"jawbone" poems
They brought them
from the hollar
to the barge
to the field ~
into the wallows
in prayer
skinny little pinkers
cropped by ivory gates
buzzed with hot wire
hooked on bug worm
whistling dixie
around scrummers
and **** pen
peckers squawk
down eden lane
(nipping at jean lint
and fraystring)
deep in the hollows
a mad crow
(with steady tap)
the snouts high
on grunters
and squealers
stomping past
the feather pack
folded fingers
on the gatekeeper
(an engineer by
trade they'd say)
pigtails and
slack line
down the dusty lane
a snap of the jawbone
and lawn chairs settle
(facing north)
the bold script
and chimes
uneasy
Jan 6, 2017
Jan 6, 2017 at 1:11 PM UTC
Just the thought of them makes your jawbone ache:
those turkey dinners, those holidays with
the air around the woodstove baked to a stupor,
and Aunt Lil's tablecloth stained by her girlhood's gravy.
A doggy wordless wisdom whimpers from
your uncles' collected eyes; their very jokes
creak with genetic sorrow, a strain
of common heritage that hurts the gut.
Sheer boredom and fascination! A spidering
of chromosomes webs even the infants in
and holds us fast around the spread
of rotting food, of too-sweet pie.
The cousins buzz, the nephews crawl;
to love one's self is to love them all.
9.7k
Peak temperature water levels fake diagnoses white psychopaths starving hunger jingoism violence [systems that deprive us] guns entitlement shots fired accidents grief/mourning choking hazard corporate mascots corporate favoritism corporate bailouts corporate people ideology without monitor nationalism patriotism conservatives patriarchy murder-rape-suicide victim silence lack of conviction religious ********** false history infant mortality job insecurity invisible hands trickle down economics union busters corporate police brutal police evil police secret police debt bankruptcy foreclosure homelessness lost confused prisoner criminal banker war preparations propaganda ballots commercials advertisements campaigns money power puppets figureheads armies genocides **** bomb gas fire no survival violence wealthy lawyers assassinations heart complications death sleep.
Jun 24, 2014
Jun 24, 2014 at 1:40 PM UTC
Often times I’m staring
Awing in the curves of full blooming lips
Carved jawbone covered with deepening dark moss
The journey through the damp forest after warm rain
It is all awake alive and breathing clearly
Rising and falling like the rare drops from deciduous leaves
I cannot tell you how inhuman you feel to me
Your skin darkens around your eyes from nights up
Long evenings too many and whiskey that never even made it to a cup
Sometimes I cannot break a gaze from the casement around your pupil
The pools of honey drip further toward me
My feet find it impossible to remove themselves
So much like quicksand but sweet calming and warm
Smooth and simplistic in youth the way skin drapes
Hangs over structured bones in the most phenomenal way
Just as your eyes are lavished in graham brown
You stay glowing even in the cold weather from blessed ancestry
Down to tender arteries and muscle where I’ve placed lips a thousand times
Shoulders swoop outwards like broad boulders
Distinguishable markers play connect the dots toward inked surfaced skin
Permanence of scarred lines forming a hot air balloon and anchor pulling it down
It’s from your favorite band, I’m noticing synapses collide on the concept
Elongated extended vines lead to tools that hold and create masterpieces
Strong slender hands with fingertips that press and pluck strings
Coat themselves with paint on late evening or early mornings
Tread lightly on my skin and illuminate my face with a coaxing touch
You are the rain forest from sunrise
My heart thumps to the sense of danger behind a corner
But I know such things and if they were to **** me,
I would be treasured in becoming a tall Kapok
With roots buried miles deep
Sep 19, 2015
Sep 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM UTC
Even though your funeral was in the summer,
It felt like autumn the way the tears
Hung off Aunt Shelley's jawbone like cold raindrops
On the eaves of the old porch,
The way Grandpa's eyes were too red and wet and
A thousand years away,
The way Dad's sorrow poured out of folded arms and tight lips,
Soft like worn leather,
The way it rained too lightly to add any cliché dreariness.
I just couldn't think of that red granite box as you, even though I
Knew
It was the soft gray remains of your body.
