"mollusk" poems
She picked it up from the seashore.
He encouraged her,
Flattered her with indulgence
To bring back her dying flame.
A girl once again,
She brought it home
In whimsically ebullient innocence!
On the polished floor
In a faraway city
It found it hard to walk
With the load of mollusk
And made a funny sight!
It strained its ears
But there was no sound of the sea,
No saline smell in the air,
Instead the water was sweet and insipid.
It went thirsty.
The food was alien,
It went hungry.
Soon they polished the shell
And celebrated addition of
Another showpiece in their room!
The crab had at last
Found a new home.
Apr 16, 2013
Apr 16, 2013 at 3:06 AM UTC
I couldn't see, but water
reflecting, it danced from the sun
black cormorant dove under stars and pearls of sea
for silvery fish to fill his beak
a small boat I rowed
long through water weeds, cat tail reeds
paddles cut the diamond day sparkling
sandy shores mollusk strewn
rippled shells shimmering blue
oysters bubbled, shallows breathing
seagull smiled watchful scheming
a beach fire to warm the night
the dusky sun, no longer to keep
soon the moon between the trees
radiant, it wakes the stars from sleep
Aug 7, 2012
Aug 7, 2012 at 1:42 PM UTC
Hood Canal
I couldn't see, but water
reflecting, it danced from stars of sun
Black cormorant dove under stars and pearls of sea
silvery fished his netted beak
A small boat left untied to float, I rowed
weaving cat tail reeds, long through water weeds
Paddles cut my diamond day - sparkling
jewel of soul swayed, prayed to dive me deeper
Sandy shores mollusk strewn
rippled shells covered shimmering blue
Oysters bubbled shallows breathing
seagull smiled watchful scheming
Beach fire to warm the night
and rock the dusky sun to sleep
the coming moon between trees
dark night, the stars to weep
Dec 13, 2012
Dec 13, 2012 at 9:33 AM UTC
Siri. Type this:
More memories. Less Facebook moments.
Let’s go back to concerts filled with lighters — warm seas of flame,
instead of stadiums filled with phones and waves of blue light that keeps us from sleeping at night.
Our phones, it looks like we’re all telling one big ghost story around the campfire — our faces lit up from underneath in the dark.
It’s like a part of our bodies, a mollusk’s shell,
That we won’t outgrow until it’s torn from us and we’re eaten, still fresh.
It’s like we call it Facetime because that’s what we need, but don’t have.
Since when is being viral a good thing?
Viral means an infectious disease.
Viral Viral Viral.
I feel like I need a ****** just to surf the web.
I honestly can’t have a conversation with a person
without toying at my phone anymore.
We post our beautiful stories on snapchat,
the colorful blurred days of our lives,
and let it slip away into the ether.
Your stories are still interesting even after 24 hours.
Seeing that red notification, knowing I’m special, I’m wanted, I’m special.
when it turns out to be another Farmville invite.
Talk about crutches. Nitze called religion a crutch but at least religion helps people walk. Phones make people run into things.
I wonder if the New Messiah will have a social media account.
We are so close to just hooking up our phones to traveling robot vehicles and navigating our world from our home.
The future’s hangouts will be phones arranged in a circle
on a table,
all on Facetime,
as we take shots,
in our rooms alone.
Jerry smiles because he isn’t wearing pants
but no one can tell.
Our phones only show what’s on top.
Please share this poem, by the way.
For videos of my reading my poems, visit https://mateilatte.wordpress.com/content/poetry/
Aug 21, 2015
Aug 21, 2015 at 4:23 PM UTC
Unfolding into itself, inviolable
in prosaic self-penetration,
a boundless repertoire
of shape yearns forth surreptitiously
from inscrutable amniotes to claim
time as its own:
Here a thicket
of sycamores, there a baldaquin
of pinnate branches, yonder
a periphery of marigolds, below
a cacophony of hyraxes, above
the corpuscle of a lynx, the mid-flight
jink of a darting swift and moribund
crawl of a mollusk;
Hymenoptera coaxing
their haploid broods into teeming
life as a cell of the swarm
and viviparous apes cajoling
suckling chimerae at the fathomless
fountainhead of a rosy breast;
Higher still,
Cirrus cephalopods traversing
the trench of sky, dandelions
hitch-hiking the drift of a barren plains'
wavering hum on cockchafers'
forewings and a turbine's
bombinating pulse, the chattering
of roots ravenous for depth --
Jittering bangtails the hallowed echoes
of lascivious manes --
inchoate sprout-hood the daedal
nonage of towering evergreens --
the plaintive shrift of elegiac
redbreasts a goad to silent elation --
A likeness unlike
(vocabularies of vertiginous blinds)
(the eyes of ignorance closing)
(the mouth of the mystery)
that spurns the truth of tongues
is nature naturing.
