"canals" poems
For a creation was devised of the purest and simplest elements in life
When the calming and smooth sensation of water caressed your bones, it carved canals of strength along the way
Your skin crawled and crept past your defined chin to bind with its lover
and when the tendon reached the muscle, it fused in an unbreakable relationship
Baby, the sight of your eyes shatters the crystallization of the finest glass
And your voice pierces the night fog leaving a path for only you
The kindness of your heart poured into the rivers to feed oxygen to all of those who depended on it
Your body contains the same carbon that creates sparkling diamonds
The majority of the oxygen is the same element creating tornadoes, or when fused to hydrogen to make a hurricane
Do you see how powerful you are made?
Your soft lips are the same lips that can produce sound in an empty canyon
Your bones are the base of your embrace when you sweep me off my feet
That mind is the exact replica that discovered how to survive the times that were a bigger struggle than planned
Despite all of these acts, how simple or extravagant
You are the perfect arrangement of atoms that hold my hand when I am scared to carry on alone
And the same arrangement of atoms that pull me close and kiss my lips
One might say these actions, however small, have a stronger effect than any hurricane, or tornado, or diamond
For you are a creation devised of the purest and simplest elements in life
And you are completely mine
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 7:21 PM UTC
Give me time to be intimate.
****** myself deep into your thoughts.
Slow grind on your opinions.
Let my tongue pour into your pores.
Nibble on your ear
Light breaths caress your canals.
Euphoric exclamations, you moan.
I press on your frame
Hardening myself to your disagreement
Because bruises only remind you of past occasions
You moisten my hands with your SELF-worth
I fill you with my SELF-esteem.
Pulling on the dreams flowing from your head.
You cringe, nails hanging of the cliffs of my skin
limbs stiffen around our future.
You pull me close
I hear you whispers
While you think them.
You want to avoid
Submitting under,
Moans become muffled
Locked in by your teeth
Biting your lip.
May 15, 2014
May 15, 2014 at 9:38 PM UTC
It’s not that big a surprise
How much I adore Amsterdam
Like immigrants long ago
So welcomed here just as I am
In the historic Lloyd Hotel
To witness a wedding so swell
I’m glad I’m here in Amsterdam
Canals and bikes aplenty
Whizzing past on every street
The Keukenhof gardens amazed
VanGogh’s Museum made me weep
I’m glad I’m here in Amsterdam
We walked for miles & took the train
Our flight home I made not a peep
It must have been that Space Cake
We ate it and went right to sleep
A fond farewell to Amsterdam
Apr 26, 2017
Apr 26, 2017 at 5:49 PM UTC
I'm tested everyday,
Tempted to throw away
The sanity that's kept my mind at bay
If inconveniences are shadows,
then troubles are ink-blotted water
trickling through the canals of my temporal lobes
which causes me to follow
any thoughts of failure instead of success
better to wallow in bed then get dressed
I almost forget that I am blessed.
I aggress the trickling pain
by staring skyward
like a man seeking the opportunity
to fly
soaring above the problems that cloud the eyes
Nov 5, 2012
Nov 5, 2012 at 6:20 PM UTC
The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
****** it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.
11.4k
He misses me still, but that's old news.
He's missed me for so long now - he can do it in his sleep.
He does it while he eats alone at his desk,
while he runs for a train,
while the rain is coming down in sheets.
While a girl takes off her dress and he reaches for her,
his hands hesitate a decimal. He turns off the light,
and misses me.
It grows inside his chest, like a bonsai tree -
something natural but stunted.
Snipped and pruned carefully, but not allowed
to grow outside it's box. Not allowed to put down roots.
He hauled it off, across the sea.
Across China and the Middle East, he misses me.
Half a world apart, in Amsterdam I walk
with my eyes to the ground, all brown and grey.
Thinking of the planes and trains that bore him
away.
This has become second nature for me.
It's midnight in Tokyo, he sits at his desk
in the light from the street
thinking of trees, canals, red bricks, me
and when we sleep, he and I both,
it's with ghosts in the sheets.