Death is not like winter, cold and harsh
Death is autumn, life draining from bodies,
Life drip-dripping from stuttering lips and
Once-strong grips
Death is watching summers of laughter and hugs fade to
Hospital rooms and rain-grey skin and
Slow sad songs like wind in red-brown, dead-brown leaves
And feeling a slow, quiet loneliness invade your veins.
Your death was not cold, impersonal sterile white; it was the
Aching melancholy melody of removing
One shade of green
From a palette, not noticed in the painting at large
But felt keenly in the way the artist's hand no longer
Cues that brushstroke.
Watching you die was watching all the green leach out of the leaves
And turn them briefly, painfully on fire,
Standing in a field of emerald grass and feeling it
Crinkle and turn yellow-orchre under cold fingers
Collapsing into mud.
Watching Death from the outside is the single
Most painful part of your painless process.
When you took your last breath, your features were a
Picture-perfect memory of peace, even as my face was a
Mask of confusion, my chest heaving with stale hospital air
The way yours would never again.
I wanted to run outside and imagine all the trees turning red-gold
In your honor, mimicking your final
Blaze of glory in that last smile.
Autumn came early that year, though no trees
Turned
Til October.
Even in the middle of spring I can smell the
Rain-woods-wind-wine scent of your autumn soul
And it makes me smile.
Sep 23, 2014
Sep 23, 2014 at 9:13 PM UTC
I
All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.
How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all and all, the corpse's lover,
Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.
II
Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh's lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
And the face to the driven lover.
III
All all and all the dry worlds couple,
Ghost with her ghost, contagious man
With the womb of his shapeless people.
All that shapes from the caul and suckle,
Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,
Square in these worlds the mortal circle.
Flower, flower the people's fusion,
O light in zenith, the coupled bud,
And the flame in the flesh's vision.
Out of the sea, the drive of oil,
Socket and grave, the brassy blood,
Flower, flower, all all and all.
2.7k
He looked at her like she was the most beautiful thing in the world,
not like a piece of meat that is waiting to be devoured
more like he needed her like plants need sunlight
it almost seemed like she is oxygen and he needed her to be there and fill his lungs every time he took a breath
with every glance you could see the love in his eyes and the smile that played at his lips like he wanted to love her until the end of his life
and to be without her would be the end of his life
The way he looked at her said "I will never leave you"
like every moment with her could have been his last, and every moment without her was utter torture
She looked at him like he was the blood in her veins and every time she met his eyes it was the first time
like her love was unfathomable and without it she would not go on
She looked at him like she saw every moment they ever had together in the curve of his jawbone, every kiss they ever shared in the color of his lips, like all of the love in the world was resting on his brow
The prelude of their kiss, where their foreheads rested against each other and their noses touched seemed to be endless and peaceful as though nothing else existed
The moment they kissed looked like it lasted forever in their eyes, but felt so fleeting
like it kept them grounded and without it they would be 10 ft off the ground
"When I met Johnny, I was pure ****** He changed that. He was my first everything. My first real kiss. My first real boyfriend. My first fiancé. My first guy I had *** with. So he'll always be in my heart. Forever. Kind of funny that word." Winona Ryder
She sounded so nostalgic and soft, he meant the world to her
As though the world would be off centered without him
"I'd die for her. I love her so much. I don't know what I would do without her. She is going through a lot right now. I wish I could just kiss away the pain, make it go away, stop it, **** it! If she, you know, I don't know what I would do. I'd **** myself. I love that girl. I love her. I love her almost more than I love myself." Johnny Depp
He seemed so passionate, like without him he both couldn't and wouldn't want to go on
Like the world wouldn't stop, it would just cease to exist
"Believe me, this Winona Forever tattoo is not something I took lightly... Her eyes **** me."
I believe they did **** him, that just the thought of her cut him like glass
that every moment he spent with her made him love her so much it hurts
I want a love like Johnny and Winona
a love so strong that it'll leave me thinking about every kiss, every accidental brush of their arm against mine, every second since their eyes met mine. I want a love like music, a love that makes me feel like with it the world will slow to one beat per measure.
