"cartographer" poems
I don't know how to write happy poems
because I don't really believe in them.
I thought angst would die with adolescence,
but alas I can still feel its cold dint.
Perhaps like virginity this goes too;
no longer a creep standing idly by.
Plastic smiles taped to our cardboard faces
and yours alone I felt the need to prise.
That's okay, because the teenaged rosebud
that we claim to be so very unique
is beginning to wither, can't you see?
And now it's the thorns society seeks.
So look out over yonder cityscape.
Your mask shall be shed only by the moon.
Until then, a cartographer of love;
yours that is, we'll still pathetically swoon.
Dec 25, 2013
Dec 25, 2013 at 10:06 PM UTC
a desire to know
every muscle
governing the movements
in your face
that bring smile
from lapsed synapse
explodes from my meridians
with your name
on the lips of every
captain to my ships
in hopes that my tired thoughts
could find a home
in a harbor not far from your heart
Oct 10, 2013
Oct 10, 2013 at 10:43 PM UTC
Oh, sad Poet,
cartographer
of the heart,
mapping the geography
where sadness
is the topography
of your soul.
Oh, Cousteau
of the changing tides,
like an oceanographer,
an admiral spying
the enemy on the horizon.
Your sorrow comes and goes.
Oh, builder of sad dreams
in your house of many rooms,
but one door. Like a grave,
a casket shellacked with
black paint, a mural
of a shadow on the wall.
Architectural sorrow.
Oh, you sad Poet,
open your eyes,
paint us a poem of a rose.
Oct 20, 2015
Oct 20, 2015 at 7:17 AM UTC
I see the mole.
It lies just south of his petite clavicles,
parenthesizing his fragile neck.
I'd like to find the others.
Moles dotting his figure,
beacons on his frame.
Showing me where to touch.
I'll map them all out,
every last speck.
Just call me the cartographer.
I'll connect the dots, drawing lines,
building routes with my fingertips.
Your body will be mapped like the Silk Road.
But no ideas will be exchanged, nor words spoken.
No empires will be connected across this globe.
Only moles.
Jul 20, 2012
Jul 20, 2012 at 12:40 PM UTC
Knowledge is butterflies in flight.
A doubting caterpillar needs
His faith in metamorphosis.
Without it his future: horror.
Mother gone this way before him.
Father gone before his time here.
The only hope: whispered instinct.
A still sound in the face of fear.
"Those who've gone before me", says he
"Loved me and wanted good for me."
"They willed me to believe in life
Beyond: the metamorphosis."
Every day, eat of leaf. Chew. Rest.
Do not wander ye from safety.
Heed ye these rules, follow the way.
Know ye that our decree's from love.
Brother tells tall tales, adventure
Excitement, a world of wonder
To have now! No waiting, no need
To wait, fear, hope. Enjoy it now!
Brother says: "metamorphosis
Is a tale made by those who want
To control and manipulate.
To keep us from pleasures in life."
Brother says: "The dark chrysalis
Is a grave, death, ending, final.
Now is time to discover.
What tastes good is the true good.
Only now do we have the chance
To learn, explore, see and enjoy."
He's eaten leaves outside the path.
Brother says: "they are juicy good!
Come all, leave this way mapped by those
Who want to keep you from juicy
Leaves and the whole wide world to see"
Brother says. "Don't hope, enjoy now."
Sister left the barque, left the safe
Path to the leaves mapped out by some
Unknown cartographer. Unknown!
She's not back. He hopes for her best.
But our caterpillar here, friend,
Has chosen the old dreams and hope.
To follow the path mapped to leaves
That nourish the body and heart.
He has chosen to believe that
The wisdom of age and instinct
Is more trustworthy than the word
Of youthful brother's juicy world.
His doubts he's cocooned in faith's silk.
These bland leaves he eats for promise
Of sweet flower's nectar beyond.
Today's toil for tomorrow's joy.
Doubt frightens. The chrysalis looms.
No control, nature compels it.
Unfair, afraid, the silk spins tight.
In pain, the world grows dark and still.
He faces his end. He must choose
To listen to the still, small sound.
Have faith he's not schizophrenic.
Believe in more passed the cocoon.
His ancestral council and creed
He chooses to embrace and trust
To face his end with dream and hope.
His doubts cocooned by faith in Love.
Butterflies are knowledge in flight.
For at their end, faith is fulfilled.
These butterflies their joy have reached,
Through faith in metamorphosis.
