Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Samuel Fox Feb 2017
Should wedding bells chime in a dream you have, I pray the man,   miming affection     near the altar is not me. I am ragamuffin; a butcher with no cleaver     in his shadow,
instead a bouquet: Clenched in my silhouetted hand flowers turn into torch. I burn     as a filament in a bulb half-expired. I have smoked through my pocket money    in order
to scatter cremated angels from my throat.    I am cloaked by anguish      my grief    poorly sheathed   a tattered nerve. I have only learned        how to praise darkness.

Light is painful as it shimmers against frost: grass gleams in steady growth    discolored
scars healing. Here I am letting out a blood-letter addressed to you, wondering    if I send   a snip     of my own vein will it remind you how     one missing piece    from a whole            can forfeit the future. All any future is:      a motion into the next moment,  its pending indecision none can envision.      We can’t help but revise malleable pasts. Memories flux     rippling water and enough light changes it’s refraction with each new  ripple.        I cannot be a lover if love is not static    humming at least from its hymnal.  

I   write this letter in calligraphy mourning,    like most poets do – rending heart  rendering  this broken universe – with bone and feathered quill. This feather is from my wing, the pair fallible love clipped         the first chance you took to kiss my darkness.

I’m charting learning a path to winter in an opposite sky:
one only I can fly.
Samuel Fox Oct 2016
You ask me what I'd wish for if
I knew it would come true. I knew
it was true: you left me
to sleep out in the cold, dawn
hours and half a globe away.

If it meant I would receive frostbite,
shiver uncontrollably and turn cyanotic,
suffer hypothermia underneath the window
with the blinds closed and you
behind them shedding tears I cannot catch,
I would suffer. I did.

It reminded me of the Thanksgiving
my uncle had me grab the prong of a wishbone,
my best friend on the other side.
We made a wish and the horseshoe of ivory
cracked, and splintered into two pieces.
He got the larger half. I still kept my wish
hidden, hoping, that one day I'd meet you.

I would suckle the sorrow from your fingers,
wipe the tears and mascara with my cheek,
and croon to you I will change. I can change.
But, I must do that; and not for you.

Our love is like that wishbone. Every time
it breaks, we wish but do not work to see it through.
Samuel Fox Apr 2016
It didn’t really happen. I was awkward,
a sloppy crocheting of clumsy hands.
I was scared of my body; or maybe,
I was scared of her body. Foreign,
but bright from the veil of curtains
slighting a late spring light. I kissed
like a maniac, but when it came down
to the business of pleasure, I could not
make a transaction. She later told me
I could have gone on longer
than my half-a-minute slow grind before
I chickened out. Even now, after
my fifth major relationship and plenty
of romping and dancing atop mattresses
mine and not mine, I feel my first ****
is how I approach love. Tentative,
too contemplative, and none-so-bold.
Perhaps it is because I learned early,
to hate myself, this body that is still
so new to me: twenty-five years owned
and I still don’t know how to love myself.
I just hope that one day, I will be that light
streaming into the room, touching everything
around it, feeling with tender warmth
the goodness of what soon hinders its path
casting shadows behind what I come to kiss.
Samuel Fox Apr 2016
the patrol car has left the block once more,
a bull shark circling
nearer to some shore, headlights
blared, a black silhouette steering the vehicle;

night kisses the horizon, pecks it sharp
like a bullet case
scraping the darkling pavement,
only the whitest stars visible above.

many like me stroll sidewalks at this hour,
smoking a stogie
or sitting on empty swings
in playgrounds vacant of laughter; it is better

that children sleep while they can and can dream
before the true night,
that blight of bruise blue, sirens
wailing on their way to steal away some dark man

from the streets. where I stand on an apartment stoop
I count the vehicle
for the fourth time, lurking
out around the corner, like a wolf dressed metallic.

nothing gets better come nightfall. nothing
gets done while asleep.
i slip on my shadow, hood
dark, concealing my face. lean back into the steps

and light another cigarette. inhale.
exhale. most don’t have
to worry: their paleness turns
them ghostly, invisible, to the patrolling cars.

but I wear my darkness. i wish I knew
how to make sparks fly,
have them issue from throat, crack
into splinters of glass. the law tells me to sit

but I refuse. i am a phosphorus
fuse; i am whitened;
but i am impoverished,
and I too have my own reasons to be frightened.
Samuel Fox Apr 2016
Trill of beak into birch. Dawn spooks
the graveyard into silence. A heart
hardens at God’s withered finger reaching
but not reached for. I trim the hedges
and the whir of ****-eater disturbs
a nest of yellow jackets into tornado,
dust devil, of translucent wings and sting.
I walk among the dead three times a week.
I am learning their language. They relearn
the mundanity of white noise above
and quietly forget, quietly forgive.
This hill is the crest on a wave of coffins,
each one a boat through the world below.
Submerged in a bloodshot morning
I listen to a woodpecker in its throes
of building a home out of the depths of bark.
In the chill, the soft fog rolling, it pecks
and it knocks. The doors to these lives
long closed, I hush. I do not believe God
will visit these grounds to reclaim his clay:
I plant flowers in it between the plots,
each name engraved of marble a blank stare.
The flash of red flushes from budding branches
and I return to work. No one answers.
I relearn the dead’s language, their silence,
relearn every day how to repair stillness.
For a friend of mine who works in a graveyard.
Samuel Fox Jun 2015
https://youtu.be/73TOA_qdd0M?t=26s
Spoken Word piece performed at The Odditorium in Asheville, NC in 2014.
Samuel Fox Jun 2015
I watched the morning come,
its satin sheet of light lifting
off of the curve of the world.

Venus shone something crooked,
like the eye of a magpie staring
down at my blond head. I took

one last sip of whiskey, stood
and in the sauntering, in wobbling
home to my own bed, Venus

watched me turn my back,
like a stone rolled in front of a tomb.
I finally stopped chasing love.

I decided I’d rather spend
each night thereafter comfortable
in the bed of my life, no longer able

to sleep while sick of the resurrection
I had at one time simply called six a.m.
Next page