"friable" poems
Architects plant their imagination, weld their poems on rock,
Clamp them to the skidding rim of the world and anchor them down to its core;
Leave more than the painter's or poet's snail-bright trail on a friable leaf;
Can build their chrysalis round them - stand in their sculpture's belly.
They see through stone, they cage and partition air, they cross-rig space
With footholds, planks for a dance; yet their maze, their flying trapeze
Is pinned to the centre. They write their euclidean music standing
With a hand on a cornice of cloud, themselves set fast, earth-square.
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poetry. folded into my back
pocket dark garnet pages are
left frayed and friable like
leaves on the bottom
of a teacup
poetry. stancion of
formed glass emptied of
its torch by breakage
each shard a grain
of obsidian
sand
poetry. lamp of a great
beast structure struggling to
find its way through the labyrinth
Minotaur myths blackness
camera obscura to a feast of souls
who's meat is dusty tomes
skeletons in tombs
choking on their crusts of
parchment owls
poetry. oil of anointing
for to wrap the Christian
alive as he burns in
the garden of
Caligula
i am poetry. all of these
am i. a paper soul clipped
from an origami bird's wing
frayed like a homemade
leaf but never
empty
Jul 15, 2015
Jul 15, 2015 at 2:29 PM UTC
Having a nice little chat,
Walking side by side with a brat.
Step upon a friable stick,
Under your foot, it feels like a brick.
It crackles, pay no attention.
Sit on a bench, feel suspension.
Hear a large crack,
Then you fall back.
And now you're awake,
due to a bouncy shake.
Sep 18, 2012
Sep 18, 2012 at 9:01 PM UTC
you lick me clean,
(no need for seconds)
i am dinner and desserts,
wrapped in one.
i have metamorphosed.
(you chipped and cracked until
the cocoon fell and shattered)
sticky air kisses my collarbone,
you slurp the salty water because no one can
satisfy you like I can.
the fields tingle through my old bones,
the lakes shiver upon my friable vents.
i am free, darling,
free only when i am with you.
May 17, 2013
May 17, 2013 at 7:10 PM UTC
Ripe, bitter, sour and oh so sweet.
Dangling off of a Californian tree.
Living within peels so stringent and
containing cascading juices so pungent.
He leaves you wanting, aching to know more.
He lures you in with the irresistible sweetest of enchanting
songs and ballads.
But what you didn't know was, that the ending
melody left you in a note that made you feel as though
you were drowning in a sea of rotten,
forgotten, and lost once loved dreams.
You became addicted to his freshness,
to the zest of his scent.
You became seduced, captivated even.
You let yourself become vulnerable
and susceptible to his touch.
You slowly opened up your wounds.
You let your friable bandages flow free.
You even let him lead the grand dance.
You let him twirl and spin you to the point
of reaching a state of trance or reverie.
He took you on romantic evening picnics,
he brought you to the oldest of antique boutiques,
and he even painted you angelic
mosaics in oil.
Ones comparable to those grandiose and imposing
works' of the masters.
At last he casted you under his spell
and he enticed you once again.
He had the charm of a thousand
and he was spontaneous in all his ways.
He never failed to surprise you.
They say he had an oriental descent
and this would explain much.
But when you least expected it,
he touched your wounds.
You felt an unbearable pain,
and a strange surge flow through you.
It burned, to say the least.
You almost felt your incisions
blister under the effect of his acid.
His yellow and aureolin tint
seemed only to be a facade.
An illusion, a charade to the naked eye.
But in that moment you could see through it.
You looked at him with pain-struck eyes,
full of confusion and disappointment.
You couldn't really identify the look in his.
You realized that he really had nothing to do
with his cadmium yellowish golden tint.
You felt as though you were fainting.
You were sinking and all the sweet
memories you two shared, flooded your
sight.
But then he said, "look at your wounds"
and you did as he ordered.
You looked down and shook off the stupor
and came back to.
You looked at your wounds and
became staggered and managed a mere "thank you".
For your wounds were no longer swollen and irritated.
He had healed you.
So when life hands you lemons,
don't make lemonade.
No, instead care for those
misunderstood beings,
and tend to their needs.
Because the lemons in our lives
are all too prevalent and far too
misread.