Jun 25, 2011
Jun 25, 2011 at 9:01 PM UTC
My Lucifer, unwitting Muse, dog-eared Vonnegut,
afrobeatnik third eye, howls escaping
from your headphones, wailing about secrets, about infidelity,
about analyzing life until there ain’t nothin’
left. Then you shuffle by in your black and white Adidas,
hair in twists, wearing the striped sweater
of nihilistic intent, quoting the rants of Holden Caulfield
in your blog like you never didn’t know him.
I never asked to know you, to want who I can’t have
when I can’t even love myself. And every fiber
Of my being yearns for reciprocation. What is there
to return? What is there to feel, you meditate on truth,
fallen angel in the parlor of rebellion, blasphemous goodbye,
bright and morning star simpering like crickets in the palms
of daybreak. Your musicality radiates from subway chatter
and overheard profanity down El Camino Real.
I take in your ballad at my post office mailbox,
in the abandoned echoes of daydream monologues.
You’re a philosopher, exploring theory of mind, a cartographer,
mapping the labyrinth of your deepest desires.
Tell me again about desires, demonstrations of divine sadism. Tell me
about human empathy, the animated faces of wordless expression,
the metaphysics of free will, my beginning and my end,
alpha and omega, my fortress in the land of chic.
Blasphemous hustler, let your idealism simmer, your wit, your mojo,
I come to you an amateur, a neophyte, a lowly scab
in the strike against ignorance. Give me my melody, my song,
my one-hit-wonder of all that is cliché and unknown.
But I can’t be the other woman, your girlfriend, your aspiring
Playboy bunny only 10-bucks-a-throw. Your highness-who-yells-
his-ideas-into-the-ears-of-echoes, your every quirk spellbinds me.
Each day I wake to your entourage vibrato.
I am held captive by your brooding stare, empress of liberal
doves. You visit in my dreams when the sky is a force of darkness
viewing light through peepholes, your flaws an aphrodisiac, a love drug,
a fast hit in the basement from the ecstasy of words.
Aug 1, 2012
Aug 1, 2012 at 5:37 AM UTC
Your name burns
at the base of my stomach,
it tastes like flames
when I say it
but I continue to swallow,
big gulps
that drown out the ringing in my ears
I wonder what it would have felt like
to kiss your lips,
taste the fire in your heart
blood red lust
like innocence dressed in her mother’s lipstick
to trace the outline of your freckles
on soft uncharted skin,
I wonder what it would have felt like
to be your cartographer
to sail the high seas in your iris
and find sand in between my toes
after every visit
I keep imagining the things I would say
if we had met at a different time
I could have started by throwing matches
into your puddles,
and noticing how you smile like sunlight
glinting of the ocean
you are across the world
exploring,
mapping your own skin
and sailing with a crew called options,
they beckon your name
and make you forget that our hands ever brushed,
that we ever exchanged smiles
like two preschoolers
making engagement rings out of fruit loops,
you’re standing tall and brave
shrouded in the peace of letting go
while, I,
wait at the port
for you to return
knowing at the base of my stomach
that you will pass me by on your way home.
“land, ** means refusing to
acknowledge my tedious “hello”
you will step on my apologies
like the creaky old boards of a ship,
and I will become the tide
lapping at your bare feet
Jun 21, 2014
Jun 21, 2014 at 2:17 AM UTC
Mr. Cartographer,
map my smooth, uncharted curves.
Don't dare miss an inch.
Apr 23, 2015
Apr 23, 2015 at 3:17 PM UTC
Hints of maple kiss each of
your highlander grog fingertips.
The smell of her shampoo
pierces & permeates throughout
your living room, lingering still
to this day, on your pillow.
You told her you'd make a perfume
that smells like the car heater on
long drives home for Christmas.
Aromas of her laundry detergent
still live in your spine
like LSD.
When you turn your neck a
certain way you fall back
into trances of her & 1997.
Vick's Vaper Rub, NyQuil
Cough Syrup breath, with
a 104 degree fever. She
sobbed when her last
sea monkey died
You called her cartographer.
Intricate trails of herself connecting
each board of your apartment floor.
Charted long ago when her
candle still burned scents of warmth.
The art of burning,
a front the fire place of
maple logs where you told her
to "Let go."
