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Robert C Ellis Nov 2021
Oh, Christ
Am I death?
Everyone has always looked at me so
Eerily
Perhaps my mother split me with Time
I am Gravity’s cantileve.  
An imaginary house I revisit in
Capillaries crackling with dreams
Robert C Ellis Feb 2016
Objects we dangle in moonlight
The luster of God, eyes it might
Rocks and weeds and broken glass
As midnight makes its gentle pass

Once was heaven and it shattered
The shards drove from mountains
Creatures of habit
Broken backs, whetted skin
Dancing Devils and infection
Robert C Ellis Apr 2018
Jawbones shivved from the universe
Iroquois gypsum, the mother art
Puppy kisses my crusted hand
Devotion is the soul spread apart

Am I a monkey reciting emotion
Are the eyes our only trade
Dark, delving; mystery
We are all actor fillet
Robert C Ellis Apr 2016
Hey, Malaise.  
Perhaps a comfortable walk?  
A conversive stroll tolling my attention;
a religion, aren’t i?
Robert C Ellis Sep 2024
A forest; the woods.
Time's apothecary
Mix your hands up to the arms in
Dirt and leaves
Until there's no difference
Petiole and vein,
Recollect Chemistry
Robert C Ellis Jul 2022
When waters are so slowed to tepid
And are infected and
Draw breath, and heartbeats detected for medication
Because disease is self-feeding
And forming nations
Tithing ,the soul
The eyes
The ocean breathes
Tides
Blue is Earth, universe
But our blood is aged and stagnant
Recirculated red
And the microscopic wet lizard spirits
Breed until their voices grip our heads
Robert C Ellis Aug 2018
Every term of the universe is a human verb
They are fused in necklaces we don't disturb.  
There are gods and we make them constellations
From my porch we finger their cancerous radiation
Robert C Ellis Jan 2022
Took a photo of Jupiter through my telescope
And it’s moons
And I showed it to friends and they knew of it
A portrait photo of family in some Sunday afternoon
When the world was childhood and creatures brewed

Too deep now to hold my breath to
Robert C Ellis Feb 2016
***** hysteria
Limp along consonants
Ladder up the laughter
Falling down repairs
Disingenuous social party -
Razor thin grins and
Tightly-woven stares

Wave at the waste
Wavering gasps, the pain
Hip and wrists dissolving
Dance, their words in vain
A Princess-cut moon
An encrusted crown
Colors eyes blue
And I drown

****-tails
Robert C Ellis Feb 2016
Beans and melons
He sung
He rung
From strumming chords
The bar, our Lord
Gravel on chalkboard
Verse by Verse
Whetting the appetites
Of the universe
Candlelit darkness
Our first and last quilt
Wrap me drunkenly
And so my will
Robert C Ellis Mar 2022
The grass rises wild,
flowers blasting
from the poets grave but
He did dream of cosmos fishermen
and is casting.
Robert C Ellis Jun 2016
The sing song of a child
Aghast face making
Wretch, guard, gild, hone, smelt, style
The seasons snapping our backs, wild

A love affair with God
Bodies old as cast wax
Stuffed with junipers, natron
The future I regret; my past I laud
Robert C Ellis Jan 2023
I swear to Christ and Holy God
I want one more insight like a dog screaming barks in the dark at unknown intruders.
I want to jump so I have a heart because I’m afraid it will break under the moment.  
And then I know I was built
because I didn’t make it myself and so it has a purpose but I don’t know it.
Until it jumps again.
Robert C Ellis May 2022
That’s the Everything dream
Find wings beneath the flesh
Enough to tear the shirt at the seams
Be the universe that percolates between
Robert C Ellis Apr 2023
The foliage twists out of the ground like sick infection,
and we marvel at the flowers.
Imagine a carousel so old we rode it in black and white
and dreamed the colors
Childhood breaks atop the crease between sleep and history
I am the weights of every day, like stars pulling one another.
Never cowering from the hours
Robert C Ellis May 2018
Her every thought a dodecahedron flowering  
Creation contaminating inebriated genomes
Petty larceny
The moonlight freezes the starless creek

“I know… we’re just eternity”
Robert C Ellis May 2022
A tree is a cemetery of atoms
much like me
Together we bend skyward and see
Where we, ourselves, used to be

My Yorkshire terrier likes to sleep
Where these particles tend to breed
Within me they stitch a harmony
And he lays his head, devotee

Space it seems is a distillery
Where every emotion ceases to be
And God is cultivated to believe
That we are the vehicle
to everything
Robert C Ellis Feb 2022
I guess Jesus ventured so we’d have skin.
A difference between water and benevolence
I love the urge to defy a God
who wills such resistance to the fog
Of time, Pump Gypsies, folded trachea, funeral attendees
and the cloveture between of all
Raindrops in the Andelluvian sea.
Time and People dissolving the I Believe.
Robert C Ellis Feb 2016
And there are fountains
And balloons and taffeta
And baseball and popcorn
And your legs and head
In your father’s arms
As you are carried to bed

