"appendages" poems
Gold crown of Olympus, hair crown and
Skin gown. First we throw our bodies at
One another. Heaping piles of human soup.
Bold maneuvers, hands and mouths and
Boy meets girl lying down, on top, intertwined.
Skittish moves on a tryst. Wet fingers of freshly
Tendered infinite decibel pleasure screams.
Streamers above a long rooting movement.
Overture of Aphrodite. Sparkling, glitter woman,
Legs pressed tightly to the chest,
Loose appendages intertwined. Intersticed dactyls
In rapture, soothing. Bodies build to one heart's beat.
Two muses fused together. If I wasn't afraid I'd wake you up
I'd slip on my shoes and make a tropical fruit fondue.
Stage two:
Ice cream lover's delight. Opus to brown sugar.
To swimming again, a pursed lurking of lips
In the academy of the pastoral commonwealth.
We eat at our stations of the sublime. Today which was
A day of discord- you nursed me back to the land of the living.
Stage three:
***
Stage four.
***
Stage five:
As we earn our pageantry to take
Stride on this Earth, and string a
Great bow of eager success among all of us,
You, me, them. While I continue to
Gaze at you. If not dinner, perhaps a
Cup of tea instead.
May 17, 2014
May 17, 2014 at 4:35 AM UTC
A fleshy thing—
warm blood and organs
and cells and appendages
and mitochondria with cells
who have cells who have cells.
The introduction of a touch—
a soft, palpable meeting—
moved me and made me.
A union of dissimilar atoms
is moved as the object nears the skin.
And when the two meet, to tell
what happens next is to tell
of the long history
between one thing and another.
A fleshy thing—
warm blood and organs
and something else too:
many dissimilar atoms
that could laugh and play with you.
Apr 19, 2013
Apr 19, 2013 at 9:58 AM UTC
They were like two satellites,
Orbiting the same heavenly body.
The perpetual rhythm of the universe,
Always moving forward.
Black holes in the back of their minds,
Far off, yet consuming.
Invisible appendages, pulling at the surface.
Dark forces reeling them in,
Gently
Deep craters gouged their exterior.
Ages of abuse yielded hardened hollows.
One more revolution.
How long until the inward force is too much to bear?
A rogue nebula.
An imploded core...
One more revolution.
Nov 18, 2015
Nov 18, 2015 at 1:16 AM UTC
At the money table, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac,
And neither one cares how you’ll pay as long as it is not a check,
Brassy appendages obversely curl to abruptly angular truncated legs-upon-his-lek,
And the proof of who he represents hangs weightily about his Plouton neck,
See the cotton-wafer stacks shuffled as bricks in rows to the translucent deck,
The waiver now giving its woe whence once wished-for upon the Great Molech?
Mr. crooked hook-nose at his compose will take on any bet,
As Sheol will have it, many lament, being in his debt,
A Canaan cursed and tribal descendant, the relative of Set.
For with misery and suffering well you get what you beget!
Jun 14, 2016
Jun 14, 2016 at 3:42 PM UTC
The shoreline bites at the toes of attendees,
watching the little appendages curl up together.
The footprints there have been etched into fossils,
the sand crunching together and sounding like
echoes of war cries and whispered endearments.
The raft is loaded. The time is traced.
A caterpillar in a chrysalis hums a love song,
glows with the light of ‘vita vita vita’ as
the gathering crowds taste dead languages.
Children eat from lunch boxes carved with runes.
Sometimes a glipse of twenty years is caught,
a journal is forced open by the wind; it’s pages
creak, the voices from the world's coffins
that have been wrenched open start a hymn
and the songs pile up in our ears as dust.
Those who are do not mourn titter respectfully
as men in white coats try to push the raft
into the water, but you were so lovably stubborn.
You always returned and even here you knew it;
your final laugh was filtered through sign language.
I step forward and push, float you off into
the water, put my fingers over the candle and
over the lips of dead kings as masses shoot the sky.