Jan 9, 2016
Jan 9, 2016 at 2:56 AM UTC
These days have defeated me
The cartographer burned the map meant to take me home
I don't know how I ended up walking in circles
The ground below has a divot where my thoughts have weighed down the soil
I've taken step after step to get where I'm going
The only step left will be the hardest one
I just need to lift my foot off of the ground
To fall
Jan 11, 2013
Jan 11, 2013 at 1:21 PM UTC
dark storms rising
as electricity
crackles up my spine
in ascent of moonspell
as I trip through
my own wires
my inner sense
of flesh
reverberating
in waves of
magnetic fireworks
and suddenly
I am spinning
my fibers
all splayed out
for you to see
a cartographer
of emotion
mapping your veins
and arteries
and we hold citizenship
of a private inner land
a country
that we share
as we into light expand
my inner goddess in tune
with your
molecules and carbon
your cells rushing like
a river
into my estuary
in landscapes of longing
blissfully unaware
but for our souls'
secret language of
pumping blood and fire
from here, it's uncharted
but for the rhythms
of desire
invisible to the naked eye,
we exquisitely penetrate
the surface
descend into the
depths of bones
the most primal core
where lava licks
push spirit's will
straight up to the fore
and I am the spark in
your most opaque rage
ready
to give it up
in dust and magic
as pulmonary exhale
flows the blood
and we dissipate , slowly
into uninhibited flood
Take me apart,
dark love
pulverize my limits
fly with me
to the opposite
of loneliness
where
every
millisecond
breathes
Feb 3, 2017
Feb 3, 2017 at 12:15 AM UTC
In a steady, illiterate static
this room is my study.
And you are my book.
Legs spread 'cross my lap
hands firmly upon my frame.
I lean in to see the words.
Your soft lips graze mine
like branded cattle in a glen.
Wet and cold we sit there.
Then your tongue begins flickering
beguiling like the serpent of Eden.
How could I resist but to bite?
I kiss you sweetly
and you kiss me back.
Minutes pass in the study.
My tongue examines your mouth
like a cartographer mapping a new world.
Each slick and slope is wholly new to me.
Teeth clink like crystal glasses
during a wedding day toast.
Eyes shut tight make the black of mourning.
The noises dribbling from our mouths sound akin
to a murderer tromping through the forest mud.
Shovel dragging hard. ...Plop...Plop...Plop...
Our hands run over each other's bodies
open-palmed like a child examining the globe.
I want to feel you from pole to pole.
I pull back and run my fingers through your hair.
Your color is rushed with red and you wipe saliva from your lips.
Your smile is without flaws, and you taste like ambrosia.
I love being literate.
Mar 9, 2012
Mar 9, 2012 at 9:00 PM UTC
1) Your heart is so entwined into mine that I'm not sure if it hurts you or me when I pry it out with a crowbar and leave it on your windshield.
2) You're letting boys ****** you sweaty in your backseat and I just want anyone to write about me the way all my blank pages scream about you.
3) I've always been one to root for the underdog and baby we're a million to one shot.
4) You're the Dragon and the Damsel and I'm not sure what to do.
5) You're the draft I've been writing on for months. Art is never finished.
6) I'm wicked and I'm proud, just like every fallen angel.
7) That's not a light at the end of the tunnel. It's your eyes and I think I always knew it was.
8) There is no salvation. There is no damnation. There's only you.
9) And I'm sitting outside the Pearly Gates, cigarette perched in my lips like a crow.
10) Or maybe I'm sitting on the bank of the river Styx, I'm not much of a cartographer and Dante doesn't have time for fools like me.
11) My poetry is a lip-synched prayer and my goddess has turned a deaf ear to them.
12) I was replaced by we and me by us and you wonder why I don't know who I am when you're gone.
12b) You wonder why we don't know who we are when you're gone.
Apr 17, 2014
Apr 17, 2014 at 2:15 AM UTC
**This land, where we can roam free
Boundaries have been set up
Mapped by the pen of a cartographer
Continents drifted apart, tectonic shifts
Ripping across the land mass
The mightiest of mountains turned to rubble
Giving rise to new landmarks
The fury spewing fire, the molten lava
Created fissures along the ground
Rivers of fire flowing across the veins of Earth
Resentment of nature marched to new frontiers
Earth transformed itself, to a new avatar
New landscapes and greenery adorned it
In the coronation ceremony of the usurper
Commandeering life - forms to a new future
We are living that dream for centuries
Without an inkling of the next rebellion**
© Amitav (Radiance)
Jun 7, 2014
Jun 7, 2014 at 12:45 AM UTC
Seeing faded memories of faded nights
Lying on faded baby blue sheets
The inoxication of two styrofoam cups
Feeling heavy in hands made of feathers
Eyelids the weight of the world compressing onto cheeksbones dried on tongues of new sneakers
Float away
Away
Away
To a world unknown
The cartographer of your own mind
Pick up the next sip
Let it be your map
The thickness sliding to your stomach
The river to bring you home
Ferryman collects no fair from pain filled travelers
Close your eyes
Let the purple jungles captivate you
Your baby blue eyes are the way home
Call me a runaway
Nov 4, 2013
Nov 4, 2013 at 11:33 PM UTC
If I had a mountain for every time I thought of you
I would have a mountain range twelve times the size of the Andes,
So long it could wrap around the earth twice
And then some.
