touka

1d

Agnes de Lods

Tremor

Today again I saw a gate in the sky.
Streams of pale light trickled through it.
I no longer looked at the sun, only straight ahead,
My silhouette reflected in the ***** tram window.
I looked farther, hypnotized,
sipping words veiled in the dust of the autumn sun.

Dry spaces. Leaves.
Golden bile sparkled,
And no one saw this wonder in the sky.
At the stop, in the crowd rushing by,
An experiment took place:
A man wrapped in copper threads.

He searched for relief while anger bound his soul.
He fought the air, attacked with words,
Like a puppet moving in convulsions.

Hands clenched, anger in his eyes.
“This will pass, this will fade,” I thought,
Moving to another car.

A primal tremor. A change of frequency.
Someone is turning the **** of our universe.
How many more cells of the body will they spoil
Before it is ground to ashes?
Until all ends in colonization,
A reward for micro-souls from another world.

People sunk in their minds
do not hear the hum of strings.
And I plead in my thoughts:
listen, look, be your reality.

Behind the gate a hundred weeks ago,
a crackling gramophone plays.
My calm relieves someone’s thoughts.
Somewhere, thousands of hours ago,
the past becomes the future.

Next time when you pass by me, indifferent,
the warmth of my thought will warm your
Dry, wrinkled hands.

I will never know You, and I would like to know
what you will say when these trembling words arrive on the wind.

In the autumn glow of the setting sun,
Like a gentle brushing of leaves at the next opening of the gate.
I will be there in the crack like a stray thought
that wanted to become immortality.

#tremor

1d

Nat Lipstadt

This insanity is all mine

curse the summer breeze,
despise the winter's harsh laugh,
this insanity is in every season,
the more I write, this invasive ****,
like the strongest tallest bamboo sticking,
drafts me again and again into the army
of just one more, and for every one I release,
a dozen more inventions, incensed interventions,
come asking, pleading, needy whining, but
for themselves only, not for me,
provide,
do not deny
them their own
new perspective,
an original fabulation,
and I remind them
of Balanchine's wit,
"there are only new combinations,"

and my mental thresher~combine,
explodes that numbered field,
of semi~scripted, planted
yet to be finished,
it only grows larger,
but not higher,
perhaps, sadly thinking,
but not better,

while my sighs of tired only grows louder…as my-race against time, only shorter, the rat on the spinning wheel....
nml

#this #insanity #is #all #mine #nml #nat #lipstadt

Sep 12

William A Gibson

Idle Engines

She keeps asking what he does,
though his answers are recycled:
half-finished carpentry jobs,
French bulldogs, paintball,
a seventh-grade broken nose.

The basket of fries between them
feels like an interview.
She teases about sweat-stuck bangs,
neon-laced Docs,
his faux leather squeaking when he moves.

Her smile forgives empty stories,
softens each silence.

Condensation slips down her glass,
her knee brushes his-
a spark he does not catch,
his throat working like a valve.
The door opens, closes,
a draft follows smoke and cedar,
distant wildfires.

Outside, a truck unloads shrimp.
A box bursts on the pavement-
pink shells and thawing ice
sliding into gutter water.

Curses flare into the alley.
Engines idle.
Hydraulics hiss.
The stoplight clicks red to green,
green to red,
its metronome louder than either of them.

#date #shrimp #detachment #mechanical #urban #diner #metronome

Sep 12

Kiernan Norman

Ophelia, Rewritten

They said I drowned,
but the truth is softer:
I laid myself down like an offering.

I spit river into their open mouths.
I bit the lilies in half.

Silk turned cathedral.
I let my dress balloon with river light.

The earth had nowhere else for me.

If you pressed your ear to the surface,
you would have heard me humming.
They didn’t write that part.

When they pulled me out,
I still had violets in my teeth.
I still had the nerve to look alive.

If ruin was the crown they gave me,
I wore it dripping.
I wore it bright.

You think you know the story:
girl, river, grief.

But the water was warm that day.
The sky was a soft ache.
I was tired of carrying everyone else’s ending.

So I wrote my own.

Not drowned.
Not tragic.
Not accepting their ending.

#poetry #confessional #myth #ophelia #retelling #tragedy #survival #girlhood #women #resilience

touka Jul 12

Interior

I am

decorating.

Renovating.

I slide my lone box over
a few centimeters to the right,
all the snakes pile out, all the
crocodiles cry in the new light,
all the bugs
call me mother
or
something
of the like.

There is a draw string
that I never pull.

There is an empty corner and another
and
another and
oh, well
too many to count
And a memory of
my father
gesturing in silhouette
something I
can’t make out,

but he looks like
a womb, and
he looks like
my husband

and I have to clean

this

room.

I use my
little fingers to trace
the paths of echoes
long silenced
just to taste
a familiar kind of quiet
because it makes
more sense than this
gnawing,
        idle
           knowing
come upon me as I age,

I must

clean this room

But
I
return

with dust.

There must have been,
I think

Something brilliant here,

once.

My
lone little box, housing my
lone little feather
Underneath my
lone little light
with its drawstring untouched,
because
it flickers
as it likes

All the crawling things beneath
This paltry foil
to my utter
desolation

The snakes,
the bugs,
all plaintiff

I don’t do things
I don’t put things
places,
I don’t
make the room full

I just
wander away.

But I am

decorating.

Renovating.

I slide my lone box over
a few centimeters to the right,

all the snakes pile out, all the

crocodiles cry
  in the new light,

all the bugs

call me fat.

touka Jul 12

Vulcan II

You found it meandering

                                                                I walked it alone.

You said the Phoenix rises

                                                                 I am stuck in the stone.

    A common bird —
      With two wings,
     now

                   Tinged

                       That same old color

of the rock burnt out

                   of absence

                                                      of nothing —

of silence.

for a critic