“when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.” Grace Paley

fall into me
on blackout days
for something beautiful
is here is everywhere
is nowhere
you knew it
Borges used it
beauty is a physical sensation
the axis mundi piercing
the palms of my hands

memory like a gipsy woman
who reads palms
beauty, yes, it draws the soul
ascetic
I figured it out in the smiling of your sleep
like babies smile to angels, they say
this game that keeps us alive is hers
golden beetles die for it
of for the love of dust

pastimes of gods its archives
everyday the light tastes differently
the body moves where the mind is
or the other way round
I'll read Cartarescu to you half naked
one page a day

beauty is the quest,
this spiral of wonder
filling up the rest &
my nails

I wonder if He can see you?
Is it all you believed?
Do you know now that
believing is the cracked

cement of your time
here.  It was not new.
Are the streets of gold
and are you walking in a
white gown?

Tomorrow I will write in your
journal of the Jabberwock.
You know him now, the painted
struts of glove and spats.
He tells me stories while your
world ends.

His bandersnatch is not
what you believed. Beware
the marble veins of his
indifference.  He says he will
En garde and you will fail.

You will, to the ground, bleed
in your reminisces, as he
walks into the water to wash
your lies with ***** soap.

Beware the stance of shaking
legs, the bleat of strangled sheep.
He cannot see you in your
personhood for he would
crumble into mad bad shoes
and slither away to your
last poet's rhyme.

Snicker Snack.


Caroline Shank
2.10.2023

some waves just pass through me
I let them touch other surfaces
they got carried away by the breeze
or the lament of seaguls
my architecture or the scripture
no wonder the receptivity
but only if you feel the field
to understand the predator
merge with one
to understand a bird
feel the weightless air
to understand a flower
dream its sensitivity
to understand the ******* of dawn
let yourself be devoured
there is empty space
in the great chain of being
oh, how mimetic everything is
lust doesn't last, it isn't so obvious
nor the craving for shining surfaces
as an empty screaming in raw beats
it tastes like sand in the eyes to me

I can see more and more
the spinning of burned eyes
I won't let myself be
devoured by a false premise
no, no need no worries
beauty is the mother of
the night when
every wall shouts
our name
leave the door open
leave the seduction
to me

let your skin
surrender
to the labyrinth
untranslatable
let me be in love
with the sunstone
you'll find the right
melody
to leave beauty
unharmed

i emulate you
in forms that i can’t have
and find myself in stories of flooding *******
and summertime haste
it’s strange and comforting
that everyone you ever
love becomes a part of
you somehow

Breathtaking beauties, they all are..

Ha.. but They'll cut your ******'  heart out
if you ever turn to face them

Yet even with this  slice-n' diced
brokendown, blood-pump
I can still.. so very much, swear

that every single one of those gorgeous
little sunsabitches, 

    were sent, directly  to me
    by the very hand of God