"mapmakers" poems
We live in the sunshine of our broken loves,
Where window curtains flow like pouring water from the aqueducts.
Sunlight is the memory of an old world, and we are just
Watchmakers who labor at the trumpets of time
As if to blow from the mouthpiece and unwind
The second hands and derelict hours of our luminous grief.
So too shines the scintilla of frost that covers the ancient wheat,
Snow falls like the listenings of lovers in the dark, and we are just
Cartographers of snowflakes, mapmakers of frozen eyes,
To zone the parallelogram of her strands of hair across the sky.
These and these and these
Were never ours.
Jul 14, 2024
Jul 14, 2024 at 11:31 PM UTC
Remember when we thought we could burn the world down?
And now we can’t even manage a spark
We aren’t bored with passion or refused it
We just never knew it
And we’ve all become compliant
Being stale gasoline in gallon drums
We could be virgins or saints but we’re liars
And we wouldn’t have it any other way
Are lilac fields are wilted
And covered in swarms of honey bees
And we walk hand in hand through the hives
And come out swinging
Putting our trust into mapmakers who’ve never seen the world
Their limbs have all been broken
Now treading water with their hearts
This could be the most meaningful turn of the world
And you’d never ever know it
Until it came like a tidal wave crashing through your front door
We’ve been screaming at the sky until our throats are raw
And all we hear back is silence, not even an echo
I swear to God I haven’t felt like myself in so long
‘Cos all that’s left of me is confusion
We’re all mad here in this wasteland
With our dead cowboys and our dead spacemen
Forever Peter Pan in a business suit
Forever Peter Pan when my spine has doubled over
Forever Peter Pan on a morphine drip
And forever Peter Pan in a casket
And all that’s left of a name
Is what’s chiseled on your gravestone
Mar 30, 2010
Mar 30, 2010 at 11:35 PM UTC
You were my beautiful urgency
Your lips promised the world onto the fragmented map
left in me
A beautiful Pangaea sealed together
The world stopped for us- the naive mapmakers
While everything else spun into beautiful chaos
The madness of the tectonic mountains
stop for none
Not even the innocent promises forged across the continents
They laughed as their rifts
battered our beating hearts,
Until their was nothing left but a single pulse
Memories flood me, brutally constant, like the tides angered at the shore
When your laughter stretched across the ocean
But somehow only seemed to reach me
Pulse
When we picked out the life our children would have,
Like it was some neat and concise future picked from a catalog
Pulse
When our world went up in smoke, it had never been
clearer
Pulse
When our hearts started beating for someone else
Someone else besides for you and me
Pulse
When you walked away
Pulse
And I realized it was too late
Pulse
When I knew in that moment your brokenness would forever
Cut sharply at my heart, etching those four words left unsaid
Until I was as broken as your ghost
Pulse
When
Pulse
I
Pulse
Realized
Pulse
You
Pulse
Were
Pulse
My
Pulse
Everything
Pulse
And I was just your side thing.
Pulse
What can be said about your beautiful urgency when your time has run out?
Jun 16, 2015
Jun 16, 2015 at 3:01 PM UTC
*There’s a famous town that does not exist
It’s in new York state in the Catskills.
It is name Agloe.
It’s a paper town.
Put on the map in an insignificant place.
To protect the mapmakers in 1925
from copyright infringement
By unauthorized reproduction of the map.
I followed a map once all the way to
a place that did not exist.
I travelled slowly to it
Mile by mile.
I loved the thought of living there.
I even fell in love with it.
But it turned out to be a paper heart.
Filling a space where the real heart
Should be it had no feelings or love
It was paper just to look like a heart
to outsiders like me.
So after all the tiring journey
to find it.
I found out It never existed.
Just like Agloe
On the old paper map.
But Agloe never
broke anyone’s real heart.*
Jan 14, 2016
Jan 14, 2016 at 2:14 PM UTC
Woe is a horned creature
Color/blue (soft)
Youth of savage taste
Piano is envious for magic
(The noise is disquiet)
Angel wise and
a whisper
Mother cleaned up her
violent act on stage (a highwire)
The temple forever stained with
birth
Garden of age/
A river's foolish plea with the moon,
People wrapped in ivy dance holily
With their April patterns in a truly
Dionysian scene
I am there (a poet)
day belonging to death
as death is owed to
life
I feel balanced in this state
(on the edge of the river)
we are joined by harmonies from the Valley,
they can be heard from above
flowing
downward
featherlike
unafraid
(a warmth/a womb)
II
The sea is still alone
(chasm of black)
Thinkers chase its waves &
Our eyelids disappear like marble
into empty flies
released from a tropic fantasy
The inevitable scream, humid &
Covered in ash (volcanic)
III
Illness rejuvenates the dream/
questions remain questions
An elephantine flowerbridal looms/
Smoke erases the memory stained in each ring of each pine,
burdens relieved from the Antlers of
ancient death
(smoke, tide, branches crackle in a flame, peace is envisioned here, I love you)
Narrow ceilings attempt to re
create
The sky/
Paint flaking off pathetically (the palace)
darling ember washed away with simple time
(Where has our capability for survival gone?)
mapmakers and children watch their hair fall into a promising wishwell
...kept secret and sacred
those who see the bottom of the well are branded with eternal laughter!
IV
? Healers hand
(You've arrive
d
at the entra
nce you once saw asleep)
The conquest for simplicity is finally realized as no conquest at all
You're in love again,
(Yellow love)
!
Apr 26, 2017
Apr 26, 2017 at 2:36 AM UTC
a vehicle of the family of man;
who say what cannot the mass.
mapmakers of the human psyche,
topographers of the human morass.
culling small order from the disarray,
trying to sow joy in infertile topsoil.
redolent the music on the mind's wind,
sacrificing sleep and self, for creation.
with all the monks within his head
praying for so many antithetic things,
notions and trinkets, truncated by dread,
oceans and skies and flutterby wings.
writing the songs of the solitary deaths
of the incomprehensible connections
missed by humankind's transient passing.
May 12, 2018
May 12, 2018 at 3:52 PM UTC