Dec 21, 2015
Dec 21, 2015 at 6:06 PM UTC
[it all matters]
**i seek a chain
made of silver
with three black orbs
and a bird facing the sky**
to wrap around my chest
fall between my *******
clasp around my waist
and the back of my neck
to remind me
of my shape
all day
as i move
i am conscious
of a bead here
a tug there
and i am reminded
that i am a
woman
and
i
feel
power
i stand tall
i feel sure
i use my grace
and i wield my weapons
have you not seen
the plumage of
the birds of the sky?
colors
textures
and sounds
m e s m e r i z e
attract
or distract
hide
or reveal
have you not seen
the cuttlefish?
the intelligent
mollusk
and
master of disguise
hiding in the sea?
beauty
and mystery
abound
*oh
that
i knew
the ways of
the cuttlefish
what wonders
i would create*
female /human/
a fairly blank
canvas
unadorned in
color
but for eyes
hair and
skin
no spectacular showing
of plumage
no mysterious
change in texture
or majestic wing
some humans
are aware
of this
(seemingly)
overlooked
pomp and
circumstance
i want more bird
i want more cuttlefish
so i seek a chain
made of silver
*to remind me
of my shape*
i seek paint of
many colors
to adorn my
feet and hands
*i change the color of
my hair with
the wind*
i line my eyes in black
i paint my lips
**if i need warpaint
i shall have it**
if i desire to blend in
then i shall
where can i shine?
where can i glow?
where can i
pattern
myself
like a leopard?
now
i am powerful
because
i am me
now i fit better into
nature because
i am of nature
i am as human as i can get
/i am all animals and all things/
roaring and silent
swift and slow
beautiful and plain
because i am human
i can choose it
because i am human
i create it
because i am human
i am claiming it
and you are my witness
Sep 1, 2013
Sep 1, 2013 at 12:54 AM UTC
well it was the alternative to gregory isaac’s night nurse... but then the bouncer on the catwalk with flares... skidding up on a rhyme and cooling it with an edge of the appropriately cut fashion... chased it.
innit kamikaze (rap’s shortchange in shaken pears
for martini bond and chanced cockney slang in shakespeare,
all 90’s groove though)
lyric’o gangsters
in the mollusk slush
two’s up freed
with the sly sly s.o.s. sloth
chinning up to the chariots of nero’s double for portrait:
naa na na na na na na na na na na na na naa,
naa na na na na na na na na na na na na naa
(i miscounted... didn't i?) -
where kurt cobian’s yeah yeah yeah used to be
along with r.e.m.’s cowboy astronaut.
come mike jagger with me the liszt skeleton
of b & w’s worth of crescendos tipping lazy waitresses
with a toreador’s worth of breezy napkins folded, flapped and sneezed into -
i’ll be dumping my shadow into splits for extras to boot frying it in
the hiroshima of paparazzi’s blinking.
failures are worth other people’s success when playing the lyre to a burn out of capitals:
anyway, edinburgh is the ultimate cameo in the literary bloodline
begot by paris for the 20th century ultimatum of identity scripted.
Oct 9, 2015
Oct 9, 2015 at 8:38 PM UTC
Garbage, filth,
the literal ****
stain on your
perfect, porcelain abode.
Wash me away with all of
the heat that
you can muster. The
burn is vital.
I flourish
on the notion that
I'm needed.
An inadequate being,
I'm bound to this misery;
living in
a hollowed shell like
the mollusk.
Apr 27, 2017
Apr 27, 2017 at 12:10 AM UTC
Once filled with a writhing mollusk
Now excavated and empty
Enter at the mouth of a continually twisting cave
To the left
Curling deeper into the heart of the shell
Shining and polished from years
Of water lapping at the coating
And brushing gently against the sand
Iridescent green and blue fade into purple
Suddenly
The shell’s twisting cavity
Ends
Jun 4, 2012
Jun 4, 2012 at 1:31 PM UTC
In dreams I see her blonde hair
always in a pony tail
She walks along the shoreline
Scouring the sand for treasure
Light blue shorts and a striped shirt
She quietly wends her way
Bare feet in and out of foam
In her hands, she holds small shells
Delicate and colorful
Orange, pink, yellow and white
These were wampum long ago
Gone now, all gone from this shore
But there she is, eight years old
Golden, tanned, happy alone
Treasures, wampum in her hand
She slips them in her pocket
Stepping into the water
She sees something moving there
A scallop! So carefully,
She reaches down patiently
Leads it with her hand until
The live mollusk slips right in
Clamping shut as she lifts it
It is beautiful, alive.