Feb 3, 2015
Feb 3, 2015 at 3:17 PM UTC
If I had a heart in my hands
One not made of flesh
If I carried it all the minutes of every day
And it was made of friable stuff
If I stumbled in a careless way
And it slipped before my eyes
If it fell to the hardened ground
And smashed into a billion atom bits
If the fractured shards were
Myriad made in a smear of salty tears
If I had no one but me blameworthy
Because it was only me around
If this was the case
Then I can’t look behind me
With accusations tumbling from my lips.
If I had the chance to glue, piece by piece
It back into a heart-shaped thing
If each tiny silver sliver was slotted into place
To once more catch the noiseless light
If I took a thousand years
And made my fingers bleed
If I once more held it up
And it had glinting form
If this repair was done in the dry dock of my hands
Would it still be a flawless gem?
If this repair is painfully gained
Does the time and care infuse the fault
With a lustre of perfection?
If all I see is the spinning binary pulse
If all I have is a sparking
Einstein-Rosen Bridge
If all around me is a sea of foaming mediocrity
If nothing else is worth my time
Then surely repairing this shattered glass is
The worthwhile work of every second
Of this remaining life
Feb 19, 2012
Feb 19, 2012 at 11:51 AM UTC
pumice
peat
mulch
humus
leaf mold
clod
loam: a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.
marl: Geology. a friable earthy deposit consisting of clay and calcium carbonate, used especially as a fertilizer for soils deficient in lime.
argil: clay, especially potter's clay.
bole:
noun
1.
any of a variety of soft, unctuous clays of various colors, used as pigments.
2.
a medium red-brown color made from such clay.
clutch
kaolin
loess: a loamy deposit formed by wind, usually yellowish and calcareous, common in the Mississippi Valley and in Europe and Asia.
slip
till: a stiff clay, a glacial drift of clay, sand, gravel, and boulders
Nov 25, 2015
Nov 25, 2015 at 1:01 PM UTC
Effulgent, she stands in the stands and demands
for her rights that were ripped from her calloused red hands
but calamity falls and hits down like a gavel
and the thread from her dress gets pulled and unraveled.
Her serpentine body, verdant til plucked
from the branches she clings to and prays for good luck.
The hyenas, voracious, yapping volubly
at her ankles while she tries and tries to scream, but
nothing comes out and she feels her bough become friable
she knows that these fiends wont be held liable
dropping contumacious only made her life worse
hit in the face he cursed and then hurt her
she burst in tears, ******
Hoping they’d stop, but they only went further
and nobody heard her.
No superman hiding til he’s plucky enough.
No Samaritan testing to see if he’s got the guts.
Now brittle she’s turned, but only physically;
She’s still adamant inside, strong mentally.
A couple months go by and one day she realizes
she’s not alone alive.
And forced to be together to survive,
she decides to take both of their lives.
I wish I could say
all those men were put away,
but they ran and ran for days.
Gone, and without a sound they stayed.
And now she’s
4.
5.
6 feet underground today.
Sep 25, 2013
Sep 25, 2013 at 12:52 PM UTC
every atom
blasted apart
reconstituted
in an instant
random fragments
of memory surface
then spin out of sight
permanence and solidarity
laughable
dissolving
everything tissue thin
friable
Mar 5, 2014
Mar 5, 2014 at 4:37 PM UTC
Paper hearts
Coated in sugar
Sweet simple art
Lightly tread on edges thin
Living through warm smiles and dormant memories
Forever and ago we will reach fin
Side by side
Lightly caress to break my stationary casing
Barely close enough to confide
Hoping everything
Leaves a beat
An exigent effort to remember
Living by friable motions
Break with rain
Torn apart
You can't wear me down
I'm sustained by something paper thin
Stopping my heart with a touch at a time
May 21, 2014
May 21, 2014 at 5:19 AM UTC
Charcoal trees
crowned in
greenish grey,
diluted in mist;
glitten dew, spilt
by sword shaped ferns,
bruising in yellow
the bushy scented moss;
likens' frozen tracery,
gothic earthly waves,
bursting gloomy barks
into shades of red and sand;
in a friable sunbeam,
a swirl of a honey bee.
Jan 1, 2015
Jan 1, 2015 at 7:52 PM UTC
friable alabaster bones huddle
in rugose rose wrapping,
words hanging pendulously in the air,
and I think this is where we fell in love –
somewhere in the Gehenna between
how-do-you-do and nice-to-meet-you
the moon thawed and
bled
into the crescents your fingernails left me with.