The match roars and your raft gasps as it burns,
old things being laid to rest and new ones kindling.
Sep 26, 2013
Sep 26, 2013 at 6:28 PM UTC
So many days now,
hush,
I hardly remember.
The scarce tones
sung so swiftly
from my sweet love.
Her thin waist about my elbow,
her thighs
pressed beneath my chin.
So softly how I once caressed
the thin and delicate neck,
and stroked so gently
the cords of her being.
Those are days long gone.
My fingers now,
curled with the stiffness of age,
are innate appendages,
restages
of their former days,
now limp with the ravages of time.
May 13, 2011
May 13, 2011 at 8:43 AM UTC
Nostalgia
is a poor excuse
for ignorance
yet it pervades
with a tenacity
stemming from fabricated desire
for the smell of ****
we're told
is roses
and it's blasphemous
to question potential "isms"
lurking behind the veil
of Saturday morning cartoons
and black and white family sitcoms.
Yet by the time the sonic *** organs
have lain into us with repressed emotion,
the holy spirit has spilled its ***** in the dirt
to traverse onward floating apparition
out of the room and down the hall
closer towards progress.
and we are left reeling
stumbling into the hallway
buttoning our blouses
and yanking at our zippers
wondering what could cause
such great haste
and we follow blindly
in the wake of the first high
or we turn backwards
and plunge into fading bricolage
as a means to cope
with the rapid and fleeting ***********
of the electric eye
in its shape-shifting pylons and appendages
getting smaller in the naked eye
and gargantuan in the mind.
Clutching our *******
in great amorous heaves
of lust
or donning our father's clothes
in a mask of artifice
and enlightened cultural pretension.
Moaning for the days of youth a week ago,
the epoch squeezed in the space between thumbs,
looking for treasures in the trash
craving something tangible
in an increasingly intangible world.
The semblance of touch lost on a generation
who knows only of emotion through hieroglyphics
and never through direct sensation.
So we dig through the toy boxes
and leave Generation X puzzled
as we dig into their records
in Guns n Roses T-shirts
and high waisted jeans.
We're just looking for an immaculate conception of something palpable.
Oct 25, 2016
Oct 25, 2016 at 10:26 AM UTC
Wicked nether-land. Nether world, white, askance. Capitulating mangroves, verdant trees spliced with hyperbole, onomatopoeia, and manilla envelopes; her world is stuffed with secrets, she listens to gorillas cracking mussels a kilometer away, near a rill. Never she thought. Nothing that could provide....providence. Mangled heliographs sprayed all over the everywhereworld.
"Don't be S.A.F.E.," she whispered. A bouquet of gorse, cistus, and pimpernels squished in her small fingers. She climbed her way through the pedimented stairway, then collapsing on the porch. Legs spent, and spread out upon the desiccate grayed four by four planks of the portico.
And as time elapses, the shuttering shake of the hemlock, which writhes through her skinny nimble dactyls, upwards straining the heart as its toxic bends appendages- crisp cerise lumens bend on the Titanium White walls, where only shadows bend time. The hour, still nine. Every adornment, furnished with red and its hues. Not purple, periwinkle, or any masked enhancement.
These are the symbols that reticulate splines, that curve temperatures, perverse hemispheres and debunk worlds. Upped antes, verbs that terns flirt worth, birth words. Ooh. Aah. Camera. The forest wraps her in its verdant pasture, where at last the moribund tamarisks disperse.
While at the plateau she is quiet and longing. Arms astride, dangling. Vaunt with highs and bliss- a kiss of withstanding pleasure serves her the cure for a lifetime of whining. This, yesterday where her body rattled through crooked vines. Square ships toasting her vocal melancholy in the sweet-waters of Time. So that all of her ripened limbs could grow, no more sheepishly than the magic she knew as a child. Stress free. First among the Earth-words, verbed-up and made jealous by pronouns that encompassed her joy-brimming hide. Closing down her voice and hugging her from behind.
