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Writing is like:
Trying to sing a song you've never heard
Or trying to live someone else's life,
As a picture inside their photo album
No one can help with it.
The sadness appears far away
Speedily it moves to a place inside of you
Inside the eyes, like ripe berries, of a blackbird
Inside the absence of the sister I never had
Inside the tens of thousands of unfertilized eggs
Life does not reward us for the sterile urges
The aborted plots, the miscarried plans
In the flower I just plucked
Lie all the other three thousand blooms
I ever dismembered
Breathing out as one, they plant the seed:
Watery tears and then
A bank of weeds sprouts somewhere within my brain
Privy to the common lot of flowers, and mankind,
How can I ask for more?
How can I fail to ask, for more?
I was thinking of a son.
The womb is not a clock
nor a bell tolling,
but in the eleventh month of its life
I feel the November
of the body as well as of the calendar.
In two days it will be my birthday
and as always the earth is done with its harvest.
This time I hunt for death,
the night I lean toward,
the night I want.
Well then--
It was in the womb all along.

I was thinking of a son ...
You! The never acquired,
the never seeded or unfastened,
you of the genitals I feared,
the stalk and the puppy's breath.
Will I give you my eyes or his?
Will you be the David or the Susan?
(Those two names I picked and listened for.)
Can you be the man your fathers are--
the leg muscles from Michelangelo,
hands from Yugoslavia
somewhere the peasant, Slavic and determined,
somewhere the survivor bulging with life--
and could it still be possible,
all this with Susan's eyes?

All this without you--
two days gone in blood.
I myself will die without baptism,
a third daughter they didn't bother.
My death will come on my name day.
What's wrong with the name day?
It's only an angel of the sun.
Woman,
weaving a web over your own,
a thin and tangled poison.
Scorpio,
bad spider--
die!

My death from the wrists,
two name tags,
blood worn like a corsage
to bloom
one on the left and one on the right--
It's a warm room,
the place of the blood.
Leave the door open on its hinges!

Two days for your death
and two days until mine.

Love! That red disease--
year after year, David, you would make me wild!
David! Susan! David! David!
full and disheveled, hissing into the night,
never growing old,
waiting always for you on the porch ...
year after year,
my carrot, my cabbage,
I would have possessed you before all women,
calling your name,
calling you mine.
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.
When once you find that sun
After searching for years
Going on only what you have heard, but never seen
With your own eyes; tales that brightness would make you blind,
Listening ear to door for that one footfall
When sun ascends the last horizon and appears
At first you don't recognize it's splendor;
Bearing the brilliant crown that you once were told of
Back in your deepest dark your loneliest hour
And you are startled when it recognizes your face
With small cupping hands of warmth
And kisses your countenance a golden highlight
From it's igneous soul of ancient flame
Glowing it x-rays your heart with it's shimmering visage
A benediction falls upon your life to never court darkness again
Henceforth you will live in the light; sing only his praises
And rue the night, and hate the shadowed
Strive all your life to never feel shame
Of what the unblinking light will reveal;
Your own humble pilgrimage that light shines through
Never dimmed by moon, comet or cloud
Because it is made out of heaven, made out of you
And because it holds not earth.
if some electric joy could paint us
here in the vivid shards of wasted glass,
or create a beauty that's never been drunk
we'd question our surreal imaginations,
drugged by passion's symbolic chisel;
the blue aesthetic of an angel's dust,
of abstract life more sensed than performed;
the psychedelic absurdities in bolder strokes:
I'd sing your **** genius sculpted through every world.
My friend tells me that each morning
she awakens with suicide and coffee
on her mind, then she has a smoke.
I want to tell her how my mind
entirely bypasses the coffee -
how suicide is the first thought,
second thought, all day and night thought.
I want to tell her that if I must stay,
a simple razor blade will do...
criss-crossing over old scars, gashes
just deep enough to bleed out the pain,
or awaken the senses and escape numbness.
I want to see my blood trickling down, down, down
my thighs or arms like red rivers creating their own pathway
through my white valleys of flesh.
But instead, I sit silently, coffee in hand,
swallowing her pain as I stifle my own.
© 2010,  Lori Carlson

All poetry under the names Lori Carlson or Iona Nerissa are the sole property of Lori Carlson.
Please seek permission before using any of my writings.
~Lori Carlson~
Lonely, deep, swift moments I commune with you,
Looking through my open window into blue,
Uncharted, star-filled, never-ending space
That holds the cherished image of your face.

Longings I would tell you in sweet, sudden word,
Catching in my throat, are stilled, and never heard;
And lovely, unsaid thoughts surge up anew
To wing across the darkness, seeking you.

Knowing not the time and distance in between,
Silently and eagerly, by eyes unseen;
Across the star-filled, never-ending blue
My heart springs up and runs away to you.
My grandma had this poem in her things. She was not a poetry person so I was surprised by it. Sure would love finding out when it was written and the author. I am a lover of all things romantic, such as this is.
Oh, love, why do we argue like this?
I am tired of all your pious talk.
Also, I am tired of all the dead.
They refuse to listen,
so leave them alone.
Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.

Everyone was always to blame:
the last empty fifth of *****,
the rusty nails and chicken feathers
that stuck in the mud on the back doorstep,
the worms that lived under the cat's ear
and the thin-lipped preacher
who refused to call
except once on a flea-ridden day
when he came scuffing in through the yard
looking for a scapegoat.
I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.

I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you -- you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.
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