Oct 9, 2014
Oct 9, 2014 at 6:16 AM UTC
On a plateau
by the seashore
sits a naked goddess,
a dryad or a naiad--
she laments a soft
song of mechanical
love. Bathing in the
quiet night, the
light, the
diamond-bright
stillness. She looks
at me with sad eyes.
On a conch-shell loveboat
together we sail
through snaky canals
of the heart.
Cool, lapping
water drips
from her long
seaweed hair as she
sings for me--
we go beneath
the sea &
look up at
intangible starfish
that mirror
the stars of the
surface.
Sep 25, 2014
Sep 25, 2014 at 12:17 AM UTC
The right winter
for dope and ice
for walks along the river route
home
The right winter
for arctic pin-prick wind
holes in boots
turquoise dress coat
far too thin
for walks along the river
But The Merrimack couldn’t find her way
when fabric moguls migrated south
Fascinated by nylon nasties
they traded their silks and cottons
for those petro-polyesterdays
While she—
could no more manufacture life
than mint their money
So, they blamed her
Pronounced her—“Dead”
Decried her *****
Now—
She wanders sadly under bridges
stopping to eddy in an overhang of birches
In dank canals, I found her sleeping
angered only at the falls
Poor outcast!
with current edge she splinters light
from cities sadder still
retching her oily stench
past Plum Island
into the sea— into me
What’re a few warm tears
falling from someplace on a bridge
to the icy waters of the Merrimack?
Rivers get lost in the ocean don’t they?
Let them find each other there
Mar 27, 2017
Mar 27, 2017 at 12:49 AM UTC
I am in levels. Past levels. This deep, intrinsic wonderful lost, the lawlessness of its fascinating expenditure of excite. Pushing through the wild and feral snow-dusted plains and timber ridges. Like red-spotted dots breathing through the cylinders called the spine. This descends into a narrow channel of scantly clad greenish scenery in a time-soaked visionary wilderness of snow,
Our crab legs dancing down wiry purple highways, our heads could not even look backwards if we had wanted.
Furious, love-latitudes, stalking breaths thwacking fork-ended tongues into a pinkish knot buried into the first layer of organic membrane on this railway of miniature canals, showing. And their pride snuck into the elbows, shooting down each vertebrae as it stepped with great precision every ledge that the currency emphasized. The raw accumulation of stolen heart-beats rattling between the interstices of new fuel careering these red engines. Crashing with exquisite pleasure into one another.
Apr 26, 2014
Apr 26, 2014 at 4:41 AM UTC
"...a frozen memory, like any photo,
where nothing is missing, not even,
and especially, nothingness..."
-- Julio Cortázar, "Blow Up"
Mirror-mad,
he photographed reflections:
sunstorms in puddles,
cities in canals,
double portraits framed
in sunglasses,
the fat phantoms who dance
on the flanks of cars.
Nothing caught his eye
unless it bent
or glistered
over something else.
He trapped clouds in bottles
the way kids
trap grasshoppers.
Then one misty day
he was stopped
by the windshield.
Behind him,
an avenue of trees,
before him,
the mirror of that scene.
He seemed to enter
what, in fact, he left.
5.8k
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.
May 13, 2019
May 13, 2019 at 10:06 AM UTC
Meandering like its canals
Venetian streets sing underfoot.
Who wore away the stone cobbled streets?
Who walked down to the shore?
Who gazed out at the Adriatic?
Who's dreams were lost in Venice's stream of streets?
Licentious lovers loved in Venice's streets, kissed on her bridges,
Crossed under by gondola and over by foot.
Proposed at the piazza San Marco.
Kissed, while the Grand Canal wound her way down.
Down into the sea,
where the menace that is the world, Venice shuns.
Rialto, Doge, Basilica, St. Marks, pigeons!
All evoke that lagoon city of streets.
Originally refugees, incolae lacunae ("lagoon dwellers")
Venetians, gave not only a place for the dispossessed,
but a place for the world to see, feel and taste.
Art, war, politics, commerce, spice and silk.
Venice with her ribbon of streets, alleyways and bridges
saw the Renaissance, the crusades, and the Black Death.
Glassware, paintings, sculptures, religion, refugees all
synonymous with that floating city.