Apr 26, 2014
Apr 26, 2014 at 4:44 AM UTC
there is a spider crawling up my back
sending bite-sized shivers as he climbs up ascending vertebra
i think of you and he makes his way to my thighs
spilling rose hips perfume
medecine of angels
the drowning ache
the tingling between my toes
delirious drool language not meant for you to hear but meant for me to answer
Trembling
beneath this tiny mess of appendages and swoony eyes
i can see your mass traveling through each season
your soft tufts donning golden shimmers then glimmering at the dusk of white
but i knew you when the bees knew warmth
spitfire busy buzzing sweet melodies to the open flower fields
but i knew you when your bones kissed your skin too tight
before falling renewal and peachy light
spiders making their homes in unfamiliar hiding places
crawling hyperbolic
a silly old mess
May 30, 2014
May 30, 2014 at 10:46 AM UTC
You are the razor's glistening edge.
Slits across fingertips.
Yes, there will be bloodshed.
Blood from tips to wrists dripping and spilling from my veins.
It is not poetic.
So I'll clean up my own mess.
No nerves left to damage with the memory of you hardened, turned to stone,
stored in nails and soft hairs.
Locked away. No key in sight.
I have tried to unfurl these fists,
only to fumble around with the essence, the innocence, of lovers after.
These hands are cracked, wrinkled,
disintegrating.
Their untold stories turned to dust.
My palms no longer hold signs of a future.
They can do nothing.
Paralyzed by your pride.
Paralyzed by your edge.
Glistening.
A razor's edge.
Jan 7, 2015
Jan 7, 2015 at 10:56 PM UTC
Black lagoon brain pools,
Drown me in our retrograde...
Long and tactful tentacles ...
To catch my anatomical....
Retracting my soul from your memory tubes.
Painting our moments in shades of black.
Disappearing phantom laughs...
And lucid nightmares follow me to sleep.
Ghostly appendages wrapping me tight.
Ensnared by his tragical hold,
Farewell snap shots are never enough.
Goodnight static dream tracer.
Your everywhere is no where now.
Oct 23, 2012
Oct 23, 2012 at 4:50 PM UTC
Demon from Depressed Depths
Horror lurking in the murk, squirting myself through liquid nightmares, paranormal animal portrait
The walls of my bedroom are black, the ceiling navy, ****** sun above me winks in mockery
My friends are few in this frozen almost-society; I wander the briny fog in boredom, purposeless
Eyes swollen from swimming, swallowing so much salt: dehydrated underwater, skin pasty and ill
I hide from starving sharks and their terrible tiny teeth, but duel the diving whale: he I can drown
I can ***** forth literature; the pens of Whitman and Carroll were filled from my blackened innards
From fingertip to toetip I am nearly biggest, in a world without fingers or toes, primitive appendages
I am all knowing: I commune with the dead: I can operate a Ouija board alone with all these arms
I was killed off by Tennyson after just 14 lines, but Lovecraft made me what I am: heathen deity
Wonderful creature, yet I find myself here: battered next to chips in a polystyrene tray: Beach food
Apr 24, 2013
Apr 24, 2013 at 4:10 PM UTC
My friends and I
are forlorn fabrics
haphazardly stitched into a quilt.
Comprised of different textures and fabrics,
frayed at the ends,
rejected pieces meant for the trash,
not good enough for made-to-wear mall clothes.
My friends and I
fit like a puzzle
consisting of pieces from various other puzzles--
found under coffee tables,
between couch cushions,
tossed into the bowels of forlorn toy bins--
forming a collage of something
disoriented and ambiguous.
Crammed together,
smashing our appendages,
leaving crooked gaps,
wrinkled, torn, ****** up,
but feeling better here
than in our small contribution
to the bland image of our factory's design.
My friends and I,
outcasts, rejects, punks,
convening in the junkyard heap
where we dance and laugh among trash
that makes us feel clean.
