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Dave Hardin Oct 2016
Brushwork

If I were a jazz pianist I would pay
my dues in one lump sum on a tip
from some country singer on his way

down who gives me the shirt off his back
a Nudie with piping and plenty
of rhinestones that catch the stage

lights just so and sweep in reflection
across the polished planes of my 1890
rosewood Steinway Grand Modal C

a beaut with a pedigree, one I won’t fail
to mention from the stage in the second set
during the pause between How High The Moon

and I Love The Life I Live from behind
a bobbing cigarette, sharing the remarkable
fact that this is the very same piano

Mose Allison played in a two night stand
at the Blue Note in 1962.  Later I’ll work Jimmy
the trumpet player’s name into a tune and trade

winks with the guy on upright bass
the drummer slack jawed oblivious, lost
to us all in some very tasty brushwork.
zebra Oct 2017
Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

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Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

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SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

......................

.
IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
...............
PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

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OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition
Chris Saitta May 2019
Venezia, its musical key of brick and shade
And the canals in rejoining polyphony
Sweeten the dour Church-ear.  
From the impasto knife and loose brushwork,
A thumb-smear of waves and gently-bristled strife
Rise to assumption of the cloud-submerged bay,
Mural of cristallo, only-light without landscape,
Made too from the winds of Murano,
Its clayed blowpipe of waterways molding
The lagoon of blown glass and bouquet of colored sea-shadows.

The Tiber lies on its side, like the lion and fox,
Licking its paws at empire’s dust,
A drifting gaze of water that already foresees
The swift-run northward to Romagna,
Where the veined fur of the roe will succumb…
A ripple twitches like one dark claw of the Borgia…

The watercolors of the Arno are a fresco
On the wet plaster of the lips of Firenze, Tuscan fire-dream.
Or like the warring leg in curve of counterpoise,
Sprung foot-forward to the daring world
And arm slung down in stone-victory
From this valley, too much like Elah,
With taunting eyes turned from the Medici toward Rome.
Titian revolutionized the style of painting that contained no landscape in his "Assumption of the ******" (circa 1515)
"cristallo" is actually a term that means clear glass, or glass without impurities, and was invented around the time of the Renaissance.
"the lion and fox" was a nickname for Cesare Borgia.
"Romagna" was his intended conquest.
"Elah" was the valley where the Israelites camped when David defeated Goliath
Carlo C Gomez Aug 2022
tonight the sky.

dark palette.

the stars are projectors.
the paintings of them are in
perpetual motion,
carry the zero.

conflicted still life.
of spathodea.
of pomegranate.
of her own folded-up *****.

it's all in how you interpret
the brushwork.
girls can tell.

a reassuringly dull sunday
turns to intrigue.
the busy girl buys beauty.

people are places and things.
lost affections in a room
in need of images
or at least explanations.

she looks for it.
she listens for them.

the sound of existing.
the sound of a quiet room.
a rainstorm or possibly the sound
of someone taking a shower.

blind little rain.

autosleeper lowers her head.
the economy of sleep patterns.
and little else celsius.

tonight the sky.

tomorrow a place where
one can ruin oneself,
go mad, or commit a crime
with paint.
annh Sep 2019
Dream your life in watercolours,
Live your life in oils,
Frame your canvases with time and distance;

Hang each by a silver thread,
In a windowed gallery of memories,
Exhibit often and without discrimination;

Celebrate the beauty in your clumsiest brushwork,
Accept the imperfections in your mastery,
Reshape your truths, as light plays and colour transforms.

‘If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.‘
- Émile Zola
Dornish Bastard Aug 2015
In a room full of his art,
He stood as strangers admired.
There was only one subject -
The one woman on his mind.

He'd stopped time to draw her,
Living in that one second for hours or days.
He'd done it so many times
He filled the gallery with paintings of her face.

Iridescent eyes in black and white,
Blonde hair filling the canvas.
He'd seen her from every angle
And what a beautiful sight she was.

Then she was walking through the door,
Moving like air in her red dress.
She exuded the beauty and grace
That his artwork couldn't quite express.

If ever a person came out of a painting,
She was not the one.
No amount of talent and brushwork
Could captivate him like she'd done.

