"filament" poems
,***how do you know when
(a human is too broken?)***
<•>
human too broken?
like the light bulb, removal from its fixture, a simple shaking revelation of the tinkling filament spent, something that cannot be repaired, the only option is replacement and that makes
you cry
the empty box of oatmeal raisin cookies, you find secret’d,
hid by you, not to be found by you
at the bottom of the kitchen garbage,
but box betrayal, by the chartreuse tipped box lid sided
peeking upwards, asking, silencing screaming,
what did I do to deserve
this degrading
like the blouse now too tight that it brings stares as the buttons strain, unwelcome attention unintended,
you know it but still pretend not to see,
for you both once loved that silky guise that so
heightened the high tender, the match of your pink rose skin letting, no! making
your eyes glisten, like broken filament glass, on the sidewalk,
recalling the pleasured admiration,
rain remembered from the
prior priority of a life consisting of only
perfect gifts
so mean revert to the poseur question; this is how...
remove the human from a fixed place, whimpering-threatened,
you may hear clear the crackle cackling of the innard shards against the misperception of a body intact,
even if you do,
no repair service you want, can be found, see it nowhere,
is it even
anywhere advertised?
the body presumed intact is secret’d under a tactile coverlet,
holey scupperrd holy cuttered
so that the cells and bicuspids, the threads
no longer function in a tandem,
you keep it in the closet closed,
in the back, deep hid, where,
when it screams why,
it can be safe ignored,
because ‘betrayed’ is no longer a word,
in your globe's dictionary,
the parental controls activated by you to
save your own inner child’s unconstrained confusion,
it has been removed
so the broken glass, the clothes you dressed each other,
if not weep-well,
well enough hid,
the fit is off,
the fit is off,
the coverlet ripped so bad and neither cares
Aug 5, 2018
Aug 5, 2018 at 11:17 AM UTC
I. Neptune’s Theater
A rock spins through the universal tumbler
and its warm blue pools calcify
as turquoise Neptune in his cloudy blue bath bath
builds a lace castle with his fingertips
Sculpts a submerged eden of crimson and emerald
where painted parrots chat up cardinals
butterfly and angel fry sway with wave pulse
and foliated coral fingers beckon from arched windows.
Neptune’s children are flat and bright, spined and notched
free yet entangled in lace mesh ecosystem
beneath an array of bioluminescent stars
as a gangly pretender watches and blows bubbles.
II. Sapien Siege
The hot acidic hand of death grasps
the mesh rends and tangles
the ecosystem shattered
reef’s loosed children scream beneath planet’s stars.
Butterflies impaled
cyanide-swooning damsels
mesh-tangled angels hauled heavenward
coral to potash, corpses to coal.
The pretender to the throne blinks
rubs blurry lenses,
kicks plastic fins
and moves on to the next show
Unseeing and unaware
of the luminous filament in his wake.
Self-appointed divinity,
deus ex machina.
*******************************************************************************************
Ann says: All of the animal and human characters in this poem (except Neptune and The Pretender) are named after coral reef fish. Coral reefs, one of the most diverse ecosystems, are expected to be largely extinct within one human generation. Deus ex machina is Latin for “God from the machine.”
Copyright 2013 by Ann Marcaida.
Jan 23, 2013
Jan 23, 2013 at 3:43 PM UTC
My neck is a nest
The warmth in it an ever present creature that
Oscillates and breeds and collects
And attracts creatures that do not
My neck is a nest
That doesn't just need to nurture but
To be nurtured and
Touched and kissed and electrified
In order to keep that warmth
My neck is a nest
That rests on an unsteady beating branch
And hangs under a filament-ridden sky
Neither of which can ever agree
But to disagree on whether
Niceness or smoothness or alcohol or hidden agendas
Should have anything to do with
How the warmth is kept
My neck is a nest
Full of hatchlings that have already
Dropped and soared
Dropped and stopped
Dropped and swooped at the last second
Where they are now
I have only an inkling.
My neck is a nest
That wishes to blend with the
Twigs and leaves and eggshells
That become it and
Be humbly content with who
It wants to attract and collect and warm.
Mar 9, 2015
Mar 9, 2015 at 9:06 PM UTC
At night-the light turned off, the filament
Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,
His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low
To touch a swampy source-he thought of death.
Her father's hilltop home allowed him time
To sense the nothing standing like a sheet
Of speckless glass behind his human future.
He had two comforts he could see, just two.
One was the cheerful fullness of most things:
Plump stones and clouds, expectant pods, the soil
Offering up pressure to his knees and hands.