Pure when we're filthy.
Quilts and puzzles,
to instill and befuddle;
****** treasures.
Oct 12, 2016
Oct 12, 2016 at 11:53 PM UTC
We've taken you from your home. Lush in line, your twins and elders, taken.
You lost connection to the Nexus, put on display with porous candied paper messengers and the consumers of blood, perched from the ceiling by invisible lineage.
We have taken you. We're sorry. We lament. We trade small goods to take you, but its easy.
We take the tools too. The serration, the sadism, newspaper mat lobotomy.
We lament. We are sorry.
We lament and cut sad faces. We cut the undead that spawn from the soil and ****** your innards into the hot room. We are sorry. We too spawn from soil. You feel you've lost connection to the Nexus- with the stringy appendages of chilled gore.
We've taken your insides and given you a new face.
We are sorry.
Oct 1, 2015
Oct 1, 2015 at 2:25 PM UTC
It's cranberry sauce
That’s it, I’ve done it
My brain is mush
Heartbeat through a megaphone
I’m pulling on my pant legs
Tightening my veins around my bones
& I think the thermometer in my brain needs reprogrammed
I. Now I’m a cozy embryo
With cotton in my marrow
Last of my breed so the bad men can’t see me
I’m sitting here in my own bullet train
Flying through metro lights at night
With coruscating sodium vapor
Vibrating in my peripheries
My appendages do not exist
II. We are the carbon monoxide leak
We are the cold coaxing hypothermia
Still trying to define the agony of existence
& Beauty of meaning through definition
III. “If you don’t get old, you die”
Shut up & pay your taxes old man
I can stay young for as long as I want
I am healthy
I am eternal
I’ve got all the cotton in the world
IV. I wonder if all sentient life deals
With the same paranoia as humans do
It’s the reason we never shut up
& hold love for vague idols
V. I like smiles
& I like sadness
VI. What does loneliness see when it chases its
Shadow?
You’ve got a mouse in your hand that cannot know that you are
Sentient.
You are a wooden giant from outer space that burned upon
Entry.
Where does apathy sleep when it has had too much to
Eat?
Why can’t you see your house from three million miles
Away?
If you need help breathing then you deserve to die in
Appalachia.
If I lie here long enough under enough blankets, then
I'm not real
Is it possible to save up enough money to avoid humans
Altogether?
Just like that, the spiral ceases
We were packed
Like sardines
Wrapped in butcher paper
Blind night vision
Then deer in headlights
Kissing the pavement
Mutually requited
Uninterest
Jan 25, 2013
Jan 25, 2013 at 12:41 PM UTC
mass chaos,
violence,
anger,
brotherhood.
it starts
like a fire,
slow,
smoldering.
the noise is
unbelievable;
it echoes
through our
skulls
and makes
our bodies
rattle and
ring with
its invasive
presence.
we stand,
heads moving
in time,
and we
enjoy.
we.
they stand
together in
front of us,
elevated,
worshipped.
but soon,
the leader
uses his
slurred,
raucous
cries to
welcome
the
ferocious
spectacle.
the hurling
masses,
we oblige.
the crowd
opens,
and with
no regard,
limbs fly
about like
blades on a
helicopter;
heads
shake and
roll,
and we
throw
ourselves
into the pit
of trembling
appendages.
bodies collide,
sweat glistens,
and we laugh,
together.
we ****
without
***********
we share
without
conversation,
we injure
without
ambition.
our barbarism
is ******
and we have
no concern.
Apr 23, 2012
Apr 23, 2012 at 12:56 AM UTC
My existence hunches on the surge of homeostasis,
Peeking through botany and paralyzed life.
These skeletons are coated with flesh, fluid, and cells,
An integument the size of my being in spitting distance,
Admitting natural flaws with debeaked drains and
Demonstrating actual emotion with rearranging face.
