one on the left and one on the right
us little ones in the middle
one on the left
one on the right
like bookends, bookends for me.

one on the left and one on the right
with four little ones in the middle
and i look to my left
and i look to my right
my sisters and i smile and see.

one on the left and one on the right
precious little ones in the middle
one on the left
and one on the right
strong, beautiful bookends for us.

and i hope one day,
when i'm finally a man,
i can be a bookend, too.
i'll be on the left
she'll be on the right
strong, beautiful bookends we'll be.

In between me and you
There are volumes untold
We the bookends
Kept the stories within,
Pop up books
And color by numbers,
There's still crayon splatters
Across the pages,
Folded corners
And still wet edges,
Wilted bookmarks
And underlined sentences,
Highlighted passages  
And crossed out paragraphs,
Pressed in between some layers
Are dry roses and leaves,
Memories that left the letters smeared,
And though our stories may finish
And remain unpublished,
I just want to tell you
Our love was volumes
With no bookends...  
© okpoet

bookends are better than none
everything falls when we add something in
better we find, familiar in kind
than everything falling on end.

Everything falling on end
that's how it goes when we think that we share
something it's not, and all of that rot
better to stack 'em up there.

Better to stack them up there
don't need the floor space and don't even care
from where I am perched, less often besmirched
but I'd rather a bookshelf to share.

I'd rather a bookshelf to share
got plenty of wall space and welcome one there
you can have your own shelves and just keep to ourselves
or mix 'em all in if we dare!

Preface
Life is bookended by nothing.
Grasp what nothing truly means.
Nothing is not another form of something.
Nothing is — nothing.



Where were you long ago?
All that time before a tot.
In some distant god’s château?
No. Not there. You were not.

Perhaps a soul in surplus stock,
A spirit not yet wrought.
Dressed in some heaven’s frock.
No. Not there. You were not.

Then came a twist of fate,
***** and egg were now one.
In this way did they create.
Your life had begun.

So began your book of life,
That in volumes three.
The past, the present,
and the yet to be.

Life is always in the now,
Presents itself as a choice.
Many matters to disavow,
To others, you give a voice.


Life is more than career,
Love is much more dear.
To love another earns its worth,
Makes your mark upon the Earth.

Take the time to stand and stare,
Feel the sun burst in the air.
Enjoy laughs and romance,
Work at love, at every chance.

And when the last word is writ,
There is no more, yet to be.
Life for you did quit,
Not something faced with glee.

At the end, where do you go?
To the place you were taught?
To some distant god’s château?
No. Not there. You are not.

Your Book of Life, a mere spark,
‘Twixt bookends of eternal dark.


This poem is also on Vimeo
Runs 3:39
https://vimeo.com/432650832

just
ordinary friends
or
both of us
only
bookends
nor
we
want to live apart
but
be
together again

It started with a brofist
Interest fenced in
By the facade of indifference
Fueled by pride
And it ended with one.

Do you still remember
When we first met?
Us stealing glances at each other
You gnawing on your nicotine-stained nails
Me soaking in contrived nonchalance
Both of us clouding the air
With the static of bro, man, **** that, dude...
Supremely confident
In our juvenile, preconceived mastery
Of subterfuge.

How idiotic we both looked,
But how wise of us
To stay our hearts and tongues
With the ancient wisdom of abstinence.

You still sitting there
With half a heartful
Of words left unspoken -
Perhaps an apology was in there somewhere -
Staring in barely-concealed disbelief
At my abrupt flight,
I sensed your hesitation
As I waved goodbye
For the final time,
My back to you,
As I disappeared into the night.

Stillness,
Waiting for words to come while you sit still
Wanting the perfect simile
To tell you what you mean to me
But each passion charges right to the end of the pencil,
Breaks and falls off as mumbles
Like the pencil lead that crumbles
Until there's so space on the paper
Just the scars and scribbles
The pencil gives in and sits still

Seeking stillness amidst the busy city circus
It's the end of the longest day
We wait, wordless, wanting not to work
Letting the steady melody of Old Friends
And Bookends lull us,
Lead us, keep the world at bay
I'm mute except for simple words
But holding out for more
Biding time until it feels right
Finding the stillness inside
Stifling the roar
Fighting out a title
Then the page falls to the floor

You smile, say goodnight
Walk off towards the door

Still the pencil sits still
The pencil sits so still

I could use a couple
of bookends to hold up
all these words. They're seams
are unravelling and they're toppling

over onto each other. The pages
are all yellowed and some I fear are
missing altogether. But it would
sure  make a nice presentation to have

them lined up straight,
even if the binding has loosened. And
there seems no use in acquiring such
support that persons easily abort.

