"crosslegged" poems
Rich, red raspberries in your palm,
rolled there from a damp paper towel as you sit
crosslegged on hardwood floor,
perfect posture,
head leaned against the lowest of the barres in the studio.
Your shoulder blades shift and
your collarbones gleam with perspiration.
Down the wall, another girl savors every drop of an orange.
Through the wall we hear an instructor yelling
and slipping into strings of Spanish curses.
You lean your head on to my shoulder wearing a new shade of lip stain: raspberry romance.
I bite into my bell pepper like an apple and
try not to breathe too loud.
Sep 19, 2015
Sep 19, 2015 at 12:38 AM UTC
---
the Man
sat crosslegged
on a mat of
green reeds
the woman
gulped and
wept as she
broke the
beautiful bottle
and poured out the
oil of spikenard
(worth a year's wages)
onto the head
of the Man
grumbling from
the thief as he
saw the chance
for his fortune
running
down
the
beard
of
the
Man
he
valued
less
than
dust
but i set
these words
down in
rememberance
of this deed
for her
she valued Him
more than
her most prized
possession
more than her
own temple of flesh
she had perfumed
and so
she
prepared
the
Man
for
leaving
His
own.
in DEATH
soulsurvivor
(C) 8/17/2015
Aug 17, 2015
Aug 17, 2015 at 2:02 PM UTC
like the time i walked a mile
to her house with no shoes on
she was waiting with a bowl of cold water
the pavement was wet with heat
twenty nine **** cigarettes on the teenage balcony
trying to hit the neighbors house with spit
or ash because they
never really liked us, distractedly stroking the dog’s back in
every crosslegged seventeen year old
too hot to breathe sticking minute
the bathtub is overflowing because
i’m talking on the phone
ghosts slip on the stairs
i’m needlessly concerned with everything, with
victory, drooling blood all over the bathroom
i get in trouble for the things i do with my boyfriend
in the 35 thousand dollar swimming pool
and in the foyer of the two million dollar home
that i’ve been ******* around in since 1995
distractedly mouthing words every crosslegged
fourteen year old minute, we are both
licking our lips
looking at all the cars in the driveway i’m
somewhat tired of gentle eye makeup remover
the classic morning lens flare in the guest bedroom
artifacts gathering light instead of dust, it’s all
growing white through the glass blocks, carefully installed
wary of “architectural importance”
(the cars in the driveway are all
just people looking)
i’m pooling in this glass
and all over the walls like a thrown egg
i can’t help but kneel here
and keep my face turned up,
licking up sweat, waiting for the fever to break
when the tornado comes we’re pressed
together in the safe room
where the house is the most dark
if you look outside, you can see owls
and where the turtles were buried
the swimming pool
the gasping fingers clenching
the high water pressure-
do you know what i’m talking about?
Apr 7, 2013
Apr 7, 2013 at 8:39 PM UTC
There were people in every room
Inthe hallway
In the street
There was no where safe
No escape
No secret harbour
Nothing
Eventually he found an alleyway
Wonderfully empty
Until he noticed the human canvas
Sitting crosslegged in the corner
That's the day he painted his first masterpiece
Thats the day that he met me
Jul 26, 2021
Jul 26, 2021 at 4:43 AM UTC
if it were left up to me
this whole poem could be worshiping
the shiny puddle of silver light the stars stained
onto your heaving collarbone when
we made love & connected souls first
under the third eye pyramid tapestry then
on a rough bed of flat canyon orange dirt
in summertime georgia
but it's not & can't ever be
because people don't know you
like i do for example they aren't aware
that you dance with a summer breeze
like the lighthearted yellow butterfly
i can never catch in a net or
that you're the reason
i became a writer to begin with
they probably aren't prone
to remember the october morning
you found me huddled just before dawn
in a half-lit safeway parking lot
burning my clothes & yellow wooden pencils for fuel
chewing the pink bubblegum erasers or when
you said i have a beautiful pristine voice &
i melted giddy into your wet violet
hair as the wind whipped it
i was around nine & in the third grade
so i sat patiently crosslegged & camouflaged
a lizard with my tongue out savoring
that moment like an unexpected
rainshower in the pre-puberty desert
listening to the rhythms of your salty blood
pump waves of breath out of your lungs
& they still don't know about
later on when i was walking home
shoulder bones barreled against the long fog
you picked me up again in the
immaculate rust wagon your brother left the keys in
you bought me firewood at a gas station got me
happy drunk on hot kisses & so paranoid ******
listening to thin lizzy on tape in your garage
you laughed hyena hard
when i asked you to marry me
that starless purple night on your daddy's farm
& so did he but he never really said no
& neither did your eyes they just glistened
like they were floating in olive oil as
you ascended the stairs to your bedroom alone
covered in magic enormous light
Aug 27, 2015
Aug 27, 2015 at 12:48 PM UTC
Lonely the night
He enters !