She knows they have many eyes
A bright blue like no other
If opened, they look like eggs
Cracked, sunny side up inside
Return it to the water
Watching for the many eyes
It hesitates, then opens
Jets away, ever backward
She lifts her face to the sun
One must notice those blue eyes
Then they cloud, time is short now
Soon the sun will leave the sky.
She runs for her red bucket
Half fills it with salt water
The water to her ankles,
She twists her feet, digs up clams
Chowders and some Cherrystones
Digging clams with little toes
Fills the bucket, off she goes.
Wednesday’s child is full of woes.
© Lin Cava 29-August-2008
I grew up on an island. Clams and scallops, ***** and flounder were plentiful and available for the taking. No one took more than they could eat. I had bay fishermen in the family – and they earned their living from the bounty of the waters around us. This poem is about a girl growing up in just such a place. Children this age are often not left to themselves. She thrives in solitude, happiest there. Notice there is no running or jumping or laughter. This is meant to be a somber work. The child knows that she is older than her years, yet she takes her happiness in those simple things that children do. So might we all be awestruck at the beauty of shells, the feeling of a living creature with its own beauty, in our hands. If only we could take the time. In whatever life holds for her, the girl takes her childhood in whatever way she can. Gazing over the water, whether it is the ocean, the bay or a lake, she often sees a woman there, a projection from within. I often see the child in my work. I am a Wednesday Child.
Oct 25, 2010
Oct 25, 2010 at 4:10 PM UTC
I am a pearl
In the warm embrace of a mollusk
Something beautiful, glorious
But with its own secrets
I am guarded, walls up high
The mollusk moulds me
Thinks it knows every part of me
But alas, that is not the case
I was placed in the mollusk, a grain of sand
But the ones that know me better
Are my fellow sand grains
Hard, but smooth as one
They know everything about me
They know my past
They know my present
They will know my future
As I emerge from the mollusk
So do they, from theirs
We come together, to form something
Gloriously beautiful
While we journey with
Pearls who know our true face
We must never forget the mollusks
Who shaped us from sand
May 1, 2015
May 1, 2015 at 6:26 AM UTC
Renegade crows
swagger ashore
lifting unlucky tritons
high into the whirling
wind, dropping them
to the rocks below
shell is rendered
to fine dust
revealing the mollusk
vainly hiding
in the fissured whorl
of what was once
Home
now a splintered chamber
with no exit
from which to squeeze
into the minute space
between falling
and breaking clean open.
Nov 30, 2015
Nov 30, 2015 at 9:26 AM UTC
wind, think-bits, and traffic.
they all mesh up
and dawdle through
the goon-soaked mind.
okay.
this is a fine kind of
semi-quiet.
a motorbike, revving to explode
cuts through the noise and
commands me:
"listen to me groan.
boy
am I ever
alive."
on the bike, I can't help but suppose,
there's a person.
and I further suppose a rush,
sweet, vicious rush
of adrenaline.
a lurching in the *****
a landscape of streetlights and gust,
******* screaming
straight through.
out there.
maybe there's two of them?
and the wheels just spinning and spinning and spinning.
and back here my head's just spinning and spinning
and spinning,
while people are out there
tunneling through to
the edge
of death.
****
now I gotta get up and write all this down
just so I don't feel like a mollusk.
Dec 26, 2014
Dec 26, 2014 at 8:26 PM UTC
the english don't know how to drink *****
sorry...
they don't...
by the way?
the english artifact of saying sorry?
it doesn't actually mean an apology...
the apology always comes too late...
but english nightclubs?
the english? they don't know how to
serve *****
***** is never served on ice...
i'm losing followers? am i?
good...
i like my self-imposed
censorship...
i like weeding out the soft pockets...
of people with weak
stomachs...
for all the celebration of Darwinism?
peer into my eyes...
if you really want to serve *****
***** isn't whiskey isn't
red wine, served at room temp. being
allowed airing...
mind you... funny fact...
six cloves of garlic dumped into
a bottle of red wine, matured for 2 weeks...
3 x 25ml of the wine...
apparently curbs your appetite...
don't ask me whether that's inclusive
of a placebo effect...
but when you're drinking
***** proper?
you don't add ice...
and keep it at room temp.,
you freeze it...
to below -10°C...
vodka isn't whiskey!
i know what warm **** tastes like,
i once fused red wine,
and, having ****** into the holy grail,
and subsequently drank the concoction...
come to think of it...