The other was burning the trash each day.
He liked the heat, the imitation danger,
And the way, as he tossed in used-up news,
String, napkins, envelopes, and paper cups,
Hypnotic tongues of order intervened.
5.9k
Deplorable and horrible;
Despicable, abhor-able;
It reiterates, evaluates,
Desiccates, and exacerbates . . .
It never fails, to fall too short,
But always fails as a support . . .
In an attempt to be freed, it misleads to bad deeds
And creates a hunger -- vacuous,
Yet, impossible to feed.
It chases the light away,
And it longs to be alone.
So I am so ashamed to say,
That in my skull,
It found its home.
So I'll fight and fight against it,
. . . But I'll always lose the battle.
It seems that even as I trudge ahead,
That somehow I still straggle.
It is the artist, I am the instrument.
Like a light bulb to its filament.
Every day I'm at the bottom,
Forced to climb back up the hill again.
But I think the day has come . . .
When I've finally stopped walking.
I've reached a door that can’t be opened,
And decided to stop knocking . . .
It's me and who I've become;
It's my actions and what I've done . . .
So, as much as I despise it,
It seems my brain, and I, are one.
Mar 8, 2013
Mar 8, 2013 at 3:12 AM UTC
The sun tipping over the horizon
Lifts my lids each revolution of this Shady green sphere...
And for a few brief seconds
The fingers of sleep
Drag me back.
Warm pressure on my eyes,
Pooling, (re)opening them to the last
Paradise;
The only oasis where your eyes are not closed
And your bones are not dust somewhere
Mingling with the soil in Pittsburgh.
Just the same, I know you're the product now
Of some hypnagogic state;
Of the last traces of theoretical DMT swirling in my brain
As is leaves Morpheus behind in the shadows.
You're just the most beautiful hallucination
The truth in the chaos of dreams
Cluing me into what I've been denying
For 13 years.
Impossible that I've preserved you better
Than any mortician could have
In the recesses of my mind
You are a perfect replica
An unholy copy of the original
All creamy skin
And ocean eyes,
Full-lipped smile tipping somewhere between
Arrogance and joy.
"I'm gone," you say. "I'm dead."
Repeating what I already know
"I'm dead, I'm not coming back."
On repeat like the worst kind of ear worm;
A carousel of sound that dips and weaves through every filament of Unconsciousness.
Denial; like reaching out my hands
I shove against the reality, against the unreality
Against the prison sleep has woven
And crash forth
Damp and gasping
Like breaking the surface once more
Teetering over the horizon with the sun
Into the waking hell of another day.
The carousel makes another revolution.
See you on the other side tonight.
Nov 11, 2015
Nov 11, 2015 at 10:08 AM UTC
A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somwhere, O my soul.
4k
It is nothing,
a mordant of the soul,
an elixir, a panacea, a placebo
for my lesions, there in the thistle, grows
our drastic garden of red posies and hyacinths,
such little things, on the verge,
lilting as the decorum begins to bobble
and slump sideways, and murmur,
on Mondays I can swallow the octave
of your absence, tendrils and all,
red quince limbs parting from the deluge
and in its wake, the wreckage
of black pumpkins and purple corn, hanging
pendulum at our door,
the Autumn lights summon a lavish song to harvest,
thirty seven colours in the brocade you gift me,
tangled and heavy the years upon my bones
begin to spur and flower
into cunning disruptions,
and stratify upon my body like rinds of ricepaper,
vellum for another wish
in the complacent burial of mango flesh,
listen,
as my song liquefies,
drowns you, inundates
each alveoli, and our love
in the swallowing gush, perched,
begins to shudder,
devoured by its symmetry,
stem cells all akimbo
in the shallow pitch of days
bound in a nostrum of wine and liquorice
it is nothing, really,
a mordant for the soul, a tulle filament
twitching in a raincoat of lightning....
Oct 21, 2012
Oct 21, 2012 at 4:35 PM UTC
Sociopathic spiritualist
Confused by this?
Ya gettin' the jist
Years in a green mist
Gorilla ****** at the sight of poachers hi-viz
Blatant thievery
Gettin' me irate & militant
Conductin' information like a cobalt filament
Hippocracies imminent
If you don't know the deal look at Africa's innocents
The future for a fee
Monitory
Cold as the Chukchi seas
If your wonderin' where they be?