He shall
NOT
return
••
The RED of his blood
Mingles with the BLACK coldness
••
The eyes of the sterile
Break
__
(The womb of the lonely girl)
---
Dissolves
Fades
Is completely gone!
••••••
Die and be reborn
•••••
Be very careful!
No mistakes!
•
SUICIDE!
( you Are NOT
Your BODY
NOT
Your MIND
••••
YOU MUST **** THE "SEED!"
•••••
It's simple
Just don't breathe!
YOU CAN'T!
/--/
Very interesting
Very interesting indeed!
••••
The yogi in the hills
Sitting crosslegged
WHAT IS HE DOING?
••
Die and be reborn
BE VERY CAREFUL!
VERY VERY CAREFUL!!
--
(no Mistakes!)
Sep 16, 2013
Sep 16, 2013 at 4:54 PM UTC
The colors grow dim with the night
And the light of day will fade.
Sitting crosslegged on a stump
I bid my farewell with a wave.
My palm is hollow for yours;
There's a stump by my side.
My partner, how you wandered –
You wavered into a lie.
How I wish I could revive
The connection we shared, my dear,
And how, you'd never wave goodbye–
For you promised to stay near.
Jan 28, 2011
Jan 28, 2011 at 12:12 PM UTC
A vinyl record makes the rounds, dust attached loose to the needle, imperceptibly
breaking
off
making
short
homes
for each
molecule
in each
black
groove.
Your hurricane breath will send them subatomic-
Superdomeward on your next mad quest
to convince your girlfriend that you are neat&clean.;
You sit crosslegged, Buddha on the brain,
corporation on the docket.
Which
one
do
you
dream
of?
And more importantly,
which
one
should
you
dream
for?
The twenty in your pocket will get you one-fifth of a silver ring
or five turkey sandwiches.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too”—it wasn’t Buddha who said that, but
it’s Buddha’s smiling voice in which you hear it now, between your ears.
“What the **** does that mean, Buddha?” you sigh, and there is no answer.
You move, and move, and you keep on moving. You leave a little molecule
on the subway, and on the bar, and on the sidewalk without feeling it, losing them to
short
homes
vulnerable.
The hurricane breath or the sunshine or the invisible rubber glove of
Buddha, or Carl Solomon, or Walter Cronkite or God or whoever does the universe’s spring cleaning
will send them subatomic-Superdomeward
and you’ll never even know you missed them.
Your girlfriend thinks it’s realcool you have a record player,
but it’s a little dusty, she says.
You touch her lower back and smile. You get eye-level with the needle,
and you blow.
Jun 20, 2013
Jun 20, 2013 at 11:39 PM UTC
The friendship isn't glitter and gold
It's not fairytale happiness
Not all the time
Wasn't built on a happy-ever-after foundation
It's real and genuine
It's two-peas-in-a-pod
It's all confessions about crushes
Confessions about first loves
Confessions about almost loves
And broken unions and never-was ones
Our soul-baring crying over the phone
Crosslegged, seated on the floor of a Barnes&Noble
Temporary residents of the poetry aisle
Readings of Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav, and the classic poets
Literature bonding
Bonding through the smell of books
Hours long conversations
Our friendship evolves, shifts, and strengthens through the seasons
And I expect..
The malleability will change and harden overtime
Harden like steel, solidify like obsidian stone.
Our friendship is weathered storms
Hurricane hearts turned
Temperate climates
A calm sea
A blue cloudless sky
Jan 11, 2018
Jan 11, 2018 at 3:32 PM UTC
crosslegged on a bed. i’ve caught myself capable of great thoughts in this position, but today it’s my place to heal. i can feel a pressure, almost like the fist of a hand against my lower chest... right where my rib cage ends and my vulnerable spot begins. where my emotions spread first. i tighten up in my attempt to best protect it. and breathe as my thoughts reach it. “a waste.”
a fear
a lie
i hear daily. but no matter how it stings I’ll listen. so I can/it can heal. our darkest corners need comfort too.
Mar 23, 2018
Mar 23, 2018 at 12:39 AM UTC
When it was all over, we sat in the San Gabriel
and washed ourselves like crocodiles.
We had lived in a world of sweat.
We joked as an old tire floated by
that it wouldn’t be long until we spotted
the rest of the car.
We watched the ants at their little work,
their little loads, and
being good, we did not interrupt them.
A big dumb foot lands in your way
you drop a leaf from your mandibles
and you can’t bear to pick it up again.
I had to become something to carry us.
Something strong. Something stone.