**** bookends
**** closure
**** the black and the white

**** the knots
******* neat
Cause that really ain't life

Life's messy
There's dirt
It's not simple and clear

It's the road
It's the journey
And the path you take there

You are my morning coffee
and my fade into dreams.

Agnes McDuff collected strange stuff,
Or so the story goes:

There were old pots and pans,
String, rubber bands,
Boxes and boxes of clothes,
Newspapers, plates,
Books stored in crates,
And candlesticks lined up in rows.
Some mason jars,
Toy trucks and cars,
A model train with a whistle that blows,
Needles and spools,
All kinds of tools,
And shoes with holes in the toes.

There were tables and chairs,
Bookends in pairs,
A grandfather clock that was broke,
An old brass spittoon,
Some Sunday cartoons,
And a bicycle mssing a spoke.
Four or five hundred old wooden blocks,
Twenty-three pair of grey woolen socks,
A Christmas Edition bottle of Coke,
A board game missing directions,
A bat, a ball, a catcher’s mitt, two baseball card collections,
And a great big rusty tuba.  What a joke!

There was other stuff, but you’ve heard enough;
About what was stored in
The Attic of Agnes McDuff.

Part 2
Agnes’ attic was quite special
But not for the things it contained
But for how she had to get there
Please let me explain!

Agnes had a one-story house
A flight of stairs led to the attic.
When she opened up the door,
The light came on automatic.

It opened to a hallway
Where there was another door
Another light, another hall, and more stairs, which
Led back down to the first floor!

Where an elevator waited
To take her up again?
But it had just one button
And it was numbered “10”.

When she pushed it, it was crazy
The elevator turned upon its side,
Grew wheels and drove out on the street
For an amazing ride!

Across a long suspension bridge,
Then underneath a tunnel,
And then it went around and round
Like circling down a funnel!

It dropped upon a railroad track
Hooked onto the caboose
And followed to the roundhouse
Where it finally broke loose.

It turned around a couple times
And ran out toward the street
The elevator ran, of course
Because it had grown two feet!

It ran across an avenue,
Around a lake, and through a park
And then through another tunnel
Where it was very dark.

A mile later it emerged,
At Agnes’ house, by her front door!
The elevator walked inside,
And was on the second floor!!

So that’s how Agnes reached her attic,
Perhaps someday you’ll go there too,
Push the elevator button,
And you’ll find my story’s true!

Part 3
Agnes stood there in her attic
And smiled at all her stuff
That almost ends the story of
The Attic of Agnes McDuff.

But Agnes’ story can never end
Her smile turned to a frown,
Because you see poor Agnes
Forgot how to get back down!!
PwL  May 1, 2015

honesty
honestly, she says
"this [book] has meant so much to me
and it's not like it ends terribly
just not how you would think"

she hands me over Silverstein -
a copy of The Missing Piece
with that note she wrote inside for me


and it ends just like you'd think

Oblivion.
Oblivion
bookends.
Life is what
happens
in between.
Not from
dust to
dust.
Oblivion to
oblivion.
What was
before?
What will
be after?
Oblivion.
Life, but a
placeholder
between.
Light between
darkness.
Life
between oblivions
What to do?
What to say?
How to deal?
Bookends.
Oblivion bookends
cradling light.
Cradling life.
Cradling us.
What to do?
What to do
with this
gift?
Gift of
light and
life.
Make something
happen.
Write.
Draw.
Sing.
Paint.
Create!
Scream.
Let the
Cosmos
know you
existed.
Leave something
behind.
Carve your
name into
the light.
Do not waste
what little
time’s available.
Make a
difference.
Make a
difference
before oblivion
comes.

