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Tom McCone Dec 2012
say something or just
keep on makin' ghost-patterned, intervening silences,
                    singing
or half-murmuring
                                 verses, those ones from slow songs under low light,
the same refrain that runs between all the others,
through the passage of weeks, stained tobacco sweet by eleven-thirty iterations;

                       [post-meridian or particulate matters only,
                                                                           of course,
                                                                        it's hard to wake before noon anymore.]


with the way these rhythms keep us down
                                                          and out,
counting the methods-
the summations of potential miseries,
and the probabilities that all would or could turn around, before the end of the week.
                                                                                        or the next one.

                            and,
outside the door, the one after that,
                                       over the acres of concrete and pale shade,
streetlit likenesses hushing air through melting neighbourhoods,
                                                            I make imaginary footprints,
wondering which, of the field of household starlit comforts,
                           is the blade of grass you cast seeds from
to inadvertently germinate and sprout a well of aspiration, the wind in a stranger's ribcage,
                                                                      continually growing, hiccoughing leaf litter,
                 with every last breath.
I couldn't think of a title, which ended up in lawn research
my sister said "I think I'm here", as I embraced another goodbye and I was already opening the door
[this was unnecessary, but I liked the line]
I am tired,
too tired for my own good. and, still, awake.
It has been another day.
Like any other.
Misnomer Nov 2011
this is not a poem.
this is not a senten--

sometimes i ponder like
a young girl swathed in grey film,
earnest eyes bent to world's phrase.

sometimes i write like
a peering boy, letters of letters
and paper cut fingers
waiting to cause her lips to
crease while she waits at her locker

once i dreamed i was
suffocating in my cherry wood coffin,
preacher's voice scribbling
psalms on to his note cards,
even though my Bible died
by hiccoughing moths.

i will imagine my eyes
tracing the back of midnight afternoon,
a word scrawled, fractions of
letters gathering like sickened ants
anticipating pools of honey.

this is not a poem,
i told myself

this was not a poem,
and will never be;

unless everything is
a poem.

— The End —