Let go of Albert Square & check your geography
Menace to sobriety
Rudarellis playin' tennis with the moods it's supplyin' me
Preachin' no class As
Hittin' the mirror like the mans buyin' me
Apr 23, 2012
Apr 23, 2012 at 7:27 AM UTC
~dedicated to the old poets here~
the addictive pairing of certain words, a line,
a lyric, slap-snapping you to full attention,
unfailing decades of instant recognition,
an adrenaline + caffeine shot that powers
a chance, a tensile injection that causes
the lips to commence a new choreography,
the fingers to tap, a jumbled, hurried, embattled
disorderly mess that regenerates, reformulates,
concords into agreement, a harmonic consistency
a geometry of many differing angles that equate
a hard physical, a soft mentality in a singled work,
coexisting in a sacred state of singed confluence,
though imperfect, satisfies mathematical boundaries
of a random outpouring, crowning the stripe inspiring
the spark that finally satisfyingly silences an ignited
filament a-glowing for years, that holy happens
to cross your antennae, fulfilling the need to honor,
the sacred geometry of chance, the honor to need,
the joy of saying, at last, this unwritten debt, paid!
————————————————————————-
(1) a favorite of many years, a lyric from “The Shape of My Heart” by Sting
(2) Dec 3 2020 2:53pm NYC
Dec 3, 2020
Dec 3, 2020 at 2:59 PM UTC
I lie strategically in place
Innocent framework fused
With royal carapace
Frail and allknowing fingers clenched and intertwined,
Mimicking the honest silver circuit in the night sky
As candid as the shore
Each slumbered and delicate breath
Vitally delivered from those sublime lips
Both damp and potent
I get a candied wind of
An accidental consolation
To my crippling worry
Sorrowful, I am, my love
For eavesdropping, but
My reveries are your keepsakes
And I,
Watching you sleep, carefully
In A placid coma, caging waves of covenants
And exhaling tokens of a life once dreamt of
I envisage the unvarnished truth,
your marrow as my sustentation,
Your veins, My lifeline
Where each filament of platinum and sorrel remain entangled and sprawled in forever, impeccably
And how drawn out and vexing
My intervals of lingering for you
Have been
And then you leak a sigh in a dream
And exhale a veil of whispers
Directly to my ribcage
And I simper, cradling you tighter
So you can breathe my craving,
My contented tribute
To my one veritable sentiment.
And I seal it all in the midst,
Of a drifted and slumbered and deathless
Kiss.
Nov 26, 2013
Nov 26, 2013 at 7:24 PM UTC
I'm afraid.
Simple as that.
Just irrational fear.
Complex in the cracks.
The dark envelops me.
Blinding me and quickening my heart.
Even though a game, I start to scream.
Trying to rip this closet door apart.
The tears dampening my face.
My breathing changing pace.
My mind plays games just like the others.
I cant even steady my hands.
Then light.
Sweet, forgiving, white knight in the form of a filament.
I wipe my face, realizing the blood that covered my fingers.
Where was this savior that had been sent?
His smell lingers.
He stood tall.
Dark.
Faceless.
His hand brushes my face,
My neck,
*****
I look up to see a familiar, yet unnamed, face.
His pernicious smirk haunts me.
Swift air brushes past my face followed by sharp sting.
He leans into me, his lips touching my ear,
His tone is sarcastic and grave.
"Welcome back, slave"
Sep 25, 2012
Sep 25, 2012 at 11:05 PM UTC
Murky water,
Depthless mud,
Drown by chains,
Bound by blood.
Onlooker, the key,
History, the judge,
Neglect, the decision.
Doomed to the sludge.
Filament of algae,
A shaky explanation.
The onlooker runs,
Blood left to damnation.
Onlooker lives,
Lacking of blood.
Drinking away his memories,
Of the murky water, and depthless mud.
Oct 31, 2018
Oct 31, 2018 at 11:56 AM UTC
A capricious young mind
alive with reveries of vistas and granite hues,
enthralling nocturnes
and his touch in the night air.
Disparate and removed
you contemplated the stars,
a life lived with arms outstretched
beckoning the notional.
Beneath the ceaseless sky
you yearned for his warmth,
to feel your ashen flesh adhere to his every fissure
raising your arms to his celestial vantage
you beckoned, once more.
From the dimming light,
above the distant horizon he rose -
like the smoke of an ardent fire that resided within,
ascending through your being,
coming to rest upon your weary head,
he suffused each lissom filament with a fragrance,
eternal.
©Thomas Gabriel
Dec 2, 2011
Dec 2, 2011 at 10:41 PM UTC
Ethereal and Base a harmony so diametric a solid.
