gently through the dusty fields
Working slowly through the trees

Music is most everyplace
Just listen and you'll find
Music in the meadow grass
Music of every kind

The crickets make their squeaky noise
The birds they quack and coo
I hear music, if I'm listening
And I bet that you do too

There is music in a lover's voice
A gentle lilt in what they say
There is music in their breath as well
Listen closely as they lay

Don't close your ears to all that's there
You will miss the orchestra
You have two ears to listen with
Open up, hear nature roar.
 Jul 2012 Haley Brown
Odi
I don't think anything
I don't speak or write
Never mention the silence
that this void leaves behind
and no one sees that
behind my eyes
because deception is brutal
though some people aren't killed
never even fooled
(such a pity)
**** them all
I stare at you all my circle of friends that I-
(or **** yourself)
and feel nothing for these blurs of people
They look familiar.
Thank god for the idiots that-
no hand prints by passing strangers
the Russian palm on the back of my neck
Eugine, Nikita,
big boys, big big big big big big
with big ***** and strong hands and broad shoulders
(look away)
god bless the ******* that buy you  gin and there's this miracle
in the form of something lyrical
runs like water tastes like liquor I
love
the lyrical melody of being so ******
off your ****
face, *** whatever you wanna call it-
drunk.
I'm soberly contemplating switching the feelings off
Oh how it works
nothing but irises and going back home and kittens you don't bother to save-from
the streets
they all die anyway.
its a grown up kind of feeling
(silly)
Laughter doesn't ring the same way
you bash skulls against the wall
On Leo's drum kit and you swear his eyes are a deeper purple than the shade
of your hurt
you don't care
cant find it in you to care
we are the same you see we dispose of those we need nothing of
so its okay I guess

I can judge you anyway though
nothing nothing nothing
no feeling
"the contours of your face as mysterious as the scars that lined your hands"
left a place back there as cold as daddy's coffin
they don't tell you that sometimes
you hold onto a little bit of childhood, like laughing at
people falling on their *****
now protect us against that kind of crass humour
Ill pretend to care
-but you'll see that I really don't
the restless way my knee jumps like
your heartbeat and eyes that swim over walls and
faces
like a ski *****
left too many bruises
were all going down
and I just don't care any-more.
Ma, Ma--look what I did, Ma. Look what i did to my hands, I broke 'em.
You gave me the stone, gave me the chisel, didn't say how to hold 'em.
Eat
fresh tilled soil revealed phalanges of innocents
disarranged,
like chewed chicken bones, pointing or reaching
mixed with lost tree leaves that steel tines stirred in;
twigs snapped from limbs by some storm long forgotten,
skeletons left behind after picking the cotton

the Farmer sows afresh earth’s next crop rotation
seeds of winter wheat for bread we’ll be eating;
or grasses and sorghum for new cattle pasture
laid in shallow furrows with prayers for cover
a swaying anthem of living,
our losses forgiven by a harvest of summer
blunt tips of bent cigarettes
were incisive as razors -
sliced wrists weeping
bright red sentences,
spattered unborn to blank paper
and turned into statues
so the dead would always remember
what they did,
never safe in the graves
in which they'd took refuge

but blue on blue
was ever her color;
blue on blues
seeping from old sins,
deep, hidden within spidery veins
that traced pale, soft *******,
finally filling mute lips as she slept,
subsumed in oceans of color,
blues that gave stories, as waves to shore
subsided, reclaiming their pain,
and cleansed sand once more

What end to life!
a collection of furies like stone turtles
arranged on the mantle -
just a few dozen last words
tucked among ads for
Old Spice and Polident tabs
unread, used to line
litter boxes in Cambridge
or wrap fresh fish at Hay Market;

then, someone pausing to wave at the sky
missed saving the drowning woman
by years, if he'd tried,
finding questions in every answer;
child curled in hard lap of his mother,
her cold affections of words
blew from dead lips like old wishes
without tender touch or wet kisses;
but that life continued,
if lived only blue on blue
From memories of Anne Sexton I never had, but only imagined were real, from that time we met on Mercy Street.

— The End —