I wrote a tragedy with my lips
the story of our love
the pages of your hands across my skin
paragraphs of our hidden desire
our stolen kisses written in-between the lines of the public eye
the ******
metaphors to mask our immorality
chapters filled with indiscretions
the leatherbound catastrophe of your infidelity
the bookends were our lips
and between them was the story of our tragic love

Between heaven and earth the ethereal pulse of God's creation
sifting through the soul like a fluttering kite in motion
Here we are in a dwelling place of  quarrel and demolition
only peace can assuage the heart and give it, its contrition
In the middle of war stretched across landscape of your heart
"The Lord's prayer," in a lilting whisper, you got this to an art
Give us today our daily bread and help us to do our part,  
it is only love agape that gives our soul a fresh new start
Connecting spaces of our head-heart connection a mantelpiece  
decorated with meditative awareness and unblinking utter peace
"Lead Us Not Into Temptation" let me decrease as you increase
seed and bloom inside my heart and help me fold this crease
Side by side two strong bookends holding together what rends  
with a soulful melodious vibration, I arrive at every bend  
"May Thy Kingdom Come" and live within me until the very end  
side by side, ... like two old reliable and sturdy, bookends.

I'm disowning my name.
In America, my name is cumbersome
and clumsy
and confusing
so I'm leaving it behind.
See,
my name starts with an S and ends with a Z
and one's a mirror of the other
so they're like bookends
for a collection of letters
that spell a name
that I never really felt belonged to me.
Every morning, when I wake up,
I wriggle into my name
but it doesn't feel quite right.
It's like borrowing your best friend's jeans
even though she's tall and skinny
and you've got a hundred generations of Puertoriqueña swirling around the blood in your hips.
I don't like my name
cause it doesn't diffuse across your lips.
It bursts through your teeth.
It's got a weight on your tongue
that brings down the sound with the weight of
a thousand sinking ships.
I've got a
Hispanic Titanic of a name
but my skin's so white
it seems impolite to claim an ethnicity
that only lends its elasticity
because of my father
and the people that brought him here.
My name is not me.
It never was.
It is an anchor that keeps me on the island of what my family used to be.
I am not a race.
I am not a category next to a box on a sheet of paper.
I am the syncopated heartbeat of a tribal drum.
I am the ****** whisper of water on the sand.
I am the sunburn on the corrugated tin.
I am the hunger in the stomachs of the working poor.
So when I die
let me not be remembered by
fifteen letters I did not choose
seven syllables I did not select
three titles I did not ask for.
Let them tell stories of
what I did
where I went
what I saw
who I loved
the words I spoke
the thoughts I formulated,
ignorant of my race
free of bias and prejudice
and preconceived notions
of what I should have been
because in the end
none of this will matter
I'll have no strength for words
but with a penultimate breath
I'll still be able to smile.

we dig our selves into the hillside

the time you talk about unremembered.

perhaps I was never there

or unaware

so have dug into this hillside

placed tidily in awareness

of all that is happened,

happening

The sound of small plastic wheels
On the ridged metal lip of an escalator
Bookends each trip between home and birthplace.

The first two uptempo, eager
To race to the smell of marble and leather,
Perfectly cooked fish and pastries with blueberries
The next two, piano, as I cross back,
Result of exhaustion, arms full of clothes and sorting small bottles into bags.

But on exit
Not due to vents, air conditioning, or the sensory assault of shopping under halogens,
Home smells of rust.
Of dirt and smoke - burnt.
Home smells more damaged and ****** up than its neighbour
And it's apt position on the map
Behind our back
Peering over the shoulder of the small ursa, overbearing and controlling.

But it's not the smell of burning petrol and tissue in glass,
Nor riot shields and plastic armour,
And only slightly of over emphasis on Northern Irish poetry during exams.

It's the stench of friendships, bouquet of break-ups,
Awkwardness and overconfidence,
Fake tanning and too much tea.

And like bonfires and cigarette smoke,
Burnt wood and tobacco embers,
It's the one perfume I can't get out of my clothes.

the mere bookend soon became the fury of beautiful beginning!

death so small when you
have the world in your lightsome hands.

the way your face crinkles
at the glare of a word's
furious light

and the way your eyes
widen anew like tapestries
and the bird of syllables
stills itself in
the woven shrub. unwrapping with utmost care is your mind's calloused hands, revealing a spar of darkness and light.
unsealing you is your yearning's
fingers, like autumn to snow's enveloped remnant.

oh how the world
sinks in its solitary axis.
oh how the comets intermingle
in orbit, greeting each other
with flamboyant punctuations back to loose fluidity
for us to drink and revel in.

what joy is the sight
of you, reading.
what bliss is the sight of
reading you, as bold as the word
is in sensuous print,
yet shy as a daffodil shivering
in the wind,
unheard of as a hurl of a voice
in the zenith,
trembling in your hands,

the word of the world.