A city returning to the water she arose from.
Subsiding with grief as she drowns in elegant decay.
Jun 13, 2014
Jun 13, 2014 at 2:56 PM UTC
How long will our bewildered heirs
marooned in possessions not theirs
puzzle at disposing of these three
cunning feignings of hard candy in glass-
the striped little pillowlike mock-sweets,
the flared end-twists as of transparent paper?
No clue will be attached, no trace
of the sunny day of their purchase,
at a glittering shop a few doors
up from Harry's Bar, a disappointing place
for all its testaments from Hemingway.
The Grand Canal was also aglitter
while the lesser canals lay in the shade
like snakes, flicking wet tongues
and gliding to green rendezvous.
The immaculate salesgirl, in her aloof
Italian succulence, sized us up,
a middle-aged American couple,
as unserious shoppers who,
still half jet-lagged, would cling to their lire
in the face of any enchanted vase
or ethereal wineglass that might shatter
in the luggage going home.
Yet we wanted something, something small ....
This? No ... How much is ten thousand? Dizzy,
at last we decided. She wrapped
the three glass candies, the cheapest
items in the shop, with a showy care
worthy of crown jewels-tissue,
tape, and tissue again sprang up
beneath her blood-red fingernails,
plus a jack-in-the-box-shaped paper bag
adorned with harlequin lozenges, sad
though she surely was, on her feet waiting
all day for a wild rich Arab, a compulsive Japanese.
Grazie, signor ... grazie, signora ... ciao.
Nor will our thing-weary heirs decipher
the little repair, the reattached triangle
of glass from the paper-imitating end-twist,
its mending a labor of love in the cellar,
by winter light, by the man of the house,
mixing transparent epoxy and rigging
a clever small clamp as if to keep
intact the time that we, alive,
had spent in the feathery bed
at the Europa e Regina.
4.5k
Obedience,
ECHOING LOUD,
In the hallway,
Of decisions
It's THUMPING,
Like war drums,
In your canals
But, can you HEAR it?
Sep 2, 2015
Sep 2, 2015 at 9:26 AM UTC
"Boy were we wrong! We're the oddball. We're the freaks." --- Dr. Michio Kaku
We looked at trillions of those stars and knew,
that somewhere out there was another Planet Blue.
Those were not canals we saw on Mars;
optical illusions, lensed figment memoirs.
Stare into trillions, space mind overwhelms.
Rimbaud entrapped in countless ethereal realms.
Not the goal of evolution, merely happenstance,
the search for elsewhere leads a merry dance.
Planets a dime a dozen, yet no Goldilocks Zone
produces signals bearing SETI transient tones.
Birds more subtly impact our lives,
than do the aliens our universe provides.
Aug 14, 2018
Aug 14, 2018 at 1:16 AM UTC
We used to go down by the old dock
To wait for the boats to pass by
In Amsterdam's last nook
With our old hand gloves
That kept the last inch of our old selves attached to our bodies
And the air was fresh
Filling our lungs with aromatic daytime
The buildings leaped out of the river
Making the horizon line a thin slip above us
And we came alone
To Amsterdam
To the handsome port here
Just to get some chips in a cone
In the Afternoon when the fog had gone and the cold had warmed
We went for a long walk
Just on our own
Through the city
Along the Canals
My lord It was beautiful to see it all so clearly
The floating tops of great cathedrals
And slanted open top house boats
We even rented out bikes
Saw the streets by night
Felt the chilly winds return
But in bed felt the warm ironed sheets beneath us
And we came once a year
To Amsterdam
To The constricted Canals
Just to get some chips in a Cone
But we did go home of course
Well you did
I though, never left those days we spent
In the golden light of the canal-side winter markets
You moved on and called it a thing that we used to do when we were young
When we had more time than sense
I still remember it as if it was yesterday
Us in a peddle boat
Passing the Frank's old place
With that love of the past
And of just silence
And we came with each other
To Amsterdam
To the storm of riverside cyclists
Just to get some chips in a cone
I'll never forget them
Those chips in a cone we had
At least seven times a trip
We'd go up to the stand by the canal
And not worry about our health for once
This was more important
It was the chips in a cone that brought us together
And the taste of such a simple thing still makes me smile
I remember the last and final time we went
Just before we had our first son
It was the night before we left
And I went up to the woman in the chip in a cone stand
One more order
One last chips in a cone
It was all I had come for
So simple but such a milestone
The end to my youth
And we left with each other
From Amsterdam
With a lot more than we brought
Forgetting to finish our chips in a cone
Jul 2, 2014
Jul 2, 2014 at 8:27 PM UTC
It is early.
