"cufflink" poems
'bury me,' i say, 'god,
stop choking, ******* bury me,'
lay me to rest with the other dead things in the garden
i spit in the ground to make it special
i want you to eat me
i want a lot of things
(i want you to eat me,
among other things
like the dead bodies sewn into my ribs,
and the carcass at your feet--i
want you to eat me, and enjoy it)
i taste like royalty
are you satisfied?
are you satisfied?
are you satisfied?
im still awake after all this time,holy and undead
(or just unholy and dead;but
what i meant to say was,
'i still love you')
today i will tear my stockings
i don't want a dead lover i just want to be dead
this time tomorrow i will have forgotten, i swear, or i promise, or something
god you're beautiful
and other sentiments
(are you satisfied?
are you satisfied?
are you satisfied?
why the **** are you here
you're not special
its ok, i scratched out my own eyes years ago)
god you're beautiful when you're dead
and other sentiments
im not a corpse im a cufflink
another one for the tally mark sweethearts
and the milk carton crying downstairs
i tell you i feel fine but im still drooling
it doesn't change anything
i say, 'i wanna bleed out'
and you say, 'i love you too,' and you stab me in the jugular
Nov 11, 2014
Nov 11, 2014 at 8:56 PM UTC
Getting to a 4
After the dinner of rising losses,
in the bedroom, where open finds shut, shut
finds open, a sprawled business shirt crosses
the flowered spread. Its armless sleeve in the rut
between two pillow with matching bolsters.
A sole cufflink, like a dignified mourner,
ignored the calls of a telephonic pollster.
Its brother is abandoned in the corner,
by the shoe boxes arrayed in columns
of flats, high heels and sneakers for the gym;
sneakers worn down by her vow given solemnly:
“If I lose weight, I won’t mind losing him.”
In her closet, pantsuits size 8, size 6 size 4
And tiny cut-offs hanging from the door.
Marc Tretin
Mar 4, 2014
Mar 4, 2014 at 10:43 PM UTC
well, you never swipe across to get a smilie and a
equator all at the same time, do you?
unless you’re chiseling the hunger
for a sir lancelot affection in
ordinance affirmed in cataract contrast:
usurper of the empire neglected,
by hanging ha ha!
also termed hong kong... labour government victory
was the preferred choice in terms of what
the queen would have ate had she ate charles i’s head first;
hey... we’re being invocative of the victorian gentleman
being the necessity of attire in what’s defined as asia
content to be europe given england be iceland...
and europe be content with northern africa as sanded plateau:
if england take ben nevis to errupt in hawaii,
and call it the utmost height of clustering & suffocation;
i'll call something else something else, and not
chanel la manche, the english cufflink, rather than sleeve attaché ruban:
oi v. ode of pauper's elephant trombone impression in #a
of the carving of celestial globes alongside orbits
into the pythagorean universe: triangularly stanced exempt.
Nov 28, 2015
Nov 28, 2015 at 12:12 AM UTC
Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago
for two friends
Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.
A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.
Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.
For generations the seasons in darkness slept,
Since neither love nor life were free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world sighs
The old world sighed in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascended, pushed the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.
And now golden sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.
The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring fragments of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.
For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over her wide lands high church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s eternal now.
Dec 10, 2017
Dec 10, 2017 at 4:48 PM UTC
Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago
for two comrades
Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.
A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.
Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.
For generations the seasons in darkness slept,
Since neither love nor life were free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world sighs
The old world sighed in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascended, pushed the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.
And now golden sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.
The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring fragments of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.
For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over her wide lands high church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s eternal now.
Nov 13, 2016
Nov 13, 2016 at 7:26 PM UTC
9/30/2014
Manhattan, new york city, new york
you got to wonder
September saturday nights
walking down church street.
the man on his smoke break
gives me a smile on the corner of 9:30
at night and i return it even though it
isn't wise because
it seems kind,
a smile i’d like to get to know better.
in the taxi
i think uninspired thoughts,
running along the sidewalk’s lining
sidewalks i’ll probably never walk on
and this is when i realize
Manhattan is a small island.
back on the train
i think that monday mornings wouldn’t
be so bad if I lived in Manhattan
crosby street or wall,
but then i think of all the
manhattan schoolkids
that seem like they know everything
and i think: do I really want to?
back in Princeton
i think that i am bored
and i realize far too much has changed
from april,
the raw essence still the same
seeping at the core of the stem, however
and i accidentally step on an ivy league
cufflink. I think to myself
i probably wouldn’t think so much
if i was in manhattan.
Dec 18, 2014
Dec 18, 2014 at 9:35 PM UTC
the crinoline in the corner
blinks twice
at the mascara
spinning on the vanity
slowly leaking blood
house cats pirouette down hallways
of marble and steel
ripping their claws out
as to not interfere with their work
******* don’t last forever
they say
two years max
three if you deflate them
every night before you sleep
there’s a lily
in the dining room
who pierced her tongue
with a cufflink
she once wore a crinoline too
you know
her sister works at a diner
from four to close
no scrambled eggs here
she’ll say
it's over easy or nothing
sausage on the side
but the crinoline
is too close to the fireplace
and the cats
don’t know how to love
while the lily
stopped being beautiful
when her sister melted
into the frying pan
a spark punches the crinoline
upside the face
and a ****** cannonballs
towards the toilet
drowning in bliss
Dec 7, 2017
Dec 7, 2017 at 2:22 PM UTC
Dire straits necessitated
yours truly to bethink
outside the box (literally outdoors
of squarish structured nested dwelling),
where blinding albedo effect
forced me to blink,
additionally also ruffled tail feathers
of this sole surviving male bobolink
(North American songbird,
Dolichonyx oryzivorus)
pushing survival species
to extinction brink,
thus series of unfortunate events
woke resident chewink
(North American bird,
Pipilo erythrophthalmus
also called: towhee
or ground-robin),
tweeted from within
his cozy armoire *****
polar vortex froze habitat,
whereby arctic wind found
brushy areas to clink
unwittingly brambles ferocious
waving circular rotation
wrought minuscule countersink
eh, no bigger than a cufflink
his ornate bejeweled complex edifice
compliments of sizable income
allowed, enabled, and provided
opportunity in tandem
with significant other
to create acronym named ****
(dual income without kid)
acquiring handsome combined income
rendering and selling stylized goldfinch
also known as distelfink
common motif in
hex signs and fraktur,
which interpretive native folk art
eye state meaningless
without rhyme nor reason,
superfluous gibberish by George,
and/or...well... courtesy
following more purposeless gobbledygook
defying poetaster to incorporate doublethink
intelligently nsync with downlink
playfully, jauntily, and deliberately
creating confounding badinage eyewink
at thee, no doubt many
an anonymous innocent
reader calling me ratfink
under their breath or more
colorful brutal appellation
inducing cheeks of unknown followers
turning fifty plus shades of firepink
moost definitely concurring gink
perfectly apropos description
concluded individually versus
collectively, quickly, and
unanimously i.e. (think) groupthink
I approve this entire message, which
most likely tinders pet peeve,
concluding GoDaddy liberally did hoodwink.
Dec 20, 2019
Dec 20, 2019 at 7:55 PM UTC
Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.
A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.
Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.
For generations the seasons are lies,
Since neither love nor life is free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world gasps
The old world gasps in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascend and push the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.
And now the sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.
The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring the seams of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.
For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over those wide lands her church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s ever-spring
Feb 16, 2018
Feb 16, 2018 at 3:41 PM UTC