A love that feels like the ocean, they are the shore, and I am the seashells that get swept up in it
A love that is completely undeniable on every account
A love like Johnny and Winona
Mar 2, 2015
Mar 2, 2015 at 3:31 AM UTC
Lucy kissed a jawbone
bye beneath a diamond sky
2.8 million years
and a gazillion tears ago
That's a lot of sorrow
for a man
kinda like me.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/04/jaw-bone-discovery-in-ethiopia-is-oldest-ever-human-lineage-remains
Feb 6, 2016
Feb 6, 2016 at 10:32 AM UTC
'''I thought naked beautiful woman in front of me makes me a good poet
Until I tried writing a poem in front of one
" hips seldomly hilly nor watery
Valley still waterrrrrry
Hey jawbone still showing her dimple
Why make her carry perfect melons God??🤤 "
I never held myself back anymore😂😂🤤🤤
I had to write a real poem with a real pen'''
Oct 1, 2020
Oct 1, 2020 at 4:13 PM UTC
I can smell your laughter on my skin for days
And your smile lights my room long after you've gone
And I've been homesick every where
Since I turned seventeen
But I don't have that yearning lately,
You are lavender walls
And cherrywood floors
You are warm vanilla cuddles
And ruby red grapefruit kisses
And I am warm in the dead of winter,
And I am home inside of myself
And I've been trying to find the
Words to tell you,
That my heart skips rocks
Over the lake you've laid down
And I'm jumping in puddles
When you start to rain
I'm admitting things I've kept
A secret
From myself
With your soft hands
gently wrapped
Around my throat
I count my blessings
When the sunlight swallows my bedroom
I'm not a zombie
Rising from a coffin
I'm a kid
Excited to begin
Every day
I'm excited to begin
Please don't leave
I drop you off in your gravel driveway
And I feel whole the whole way home
Please don't leave
I touch your jawbone
And my teeth are
No longer daggers
Inside my gums
The letters that fall
From my tongue
Are rose petals,
Sugar,
Tea leafs,
Where they once were
Dust
And dirt
And blood
Please don't leave me
Spitting up charcoal again
I cough cocoa powder
I am getting younger every day
I cry maple syrup
I am getting safer every day
I bleed pomegranate
I am getting stronger every day
Please stay
Jan 19, 2017
Jan 19, 2017 at 7:01 AM UTC
I have love for you
Rooted in my jawbone
Your secret perfume
Convection heat in a back seat
I want your thin fingers
Tangled in the web of my ribs
I want to lose you
In the honeycombed purple layers of my heart tissue
I will cradle your head on my sternum
Letting my lungs do the work
If only
Your elbows were not so sharp
Then I would crave the dig of your fingernails
Your pastures of hair
The butterfly tremble of your lips
Speechless- words no longer hold the weight
My tongue on the novel curves of your sigh
Tasting the twenty summers of your growth
Trembling due to lack of oxygen
Trembling at the onset of lust
The kneading want of knuckle bones
Drawing me ever closer to the colors of light
Static in the stereo of the
Cerebral cortex
Bunched nerves
Shocked into submission
By your bleached bone canines
Open and breathe
The quick pinch endocrine valves
Releasing steam
Drape me with your skin
Wrap me up in your pulsing warm veins
I bleed blue
On every day of the week
I am deafened
By the rage of your heartbeat
I am stricken dumb
The symphony of your eyelids
Swelling in my chest a familiar lust
The wind from your eyelashes
Could blow us out of this winter
And right into spring
All the days of the year
I bleed blue
The dedication of your palm
On my cheek
Warms me like a leaf in sunlight
Peel me layer from layer
You will find no lies in between the pages
I am your machine
Waiting to be properly lubricated
I cannot wait for our first day under the sun
I can't wait to get you out of the fluorescent lights
Of the Assembly line
We will journey together to forgotten realms
And sleep beneath the strange constellations
May 10, 2013
May 10, 2013 at 2:00 PM UTC
I never quite understood the meaning of the word lonely.
the quiet of the word ghosting through my lungs
creating a safehouse in my skull
comforted by the spirit of liquor in these dry riverbeds for veins
This plastic sky is viewed from a colorblind childhood
sometimes there are no villains
the side walk chalk is a living outline,
decorated in ferocious shades of grey.