Dec 18, 2017
Dec 18, 2017 at 4:25 AM UTC
Chills abound enliven the skin
The quiet is pervasive
Yet you still listen
Mist of your breath
Reaffirms existence
The placidity of warmth
Is yielding to friable ornaments underfoot
How is it that the smell of the impending decay
Is so intoxicating?
Oct 19, 2015
Oct 19, 2015 at 11:44 AM UTC
but I'm not all here
my words are like dry wheat,
snapping
in the middle of a sentence, there are
parts of me that are lost and cannot
speak for themselves so the things I
say often break
Dec 5, 2012
Dec 5, 2012 at 3:02 AM UTC
Meticulous, Prodigious;
Pedagogy, Melancholy;
Sanctimonious, Sacrilegious;
Fallacy, Facetious, Flippant.
Contumacious, Efficacious;
Equanimous, Calamitous;
Sclerotic, Spasmodic;
Fastidious, Feckless, Fecund.
Rebarbative, Pervasive;
Petulant, Redolent;
Wheedling, Withering;
Fulsome, Friable, Factotum.
Jun 22, 2018
Jun 22, 2018 at 7:11 PM UTC
Dead leaves are colorful,
aren’t they?
laying like a frozen dance
atop the dewed staves
were seen every day
waiting below.
Dead leaves gave their bodies
to the upward aching hands
of a graying yard this morning.
Dead leaves were tranced in
the whole apparition
this morning.
The sun made snow falls
frailly through mist on my
friable face.
Am I an old man, already?
I don’t ask if it’s the change
made them fall. I don’t ask—
I know.
Time breeds wisdom
and also Alzheimer’s.
But it doesn’t matter, we’ve
learned to laugh at Woody Allen
movies, after all,
haven’t we?
Dead leaves are colorful,
aren’t they? Aren’t we?
Mar 27, 2012
Mar 27, 2012 at 6:33 PM UTC
holding little sewing pins
to flag and label
the delicate nerves
of reminiscence
and the friable folds
of understanding
we always stand here
put on spot
to answer, to name
what is laid before us
all its pieces and parts
and we always struggle
searching other eyes
to find a sense of comfort
that no one here
feels entirely sure
of how to go about it
Mar 25, 2025
Mar 25, 2025 at 6:12 PM UTC
Rushing with the piece
Resting with the ease, of the meals
Hunger of the daydreams, and elation
Rush of blood to the body
Rushing into ravines into the edifice
Friable spice and the ravines, protean about my description
Repetition of the surreptitious, debate preaching
Pecunious, fidelity and high on life lying on my own
Each to his, one for his own, stress about the abortive
Imitative, about love being his stressful, hurtful for her
Free, and then shielding myself about it, hurting her
With defenses, maybe, going to cry broken fears through the ticking time
Aug 10, 2019
Aug 10, 2019 at 4:55 PM UTC
Indurate or friable?
it's
frustratingly undeniable
I do not know.
Hard of hearing
soft of touch
is it too much to ask
an answer to a question?
such are the lines
hard times
soft landings
I think that I'm
still standing here
waiting.
Apr 7, 2017
Apr 7, 2017 at 11:57 AM UTC
poetry. folded into my back
pocket marooned pages are
left frayed and friable like
leaves on the bottom
of a teacup
poetry. stancion of
formed glass emptied of
its torch by breakage
each shard a grain
of obsidian
sand
poetry. lamp of a great
beast structure struggling to
find its way through the labyrinth
Minotaur myths blackness
camera obscura to a feast of souls
who's meat is dusty tomes
skeletons in tombs
choking on their crusts of
parchment owls
i am poetry. all of these
am i. a paper soul clipped
from an origami bird's wing
frayed like a homemade
leaf but never
empty
SoulSurvivor aka
Write of Passage
Feb 22, 2022
Feb 22, 2022 at 9:28 PM UTC
Pitiful plow tilling fallow ground
Turning friable soil
Loamy luckless pillows trailing
Investments with no reward
Love doesn't grow here anymore
Persistent Poly; grandiose gumption
Attempting to alter the arc of a function
Showering afection
Anointing rays of attention
Amalgamated with emotion
Sowings showing no enrichment
Capsicum capsules; dormant destiny
Fruitless loom; hindered harvest
Barren barrel; wanting womb
Mirthless smirk; sorrowless frown
No seeds to spare, no crops to share
No capacity or compassion to care
Aug 2, 2018
Aug 2, 2018 at 11:24 AM UTC