"flints" poems
late night by the holland sill
white framed and frilled
alongside the meadow
down by the grand
where cat fish
and cow pies
and silly yellow bees
make their stay
there are swings now
and empty barns
(with quiet corners
and broken walls)
echoing chambers
that speak of the past
...and little dogs
not big ones
the plaster cracks
and wheat sways
from a warm west wind
it’s about time
for that late afternoon pour
you know how it cleans the soul
old percy would say
and flanders
(the holder of those pigs)
who fed us good
with sow and milk
as we plowed the
dusty fields
into the
hot summer sun
i can still hear the screams
of river shore dreams
the grand slams
and flints run dry
the barks
and breaks
and bends
a world past
with forbes
and dolls
and crab apple trees
think i’ll take a trip
up the back lane
they’ve cut the brush
and opened the line
Feb 11, 2017
Feb 11, 2017 at 4:46 PM UTC
I remember sitting on your back porch
Back when we first started hanging
I knew at that point that I liked you
But I wasn't ready for the feelings
That consumed me when the sun
Met your eyes and mine
I knew you had brown eyes
But when the light hit them just right
I fell so far
Into the golden flints reflecting back at me
I lost a piece of myself that day
And you never gave it back to me
Sep 2, 2018
Sep 2, 2018 at 8:37 AM UTC
958
We met as Sparks—Diverging Flints
Sent various—scattered ways—
We parted as the Central Flint
Were cloven with an Adze—
Subsisting on the Light We bore
Before We felt the Dark—
A Flint unto this Day—perhaps—
But for that single Spark.
2.7k
All estuaries flow eastbound, and the subterranean rail tracks keep forcing against the estuaries’ grain and dust foundations perpendicularly to them.
How can a sane proposition -- a quantification of syntax execution (those squirming cuticles through bonds of regression)— an excessive reflection, reflexive inspection,
Prove its sanity through continued suggestion?
Deductive insurrections stirred in memory,
A rumble, causing sediments to crumble,
Wineglasses balanced atop countertops tumble.
Spilling contents upon the grained wooden, elitists' floors.
"Anesthetic, onsetting tuberculosis in breath patterns,
Gavels ringing on rigged tolling tongs in caverns,
Dark tolerances to Copernican astronomy in shadows,
And the handle grinds as boxcar wheels' flints and steels catch and spark in addled locks," I mumbled from a half-nap.
It was surgery, the smooth procedures on the moving trains,
The gains and plectrums scraped against the brains' spider veins,
To reorganize the sane, to bridge the broken definitions changed,
To prevent arguments' bone structure from fractures and sprains.
"Use gavels against the scalpels, sculpt with their judgment," a corona dream's habitant corrugated.
He pounded the gavel's end against the knife to chisel at the pituitary gland pulsing in his subject,
And her arms flailed like a horse's legs in heat-induced convulsion.
I thought it was done.
The Canson Merue train screamed in the night under earth to Yellowknife to meet Canadian soil as the Heavy Breather pounded his gavel.
Oct 9, 2014
Oct 9, 2014 at 5:06 PM UTC
There are always little sparks
Created through the friction of
Those two jagged flints though
Never enough to create fire on their own
Naturally, there needs to be a fuel.
Sometimes it’s tissue paper
Sometimes it’s gasoline
But as I’ve learned one way or another
There’ll always be flames between these
Chasms, valleys and gorges.
And the bridges built to cross between the two
Won’t always last. The raw energy will just
Wear away at some but the good ones stay.
Solid. Carved with rock and fortified with steel.
Like a scientist (or an arsonist)
I’ll test every. Single. One.
May 28, 2012
May 28, 2012 at 6:48 PM UTC
keep it lowkey
we speak separate no lips
treasure spelled question baring finger tips
slips **** crisp nips
no *****
or ***** in the whips
while im in the slit fits
i try to miss ten prints and thin flints like flavored sin mints
like take one before you commence this, well he said pre tense
like post ***
no matter how slow
or if you are driving drunk
in control
Oct 8, 2013
Oct 8, 2013 at 10:06 PM UTC
once you claim to not have not experienced
all the fooling with women in youth
and exhausted the libido...
you never really want to claim a need
for their company while ageing and
growing jealous when her stories emerge
over drunken conversations when her
friends get invited -
i mean, it's almost like you have a *****
stitched to your forehead that
is a reminiscence of youth not claimed -
indeed old age is hell for women...
and youth the hell for men -
in between there are children...
feminism is an odd-ball... it's this rebellion
against an ageing patriarchy...
men who sway power...
what a weird and wired fetish of thinking...
why would i claim companionship with a woman
if she experienced all the sensual freedoms
in her youth... while all i got is a freedom
of a range of professions? exertion of one muscle
here, exertion of another muscle there...