And you are not afraid of that mistress, Death
And you can close your eyes
Because they will open
And you can dream
Because you will wake
And you can fall and cry
As Memory nests inside
The immaculate life that waits
Robert C Ellis Mar 2018
Human will is a death mask distended and descending torso from wings to feet clawing mournful meat

The hand of God holds Ritual
Divinity, the face formed from infinity running over gravity
Streetlights frame the kingdom beneath
Robert C Ellis Feb 2016
Slider, this
Cellular vestibule
Pink-yellow capillarium
**** sack, wretched thump sump
Stuffed with sauce and rind
“I was always meant to go”
He said on the way out of his mind
The *** Runner and his misbehaving
Alchemy, of blood stunted
By the soot of
Planetary catastrophe
Robert C Ellis Jan 2022
soul:
(((Heart)448,000mph (speed of solar system))ht)(F)/
()(G≠ God)(Gravity)
or Ocean.



ht - Heartbeats/hour
F - Friction
G - Gravitational force
Robert C Ellis Apr 2022
I Hate it when Time presses its depthless face against the Glass

and I have to Fight the urge to walk Past

the bulbs on the stars coming loose, like all seas do, and HIS hands, like they’re depicted in cathedrals: carved from clubs, dirt in the creases, waving in the darkness

and wonder if I will Last
Robert C Ellis May 2018
There’s never enough time left for me
Swinging from the rafters of the universe
A proper God adjusts his creatures
And man recollects in annotated verse

My cabbaged heart
The layers dried and peeled
Like a fleshy carnation
But brewed like camomile

I sleep beneath the vespers
I wretch until my fingers break
From my ribcage seize a bone
Take thy bread, forgive the taste
Robert C Ellis Jun 2018
The past casts light as a faint star on the edge of space
Reaching from the depths of depthless black
The Caretaker sifts fingers between  the soot
It’s my fault, He says.  And molecules can’t come back
It’s madness
The cobbler draws his eyepiece, selects a tack
History is a sheath of imagination tucked at the seams
Their words the clack of the planets on their tracks
Heaven is the never we forever grieve
Robert C Ellis Dec 2023
A sunny field 1977, thistle-trees-stirring-the-blue-orange-sky memory ripened, beaded up
fruit wet between my teeth.  I dream
Childhood with an eccentricity,
An ache and I wonder
How my mind makes up such things
Why from it I woke and can’t go back to
Sleep
Robert C Ellis Sep 2024
Lungs are His cathedrals, on this night A
Boeing 737-7 cuts a spotlight
between twilight and dream
Gods breath carving alveoli with a 10:35 flight across rib bone
and destiny
It is the curse of existence, trajectory
Neither sleep nor sunrise will stabilize me
Robert C Ellis Nov 2016
Ariel ruins, the left foot to lead the dance
Spiral, laughter; the endless
Chance
Water crests, the deck boards ache
And the jawlines clinch
Death will have to wait
Robert C Ellis Apr 2016
When you know too much
When you name the wind
God takes a limb
And carves His name in

You Breathe Too Much
He says and sings
The seasons ever faster
Spring so unrelenting

Cannibals ate
What they could not whittle
And your death bed warms
To His unnerving riddle

And your memory, no
What was I for?
To barter flesh and bone
And ever He took more
My body never did what I wanted it to
A graveyard by a river
It never flew
Robert C Ellis Mar 2022
From Infinity stars to infinity grass beneath my feet
Infinite molecules dropping the ceiling to eternity
The first stars didn’t sing
They drew the darkness from relativity
They were God, falling
Like Insanity, a happenstance of a gravity
And so there is a sun
And heated seas that pump me for teeth and symmetry
Robert C Ellis May 2018
Ferreting intwo self annihilation we
My siblings
Ram our heads against the calculations
Chalkboard twilight plus afternoon plus alcohol is
Poetic, tropical  annilihatuon.

To man we matter when our souls vacation
Robert C Ellis Jun 2016
Tumble quasar roaring blind, caustic stick etchings of candle wicks
carving starlight into unkind creatures
Clawed, aligned
Rivulets between the rivets, precession,
Your star, Our star the finger of another constellation
Advising wayward comets to deflection
I watch tadpoles in the pool
Swim a spherical galaxy
Sun and the earth and the moon alive
Deciding
That gravity is company
Robert C Ellis Dec 2022
Life is industry
Because there are 7.5 billion scampering casts of lungs and livers.  
Cogs of machinery.
Greased and repaired and tedious
Like the finest clockwork of the futility
Of money
Hoping elegance is eternity.
Robert C Ellis Dec 2021
The first chore of consciousness is to
remember that it is darkness,
and that some of that darkness is bone.  
Its these molecules that grew tired from all the fuss of Gravity
and slowed,
and built a circular cathrdral and
from it cast long outreaches ******* more
but its not enough so there is skin, sailed between
and catching breath for the movement dreamed.
Robert C Ellis May 2018
Skin is when I resist the shift in
Gravity irking foundations of scenery
Like this moment at the bar, a whisky
Lip leaving my words with intensity