And his eyes did not stray now
As she bridged the space between them.
This meant he had a chance
To try and make things right again.

But he need not have apologized.
She sshed and told him, "It's okay.
This tells me so much more
Than you could ever say."

His paintings of her and only her
Were wherever they landed their eyes,
Save the window where she looked
And said, "It's snowing outside."

"Do you trust me?" he implored.
Curious, she asked, "Why?"
He said, "I need to show you something."
Then he made her close her eyes.

She trusted him - and then froze.
For he'd once again stopped time.
But then he let her into his secret world
And she couldn't believe her eyes.

Everyone they could see was still.
Even the snow floated in midair.
Everything was stopped in that second
And they were the only ones there.

They ran out in the not-falling snow,
Creating outlines with held hands.
He kissed her then, the snow like stars
And they'll decide when that second will end.
I don't know how to punctuate, sorry. But I'd love some feedback. :D

This was the final scene from Cashback, a film released in 2006, I think. I thought I'd write stories I've heard/read/watched before I can even think about writing original ones so this is my attempt.
Travis Green Sep 2021
He is profoundly thought-provoking
Phenomenally potent, talented
A luscious brushwork of bliss
So creatively made and cherishable
A boldly colored landscape of luminosity
A majestic treasure so ready to be opened
Fresh from the garden, a nightfall
Of paradise with streaks of light
From the moonlight streaming
Over his sightliness, essential
Enlivening eyes, fine-looking eyebrows
Like charcoal curves, like an island arc
His lips like a radiant rose quartz crystal
Like cotton candy, such a humblingly
Dream that magnifies in my treasure house
Onoma May 2019
the sky's getting behind

its blue--to terrify itself.

electric, alert and popping.

the trees fizz lime green.

the moon's askant

half-sunk--

the tapered brushwork

of a blown crown.
Orlando Weaver May 2018
The clouds, spreading themselves across the sky
As spontaneous brushstrokes upon the canvas
And the trees, having found reassurance from the evening light
Steady their bows
And reassure the creatures, who now -
String their melodies across the canvas,
Whose eternal patterns appear now -
Not so erratic,
But rather the careful brushwork of some grand design.
And now we wonder - a chapter of the change
"Could there be, after all, one first mover?"
(but without capitals of course).

Now these years of rational thought
Dissolve at the sounds of the soft dusk
And sights that are everything - or nothing at all-
Or the exact words of the Romantics
Whose verses skim across the sky like the clouds themselves-
Or infinite other things.

At this moment
The body, not resentful - but still static
Lets forth instead the mind to project its frame across the sky
And through the white waters - suspended.
Now we wonder "How could there be pain or hate below the clouds - " despite having just read the evening news.
And from the world absorbed, we let forth
An infinite stream of thoughts that unfurl
Across the darkening sky.
C J Baxter Mar 2015
I don't mind hearing voices from time to time, for they keep me company in lonely hours. They never say anything harsh, hate filled or humiliating, they just chatter on while I sit here in silence watching the paint dry- thats not a metaphor or anything, I literally did paint the walls red this morning. I don't think I've don a very good job though, because I see little devils in the sloppy brushwork; They do hurt, throw hate and humiliate me.

I really need to put on a second coat, but I'm tired and the voices aren't telling me to move yet. I'll wait for their command, or for the devils to walk up and off the wall. Oh boy, then I'll have some real company. A crowd some would say.
martin challis Mar 2015
there is an intimacy
that in touching
I cannot touch

your colours linger
after brushwork soft
has long left canvas

your words
dear friends, are never parting
and never held, yet always, always
so deeply felt



MChallis @ 2015
Ayesha Mar 2023
I want to talk to you, now
that the sadness is thickening
in the air, now
that I begin to flee the night

Sombre rue settles, ergot
of rye: i feel a blackened wheat,
I feel contorted,
and worn, crumpled, contaminated
crude

now, I am past again, i am
faint, fossil, begone from the city
I roll in little tremors
through sandpaper streets
a

franctic brushwork of the winds
I am canvas, paint, the face I hate
a feeble cry
of the stray cats in crooks
you

you make me so, so thin
I buzz a wasp in my sleep, i begin
to hate the sleep
I dont... I dont want to sleep
I want to disappear tonight
I want to talk to you
19/03/2023
For... no one in particular
Lillian May Jan 2020
classical pianist,
she's starry-eyed like Starry Night
she's got the aura of oil paints
hands like brushwork
swirling and swishing
eyebrows that twitch with every note
the room lowers by the decibels as she breathes
her heart in perfect pentameter with song
like silk running up along a staircase
sound floating thick and rich
daydreaming
the sounds of purgatory between sleep and awareness
no attention to time or reality
she slips away
oh, that classical pianist.

