"filmstrip" poems
Imagine yourself
a linear expression of experience,
a long strip of film like
the kind in old projectors with the
sepiatic sputters and flickers--
yes! Imagine yourself a strip of film but
rolled up messily like
the earbuds in your pocket or
folding fitted bedsheets.
You are a movie and the filmstrip endpiece lies at your feet,
you are knots and coils and tangles and
if you were to lie down at the top of this mountain for a moment--just a moment!--perhaps
the wind would catch the loops of film and
you would feel yourself
unravel.
Sep 26, 2017
Sep 26, 2017 at 12:44 PM UTC
i'd been saving
this cream colored
dress for you
with the silk lining
and lace flowers at the
hem,
instead i am brushing
pollen off my shoulders
knee deep in dandelions
pulling canada thistle
and sheperds purse
a black and white
filmstrip on the refrigerator
moving in stop motion
empty moscato
a blue flannel
and a half drunk
waterbottle still
on the right side
of my bed.
May 14, 2017
May 14, 2017 at 8:47 PM UTC
Boston, what a colorfully gray city you are.
At daytime Downtown seems busy.
People in suits, always walking with a purpose and defined destination.
Never stops.
People don't act if they don't have reason to.
And how the sun is hiding the people are as well.
When the bright white moon comes up, the narrow streets are quite, no soul is found.
Im the lector of the unwritten letter,
the crowd of a canceled opera,
the observer of an unrecorded satirical filmstrip of this colorfully gray city. Boston
Jul 15, 2015
Jul 15, 2015 at 5:57 PM UTC
If asked what I had done today
There's not much I could really say.
There were some routine things in between
But mainly just this one dream.
In my minds eye all day played
Some memories that have begun to fade
Where I get to kiss your sweet little lips
And trace your body with my fingertips.
It seems too good to be true
I almost don't know what to do
When images of you
Wont stop flashing through
Like a projection
Of perfection
On a reel
An unreal filmstrip
Teasing my other senses
Senselessly.
I take it back, it's too intense.
If you only knew.
Except you cant ever know.
This is just how it goes,
it usually keeps on going
by
From time to time
I'll write a rhyme
About a pretty girl.
Maybe talk about her eyes
And how they hold the world in sparkles
I look into and marvel.
I haven't said yet
A word
About how yours are hazel.
It's nuts.
An appraisal deems them priceless.
I wonder if today they were
a more green or more brown likeness?
As I completely drown
In
Them.
Aug 8, 2013
Aug 8, 2013 at 10:31 PM UTC
He perches on his black-crate bandstand,
stationed between the payphone and postbox.
The view from his seat never varies:
a restless audience of briefcases and knees.
He closes his eyes, concentrating
on breath becoming buzz becoming blare,
and he pictures his notes glossing Manhattan’s
thunder-colored walls.
Each tone fills the pavement, square by square
until the sidewalk is a harlequin filmstrip,
colored by notes coaxed from his brass mouth.
Passersby withhold their gaze, because giving a nod
obliges giving a dollar, and no one is inclined
to employ this trumpeter. But he pays no mind;
his own eyes secured until song’s end.
As long as his fingers are jumping,
he doesn’t have to be Gerard Wall–
who lost his wife to cancer and mind to the War;
he can be Louis, Miles, or Pinetop Smith.
When he looks up once again,
sun and spirit have faded,
and he watches the evening embers
drift out of his horn.
Jul 2, 2014
Jul 2, 2014 at 3:39 PM UTC
I hope one day you get ****** around so bad
we can relate about it together, so sad.
I hope one day you can be sober
so we can talk about this,
so we can think it over.
And maybe then I could look you in the eyes
and not see a filmstrip rolling of your lies.
Just thumbnails to leave out the details
so we can talk about this,
so we can think it over.
I hope one day you live alone in silence
and we can never meet again
so this **** doesn't happen
all over just like this,
and it's over.
Feb 7, 2011
Feb 7, 2011 at 11:23 PM UTC
I can read for hours until the words become one indistinguishable filmstrip
I can even write for just a few more moments longer than intended
Past the stretch of inspiration where disenchanted thoughts lay to rest
I can work non-stop until my fingertips are scraped to the bone
I can even get on the computer without looking at ***********
...............................Well, sometimes...............................