Loneliness isn't romantic,
there is no pride in being proud of your ghosts.
how ever friendly they may be
I am fluent in apologies
I am a crumpled paper pipe bomb,
Loneliness is a mother tongue
its salty words burn my jawbone,
its jaded point dug deep into my teeth
We can only tread water for so long
until we are swept under the tide
where the silence will break
the crown of our collarbones
The joke’s over,
we live to look regret in the face
loneliness, is a jagged edge of a word
its barbed wire cuts deeper than people ever could.
Oct 6, 2014
Oct 6, 2014 at 12:29 AM UTC
I’ve begun “The Wasting” once more.
That ragged uncovering of bones and peaks and ridges that crop up along my spine and shoulders.
My scapulas revealing themselves like the bed of a lake as the waters recede.
Indents beside and under my kneecaps, hollows that match the ones slowly sinking themselves back into my cheeks.
And the hipbones…the things I truly crave to see through the paper thin layer of my skin…
Those…I’d starve myself to waifish proportions just to graze my hands along the mountaintops of those things, those sharp little things.
I lose my hair and my colour and my shine just to dig my fingers into the hardness of my breastbone, just to know that my jawbone is an overhang, just to plunge headfirst into the thrill of being thin.
“The Wasting” and I are friends, and I want to drown in her.
Jul 6, 2023
Jul 6, 2023 at 2:50 AM UTC
I found a staircase carved into thunder
Each step a tooth pulled from sleeping beasts
The air tasted of copper
And half-remembered hymns
I climbed until my name fell off my shoulders
And rolled back into the darkness like a coin
Mirrors waited
Cracked and sighing with old weather
And when I reached for one
It bit my hand
A lantern swung from the jawbone of a tree
Older than remorse
Moths gathered like ash in my mouth
And taught me to speak
In vanished dialects
Even the silence had a pulse
I tried to pray once
But the sky folded its arms
Every word transformed into wolves
Who wouldn't approach me
The horizon was a wound stitched with lightning
Far below
Cities slept in the stomachs of drowned bells
Their windows flickering with dreams left unclaimed
I wanted to wake them
But my hands resembled rivers
And everything I touched forgot its shape
By dawn
I had grown antlers made of frost
And a mouth full of rain
The staircase ended in nothing
Except the sound of wings
Turning to glass
Aug 1, 2025
Aug 1, 2025 at 4:57 AM UTC
fingertips
touching lips
tracing blue veins bulging
indulging
in elastic skin
absorbing the texture, the mixture
of delicacy and sin
caramel waves cascade
and invade
brows and lashes curling
swirling
through my fingers
they l i n g e r
on cheeks
on weeks
of sideburns and stubble
white steel
feels
stronger than stone
bones
big and square, like mine
though they bite hard sometimes
lacking pad or pencil
or stencil
my hands can replicate
the contours of your jawbone
it is to your outline
design
my palms are aligned
Nov 21, 2012
Nov 21, 2012 at 6:40 PM UTC
Daniel?
A piggish snort. Crusted eyes crack open like the wings of a beetle. Ragged nails scrape against the red-worn desert of an adolescent jawbone. A fishlipped yawn.
Ugh. What?
What did you call that plant thing again?
Jesus, James. Waxwood. It's a reddish bark. Oozes this cloudy stuff if you crush it.
Oh. Yeah, of course. Sorry.
**Ambient silence. Raindrops fill with rotting organic sediment and fall into the leaves around the
clapboard tollbooth. A zealous fist of ivy tightens its tattered fingers across rheumatic windowpanes.**
Dan?
Mm?
Why don't you like to talk about Clifftown?
Ambient silence. Raindrops. Ivy.
I’ll tell you why I don’t like to talk about Clifftown.
Go on.
Sigh.