A lifetime of plate tectonic ruminations,
The lithosphere colliding where I fell in love with you;
That’s what I would have.
And I could spend another lifetime traversing
All of the ridges and the pinnacles and the icefalls of you.
I would reach every summit and look out
Across the endless expanse of you laid out before me,
And it would be the most spectacular view.
As I traveled through my mountain range
I would make a map because, while I don’t particularly mind
Getting lost in the thought of you,
I would like to be able to find my way back to my favorite places.
But like any good cartographer,
I would include copyright traps -- Things that don’t actually exist;
Valleys and cliffs that only I could have projected --
So that no one else could ever duplicate this.
Aug 13, 2013
Aug 13, 2013 at 2:16 AM UTC
Be my muse,
I'll translate you into binary
and back again.
Lying on the ground,
blue carpet between your ears,
synthesized sounds convey through spaghetti,
hearing aides grow old with us.
Child sized vowels fall off their bicycles,
from between your lips.
Keep me busy; when I'm comfortable, I get lazy.
Your shirts are overlaid grids,
the holes, coordinates.
17.43
Always a poet, only occasionally writing,
I hedge my bets and roll die
with insults open to interpretation.
I don't like your words,
I don't need your hyena smiles
I don't want your degrading remarks.
But I know your skeleton,
your tendons, cartilage and marrow filler.
I understand how you move,
the coconut oiling your joints.
Be a textbook reference,
help me cut apart the paperchain people I’ve made,
I want to portray them realistically.
Shade their features with scrawled adjectives,
resolving to care about typography.
White school glue takes too long to dry
to have hopes of staving off entropy.
Scribble highways into dusty prairies,
be the cartographer that misplaces my world.
May 16, 2013
May 16, 2013 at 12:52 PM UTC
I would like to run my five fingertips
all over your carnal curves and contours
in every crevice, crack and concavity
in the vast canyons of your brilliant mind
dive into the ocean of your subconscious
delve into the deep valleys of your psyche
spelunking in the caves of your desires
uncover the ancient arcane secrets
hidden in the space behind your vibrant eyes
let us lay among the old oaks and laugh
arm in arm, soul in soul, floating upon
velvet sunsets on sweetest summer days
until the oceans dry, the ground cracks, and
the sun dies, I will never leave your side.
Dec 17, 2013
Dec 17, 2013 at 4:40 PM UTC
Somewhere along the way the
silver threads that embroider daylight with dreams
have melted, losing architectured edges and I find
these days it's harder to tell whether I'm
even awake at all.
Trance chaos, but curiously calm,
considering and sleepy.
My corridor is long but I
have no reason to hurry.
Broken lamps against the walls
dusty apartments to spiders and fluff.
No lightbulbs.
Only husks of maybe
once upon a time ideals.
There is a familiar light of
gossamer gold murmurs over me
I've been here before and
there isn't much farther left to go.
Incandescent airspace
pulsing like a living heart
rising, ebbing, coaxing me on.
The lamps are a silent vigil to my journey.
Again I am here at my tabula rasa.
The door is laid with bricks, sealed by my own earthly hands
Will not open! Will not open! Un-opening door.
And as far as I've ever come.
Light all around, fleeing from robinred tetris brickwork.
Intimate, tantalizing, maddening
Bone aching Mystery.
Yet. Yet. Yet. Yet. Yet.
I yet.
Yet again.
I am here.
Crossroads. Yield to trains.
There is no last stop until I
play cartographer
and circumnavigate
Wasteland concepts. Swamps of muted wishes.
Until I put my broken lamps back together
I am here.
Wandering,
waiting,
a ghost.
