"bristlecone" poems
Breathtaking beauty settles before my eye’s
Palpable is this peace in a land where air is thin
While beaming brilliance, lights the skies
Rage is visible in the irate tides
Of the Rocky Mountain rapids crashing by
Breathtaking beauty settles, before my eyes
With a scent of bristlecone pines
Drifting on wistful winds
While beaming brilliance, lights the skies
Over the ridge valleys rest in dark disguise
As shade is thrown down from heavens above
Breathtaking beauty settles, before my eyes
Eager for this moment to last, time I do despise
As stars align in a language read by gods
While beaming brilliance, lights the skies
Omnipotent powers string these patterns
That rest above great valleys in masterpiece
Breathtaking beauty settles, before my eyes
While beaming brilliance, lights the skies
Dec 19, 2015
Dec 19, 2015 at 5:46 PM UTC
The lightning forks forth
Shoots Up north
Like spindly shafts in
Perfect formation.
Strange synchronization
In Martian formalization--
Grasped in nightmarish,
Garish mitts of particular
Deviant sensations...
Little Alice enters her Wonderland,
Not by the rabbit’s hole--
Rather a guillotine’s hand...
Her Wonderland;
This dreamscape quicksand--
With snakes writhing; convulsing on lurid
Inferno bandstands,
Pushing the limits of your understand--
With preposterous and impossible socks;
Technically causing bruising on acid brains.
Meanwhile The Martian walks the streets
Of the Big Apple in
A deep diver’s suit,
Picking along his way, low hanging and
Chromium laden passion fruit...
And Alice, she like what she sees.
She likes the alien’s helicopter breeze--
She’s all about melting clocks draped upon
Bristlecone Pine trees--
And she’s going to fly into the mouth of the
Martian’s galactic lion, and **** on it’s liver.
May 5, 2017
May 5, 2017 at 12:43 AM UTC
potpourri of stale disheveled grasses,
arcane and forbidden mouse holes, and masses
of leprous bristlecone pine, acid atmosphere, of venus.
sweltering, permeates gold, naked, anti-shade crevice;
torn from digested fence to digested fence.
a seething sneer in the canopy, turbid herb scents
(of spring, or morning, or rain, have since
been mumified to accompany summer’s rescindment).
and ground-dwellers, caterwauling, as this eutrophic sea
is the ulcerated stomach of a carnivorous beast.
lust drives the ferocious field,
scorching as automotive steel.
May 13, 2015
May 13, 2015 at 1:51 PM UTC
it was swell to think the city’s smell is less sickening
than the soulless scent of pressing forests of bristlecone pine
fertilized lawns now sterile with nature’s pesticide,
the crystalline flesh of some cold, lonely comet.
the forests silent and silicate as the moon’s lifeless surface
trees packed, cartooned and phobic, like salted fishes hanging
with no throb of night-dwelling insects to hasten dawn’s arrival
no sidewalk nor always-lit subway maw as a means of escape.
cause of death? no depressive episode could match such exposure;
the mood-numbing nocturne of the inaccessible semi-suburbs
marching off between the sentinel forests of the northeast.
Dec 27, 2016
Dec 27, 2016 at 5:58 PM UTC
maybe i got caught up in that rustic
devil-may-care way that you leaned
on any counter, how the hot oil from
your grandmother's pans shot up and
flecked across the posterior of your
hand and you didn't even flinch, just
sort of sighed through your teeth
and how I spent the few seconds after
that wishing I could press myself against
your back because you are so solid.
But I digress, because I've learned that
idolizing people is a mess of self-inflicted
palsies
Nevertheless, my affinity for compounding
problems manifests in my lack of willpower,
in your forearms that are like thick bristlecone pine
branches, dry and scarred with your
obstinance--
and when you would go to wash your
hands, you'd roll your sleeves in
this rough, intensely **** manner
with your hip pushed up against
the lip of my sink, working the
dirt out of your knuckles.
So as you kneaded your fingers
back and forth; your Venke's
pulsing, I found myself to
be too hungry for you,
for this
I've never been around so much
man, so much cord and bark
i've never touched a person and
not felt like I was going to slip
through them like some spectral
being, like their spine would
give way before they bend in
two around my palm, barely
grounded by their own
body weight.
The difference is (was?) that
you feel so full, so stalwart
and
(I got to thinking; maybe I wasn't ready.
Because for all your worth, all your
redeemable qualities, I'd cashed in on
the way you made me feel when
I hadn't for so long and that's not
the way I want to,
Not the way I
Want to
Not the
Way )
Mar 15, 2016
Mar 15, 2016 at 6:36 PM UTC
~_A man travels
from Mindanao to Kyushu and says his inner geography
is enlarged by each new place.
Is it?
Might he not grow more by staring for twenty-four hours
at a single pine needle?_
—Arthur Sze, "Parallax", _Gift of Tongues_
Trees!
written March 22nd, 2021
I know the answer
to the question posed above
is of course the single pine needle
but I am tired of this pine needle
day after day, year after year
this same pine needle.
I am sure if my heart opened enough
this pine needle would teach me the answer
to the question I can't think of
that would make everything ok
but I want to see other trees!
I want to see trees I never imagined
armies of them marching over hills
and also the lone banyan tree in the desert in India.
I want to see the first tree after crossing the ocean
and the last tree before the tundra.
I want to see the Tree of the Year!
every one that is still alive!
and mourn the ones that don't exist anymore.
I want to see the 5000 year old bristlecone pines in California
and visit the seedling I planted in grade school in our backyard.
I want to see the tree of life Yggdrasill
and Anne Frank's chestnut tree in Amsterdam.
I want to see every tree
growing along every fence-line
on every field men have ever plowed.
Only then, maybe, will I be satisfied to return to
this same pine needle.
Mar 23, 2021
Mar 23, 2021 at 6:32 AM UTC