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city of flips Aug 2019
pretty words for pretty girls


courageous caress of a send key pressed,
after practicing  
speechless up to the assumed,
up to assured point of perfect,
flawlessness, visible in each invisible breath,
pauses full of poignant stories unspoken
but eye cleared visible for seeing the future


pretty words for pretty girls

intuition incorporates superstition,
unending, intending infatuated moon gazing,
but not pagan worshiping, no it is love worshiping

your hiding cave places are moon apertures dark spots,
impenetrable to my eye’s naked telescoping,
but heartbeats spring my unharnessed love poems to you

me and millions whisper in full certainty of our
lost but beloved presences, moon stored for us,
my darling dares the light shine upon my bay,
here to me, our path, a moonlight waving hand
provides on many nights, a clear direction to follow,
pseudo-thrills of continence that my vision uncovers,
but my body knows is but a poor substitute


pretty words for pretty girls

my disease has a diagnosis.

your body attacked,
your body reacts,
defeats the infector,
remembering the next time
that disease comes round
how it got beat prior
and how to do it again



so how come I’m falling love once more?
  Jul 2019 city of flips
Nat Lipstadt
Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay (Razor Blades, Pills, & Shotguns)

Sittin' on the dock of the bay,
Watching the sun slip, Simon-says, slide away,
Cheeks blushing flushing from orange ray-guns,
Drinking blush rosé to oil our eyes
For the subtle story the sky shortly will reveal,
For the subtle story the sky shortly will revel.

Grievous judgement to make,
Thinkin' skills possessed to praise,
When but yesterday I easy confessed,
At the Blue Canoe Bar, I did not.

(The clouds were magnificent. No, I cannot write a poem about the cloud colors. Their shape shifting inexhaustible.  Mine eyes high on their creativity.  I'm just not good enough a poet to tamper with that sky.)

If you courage enough to
Call yourself poet, then
It is audacity, not blood,
Warming your extremities,
So foolishly try, always be prepared to fail.


No impulse. We pledged that tonight, ours,
One hour of sunset over Silver Beach.
Brought the wine, forgot the pillows,
So Abraham & Sarah went prepared to sacrifice
All feelings in their butts for the greater glory
Of love and one of nature's great poetic challenges..

The conundrum~miracle of every sunset
O'er bay, lake or ocean, is its special,
Only-In-Nature unique way of customizing
Its descent just for you.

No matter where one observes,
No matter where you worship,
Wherever your temple, mosque or church situé,
Tennessee, Rhode Island, the Philippines,
Germany, Colombia, even in the ole U.K.,
(yes, you, I know it, yes, you!)
The very same setting sun we all see,
Sends a magic dazzle gold orange path invitation
To the exact spot you are voyeuring,
One sun, all destinations equal before human.

How can that be?

Trepidation and tremblingly,
The clouds.

She leans on me, a perfect fit,
My back resting against a pylon,
So we see the clouds
With common exactitude,
But it is a quiet time, silence only shared.
Images stored silently within ourselves,
For we see the formation, man, woman,
Precisely and exactly, totally differently.

The clouds.
An armada moving imperial and imperiously
At a stately speed, saying I am awesome, fear me.
The largest cloud bank is an aircraft carrier,
Miles long, painted horizon blue-grey unsurprisingly.

The small white wisps, fast destroyers, stealthy submarines,
Moving fast to protect the mother ship,
Running random to confuse enemy radar and the
Pathetic, limited, human eye.

The colors.
Here I fail willingly, unashamedly.
So many sunsets, so many hearts,
All different, all the same.
Lacking knowledge, I cannot tender,
I cannot offer you tenderness to love
Enough,
The variety of oranges, gold, varietals interspersed
By the pinks, the cornea, singed,
And mock myself for all my meager brain yields is
Good Humor creamsicle comparison...a delicious irony

You who write after midnight
Of razor blades, pills and shotguns,
And not marked two decades even, on this planet,
You want hard,
Write a poem about a sunset in ways never done before.


You, who are wracked with despair
Speak to the man with no job for months
And mouths to feed and a life insurance policy.
Speak to me.

I want to tell you to get over yourself,
But you reject that old saw. Ok.
Get onto to yourself.

I have walked the hallways of deep despair,
Heard the bells ring between periods that signal only the next
Hell,
And to this day, still do,
But still I try to write external of sunsets and greater glories.

How many lives depend on you? Are you proud of your weakness?
Do you hate me yet for acknowledging out loud,
We are both cowards?

I have five mouths to feed,
Before I parse a morsel.
Two less than two,
What do you have but to
Grow yourself?

Yeah coward.
Too yellow to write about a
Yellow sunset, cause that is hard in a way incomprehensible
Until tried.
Or the passing of your mother who could not speak clearly
But you, thru her eyes knew that she had poems to yet recite.
Run away like I did ashamed with frustrated failure.
Why should I coddle, give you easy soft?
**
.
If you come here to share, well and good.
If you come here to find comfort, good.
So gaze upon these words and feel
The love that only experience has earned.

What do you know of heartbreak?
Imprisoned for decades in a loveless life,
I walked by the water nightly,
Yes, the same waters where I CinemaScoped
Yesterday's sunset, and walked away.

You can read about if you look it, look me, look here,
Look up!

So do something hard, something external.
Fail but love yourself more for just having tried.
Then try something else.