My brain is the wright of planetary
Rock suspended in Time as the
Sulfur stuffs the stars with me
All of matter a psalm of Memory
Robert C Ellis Aug 2018
The primordial ooze moves with Gravity,
needing to see
Mistakes the motion for greatness,
the movement detected only in the imagination,
 shaping us into what we next will be.  
 Sometimes, Time slows until we are just a face, a breath and a word.  
 And we accept this weight of a memory.
Robert C Ellis Apr 2018
Fire in the lungs of the universe
Is the gasp grasping the next
Breath and the math of existence
God, an empirical fraction of ***

The stranger is a fractal
A geometric figure of fate
Progressivelyrandom;chaotic phenomena
I only want to forget my name
Robert C Ellis Apr 2018
Street lights percolate
To the top of infinity
It is the spirit of man
To never Know, just see
Robert C Ellis Dec 2024
You’ve got to Tumble atoms into reaction
Like playing with my wild dog
Like digging ditches or squeezing
Honeysuckle until the smell won’t wash off your fingers
Break the seals off a Twilight
That lingers
Robert C Ellis Feb 2016
Neither a thought nor a child breaks loose
here, in the Elysium of the brain unbridled, blind, mute
and dreaming of nuclear landscapes.
Her careful walk cradled what was now his life,
the morning curdled with sand-whipped sunlight
and perfect whiskey sours
he devoured
as if Time’s rhythm relied upon them.
Robert C Ellis Nov 2021
You can’t cut silence with light.
It’s not that fast
You’ve seen Death in reflections
It’s where autumn leaves cross-stitch a path

I cannot **** God head on with helmet
It takes glances of a short sword
When words skip steps and seasons stutter
The universe is math blocks slowly toppled with
ROAR

Oh, Christ
Am I death?
Everyone has always looked at me so
Eerily
Perhaps my mother split me with Time
I am Gravity’s cantileve.  
An imaginary house I revisit in
Capillaries crackling with dreams

God will die from art
All of the decanted kerosene
Robert C Ellis Apr 2018
The train bearing childhood
The weight bowing the tracks
Riddles spinning from the windows
Trees and trusses speeding past

Grandfathers and television
Clock radios and Christmas Day
The godsend of dawn in footed pajamas
Prayers are wishes and so I say
Robert C Ellis Mar 2022
The moon as a field of headstones placed before
The Flocks of marrow,
Silver tipped 737 searching cloud covers
for the ghosts responsible.
A Grand Opening
Store has a spotlight spearing the night as high
As I can imagine air goes before it
Is space
And I trace the distance through the windshield, hoping everyone
Sees such blasphemy because maybe
We can all finally breathe, counting how many steps
it takes to leave
Robert C Ellis May 2017
WHIM
I can't wait to be stardust again
Protein and bone ends
And at Gravity's chagrin
Set the course of the rivers bend
I can't wait to be no more than churn
Mistaken for blood mud
Like red clay in the sun's burn
And picked over for His ecclesiastic thud
And rhymed with Time; the poet's sweet crud
Robert C Ellis Jan 2018
The momentary sunset conducts what
Words find the airwaves between
Those seconds I awoke and was aware
Of the atmosphere, still just a dream
The math of desire, of conjuring
What overturns regret and Mother Nature
The simple clockwork of my hunger
Time distilling the heart’s legislature
Robert C Ellis Oct 2017
The rinsed stars shimmer with the love
Of a newborn beneath a tinsel crown
Molecules as cicadas in rivulets of dawn
Chatter a new birth language gravity downs

The fervor of a Kiss until it carves
Jupiter red pyro igneous Hieroglyphs
The butter whipped June peppermint seed
Brewing ale, casting poetry; restoring Myth

Plant your timber limbs of thistle atop the mantle
Ascend the feathered plane of interstellar nurseries
Wrest with the havoc of Euclidean measure
Conversations, constellations; and we all fall to infinity
Robert C Ellis Apr 2018
The demons’ decibel blocks situate at every opening to sunlight,
Every sliver of a mirror to the outer reaches
Of my fear of falling into the blue of sky
Past air, past God.  Into the …

Laze are the demons for gravity comes with ease
Stumbling until their blocks stifle every eve.

My grandmother does not want us to succeed.  
She was but good at breeding
For we are here and we seethe

Every Bible verse rhymes with Sanctuary
The hum drum of music mimics the heartbeat
In case we forget, or we grieve Memory

She rises in a body I can’t forget, I crave; I tease.

A hotel room overlooking a Louisianan Oil Refinery
A city of stacks burning hydrocracked gasoline
The lights reflecting the constellations above; eternity
She cradles my delusions in this nursery
Robert C Ellis Apr 2022
“Ever look up pronunciations?”

Stripped of their fleshy chests, words are
just bones and gristle threading teeth that eat them.
Feel time, in its natural twilight, run over the words until
they are just beads at the bottom of a good sleep which  
is all childhood is anyway.
Why you had superpowers and different worlds
and falls and bee stings didn’t hurt,

not really /ˈrē(ə)lē/
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