I crouched under my task and the sun beat upon me,
until I was small, like they were.
I was splitting firewood with
a dull, cheap axe. You spun
beneath an umbrella and asked me
to join you. I wanted to ask,
is life better when the hand you hold
holds yours back.
I wanted to look up and see you spinning,
but could not lift my gaze from the ground.
Cold front. Warm front.
Mercury in retrograde.
If I knew the words once to say it
I do not know them now.
I wished I could hear the birds
like you did. I wanted evidence but also
wanted song. You sat crosslegged
while I looked in the manual.
The red breast you took to mean “heart”
I took to mean “dying”
so I sketched his little face in soundless rictus.
while you closed your eyes entirely and listened.
I carried the wood behind you while
you shone a flashlight ahead.
You whistled a little birdsong.
I dreamed that I could spin you forever and never get tired.
Jan 13, 2017
Jan 13, 2017 at 10:00 PM UTC
I close my eyes and feel the sun come untucked from the clouds,
bleeding blood orange through my eyelids.
No one really knows you and I the way we know our footsteps,
coming home across wood floors late at night.
The way we used to sit on windowsills,
or crosslegged across from one another on your bed.
Our arms sank into the crevices of one another,
I wanted to feel the weight of you to crush me,
if only just to feel the peace of the street.
May 26, 2017
May 26, 2017 at 4:06 PM UTC
i picture you reading this
sitting crosslegged
can almost hear your voice
caress the words
with your soft thought
with your soft eyes
were it to be
that i could be there
and ask of you
your true thought
ask of you for your unabashed view
that i could beg to understand
this human condition
for you see i have not known such as you
i have been denied
and i would surrender all that i am
all that i have
to know your mind
to know the tenderness of your heart
release me from this existence
this diabolical snare from which i am unable to escape
for it is the simple knowledge
of you
that is true freedom
but its more
it is all i have left
Sep 30, 2013
Sep 30, 2013 at 5:34 AM UTC
spiral days running around more spiral days
we sit crosslegged, barefoot in that circle to
carefree blaze and look to each other to
find our own happy place
lost in that intensity haze
all of us so good in our blissful laze
don't start counting these numbered summer days
cause we're still basking in the sun
we're still holding onto our gun
we still don't need no one
in our blissful laze, in those spiral days,
yeah we're still clinging to our
shading ways, those pretty shading
ways we used to count the lemon streaks
in each other's hair
to fight the summer sun against the spring's in heated compare
those pretty shading ways i got a call and a compliment in
and if this was a door then yes i'm gonna go in
good, they're finally meeting
that squint in your eyes is agreeing to the greeting
yes say aye to aye, eye to eye, eyes to eyes
God, it's lovely, yes, it's a lovely surprise
and you look so hard at me before you finally say
i love the way i love the way
your eyes droop
like a palm that could form a fruit
you're weird, you know
yes i know, yes i know
don't you worry you say
i love the shimmer i love the glow
and your eyes are perfect mirrors
color pouring all the sourness clear if there was any
all the sweetness clear if there was any
all the bitterness clear if there was any
and when i looked at you back with that face you knew what i knew
and so thank you
Aug 25, 2016
Aug 25, 2016 at 9:28 PM UTC
Some hours later, night having fallen over Lisboa, It was Clara who sat in the loveseat while Ta'ra was asleep. Simon kept graveyard hours, partly from work, partly from an ingrained watchfulness that only ever left him in the small hours before dawn. So it was a usual occurrence for the two woman to sleep and wake and find him still active and awake, cooking or writing or at work, sometimes just staring aimlessly at the skyline of the Almafa. Clara was speaking of her loves and loyalties to him, no guitar for her though. Her gifts were the brush and her voice, both of which had always held a power over men. Her life had been one of passions only half felt, half lived, an object to be possessed by those she enraptured with a whisper in the ear or a sketch on a napkin.
"You speak of passion with such...disdain. As if it's something one could do without and be better off..." He looked up at her from the tile floor of the balcony where he was sitting crosslegged like some aesthetic. She smiled her full, rich smile down at him and then turned away, knowing this was a man she had tried to conquer, and failed. She had known he couldn't be swayed the way most were the first night in Tangier while waiting for the ferry. It had been her intention to barter passage from him for what most men think of as passion. Instead he brought them both to his apartment here as roommates, gotten papers for them, helped them start a life that wasn't that of a hunted thing. "Passion is a weakness that brings us away from ourselves, and presents us to someone else's lusts and wants and needs. In the end, we give all we have, and are emptied of life," she whispered, more to herself than Simon. He sighed as one who isn't sure whether he should speak or not. "You say that, and yet I'm attracted to that word, its implications, its many meanings to us. What you think of as passion is so different from what I think of it as, or Ta'ra for that matter." Clara gave a sharp ha! as response, as if she could divine something we mortals were ignorant of. "Isn't that what you two share," he asked, "passionate love? For eachothers' bodies? Your souls? I hear the two of you, envy it sometimes you know. I haven't been lost within someone completely like that in a very long time." Turning back and staring at him hard before speaking, she slowly and precisely told him that he would never understand what that really was between the two women, because he was a man.