-LMN
Travis Green Sep 2021
I need a marvelously made man
In my life, someone I can lie next to
My hands clung to his beautifully
Boundless chest, so incredibly caressible
Venerating the vivacious verses
Throughout his spellbinding design

I don’t want to yearn for him
When I have already earned
His open and infinite world
To feel around his strong
Cultured face, treasuring
The brilliant brushwork

His flesh shimmers like gold paint
Like a princess’s gorgeous gown
Like a picturesque, clear blue mountain lake
Beauteous bearded grandness
His lips formed so faultlessly
Every design on the exterior
So extremely sparkling

His eyes are deeply dreamish
Like staring into far-out galaxies
That carry spectacular valuables
His eyelashes magical like pixie wings
His eyebrows soft as a tail feather
His hair shiny and stylishly wavy
His world everything that I deserve
Tao
Li Po bathes his hands
in the Yellow River
-- How the calligrapher
tires of brushwork

Orange Koi nibble my feet
water lilies roil on the pond
-- I will race solo again
to the open wine cave

Wavy mountains push past
the earth's surface
-- Only Tao sustains
the ten thousand things
Anne M May 2020
They saw each other at a holiday party. She’d gone every year with her family, feeling more at home with the adults than in the den of popular peers occupying the pink bedroom. He was a regular on a different schedule. His father was a minister serving hope at the midnight mass, but not that year. So he, his brother who she knew better, and their parents basked in the champagne glow of the Christmas Eve court.

He was still in school. She was in her first capital-j Job. That night, he asked what she loved about it and she talked about pottery, the edges and effort that people put into everyday objects to bring beauty and meaning to the necessary. And he laughed and let her. They exchanged numbers. While he hunted in Texas, he sent a happy new year to her in Chicago. Her ex’s auld lang syne arrived first, but his meant more.

He came to New Orleans for the weekend to see his brother, but spent every wakeful hour with her. They walked and laughed, admiring the butts and brushwork on display at the park museum. When he walked her home at night, she tucked her hand in his elbow and he held it tight.

She got a job interview in Baton Rouge. They met at a coffeehouse after and he followed her to trivia. She moved to Baton Rouge to save money, to give a coworker a new place to live...and to be closer to him, though she wouldn't admit it yet. They had lunch on Valentine’s Day. She made brownies. He paid. No one called it a date. She got the job, put in her notice, and then the job fell away. But her family was there. He was there. A life could still be there for her.  So she went to more interviews and got another job. She got an apartment. They still didn’t go on dates.

She got a boyfriend and her first solo apartment. They talked less for a while. He disappeared into school, she into work. They resurfaced. They met for coffee and went on long walks around the lakes. She made a mistake one night. Not knowing what they could still mean, she left him at a bar and went home with someone else. He forgave her (she thought). They went on walks. He talked about wanting something more. She did too. She didn’t want to be nice, but she hoped she was kind. He made her feel like she was.

For her birthday, she had dinner with friends. He came. When the friends left, he walked her under the overpass to his favorite martini bar. They played at playing pool to a soundtrack of '90s hits. They held decaf in giddy hands and sat in the garden of their coffee shop trying to find stars above the streetlights. He walked her home. It wasn’t a date.

She went to Iceland with her best friend. He told her he’d pick her up. Her flight was delayed. And delayed. And delayed. Wandering the lengths of the Atlanta airport, she gave him an out. When her flight finally landed, her bag wasn’t in sight. And then it was. And he was there when she turned around. She fell into him. He hugged her, drove her home, and made sure there weren’t any monsters hiding under her sink.