"Time it was,
And what a time
it was
It was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Can you imagine us
Years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy"

I see you hiding beneath
Old shirts and memories
***** jeans and worn-out shoes
That have walked a saddening mile
Weakest armour of cloth
Ripped and torn by cruel adolescence
Cursed with hate or blessed with indifference
I see you in there

Surrounded by toys
Some broken, unneeded
I see you and I know that you want to play with them
But time seems to have withdrawn permission
Or maybe you're frightened
Of how happy they once made you
Reluctantly believing they will never again make you smile or laugh
For they have become little more than fodder for the garbage heap
You find yourself beneath

On the other side of the locked door
I bend to peek through the keyhole
Expecting no more than shadows on the wall
But I see you

I've watched you walk in...
(you didn't know I was there...sorry)
...and it broke my heart
To see how swiftly you ran to the door
To behold the look of relief on your face
That broke up and melted the death mask of grief
Saved by grace
When you stepped in and turned the lock
A beaten veteran getting off a plane, whose salvation is the tarmac beneath him
You kiss the ***** carpet and call this place "home"

"How can a man be born when he is old?
can he enter the second time
into his mother's womb, and be born?"
Behind a locked door
You found the answer
Discerning flesh from flesh and spirit from Spirit
From the crowded confines of  your mother's womb

I wanted so badly to see the look on your face when you emerged
Refreshed and ready to battle demons
Or downcast, crestfallen for another day
It would have been worth the waiting hours to bear witness
To the power of this basement haven
Alas, sleep was not as curious
I could not risk your discovering me
Where I was not meant to be
Fallen from my hands and knees
Best to settle for forbidden glimpses through a keyhole
Best you didn't know I'd stolen a tiny part of your soul

I see you there, hiding from the light
Books on shelves half read or dog-eared to the very ends
A hardback Bible, the binding cracked, it's pages would spill out on the floor if not for your curiosity
66 books held tightly in your grasp to hold them together
In order
Camus, King...Baldwin, Irving...tattered paperback
Koran, Augustine...Srimad Bhagavatam, L. Ron Hubbard...sturdy hardback, spines still cracking
Barnes & Noble books unnaturally pinched between mold smelling garage sale bargains and bulky Salvation Army bookends (Webster's Dictionary, Complete Works of Shakespeare, Bullfinch's Mythology, Asimov's Chronology of Science & Technology...anything thick and sturdy enough to squeeze in a row of lesser volumes)
I see all those books but I don't see you reading them
Still, I don't wonder why they are there

I only wonder of you
Why you lie like a skeleton
Beneath piles of junk

I only wonder how
You find comfort there
And not in the arms of the ones who love you

Preserve our memories!
we have done nothing
to deserve
them.

Bookends with fatty livers and bad backs
squinting at instructions
for another **** fool distraction
and the laughing, thankfully

On the walk, bees, butterflies,
catkin reminders of time and loops
and irregular pooping
as constants

Thankfully, laughing
requires just enough muscles
from those that still work,
but I’ll feel it tomorrow

monday hit you like a stack of bricks. ultimately, she tried to fix you. you probably dated her early on. fists full of highlighters and notebooks left no room for your hand to hold. she was too focused on the future, she forgot about the present. half here, half there, flittering in and out of reality. she made being together feel scheduled. monday drowned you in her sea of checklist bulletpoints.

you can’t remember tuesday all that much. the milky blue of the tattoo on your left knee is all you have left of her. you finger it fondly, a ghost of a memory.

wednesday made you want to change yourself. but you are not play dough, not created to be moulded. she gave you the urge to be someone new. but you lost yourself in her passions. you will never understand wednesday.

thursday got you back on track, but it felt like a routine. surely there’s something more. there were things you loved about thursday, but it felt like you were waiting for something else. you sat on the couch together like bookends, not a pair. thursday was a marionette show, you were run by the strings.

friday was a dream. she was a perfect 10. you felt free with friday. but then friday got a little crazy. you couldn’t keep up with her. carefree nights turned into mornings of advil chased by black coffee. when she snuck under the rusty chain link fence and beckoned for you to follow her to paradise you walked away with a scar from a stray wire. she only gained happy memories. you were sinking in the very tequila shots that made her float.

after you recovered from friday, you met saturday. aren’t we all racing through monday through friday in hopes that we finally meet saturday? saturday was fun. she was different from the others. you fell in love with saturday. but sometimes, saturday doesn’t always work out. you had plans and hopes for saturday, but as you look back and realize, she wasn’t everything you always wanted it to be. saturday broke your heart. but, for every saturday you face, there will be a sunday.

you know when you see sunrise after staying up all night and a feeling of pure serenity washes over you? that’s what it’s like to meet a sunday. you can be yourself around sunday. sunday helps you become a better person. she kisses your scars left from the others. sundays are magical, but they are also human. she will not sit on a pedestal, but sit beside you in the most human form. there will still be bumps on the road, but that road will lead to happiness.