Narrow wings without sails are flapping noodled,
Desperately escaping living reality into paradise
In the black eyes which can travel with no hesitation,
Development always unfulfilled at clipped appendages.
An ordinary watcher devours the ghost souls in limbo;
Gravity allows a wallflower to soar away through diverse emptiness.
Oct 27, 2014
Oct 27, 2014 at 2:43 AM UTC
Dinosaur bones, discovered under an overturned rock. Dust-covered and forgotten photos in the attic. The rug pulled out from under us. Highway patrol of a distant creature. I woke up on the wrong side of a very terrible generation. Just when I thought all was good, it wasn’t. Giant ego ruined their reputation. Lost on the beaten path. My faith smells like ***** dishes. Heroes come and go; villains will always be. Dramatization of the fire. It’s up, up and away with a feeling of mutilated pasts. A young woman in a bad man’s dream. Keep a cool head while we enter the jungle. Booby-trapped instincts. This plan was doomed from the start. Let’s go back while we still have two of our appendages. The dog stares at the door, waiting for a Drunk. We both drink, but we’re not arrogant ****** The love I have for a friend of true nature. What’s that in the shadow of the empire? A rebellion. Smoke out the rat. The back door is a fire lane. A simply-put puzzle. Razorblade Cake-Mix. The sound scared the children. Candy from a stranger, candy from a friend, both will likely **** you in the terms of very end. I’ll stand on the first fallen soldier. He doesn’t know me in the meantime. A happy face for all those once told to forget it. My dignity in a department store lost-and-found. Jump for joy, parade for unemployed. A long line of henchmen waiting to be sidekicks. Watch where your education gets you when us dropouts change our pace. You’re better than no one, we’re better than no one, but we faced the facts about this a long time ago. Convincing isn’t working. A dark hole in the bottom of the bird-feeder. No more nourishment for your ill-advised brain.
Apr 8, 2012
Apr 8, 2012 at 6:17 PM UTC
I've waged my wars.
My spear is broken, my sword it dull and my shield lay in ruins at my side.
I'm caked in blood and dirt and the sweat running into my eyes stings almost as much as knowing that if returned to the ship and sailed home, no feast would await me.
There is no port teaming with people to welcome my ship back to dock, there's is only empty pastures and silent days.
My appendages are numb and the only thing that keeps me fighting is the hope that someone will **** me
Drive your sword through my chest and peirce a lung.
Let me choke on every breath and feel the sting of my sins
I know I've killed so many while carrying no banner
I have no tribe
I have no village
I have no home
Just the burning pain of the blade in my side, and deaths sweet whisper in my ear
I'm ready
Place me on my sheild, burn my corpse, I don't care
I've fought for too long, I just didn't think it would be my sword that felled me
Apr 17, 2017
Apr 17, 2017 at 10:01 PM UTC
At trees reunited or the Great Timber-yard in the sky
There are certain branches
who remember the incisions made
to fell their growth.
spurts & seasons,
and the wind rustling
through imagined leaves of
appendages long gone
All the gunge
symptomatic of sap coagulated
won't replace the
holes in the sky
© Copyright David Bosworth August 2013
Aug 24, 2013
Aug 24, 2013 at 7:42 PM UTC
My feet what can I say, well they're not the bravest
little things, not small but average I think.
well I put them out the sheets and what did they
do scurry back in was it cold was it warm, who knows?
All I know is that it was pitch black darker inside than
outside because stars twinkle down little light bulbs
of above slightly lighting things gently down below.
My feet what can I say, that flat foot that wanders
wherever it goes I don't know, my body just follows
those ten little digits and the flat palm of my feet.
I am but a traveller on this journey they don't mind
when it's light, this is their favourite time. But a "BOO,
and I'm standing there while my feet are running away
In to the horizon and then I follow in the distance.
My feet what can I say, they're not the bravest of appendages,
When they get spooked they run a mile in under a minute.