He made her feel funny. She mentioned an open mic and let the weeks pass. He remembered the next one, drove her so she couldn’t chicken out, and made her feel like the best person of the night. He recorded her. He called her “the one. The only.”

She felt brighter around him. She liked how she seemed to tuck right into his warm chest when they hugged. They went for dinner and long walks.  They danced and laughed. Nobody called these nights dates.

One year, four months, and nineteen days had passed since they met in the warm glow of that winter evening. She had been offered a job she could care about. In Massachusetts. No one was more excited than he was. He graduated. They went out to celebrate each other, to drink, and to dance. A friend from the open mic asked what they were. Friends(?). The friend asked why. They didn’t know.

That night, he drove her home again. She didn’t get out of the car immediately. He asked.

Why didn’t we?
I was waiting on you..
Well, better late than never.

They kissed.

They both came home that night.

She can’t remember now if it was that night or the next morning, but he gave her a gift she still carries with her. A gift he had carried in his car’s trunk, not knowing how to give. An album she mentioned because it made her feel connected to the grandfather she couldn’t always remember and the father she couldn’t always understand.

They went on dates. For two weeks, they went on many dates.

And then she moved. Like they knew she would. And he thought about moving. And she thought about it too.

He got a job in Baton Rouge. They celebrated. She sent him silly socks. He sent her a blanket poncho.

She called him on her walks home. He woke her up with beautiful messages.

She helped him look for apartments, sending him craigslist ad after ad. He asked if they were places she'd want to spend the night. She couldn't stop smiling that day.

He visited her once. A hot weekend in July spent on the third floor of a New England house with every box fan angled to suit.

She got a job in Vermont.

He was her date to a wedding in their hometown. The flights were too early and she hadn’t planned well. She should’ve flown in the night before. She was exhausted. Not the person she wanted to be. He was ecstatic. She fell asleep with a baby in her lap, but woke up to kiss him good night. He pulled away.

At least, she thought he did.

They went to dinner with her friends before she left. Then they walked around the neighborhood at night. He pushed her on a swing.

She moved. He responded less.

She didn’t wake up to his messages anymore.

She got lonely and started downloading avenues to companionship.

She saw him holding hands with a hotdog in a friend's snapped story.

She deleted snapchat.

She knew he was pulling away. Pushing toward something new.

She clung.

She had never known what they were to each other, but nothing had never seemed possible.

In February, they went for coffee and walked around their lake. He didn't mention the hotdog. She didn't ask.

In April, he told her over a text. She called. He didn’t pick up.

He stopped picking up.

It’ll be three years tomorrow (the day after if you want to get technical) since they found better later.

It’s been over a year since she started considering the never.

She always offered more than she could give. He always gave more than she could offer. Perhaps she could finally give him exactly what he asked. Space.

The album will always have a place on her shelf, though it’s not displayed like it used to be.

She’ll always hope for his reply.

But these days, she thinks three times and doesn’t hit send.
Travis Green Apr 2022
I desire for him to be in my life, to rock my house
Let me taste his soft silky structure
Feel the utter hot lushness of his entrancingly seductive flesh
Bare delectable body hair, sensual seasoned thriller
Flawless marvelous sauciness, brick-solid charming chest
Appealingly long and lissome arms
Remarkable sparkling veins, unconquerable muscular abs
He is my explosive ****** dopeness
So stunningly skilled, blissful, and filled with sensational pleasures

I crave to fold him in my gateway of gayness
Inhale his clean, sweet, and earthy redolence
Let his masculinity dominate my underconsciousness
Lay in his temple of seamlessly swirling and resplendent dreams
Gape at the brilliant gay fireworks igniting
In the impassioned black magical night
Stroke his prodigiously fine-***** body
Observe the firm flawless brushwork of his muscularity
How he takes me into a thousand enchanting nights alive with paradise
Onoma Jun 17
having dealt meditational

applications of paint to the  

foregoing walls of a bedroom.

a more youthy white cracked

open over aging eggshell.

all the same, as if uniformly

sheen.

try as it may, a paint roller leaves

a frumpy stripe from corner to

ceiling.

begging for brushwork.

it's an intimate little chat with

striving perfectibility.

— The End —