I was born there. Before all this happened, it was this small village where onions grew. Not many people lived there. There was... Christ. A church, a chemist, a library and a few houses. The biggest house was this tall yellow clapboard place, which was on the cliff by the sea. This kid who lived there. He wasn’t -
A thud as a gesticulating knuckle rasps against splintered pine.
*-Ow, **** - didn’t look human. His head was big and soft like a berry, and his eyes were wide and wet and creepy, and he never spoke. It was like he was empty.*
What’d you say his name was again?
Never did.
A dusty rubbing noise as the fluid is forced out of a cheekbone.
Leviticus Croker. He died when he fell from a low salt cliff into the sea or something. Can’t remember.
**** I’m sorry.
Don’t be. I hated him.
A lump of pressed asphalt sends a clouded multitude of motes spinning and passes screaming through the glass pane of the sunwards window. A chuckle.
That was a year ago. They had to blame somebody.
Oh. Right.
An eyelid raised in revelation traps a mote against the skin stretched taut across a young skull.
Right. ****
Aug 16, 2012
Aug 16, 2012 at 6:04 PM UTC
These hearts have become racist
What used to be kind
And all hope to be seen
is wasted
On the stampeding blind
These teeth have become stained
What used to be white
Has been darkened by the
viscera of
those consumed by the night
These hands have become destroyers
Fingers that once saved
Equal and human;
Clean or depraved
These hands have become destroyers
I feel you chewing the limb that
used to be there
Your skin is under my nails
You're burning my fingertips
And pulling my teeth
You strangle me deep
among the sea of leaves
Flashing advertisements
in my eyes, Listening to
my every word. You tell
me I'm sacrificing for the
greater good. But I feel
submissive. I feel hateful.
You say Eve is the reason
for the downfall of mankind.
She is nothing but of rib and
even bone cracks. Saying this
as you dislodge my jawbone.
I try to argue with you, but
my language is gone.
You say that a dog is harmless
if surrounded by fence. That the
owner of the dog should pay for
the fence. That the ***** could ****
or produce pups that would ****
I am still without words and losing
copious amounts of blood.
I am poor and no-one will acknowledge
my death. I am someone people will
forget died and will have to be reminded
years from now, during a cook-out or
amateur bowling tournament. My legacy
is that of failure and being obliterated,
justifiably so.
These people look to money,
to colors on fabric idols,
to pages in a book written by
share-croppers afraid of flooding.
Remove me, so, to remember me
for what potential may have existed.
Kindly ignore that I never resisted,
and that I, the apex of forevers, was
always ungrateful. That I conformed
and became deeply hateful.
Jan 30, 2018
Jan 30, 2018 at 8:03 PM UTC
were you born drinking the sky
like the oceans split at your toes
when the gulls called morning?
with sleep-sunk eyes
trapped between fingers
to watch the moon bleed through
a starburst on your jawbone
cut from kissing lightning
and threading daisies through park swings
did you sleep on the soft sands
seaweed plaited through your hair
when the water called you home?
we raised you on thunderstorms
and you brought us summer rain
Aug 3, 2015
Aug 3, 2015 at 8:20 PM UTC
I – the girl you observe
guilty pleasure
marching through molten black
torch ignited
orbiting phantasms in the aphotic
burning within
corruption incinerated upon ingestion
tucked behind your frame
nestling ear
lip grazing canal
zest to soliloquy
vivacious saccharine tone
ruminating in the lilt of your tongue
resting in gum scoop and jawbone (mandible) reserve
adroit pivot
humbled gaze
locked
exteroception engaged
hard swallow
pearls scooped catatonic
atop lingering breast ascension
prudent olfaction volatile
cribriform annihilation
ginger – basil - brine - ruminate
etch of lace
sailplaning flesh topographic
aureate sunlight cresting soma
intoned morning – essence of miasma
Jan 26, 2014
Jan 26, 2014 at 8:45 PM UTC
an old friend of mine
keeps paying me visits
in the early hours of the
morning when the dogs bark.
she is here now,
swirling her pale finger through
my hair, trampling mud through
my trembling synapses.
she traces over my scars, smiling
she reels the shrieks out of my trachea
she carefully collects the tears from
my jawbone and adds them to her murky hourglass.
i try to tell her i can't
play now, i have things to do,
but we both know that itself
is the reason for her visit.