Wisdom's forgiveness lands to the unyielding new,
white spray on black lava, merging
elemental minerals in salt water.
Life the mediator, yearns for compromise
algea harvests sunlight at the hard shore, grows into plants
fish munch coral creating sand washing up, a tree's foothold creating soil...
can rock become Earth any other way?
Mother's beauty, an unknowable generous smile
and confident grace from the sun.
Ages
sitting wrinkled and depleted to her waist,
beauty transforms
into unknowable generous laughter alighting graciously from wise eyes,
like a flock of Heaven's doves so close to home
stirred by her running children: daughter and son.
All the while all the yearning is unrequited.
For her children, Beauty is vertigo,
painful reality rooted to the shore.
Eyes long for the horizon, Vision Country
between sky holding its breath and water measuring out patience,
The heart spills out futile on the crystalline sea,
but Sadness, belonging to clear water,
lightly buoys lonely Ecstasy,
Completes the voyage.
The Vision pairs selfless love with unmet desire,
opposites' harmony the firmament,
but the sound breaks from tension and the echoes fade,
and the senses footing gives way;
vertigo with dove's wings tied shut.
Descending minuscule between dissipation
falling through molecules of bliss,
and diffusing atoms of despair,
to the last remaining positive and negative
and the tension's silver thin wire between.
It cuts tied wings free,
slingshots the dove's soul back up,
at the last second, the tension's iridescent thread tangles loosely on her foot.
She hurtles back up through the scales of size:
Microns, amoeba, minnows, birds, primates, people,
over trees, looking down at cities, mountains, yet higher
borderless nations, green and sand continents,
and again all the crystalline blue seas.
The silver filament draws taut, holds the dove's ascent,
wings slowing in awe as she views Mother Gaea
her intensely brilliant sphere accompanied by vivid tiny stars.
in a cold cold soundless night...
Grandmother teaching her children to fly;
Beauty's yearning realized complete.
Jan 22, 2013
Jan 22, 2013 at 8:52 PM UTC
Left alone on this makeshift raft,
Drifting further into the wake -
All I see is darkness...
Slowly collapsing upon my bones,
Waiting to be resolved -
To be encapsulated with meaning,
A filament of hope to define our love...
Show me my life is not insignificant.
Apr 29, 2013
Apr 29, 2013 at 9:21 PM UTC
Are you alive?
Tendrils tickle the surface
And billows
Bloom from the core,
Ribboning thinner than
those things which breach
seawalls,
Seeping impermeable
To flirt with all sides of this vessel.
I saw in him the beauty
The same as I saw the beauty of
suffused ink, mingling
In delicate patterns of fluidity and filament.
His release quivers momentarily,
Hung in fluid stillness, and
Flushed with a desire to saturate.
In saturation, one may think it
Possible to be falling
Up through a falling surge.
We two coalesce at the bottom.
Feb 1, 2011
Feb 1, 2011 at 7:23 PM UTC
Life’s a trip aint it?
Cause I can see myself there.
In the courtside of movement with my daughter
Teaching her the fundamentals to this foreplay break form we call top rocking
See, cause we all started while still in the fetus of knowledge,
dance was our way out
far sighted to the violence was most important
My neighbors enriched themselves a devil’s deal with other advocates
Sold their souls to hate,
Gun play, drugs, **** and discriminate……tion.
Since that first get down on my auntie’s wooden floors,
Or since seeing the smooth criminal himself steal the encore,
I became the Xerox copy,
mirroring my master like a parrot,
I studied more and observed a new culture.
Not even knowing this family was my narrative teen story.
****
I devoured every second.
Danced till my body couldn’t stand it.
I danced in the light and were steps away from my own shadows.
Sometimes the shadows were heavy
a filament that needs to be observed and cleansed--- go figure huh
A self-judgment clinging to aura.
A child crying who felt unloved.
A beings dependent on promises from Ones outside self.
Suddenly, light shines and the dancer feels the power--
A breath that aligns inside grace.
A moment where ones heart expands with love.
A moment where a dancer meets melody
Hip hip is a masterpiece,
hip-hop is you, me, him and her, and because of this masterpiece is a dancer inside of me.
His movements created mists around his company,
I didn't need to tell hip-hop I loved her.
I gave her all my love with this dance.