had i stuck to full-time industrial roofing i'd
probably write one poem a week...
oh please, let's not obstruct with too much consciousness
of how poetry is defined, that's for english teachers
to rekindle hopes of a Shakespeare resurfacing
while ignoring Milton in the curriculum ante-vitae...
no, when youth is not allowed mutual pleasures...
the following concerns for life suddenly disappear...
there's no acidity relevant to it, no abhorrence,
no need to testify a revenge...
it's all a matter of comfort... and it's more comfortable
to be without a woman than with one,
considering the pelvic-pivot-of-sex was not strained
well enough to settle down into a friendship
with women... since my own sensuality was barely
scraped to consider a friendship...
instilled in me, the idea of two potential flints
scratched for a spark... but nonetheless remaining
two rounded marble spheres
that dimmed the lights... i felt it too opposing
to consider a half measured sensuality forced into
a platonic love... i might as well have been born a homosexual.
Apr 6, 2016
Apr 6, 2016 at 6:39 PM UTC
Rows of red, and blue and green,
Confectionary ordered pointlesly,
Only to fall, one by one,
Or all the large to the left,
and the small stacked up.
Coins in stacks of one pound,
Unless it's pennies, Then in stacks of ten.
Books piled, large at the bottom, towering up,
Pens lie in rows,
Invisible borders prevent touching,
Keys too untidy, remove from ring, arrange in circles,
Food cut into bites, counted and ordered,
Fridge ordered by food group,
Or colour,
Depending on the day,
Lighters in rows, standing tall,
Zippos together,
Clippers and disposables,
Flints in a pile,
Wicks in the little paper sleeve.
Fuse wire in the little round tin,
The one she gave me,
The one that opens with a POP.
Jun 8, 2010
Jun 8, 2010 at 12:41 PM UTC
i never understood why people decided to couple such symbols into images esp. in fictional narratives rather than see the sound in lipstick smooched for symphony; how hard you try, the a to z will not provide you with a mental cinema image of a giraffe; more like a gaff, and what's a gaff in photo? leopard on giraffe or a giraffe on a leopard, because it's all very fine telling the narrative of traffic coordination evolution coming back from africa with the zebra to suit pitchfork stoppages in hay on the redneck lazed walk. the sole reason why it's understood: fiction is the use of lettering for the creation of images, poetry is the use of lettering a bit like a waterfall for a bored emperor apprehensive of the sound of thinking; and philosophy is the reverse of all that, strike two flints together, and enter the realm of ideas with the onomatopoeia of the image - given that onomatopoeias act like surgical scalpels, or a miscarriage of ideas bundled up for something else by kandinsky; actually, saying that, onomatopoeias are images in motion, prior to the movies, when all you had was a painting embraced by a fancy rim - still life of decay of the royal flotilla on the thames with a mouth moving: chatty chatty boor of a bloke who talked.
i see the dead sea when i cry,
and i wager
a salmon with other sea fish cropping up flying
into a butterfly net:
before the assemblage of bacon
into the mouth watering eye.
i see the dead sea when i cry,
and i wager
to have seen a thousand flamingos
strut invoking tide -
on a boneless march into marsh of
a bubbled gill of fish popped for whatever name alive,
or dead in the disco crescendo for a nixon:
tears of a robot had always the glory of man laughing akin;
since annexed was the dualistic ambiguity
of the theatrically mistaken two masked.
Sep 14, 2015
Sep 14, 2015 at 8:27 PM UTC
It must be nearly four on this side of the road.
With a great touch of import,
Trundling through the semi-wet
And gazing at the flints refracted in sod.
A few meters across and there is succor,
There is warmth, where the earth is
Turned fresh. Very little keeps me thus
From that solid solid open door.
Still, I should be a fool to with a one
Hand cast resolve into the nighted water
Of the soul and with the other
Craft the very means for its
Exhumation. As I turn around I close
The door and shamble into dawn.
Mar 5, 2011
Mar 5, 2011 at 8:16 AM UTC
You remind me of a simple time,
You remind me of a lullaby,
The way you sing in blessed rhyme
And the many times I’ve made you cry.
You remind me of vintage shops,
You remind me of the word of God,
The way I wake and still taste the hops,
In this: my hangover firing squad.
You remind me of sugared wine,
You remind me of a tired sigh,
The way we sped up along the line,
And the many times I’ve made you high.
You remind me of the Happy Prince,
You remind me of a garden fence,
The way our sparks kick off the flints,
And I think of you in future tense.
You remind me of a former life,
You remind me of tomorrow’s war,
The way that in you, I saw a wife,
The way that you so swiftly
Shut the door.