Dec 4, 2012
Dec 4, 2012 at 8:53 PM UTC
- Start by caaaaarefully removing your outermost layer of flesh - lather generously; rinse passionately; re-evaluate your life with a fine-toothed comb and carefully remove the parasites of your predetermined partiality
- String them up with clothespins to wither and flake in a badly scorched sky
- Acquire an ice pick of high quality, frosted on memories of all your ex-lovers and their numbing tongues. Begin to chisel at your own very delicate bone structure. Cease action only when the jawbone resembles the claws you disregarded in your 3 AM awakening punctured with crrreeeeaks and hazy in a soft red fog
- Dust your eyelid with arsenic until they're heavy enough to crush a small child. Tell a good joke, or two - which part of a vegetable are you not supposed to eat again? Might as well eat all of it, him, her, them - but not the wheelchair. In retrospect, pull all of your eyelashes out as well - no sense in prolonging the sought-after blackness
- Tie your lover's ruptured spleen around your waist to add a few pounds - god forbid you get too twiggy and crackle and fall into an inevitable pit of self-loathing. Stick straws through puke green nostrils and **** maggots out of gaping eye sockets. Line your lips in borrowed blood.
- Embroider your initials onto my skin and never forget where you came from.
Nov 3, 2013
Nov 3, 2013 at 11:01 PM UTC
my mother was a dental hygienist and dad thinks he's an architect
which means i'm used to sharpened stainless steel exploring the interior of my jawbone and lying to my father to let him keep believing he built me from the ground up.
Mar 15, 2014
Mar 15, 2014 at 6:28 AM UTC
Throbbing jawbone aches
Such excruciating pain
Leaves me motionless
May 8, 2018
May 8, 2018 at 4:45 AM UTC
It's already hard enough to say anything accurately
without further obfuscating and camouflaging the soul.
The faces in the funeral pews are impassive, impatient
and the dead woman cares not what's said, isn't even present.
The poet gets innumerable do-overs, it's one of man's wonders,
revises his vision of his mother and plays her piano, posthumously.
Why not say it simply? Hers was a comity and a tragedy.
As are ours. And perform the history that surrounds us.
Are caskets boats? The ship of death rides Charon's waves
or perhaps on that solitary day you happily kayak to the huckleberries.
Is the deeper sadness incomplete achievement or never to have tried?
Any attempt to decide this question for others is to badly behave.
The pablum of Christianity, esp. the Catholics, re the after life
must be rejected. It's necessary. To be replaced by community,
perfection of the human project, nature's intelligent partner.
Dusty, sadly habitable houses along the funeral route, shapeless
people crossing themselves when ambulances or hearses pass.
I wanted to describe the sweetness of her life, how she was part
of the problem and part of the solution. How love and evolution
are passed like loaves from person to person down the generations.
Find the humor in the cholera. When my father died
he waved like a surfer riding a wave or a clown riding
an elephant out the circus tent. Mom follows the same law.
The many ways a spear can pierce a brave warrior's jawbone or armor.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 4:44 PM UTC
Unexpectedly he has been cracked
Squarely across his dainty skull
Inevitably to his knees he languishes
Supplemented by a concussion
Havoc is illicitly wreaked upon the delicacy
Of this young man's psyche
As another swift, sucker punch is executed
Stylishly into his jawbone
Followed by an unforeseen series
Of frenzied jabs to the nose
The anguish screams through the brooks
Of crimson oozing from his nostrils
While a dangerous haymaker
Shockingly arises from thin air
Sinking fiercely into his cornea
Rupturing the veins in his eyeball
A circular crown of black envelops
The entire surface of his left eye
Oh, the gruesome consequences of
Applauding the eminence of nonexistence
A truculent knockout that will truly
Abduct one into an eerie coma
And rightfully deliver them back to
The portion of reality where they belong
Aug 28, 2011
Aug 28, 2011 at 4:54 PM UTC