I'm told that I can do anything that I want
If I just wasn't too ******* lazy
Apr 24, 2011
Apr 24, 2011 at 9:06 AM UTC
I'm told the only way grow
over you, is to peel apart every memory;
I must reach down my choked-up
throat, and feel around for you inside
my broken body - find the figments
of my bitter fantasies and watch them over
and over
*[the night we walked home
at 3am and shouted lyrics from Snow
Patrol at the scarecrows in the
graveyard/ the night we ******
three consecutive
times/ the night I decided
I would let myself fall]*
until I suffocate and hate you,
all the same; the best-tested remedy
is to become a practicing
********* - a professional
pain analyst,
and so I'll gag myself
cleansing my body from your
presence, I'll pour my liver out
if only to pry apart the
bargains;
I will ruin every black and white
filmstrip if only to say
goodbye
for the last time
Nov 3, 2014
Nov 3, 2014 at 8:08 PM UTC
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Dec 17, 2015
Dec 17, 2015 at 11:36 PM UTC
Her eyes resemble
a fading filmstrip
left in the bottom drawer of our wardrobe
next to a lilac dress I’ve outgrown
and the rest of unrecognizable memories.
Her bones poke
like a yellow flower barrette on my scalp,
a sharp pencil on a tender wound,
a hand of a neglected child burying
anguish on the skin of another.
Her mouth has grown
poems too soft for my hands to hold;
i try to lie with them, a blister beneath her tongue
where your name now resides
and washes away
the sweet perils of a love like ours,
her chest, now its graveyard
that she no longer visits.
It has turned into a museum
of the things she’s built with you.
Limbs, hands, fingers —
All delicate things I wish I had — was
instead repel finality
in ways ugly,
in ways desperate,
in ways this poem can never soften.
But some things are made for ending,
Some bodies, for leaving,
Some hearts, for breaking
Some grief, for feeling in all the other places
and in all the other parts
where she once laid her kisses:
now just quiet, empty skin
aching, under the colder half
of October’s distant breath.
10/01
My anatomy still learns to forget
about the love it swore to remember.
Oct 1, 2021
Oct 1, 2021 at 3:25 AM UTC
the night before
the moon grew bold
I felt the darkness
move in from above
in ominous grey
opaque
it reached for me
half asleep, I
acquiesced
relinquished
pillowy clutch
splayed sheets
like legs
for his
chatter bones to chill
where my sallow
is tissue thin
his hail knuckles
affixed to wet tongue
drug me to the floor
raking my hollows
over and over
reeling terrors
on sepia filmstrip
some scenes repeating
some to-fro rewound forward
some hovered gory ending:
frigid tools cutting
to expose my insides
stirring entrail with bone
tugging ruddy strings
to see what sounds
they made as I
buckled; choked
on my leaks
I closed my eyes
tried to escape body
but he projected on
my shuttered
darting
knotting esophagus
around the backbone
fingerpainting my end
on worn flesh walls
in char-red spectrum
choreographed in
perfect harmony
with rote fear
chanting
*this is how
you die -
alone*
I felt it all
happening.
dangling my happy
memoirs with nooses
ungraceful reanimating
decayed draggy dancing
Xs where bright eyes
were once upon
and wide
open
every ache and
smothered secret
chirped by dark faeries
too quick to swat
but when all
the pushed down
were given mallets
they crescendoed
into discordant jarring
and in its peak came
a piercing shriek:
so loud -
all stilled
to look around
I couldn’t tell
if the voice
was him
or me
but after terror climaxed
the hear ripped and
grip released
I allowed myself
to loosen, breathe
headthrob slowly
melded into felt
beats:
limbs and tips
all pulsing
relief
and I
could see
no one was there
but me.
wielding expertly
book in my own hand
thick with tested maps
to exquisitely torture
every tenuous strand
in my fragility
Dec 4, 2017
Dec 4, 2017 at 12:45 PM UTC