Mar 14, 2014
Mar 14, 2014 at 3:35 AM UTC
True hacks and phonies all around, speaking through their ivory horns of pure disgust and wallowing in incompetence, ******* and kissing and mishandling their newborn children which they name in propriety and for the pearls of God that allow them to **** and **** well. I will blast them all to the deepest of hell for there they belong with me and they will be outrightly ****** by the sojourning sheiks that give their sufferers a razor-tipped ******** that they know they deserve. Where is your relatable, so enjoyable, three or four piece family TV meal that you so deeply craved after a long day at work? It is gone gone gone and now you are subject to your deepest incongruities with yourself, how dare you be such a bother and how dare you believe in your ability to inspire. If you are not feeling this frustration of never ceaselessly being able to grasp at the story that lies within the easel of the juices of your soul, then you are not- and never will be- worth anything more than some broken throbbing piece of genitalia that seethes and suckles at the broken fallacies of pure love and distraught youth. You do not know and you will never know, and if you dare you will never truly make progress for you are a vacuous, insufferable, erratic dame that is not a good piece of skin so much as you are the perfect tool for everyone: a loudspeaker stripped naked and bare for all the world to **** a true contributor, unlike your deepest and most esteemed of peers. Aww, how does that feel? How does it feel to finally implode from your own vicarious and hollow attempts at wisdom and knowledge? What’s left to be learned has been learned, don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? Don’t you think it’s time to stop digging your ***** ***** nails into that rusted cloud of old hope and forgiveness? Everyone has left, and that is what we must deal with. You must be some mongrel to sit down like an unrepentant dog. Cross-legged and all.
Nov 30, 2019
Nov 30, 2019 at 6:35 PM UTC
twas seven twenty
on a thursday night
ma was in the ground
pa was inside
and i
was sitting crosslegged
sipping dark chardonnay
with a dead fly
in it
feeling high on fumes of
citronella candles
while the horizon
turned to rust
and huckleberry stains
and so did my feet
and the dirt smelled the same
come to think of it
but i didn't see nothing
i'd already seen it all
that's how i
broke out
of the hoosegow
that's why i'm
freer than the flies
that can't bother me
(i never saw a ****** thing)
Apr 7, 2018
Apr 7, 2018 at 10:06 PM UTC
.
Soft is the caul of breaths that seethe,
Loosed in the ears knowing
And light is held as a knife is sheathed,
Hard at the breaks reckoning.
Ebbing crawls in old cradles outset,
Clutched promises engulfing,
Death is a toll which gathers at sunset,
Ending seeps seaward in chills.
Listen for moon as it sails into lime,
Digging lost trails for journey,
Smell the salts as the sands run time,
Boarding penny barks turning.
Black birds soon flutter at drips window,
When dark winds cry crosslegged,
Lightless wings whisper— lit knowings,
Wraiths tapping three score and ten.
.
May 5, 2020
May 5, 2020 at 12:43 AM UTC
two sheets of paper--eighteen digits total
the first on blank printers paper
torn in a vaguely state like shape
kentucky maybe
pencil lines describing nine numbers
scrawled
that paper dropped in my lap
as i sat on the floor
crosslegged
drawing in hand
confusion in mind
a sly smile and shuffling feet under baggy jeans
carry the boy away
the second on lined paper
torn by shaking hands from philosophy notes
nine numbers copied with a borrowed pink pen
and a name below.
that paper placed on my desk
with a hasty whispered sentence
a kind of reverse suicide note
a hope at life he wanted to share with me
with someone he thought cared about his epiphany
his oversized sweatshirt and damp eyes
follow his flashing soul out of the classroom
Oct 17, 2017
Oct 17, 2017 at 1:01 AM UTC
Why did not you
cross the black river
and remained innocent?
Unhealed, failed inside, broken and honest?
You won the race,
the space, the heaven.
Moving away to the farthest blackness.
Your god sits crosslegged, clotting.
Brown hands on white shoulders, boneless
move in circle. Deportation
of words opens the green wounds.
Birds carry the snow on the wings.
I was confused, wanted to love
my broken vowels, for absolute you and me.
The baby face pops up again
in my perfection, speechless.
Nov 16, 2017
Nov 16, 2017 at 10:48 PM UTC