But the only problem is what are they connected to when
they leave. "I'm like I be back in a whileeeeeee!!!,
I'm out of breath but there on the spot jogging up and down
and for what a sneeze a shout and then there out. I put my
hands on my knees to keep them eased, to the spot they must
stay I look down and i know that they want to walk, run off again.
I can't blame it, just on the palms of my feet those dam digits
they have their own thoughts. Like a centipede they linger in
the thought of moving where I want to stand in a static form.
But we think we are in control but look below it's those appendages.
Mar 16, 2016
Mar 16, 2016 at 9:16 AM UTC
Teaching me the correct way to make
a paper airplane. He took me to his bindery.
The machine beats bustled and roared and shook
the unruffled metal walls that made me feel
like I was sleeping in the middle of a dragon’s
den, its snoring breaths protecting me
from fathers who didn't know how to be fathers.
I just finished losing all my teeth,
the new ones growing in at different speeds,
my front two like frozen stalactites from different
ice ages. My hair was banana yellow blonde and I liked
to compare myself to a younger Britney Spears.
A potential avalanche of paper next to the metal walls,
vexed by one deep exhale and the pieces
would go up and around like dandelion parts.
My father, forever bound to binding the parts together.
He brought me a single sheet and began twisting and folding.
I always hated him for his genes, for having a Russian
heritage that made me annoyed at the klutzy appendages we shared.
Is it funny that I lie and say I'm Welsh?
It's not funny that I can remember every detail of his over-sized,
meaty hands, how he kept that silly ring on his finger,
the graying knuckle hairs peeking out:
free me!
Not to say I think about him every time I make a paper airplane,
but not to say I don't.
Nov 7, 2012
Nov 7, 2012 at 5:09 PM UTC
The spirals swirl
not one the same
for every finger
and every name.
Identity
in skin and lines
on appendages
that reach and pine
to belong
in a crowded world
where hands break
and fingers curl.
Deliver me
from this rusted space.
Take my soul,
leave not a trace.
Purgatory?
Heaven? Hell?
They're all the same.
Can't you tell?
The world will turn
even when we're gone.
The moon will rise
just as the sun.
Our fingerprints
will disappear.
Flesh and blood
crimson to clear,
just as this
the world will fade
from dust to dust,
the one fair trade.
Take not then
this life for death
take instead
my gentle breath.
Teach me then
to breath deep and long
to fill my lungs
and make them strong,
to brush my fingers
on another's tips
and learn to love
by touching lips;
for when I die
and lifeless lay
upon the ground,
no words to say,
at least then
I'll have lived a life.
I'd have learned to love
through pain and strife.
Oct 13, 2014
Oct 13, 2014 at 1:31 AM UTC
struck by lightning twice by twenty-four
this astronomical record was hers, Guinness proclaimed,
this lady so famed, top of her class at Stanford, then Yale Med,
and blissfully wed, to a surgeon who always came in second
this did not matter at Cabo, or even in their first condo
but as her curriculum vitae grew faster than a Walmart receipt
on Black Friday, he scrubbed up for one bloodletting after another, removing appendixes, and appendages, feeling her shadow
grow heavy, even in the bright lights
of his operating theater
his first was, of course, a nurse, though at least her age
his second, a decade newer model, fixed his lattes at Starbucks
number three was the neighbor with whom they shared
nothing but a fence, and a few awkward stares
her hours in the lab with petri dishes grew, and
she never let on she knew, that her clean shaven number two
was lying with others to stand himself
when he asked for a divorce--number four requiring more
than liquid exchanges in sweet hotel suites--she acquiesced and even let him have the Welsh Corgi, the cabin in Aspen,
and half the 401K
to this day, she recalls imagining his liaisons
while she married menacing molecules to one another
in tubes under faithful light, seeking answers to questions
asked by the dying she would never meet
a lump would only grow in her throat
if she thought his scalpel never sliced
the heart of number four, for five
Jan 26, 2015
Jan 26, 2015 at 10:49 AM UTC