Tangley Wangling

Fruit Jews in Tutus at youth group, maybe just a few with their screws loose. One self-rolling righteous group, their brothers grinning
Within the depths of their white-heads at the brim of a wet blanket suckling the needles catering new drug use. Two by two, elefants and woozels, hippopotamü's confusals, spongey-butts outfitting the rye n' wines refusals.

The luxury of a coccyx felt from the fingers turn to sunrise, where the water's weigh the bricks of suicides, concrete block tourniquets from the migraines of English turnabouts. So there's some surplus of surprise in them, in an integers shock-appraisal face-lift on Catholicism's lobotomy to cuckhold housewives seeking collagen, or the thick dark-skinned forearm-******* insider's swinging in the houses of the denizens, or repurposing their malign from their unused vaginas, to **** the dust off such scab-covered stitches, which is like vacuuming between the loose inner-leg space of a succubus.

Bring out the gimp! Any fetishized leather-wearing hungry miner for the oral tongue-slapping mouth-dance might do, as long as the dom can subdue that sub tied to the stocks voted on for the public to use, there might be screaming, squirming, and scoffs, but there's nothing left for him that Marina Abramowicz hasn't already proven she's willing to lose. Plus, in this small town not far enough from Laramie, there's still too much fat to chew through, too much flab to tuck the **** into, where even the F.U.P.A. so deep that a *******-day or deity might need the leverage of a boot to get even Ron Jeremy's **** unglued.

Lucky loos by the brothel befit these new arrivals, though some tyrannosaurs despise 'em, smoke as much as you can if you've got 'em.

But don't let your antiques get you down, an ornithologist lends herself to your bookends, and even that nighthawk roosting makes your car alarm sound second rate, it's seconds late as the aves rave to the ravens, and they pontificate. Owls hoo-hoo and hooting, branch off with the others and start colluding. They just wanna get you home, to get back those prosthetics you've loaned.

Canoodling barbarians on their way back from the aquarium, demand  their fires come from oblivion, which sends sparks of arguments from the sharks and the bathylkopian oblivions, where we found that this water's warm these citizens, demand recompense for such grandiose living expense, three pence to use the phone, twelve rupees towards the sofa, and even a deutsch mark for every sit or every look at sit, it's just a chair, a doubly set of wooden legs, idling under a table plank. Pirated by the buttocks, such bullocks it is, and that's just it!

An archaeologist on assignment discovered that the future of the rhinoceros exists upon the olfactory exaggerated proboscis, the result of flushing unused anti-biotics, and is currently working for dimes out of college to deluge this quite deprived yet interesting biopic.  

The films of the *****, grab at the ***** thrown about by The Monkees, and the musicians wearing those stickers on their *******, are victim to XXS cotton denim vests, unzipped and barely covering themselves, added to by the accessories and rings, jewelry if anything, a pearl necklace and nubile sacrifis.

And the trollops frolic, diurnally dispose of logic, doing the hoopty-hoop, the alley-oops, with mom's high school flute in nothing but cowboy boots!

These are, the new discoveries of our species, carved into the marble and wet frescos, in the street reliefs, spray-painted and air-brushed motif, this creates such gatherings for throngs of people who've unachieved their needs, who've displaced their parents and display their racist grieving beliefs to trash indigenous language pleas for francophonian linguistic greed that have splayed their hellacious treaty in what's considered to be modern circumscribed and ill-painted cuneiform visually conceived, vocal graffiti.

So that the neu-faux derogatory delegates stress to sudatorium, it has regressed to moratoriums, we've now cancelled this sport consortium of awful and flagrant art performances.

A Winter's moon
silhouettes the pines.
Snowfalls silent tune
as the year unwinds.

Dark Skeleton trees
crowd  the distant shore.
There is a sob in the breeze
as the year is no more.