Oct 3, 2018
Oct 3, 2018 at 3:38 PM UTC
My Poet:
*tho evening draws nigh,
on this our wedding day,
the stars, guardians of our canopy,
reminder twinkle it can never be
fully complete, for you always make
a moment in time for me,
today we wait, synchronizing seconds
until both pronounce,
I do
let my hands,
in my tenderest embracing grasp,
perforce, when I hold you face,
still cannot hold your entirety,
for you always make and leave a space
for me to seal our universe
today, you need me to fill you,
so together, ever forward,
we will define and explore
the edges of our redrawn,
now, single unified line,
our ever expanding contiguous boundary
our blood is not commingled
but when our bodies unified,
the physics of our conjoining,
illustrates that those in our
surround of time and space,
in the aura we create,
not so very great,
and yet our oneness
'tis a shining upon the countenance of our place,
a luminous emittance upon this earth
when you write your poetry,
it always finishes with me,
I am the native child of thy words,
I am the filament webbing
illuminating the spaces between each line
but more than this,
I am your beginning,
you are my destination,
together we make,
The End
they ask me to vow,
demand I swear, make promises,
certify, preserve, record and store
the solemnity of this marriage born,
in ledgers of the city,
before an invisible god
I eschew all this
for nothing in life
ever guaranteed by words secured,
but this I know true*
My Poet:
*what I shall give to you,
and you to us,
cannot be spoke,
the words, not yet,
have we originated
for each day
will we compose anew,
each day, shall be
a new combination
under new stars,
our canopy unfolded,
our joining sanctified,
by the simple truth of us*
May 26, 2014
May 26, 2014 at 11:30 PM UTC
I don’t want you to go fishing
For salmon, when you can get ray;
If you’re fast enough, you can shoot –
– A hook around a horse’s tail.
If you’re patient,
You could weave through the jelly’s glow,
Glimmering softness through each filament,
Calming your senses from morbid to mellow.
I don’t want you to go fishing
For make-believe, when you know it stings;
If you’re strong enough, hold on –
– Gills and fins are just as brave as wings.
If you’re yearning for more and more,
Boundaries are all you’ll see;
If you’re ready to stop waiting,
Why are you telling me?
Nov 4, 2015
Nov 4, 2015 at 8:45 AM UTC
We gave the
infant
our features;
the babe got
a bulb nose
passed on by
its grandfather,
jet-turf of hair
like a wave of
soft sulphur
from the other,
but the eyes,
tungsten grey
set in firm lids,
burnt out like
incandescent
light bulbs
as it left their
filament fingers
gasping mine.
Jun 27, 2014
Jun 27, 2014 at 7:30 PM UTC
398
I had not minded—Walls—
Were Universe—one Rock—
And fr I heard his silver Call
The other side the Block—
I’d tunnel—till my Groove
Pushed sudden thro’ to his—
Then my face take her Recompense—
The looking in his Eyes—
But ’tis a single Hair—
A filament—a law—
A Cobweb—wove in Adamant—
A Battlement—of Straw—
A limit like the Veil
Unto the Lady’s face—
But every Mesh—a Citadel—
And Dragons—in the Crease—
1.8k
Memories diffuse,
like sunbeams glint off a lake,
become phenomena, evade the tangible.
In unsteady light I see my father
rowing toward our favorite fishing cove,
the wavelets of our wake
real as that late August evening.
We bait our hooks, conversation
merely phatic communion\ I know he's cheating on Mom.
Words anchor heavy.
As my face turns into the wind
to dry tears without his seeing,
questions rise in my throat,
like a volcano about to erupt,
but I have no voice to ask them.
So we sit, dangle mono-filament
thoughts in dying twilight.
Father and son,
brooding statues of Buddha,
mute as bullhead on the bottom.
Feb 28, 2012
Feb 28, 2012 at 1:51 PM UTC
Jumping high,
She stretched with all her might
Fingers passing inches below
The first firefly of the night
It flew deep into the woods
She chased it far into the night
But she was not afraid
Following that firefly's bright light
In fits and bursts,
It grew dim, then bright
And as it led, she fearlessly ran
Deeper and deeper, into the twilight
The night grew darker
But the firefly brighter
The girl ran on as,
The forest grew quieter
This part of the woods
She had never explored
"Come follow me, follow me"
Her beacon implored
She followed yet further
The beasts of the forest grew near
But still she followed
And felt no fear
A last turn she was led on,
Then onto a beach
A pond, long held secret
She stopped, flushed as a peach
Soon she had to go back
With her the firefly stayed
To light up her soul
And forever brighten her days
Jun 30, 2015
Jun 30, 2015 at 9:29 PM UTC