Jan 21, 2012
Jan 21, 2012 at 3:57 PM UTC
i arrived in this world with no map to guide me but the palms of your hands. you let me hold them sometimes, and they’re warm and inviting.
sometimes you make me feel starry-eyed with your words, or at least that’s what you used to do
but i’m waiting for you to send me constellations of goosebumps running down my arms and spine
i will shape myself into an amateur cartographer, and make it an active point to mark places on the map that we’ve been to together, and as i trace my fingers across towns and mountains we’ve yet to cross, a part of me wonders if we’ll even get to any of those destinations
because somehow you’re staggering and i don’t know why or what’s holding you back
still i persist, i yearn for adventure.
i leave the map unfurled and smooth the creases of my sudden remembrance that i came here alone. i made my own decisions and ran into you in the meanwhile.
you too, were a wandering traveler. your feelings as nomadic as your feet on these lands. i wouldn’t call myself foolish to have ever gotten involved, but you are embedded in my memories. a new story for me to flesh out every time someone asks me how i got here or there. i’ll keep meandering from town to town, but no longer will i seek you — you may find me.
i realized this was not your map, but mine.
Apr 25, 2014
Apr 25, 2014 at 2:21 AM UTC
NATO confiscated my calculator as a weapon of math destruction
Or
Matches to a pyrotechnic cartographer are weapons of map destruction
Or
Moth eggs in the wardrobe are weapons of mac destruction
Or
Nuclear bombs used in warfare are weapons of mans destruction
May 15, 2013
May 15, 2013 at 8:02 PM UTC
Silver ribbon Assiniboine
a sash for a city--a Ceinture Fléchée
tied into the Red just off Highway 1
You leak into the topsoil
in the place you call home
and come back up a street map
with fingerprint roads
I remember the way you'd trace these out on my back
with fingertip pencils--cartographer's hands--
Bird's Hill and Lag' and Portage and Corydon
laid 'em down in my veins
just under my skin
Where are you tonight, in your smiling Great City?
Crossing the bridge and inhaling the skyline?
Or walking the river in my iced over thoughts?
Maybe walking, mid-tempo, around KP mall?
Those hipsters in Osborne Village
and Wolsely
had nothing on us, did they?
Cooler than Main
on the 1st of the year
I trickled away
and I leaked into topsoil
enjambed between rhymes in apology poems.
An Irish Goodbye; a blip on the radar
stopped flashing to fade off the map of your streets.
Our voices still echo, our spectres still haunt
Dollaramas and sidewalks, Tim Horton's and pubs
Our hands still lace up--at least so in theory
Perimeter Highway's still traced on my back.
Here's hoping our avenues
meet again soon.
Here's hoping that luck can outrun shortcomings
one more time.
Jul 15, 2014
Jul 15, 2014 at 1:59 PM UTC
I marveled at every sunspot,
every freckle on your naked body.
With my fingers,
I traced them
as though I
were plotting a map,
and I had set a course
which led to your perfection.
Feb 10, 2013
Feb 10, 2013 at 7:47 AM UTC
Your words and eyes
resonate deep within
and set me aquiver.
They set me a task.
At once mellifluous
and sonorous they
tingle from my hair
to my very toes
(and all the mysterious
places of pleasure between).
I have been given
a royal charter
to explore your body.
I imagine my hands
(very willing hands)
gliding over your
callipygous posterior
or your adorable *******
or your ineffable *****
and discovering
new territories
as yet unknown.
I want to fill in all
the blank spaces
on your map.
A cartographer of lust
who will not surrender
until your world is whole
and you are wholly mine.
~mce
May 20, 2015
May 20, 2015 at 12:01 PM UTC
I want you
to be
the only
one
I’ll
ever
fall in love with.
The only one
to know
my
latitudes
and longitudes.
To memorize
my degrees
and geographies.
To
bask near
my
equator.
To
mark
courses
and
journeys
across
my skin
like ships
with sails
made of
your hopes – my love – our dreams.
I want you to
be my North star.
My guiding
force
to see me
safely to
your shores.
I want you
to never
let go.
Like the moon
as the
sun rises
in the
East.
I want
to be
your
Compass Rose.
To be there
when
you loose
direction.
To be
your
anchor.
Your
starting point.
To be something
beautiful
when
the world
has gone
dark and ugly.
Because
you are
all
that
matters.
You are my
Earth.
My map of my world.
The sun I revolve around.
My moon and the stars my fingers trace in the night sky.
The one I love.
And will always love.
Jun 8, 2014
Jun 8, 2014 at 2:57 AM UTC