Mar 14, 2014
Mar 14, 2014 at 10:02 AM UTC
At Singing Hills
Down upon the earth, boy,
brushing dirt from broken flints.
The woman, tall, in khaki pants,
slowly stands and squints.
Down upon the earth with
pockets full of stones.
A hundred yards across the land
where knife-grass spears the sand
a bullsnake sleeps in sunlight.
Speak of arrowheads and Utah,
you,
with dignified excitement;
speak of ostrich eggs!
You and I, she'd say,
Galapagos!
Where armored turtles
heave their bulks across the land.
Here Mother Earth lies naked
to her bones.
Flint bones,
in sun as white as lamplight.
With your Thermos cup in hand
talk of arrowheads again—
or Galapagos—
Where giant turtles rule the land!
Feb 1, 2017
Feb 1, 2017 at 4:05 PM UTC
I stumble across the threshold with a skeleton key in one hand and a crowbar in the other.
I had run like my tights mumbling under my breath about sparking flints and knotted shoelaces.
I promise myself I will lay me down once I have washed the moths from my hair, once the dried blood has bled once again and siphoned down the drain.
And that in my bed, I will spread out my arms and legs
trying to fill the crater in my moon.
Incoherent and blind.
I feel the walls like Braille to the bathroom.
I sit down on the lid of the toilet,
one hand clutching my ribs,
and I, the second flood,
spill out into the porcelain tub.
Jul 10, 2013
Jul 10, 2013 at 2:59 PM UTC
I'm a mix of sunshine and rain
and a storm that rolls in once in awhile,
A hurricane that never comes,
But threatens the night,
I drink from the sky
and the tears of heaven
fall in my eyes,
But mostly I shine like the sun
and the shadows
I cast are beautiful
little flints of light.
Jun 11, 2018
Jun 11, 2018 at 5:28 PM UTC
Like the story of mists on these hills, no one knows where it all begins and what it brings to bloom, when and how. Life, this mysterious journey of mirages and miracles.
Growing up, falling in love and marriage. Years that rush by like the moss-laden corners. The joy of cherubs that descend and grace your lives. Some late summer rain tears by the river on these gorges.
One-way ticket to go live rough like the winds on these bare slopes. The cherubs are out on their vast journey of discovery. You hoped, but it was all crumbling, bolt in the sky tore your lies apart.
You are here, amid the lilt of the hills and the music of the stars crackling up into eddies late in the nights. The ageless loneliness of life, and you have no one. Mute in this new haven, speechless in your unfamiliarity.
Should I sing like the shepherd Should I weep like the clouds parted from all their be-longings and tossed about by the stark stubble on the aged mountains? The air smells of rebirth. never another sunset winding into the valley, Does the river jump in the joy easing into the clouds, carefree like there was that I know this people. Now I am the sky. this snow-cladded dusk I am all the stars. hanging over the world? of the the flints that scratch effervescence of the moment, or does she weep at her heart laden in endless procession? Clouds, swirling dervishes, exodus of the sheep fire in the bush
I can take marshrutki by the dozens, heading out into the no-w-here.
Humanity, your only hope, and kindness, your only god.
Jan 27, 2015
Jan 27, 2015 at 6:12 PM UTC
they prayed for rain (so tired so drained)
they wanted relief crops and to relive
through their supporting bulbous god
the rains came and my body tightened with itch
the chored limbs ached
flints of pain ticked behind the eyes
but there was so much rain and there was flooding
cause there were no trees to root everything together
no absorption
but much concrete to dictate the fast flow
and then it rained like blood and people freaked
(it was only desert pigment or algae) and then it rained fish
but there was too much to harvest pickle and eat
and spoil brought stench and plenty of flies
and then it rained frogs that weren't able to polish off the flies
cause they'd splattered with the impact
and then...