The saddest poem ever wrote
Was not yours, where you titillate with daring words
Razors, pills etc.,
The saddest poem ever writ
Was this one, a meager vanity to capture a
Sunset that keeps trying every day to
Surpass
Supersede
Its previous glorious failure,
Like we should too.
Keep trying

Now, I shall rest,
For I know that soon I shall see, feel, think,
Of something new that will make me eager to

Write a new poem.


August 3~5, 2013
When I am less tired, I wil edit the typos. But life is full of typos, but sometimes you just gotta not look back, even if you leave a trail of typos behind you. But writing this has mentally exhausted me in a different way.  I will rest from writing to recover. Dig out some old ones, maybe

If you courage enough to
Call yourself poet, then
It is audacity, not blood,
Warming your extremities,
So foolishly try, always be prepared to fail.
city of flips Jul 2019
for the ladies who liquid lunch

<>

the finest young women of the wild west,
(the best of course just might be in Texas)
don’t always get educated in the things best,
no private schools, so somethings sometimes,
like the upscale training of the taste buds,
must be learned on the job, training the palate,
by growing up, self+taught, thank god, yes!

<>

your salty taste
reminds me of ruffled potato chips, bugles, beef jerky
and
your very own brand of
loving tears

it’s true you know,
impossible to eat
just one, which is
why my tonguing
of your body parts,
is unceasingly seizing

I will always be found
attached unbreakably,
to your moving image,
moving inside of me

so sweet your salt,
it’s your story,
your flavored lives living on
in poems unnamed, to disguise
but the authorship of whom,
in body, in mind, so obvious,
cause in all your poems is a tangy
salty

impossible to eat just one

****
<>
p.s. you tease me mean,
cowman,

bbq and béarnaise,
sassafras and edible petals,
molasses and kosher salt,
ingredient combination
which of course
you just made up,
so I show my appreciation
biting your arm so my permanent
teeth marks,
will remind me,
and you too,
just how salty
biting Texas heifers who
can or cannot be salt cured
when
it’s their turn to write some
real good tasting
poetry

****

back for more already?

****
city of flips Jun 2019
turned twenty one,
which means that things illegal in Texas now
are really bad ones, no innocence defense available,
all the adult sinful pleasures mine all mine

and the men look at me more carefully

oh they still card me to be sure,
but what
they want really is just
my name and address

when not wearing my cutoffs,
surprisingly lean toward flouncy dresses
pretty angelic ***** interesting,
men so dumb,
they rather imagine what’s inside using a road map
they imagine, than convent convenient signs  
of a nice tight short skirt that reveals
all and suggests nothing

you may recall that shy cowboy,^
feet shuffling, getting himself in trouble,
blushing loudly, when his pretense smooth goes awry,
it’s over a year and he’ll be picking me up,
with a peck and a hey darlin’
and calling me by my pet name,
Velvet Hammer Ale,
ale, the copper color of my hair,
velvet, my love for him,
a hammer for fools and my tough as nails, stout insides

yup turned twenty one
city of flips Jun 2019
Letter to Cinderella (and her Texas Fairytales)

~for EJ Love~


now lookee here, girl,
slow down pardner,
blanket love-spells need to be addressed,
especially if a return requested back to
the great state of big ole Texas

as I am loved in Texas, I’m well aware
how hard it is to find love in wide open spaces,
more trucks and cows than people,
which is NYC in reverse,
both hard places in different ways
to make angelic fairies appear,
released intact from busted soap bubbles

so here’s my idée fixe,
to the reading, less,
to the writing, more,
command thyself to march towards
the seventeenths poem, and many more
to arrive at the promised
hallelujah

take the formless visions, potions,
drifting in you, figure them into words,
shaped with passion and cunning, twitching in
a creme of teasing, a dollop of wanting,
a whimsy, sense of humor, stir with another’s pinky finger,
bigger than the ineffable lone star of lonely,
an eye tear for flavor, a salty secreted ingredient,
that needs, requires another’s hand to wipe away

and a flashing neon sign:
Texas Red Amber,  Chops, and
real good loving desired!

only good loving people,
steady on their feet,
need apply, poets favored,
but a certain kind of cowboy,
ok as well

what be my expertises in matters these,
why I am your chastened, mean no more,
sweet sister who see your spells flying by,
who writes to you with newly learned humility
  Dec 2018 city of flips
Kit Scott
They will know my name
I say
They will know my name
I claim

They will know my name
It's only fair
They will know my name
A promise, a dare

They will know my name
To tell tall tales to the young
They will know my name
Blazing bright as the burning sun

They will know my name
Spoken, crying, in a rush
They will know my name
To scream into the hush

They will know my name
To whisper in the night
They will know my name
They will know my might

They will know my name
Across the star-born universe
They will know my name
In the smallest places on Earth

They will know my name
Further than the eye can see
They will know my name
They will know me

They will know my name
For better or for worse
They will know my name
A blessing, a prayer, a curse

They will know my name
Let it give them pause
They will know my name
It will be written next to yours
I've made it my mission to write regularly, and publish what I do write even if I'm not happy with it. I'm honestly better at fiction than poetry, however much a great deal of poetry is a kind of fiction, (prose?) but I'm trying to improve myself here as I enjoy it and it can only make me better. I hope you like this.
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