and the world hangs silent, but the birds chirping their chime,
An angelic choir of vibratos
And tenor beaks
humming sweet
to the early tangerine crest of sun
slivers a powerful bar of light over the peaks
to a newly brilliant horizon.
Sweeping the dredges of darkness away
as the stars fade
like coal dust
back again, packed into their cupboard of night
one by one,
lanterns snuffed and sent
into the vibrating blue
as if the whole sky should erupt into fire
azure, hallowed morning pyre
Encircled by the gradient hues
of coral pink and castille yellow
Mediterranean teal
A symphonic
cacophonic
**** of birth
Good Day, Sweet mother earth.
Squeezed through the valleys
canals
allies
every nook and forlorn cranny
kissed with her blissful photonic army
And the infantile creatures cry with glee.
The dewdrops clutch the blades
the tender palasade
of petals
remembering their darkened escapades
slipping tender rain
to feed the dirt,
the lonely detritus
elixirs of the lovely night.
And the world bursts into a veritable
kaleidoscope of life
With a trillion pairs of eyes
accessing the mother dream
Aug 8, 2018
Aug 8, 2018 at 2:48 AM UTC
ᗩIᑎᕼᗩᖇᗩ
~ ⚪♫⚪ ~
"And people say that the Palace is
the heart," Lyn murmurs, looking
around the town. "The heart of
Aurelinaea truly beats within the
town."
~ ⚪♫⚪ ~
"Quite so, My Lady." Esshi nods in
agreement. It rings true; Aurelinaea
Palace rests and grows out of the heart
of the large island. It is even whispered
that there are secret passageways long
lost, that only the royal family know.
The towns are pulsing with the lives
of hundreds of thousands. From the
Palace, there is one street, a vein,
thick and wide, that leads down to
different parts of town.
~ ⚪♫⚪ ~
And like a heart, one vein connects
to many; thick and thin, wide and
narrow; several pathway, with
and without wooden fences, are
made of three colours; red stones,
yellow stones and green stones.
~ ⚪♫⚪ ~
All of them are winding around,
leading to several coloured houses,
gardens, markets, docks, grand
angel fountains that rests upon the
mosaics, bridges and the canals.
~ ⚪♫⚪ ~
The air is full of many smells, perfumes
and fresh flowers, fresh cakes, cookies and
breads, fresh produce and fish, fresh cut
grass and the sea. Smiths hammers away
at their swords and armour, people laugh,
children run and play around, cats meow,
dogs barks, seagulls cry and people laugh,
sing, talk and eat as they sail on the canals.
Sep 23, 2018
Sep 23, 2018 at 4:28 PM UTC
I am on a journey
and where it leads, I do not know
the bends and twists within my soul
leave my words and deeds feeling hollow
Am I the man I reflect
or a monster laying in wait
conflicting reports have come
and the doubt never abates
I try so hard to
be the best I know how to be
childish remnants stripped away
I'm left to navigate these canals of misery
Am I victim or villain
a product of an earlier fate
or is that just an excuse to unleash the demons
and become the thing I truly hate
this battle never ends....
Oct 19, 2014
Oct 19, 2014 at 4:58 PM UTC
Venice is cyan
in the soft, early morning
The canals look clean
Oct 29, 2016
Oct 29, 2016 at 10:19 PM UTC
Jupiter Mars P Moon
VENEZIA, "May" 19"th", 1910.
Jupiter's foursquare blaze of gold and blue
Rides on the moon, a lilac conch of pearl,
As if the dread god, charioted anew
Came conquering, his amazing disk awhirl
To war down all the stars. I see him through
The hair of this mine own Italian girl,
Adela
That bends her face on mine in the gondola!
