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A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biased twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boy's letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday's Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.
The sun is shining and
moonbeams glisten through the air.
Moon, not sun.
While the sun shone
and incinerated the sloshing intestines of
vengeful beasts;
the gentle and forgiving moon
projected from their eyes and
caught the ****** maw of a starving deer.
Suitcases of leather stacked behind us
filled with spruce, pine, elm, oak, cherry.
Ready for induction t
o our paperless society
which consumes the forests of
Hippolyta and Antiope mercilessly.
Burning every leaf
then forgetting to feel
because nothing mattered.
Everything never mattered.
Facts are lie, opinion is truth.
“No one is nothing”
they shriek to the heavens
striving to be limitless
and scorning morality. Embrace death
and all its glory.
Life, while full of happiness
and gorgeous splendor,
refuses to acknowledge the
magnitude of the word. The thing.
Falling and reading and lines
and circles and explosions
and whimpers and screams. Agony suffered
silently, alone; never understood
because how could it?
What could totally encompass
the raging fire that devours the veins
and burns from the inside out
kept in place by the impenetrable
flesh that glints in the forgiving moonlight.
A hostile exterior that
smiles, waves, laughs on cue to
disguise the raging storm
fighting its way through from inside.
The shell which shrinks from the moonbeam
and into the harsh sunlight
that filters beneath the floating clouds.
 May 2018 Andy Lee
Sylvia Plath
Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply.  It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous.  Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.

I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart's droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man's eye,
Comfortless as salt.  Snake and bird
Doze behind the old maskss of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
The sun puts its cinder out.  Where we lie
The heat-cracked crickets congregate
In their black armorplate and cry.
The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,
And the crickets come creeping into our hair
To fiddle the short night away.
this is an endless hellscape
housed by demons mocking my torture
blood rains from my fingertips
clotting in the gaping mouths
of the spectators' bellow
my bones snap and mend at crooked angles
set by my captor
injecting formaldehyde to freeze my body
poisoned by exposure
 Apr 2018 Andy Lee
Mister Granger
I know why the caged bird sings.

It's not because his song
is as vibrant
as his feathers, that he plucks away
each day because he doesn't
feel beautiful.

It's not because of the majesty
that exist in the freedom
of being able to spread his wings
though he knows
he'll never rise to the occasion.

He sings because he believes
that this cage
was made for a king
because he has never tasted
freedom with a side order of skies.

He's never flown past the sun
on a cool morning
or hung with the moon
on a warm night.

He's only ever known
the comfort of a prison
that his thoughts have
become accustomed
to calling home.

He would never venture
beyond the "welcome" mat
because what's beyond the threshold
holds no promise
the way these bars and metal locks do.

He sings because he knows
that no one is listening
so if he makes a mistake
he doesn't have to live with the regret
or embarrassment of knowing that he missed his note.

The caged bird
never believes that he's caged
because behind these walls
he's safe
and he prefers it this way.

I know why the caged bird sings.
A twist on a title by one of my favorite authors...
 May 2017 Andy Lee
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
 Apr 2017 Andy Lee
Courtney O
Because we might get unbound
Of something that's stalling us both
And taste and see new shores
(you need it more tHan I do)
Because Amy might not be the soundtrack
And my good fortune's still there, untouched

I love you, but things they change
Let's not file a list of complaints
and keep going, going
Because oh baby I loved you so...
but my wings were getting weak and stunted
And I cannot take it.
Notes to further understand the poem: Amy is Amy Winehouse, meaning that our soundtrack might not be sad as many of her songs are (to which I listened to a lot before), and the line "my good fortune's still there" is a reference to the song Good Fortune by PJ Harvey, which I highly link to the relationship the poem talks about. It means to me that even if the person which filled for me the lyrics with meaning is not there, my good fortune is still there. That it was not him, exclusively.

— The End —