the praying stopped and the people plugged up their senses
and retreated indoors all puffed
and angry and pathetic
and i went out for a walk
solitary except for the thriving carrion
Aug 26, 2024
Aug 26, 2024 at 11:49 AM UTC
there were times
when I filled my lonely cracks
with whatever sort of fit
though I knew
it wasn't really capable of
meeting me on all my levels -
intensity, emotion, intellect,
oddity, creativity, curiosity,
carnal abandon
I've found matches
but those compounds
burn out quickly
sparklestarts
fading
it's terrible how lonely I am
yet, resist being appeased
with (con)temporaries
it always ends up making me
more lonely
after crave subsides
and short-lived chems exit
the self-loathings start chanting
*we ******* told you so*
when my heart says nope
which it almost always does,
at some percentage,
my body knows -
I'm there, but not fully
in it:
walled distrustful protection mode
no wide open uninhibited throes
it's aspects of yes, meshed with no
it's why
a majority of my encounters
have involved substances
my addiction is afflicted
with knowing
it won't be
the thing I crave
so I numbed
my persnickety heart
in order to keep
fever down
I can't just
open up for anyone -
unfurl rose spectrum
of precise art and language
that comes from heart
and dictates skeleton
to dance in ecstatic
primal possession
I am flint
crafted for
reciprocal ignition
upon inherent nature
of symmetric material
and you know, my heart
has never been blasted off hinges
with body in tandem, 100%
but I know that it
can and will
heal all the things
burn up the pain,
the unbelonging
wipe the slate free
of tormented cravings
replacing with gratitudinal awe
Aug 10, 2017
Aug 10, 2017 at 12:34 PM UTC
in all our doings there’s a rule we make
about the bounds beyond which we won’t go
those limits of the matters we may know
or of the facts in which we may partake
like the good flints that sharpen when they flake
or that swift stream with hidden deeper flow
beneath the mountain with the secret glow
all of the places that we can’t forsake
within each heart are truths that none may speak
yet in our song they’re vibrant in their call
to warm the spirit and release the mind
allowing us the harmony to seek
beyond the power of the strong and tall
right into where the force of love must bind
Apr 13, 2014
Apr 13, 2014 at 9:49 AM UTC
A streak of sin,
just as culpable,
gives back my pains.
A half-finished poem
jolts me out of my vision.
Someone drops the moon―
and becomes evident in mist.
A profile floats. I
imagine the spreading smile.
I want to understand myself.
The colors blend. Have
you read Rilke? You will not
rise from the surface of―
life and death.
Authenticity has become
rarer. Copyright to **** is
religion. An aquiline nose
smells the prey.
Sep 15, 2016
Sep 15, 2016 at 8:07 AM UTC
Along came twelve.
Most girls by then were well on their way to being women.
Greg and I took a different route,
Sharpening the first sparks and flints of manhood into something beastly
Only to be shared secretly between us.
He would come to the house every now and then,
Cheery Goodie dropping him off in her blue and VW Golf
And wishing us a good afternoon, carefully reminding in parting:
“Be good. Play nicely.”
I tried to – Greg had other plans.
With lunch done and SABC 2 re-runs boring us to another life,
We went to my room.
“We’re going to play a game,” the cutting voice told me.
“We’ll take turns – I’ll punch you, you then me,
But no happy family – winner takes glory.” I lost.
Adding proverbial insult to injury,
Lennon’s kin summoned me to the bathroom,
Myself being the esteemed guest to a ***** hair bonfire
Followed by a hard-on measurement contest.
Hugh Hefner outinched me on my own turf.
Who knows what you’re up to now, *******
Last I heard, you went off to Rhodes
And got yourself an Honours degree in Finance and Economics.
Your marks and career prospects probably outshone mine –
Triple victory. But you didn’t have to be a **** about it.
Sep 25, 2018
Sep 25, 2018 at 8:17 AM UTC
An electric wetness tingles at the tips
of toes, pointed as the tips of me
tighten and clench...
I try to focus on the sensations
my naked self easily distracted - I need
a mental picture to freeze into memory
a snapshot of me getting snatched up
but I collapse on my back I relinquish
my hopes are high as the rest of my skin
beginning to rise in temperature
ears and face and pool of sweat on my chest
all I can begin to hold on to
are the bed covers in my grip and feeling
so many feelings in places I did not know
existed, and how it all finally made a splash
in the end - could not help but let go...
building up some soft inertia of skin in flux
rubbing these flints to spark this fire
that releases like liquid lightning
and briefly the high feels divine to keep afloat
while I lay quiet to the world--just a ghost
this is the first time -- having felt alive,
"when I grow up I want to be (how it feels now like)"
"The sky"...
Sep 4, 2016
Sep 4, 2016 at 2:54 PM UTC
you eclipsed the darkness,
igniting in my soul,
saw some brightness,
made me feel whole
my body, flints of ember
for a fleeting second,
the nebula glittered brighter,
my pulse quickened,
wanted to hold on tighter
every moment, i remember
but, alas, for you and i,
together time ticks a lil' too soon,
we gotta say goodbye, as soon as hi,
we're so like the sun and moon
to fate, we just surrender
Jul 5, 2020
Jul 5, 2020 at 12:43 PM UTC
Eyelids fluttering closed, I see those eyes,
Swirls of hazel that still thaw my heart,
Maybe I should've known from the start,
now I'm paying the price, tearing me apart
I let him in, a little too fast,
held on to him a little too tight,
thought I'd survive the blast,
that I'd rise, not fall in the fight
It's been a whole year since,
the scars remain fresh still,
maybe one day I'll feel the thrill,
when my heart puts together it's flints
May 10, 2025
May 10, 2025 at 2:51 PM UTC