There is scarce a breath of wind on the lagoon.
Life is absorbed in its beatitude,
A meditative mage beneath the moon
Ah! should we come, a delicate interlude,
To Campo Santo that, this night of June,
Heals for awhile the immitigable feud?
Adela!
Your breath ruffles my soul in the gondola!
Through maze on maze of silent waterways,
Guarded by lightless sentinel palaces,
We glide; the soft plash of the oar, that sways
Our life, like love does, laps --- no softer seas
Swoon in the ***** of Pacific bays!
We are in tune with the infinite ecstasies,
Adela!
Sway with me, sway with me in the gondola!
They hold us in, these tangled sepulchres
That guard such ghostly life. They tower above
Our passage like the cliffs of death. There stirs
No angel from the pinnacles thereof.
All broods, all breeds. But immanent as Hers
That reigns is this most silent crown of love
Adela
That broods on me, and is I, in the gondola.
They twist, they twine, these white and black canals,
Now stark with lamplight, now a reach of Styx.
Even as out love - raging wild animals
Suddenly hoisted on the crucifix
To radiate seraphic coronals,
Flowers, flowers - O let our light and darkness mix,
Adela,
Goddess and beast with me in the gondola!
Come! though your hair be a cascade of fire,
Your lips twin snakes, your tongue the lightning flash,
Your teeth God's grip on life, your face His lyre,
Your eyes His stars - come, let our Venus lash
Our bodies with the whips of Her desire.
Your bed's the world, your body the world-ash,
Adela!
Shall I give the word to the man of the gondola?
3.4k
I smash open my skull and pry apart my frontal lobe ,
so I could forget how your smile made me felt.
I pull my teeth out with a pair of rusty pliers,
to make me forget the taste your tongue left me.
I tear my fingernails off and replace them with sharpened glass between the ripped flesh,
to forget the tender sweet touch from your hands.
I gorge my eyes out,
so I can forget how you used to look as you slept.
I stab my ear canals with scissors,
to forget the sound of you laughing.
I plug my nose up with mothballs,
so I forget how your clothes smelt when I wore them.
I peel off my skin piece by piece
to forget how soft your skin was.
I can’t forget.
Oct 20, 2014
Oct 20, 2014 at 8:08 PM UTC
The first in hale,
deep as the waters
that are now absorbing me.
Expanding my lungs
making room for the breeze
carrying with it opportunities.
Tingling my nostrils
that are like the canals
connecting to newborn perspectives.
A balloon ready to burst,
the clock stops ticking
I hold in this wave of awareness.
As still as the bridges I intend to cross
in that moment
I forget myself
and locate who I am,
simultaneously.
Exhaling all the storm clouds
that were filling my brain,
creating a galaxy of possibilities.
My shoulders releasing the tension
excited to take on new weights.
Repetitive in this breath
for the first time feeling
alive.
Dec 21, 2014
Dec 21, 2014 at 8:49 PM UTC
my body is a topic that trails the mouths of a family at dinner
it is the trail of saliva that leaves shortly after breaking a heated kiss
always leaving a bitter taste
but when did you taste me?
when did I crawl into your mouth full of cavities?
existing as I am cements chains in people's root canals
a topic for discussion
my life to debate
trans people being the forefront
it is so inconvenient and sinful
and yet its the flavor on their seething lips
kissing one another trailing more saliva
knowingly trading hate with ones mind and lips
integrating more citizens and normalizing their behavior
transphobia is the topic for discussion
Jun 18, 2021
Jun 18, 2021 at 1:25 AM UTC
I can't quite wrap it around my head
**** polishing hobgoblin
Gobbling hot fudge banana split sundaes
topped with ***** cherry toppings
What I'm looking for
Just on the tip of my tongue
Just the tip
I can almost put my finger in it
*On it
Oops!
A slip of the lips
Verbally retching
Wretched word *****
Armed with an armada of double entendres
Sensationally double penetrating your ear canals!
Jan 17, 2014
Jan 17, 2014 at 7:57 PM UTC