******* the Vatican colored flag of
extraction into a sacrament?
you need ***** to be served below
the freezing point of water,
given that, 0°C is a baron of quality
differentiating water from *****
alcohol evaporates at around
70+°C...
p.s. interlude:
i was never fond of the imperial rubric
of Fahrenheit and ounces, pounds,
miles, inches...
and all that quirky "genius" of
measurements...
mathematically?
i'm aligned with French...
but you don't serve *****
at room temp. with ice cubes
and a mixer...
given that ***** has a lower
boiling point,
you serve it under the "niqab" of
waster becoming ice...
so you serve it...
as something, equivalent of
gomme syrup...
you drink ***** that appears
syrupy...
like any single malt
puritan when it comes to whiskey?
there are ***** puritans out there...
you don't drink ***** lukewarm,
or slightly chilled...
you drink it at a temp. of
a gomme syrup...
liquid -20°C...
thick...
with all the alcohol poisoning
bacterium dead...
appearing
excessively sugary,
but not really...
night clubs that serve
***** not stashed in refrigerators
like butcher's meat?
don't drink the *****
in those places...
if it doesn't have the smoothness
of a gomme syrup?
sliding down your throat
like a mollusk on amphetamines?
the epitome:
***** and orange juice?!
you ******** me or opening
a ******* parachute while
stranded to the the ******* ground?
Aug 23, 2018
Aug 23, 2018 at 8:00 PM UTC
You
Shattered
My silence.
My
Empty
Mollusk
That
Is
My shell.
If
You
Think I loved
You,
Wouldn't. You. Be.
To. Tell?
I
Would
C r a w l
To
The edges
Of
The universe.
Just for
You.
Oct 16, 2013
Oct 16, 2013 at 6:42 PM UTC
Crushed under the dust
riding thick in the air.
Hands and knees to choke
and cough on a heavy
*** of burning oxygen.
In the valley
where all is a blown out
shade of sepia green,
you're reduced to a mollusk
crawling in your clothing,
clawing at the dirt,
calling, shouting,
eyes defeated,
"Someone turn that ******* light off before I go blind!"
May 10, 2014
May 10, 2014 at 5:00 AM UTC
We aren’t, necessarily, up. Beat not
beaten, we feast, and we will be. Come,
tell me, what information can’t be held in
our fatty acids? Immodestly, we’ve had both
the morsel modified and not. Its tiny bits mix
in us and with us, so it can inform us
forward with a digestibly new identity. We have
eaten more than this too, and it’s all in us,
with the knowledge of a world less well-preserved.
Less is on ice, but there’s more for us to taste,
and it’s the more and we’re the more. We
know of it, what it is that can’t get inside of us
if we don’t eat it. Let it, get inside, it won’t
eat at us. It won’t, it can’t shake us from
the unusual way we’ve wobbled through
a closely-measured firmament cold-packed
with these immeasurable clues. We’re no less
permanent there than this half-shell is here. Fixed
by a thin glaze, it awaits one sun, or the tide’s finding
its stomach again for mollusk, fine sand and pebbles.
Feb 7, 2012
Feb 7, 2012 at 11:17 PM UTC
Pain is awakening: the expansion of consciousness.
There is no half-way mark:
ignorance in sleep, health in full waking,
bound the gulf of hallucinations we call life.
In that Abyss of lies we deceive ourselves
until at last Truth annihilates the deceived,
unveiling the hidden Glory of the liar.
In the mantle of victimhood, Identity accretes
like a pearl on the tongue of a mollusk;
and a narrator, lost in the telling,
comes to mistake the story for reality,
wounds for tragedy, scars for harm.
Identity forms about Chaos,
a shell of experience that shrouds
a kernel of Truth.
A pearl is but a grain of sand
made beautiful by pain.
Apr 29, 2014
Apr 29, 2014 at 11:49 AM UTC
Here's the thing about a mollusk
Sometimes from a distance you can think you've glimpsed a pearl inside
So you get closer to investigate but the thing clenches tight
It's a defense mechanism; you know this
So you fight, and struggle to get the **** thing open
Your fingers bleed
Your muscles ache
You begin to believe that it will never break
Really going through something
But right when you're about to give up, it loosens
And you gaze inside to find
Nothing
What you thought was a pearl was just a trick of the light
I've had it with this girl
It's over alright
Jan 10, 2014
Jan 10, 2014 at 9:04 PM UTC
I destroy my imperfections with methodical, practiced precision.
In the mirror.
Face to face with the witching hour.
I swallow them whole like oysters in the moonlight,
ripe and swollen.
I strike when I am the least opaque.
Which is, of course, when no one else is looking.
My belly swells to fullness with my mollusk sorrows
and all the ways I hide them.
I admire its roundness, and caress its crescent shape.
I am alone on this plane, with my hands,
Where every night I digest and birth myself
in endless cycle.
Until morning.
Daily, I reteach myself my own history in pictures
And try to remember how to love.
Feb 26, 2019
Feb 26, 2019 at 11:48 PM UTC
I retract like a mollusk receding into it’s shell.
I think of the way I could simply just tilt my head back out of the passenger seat window
he drove,
moving through songs that meant the same to us.
I tickle the sand between my toes
slowly into the water while it wades around my knees,
how I could wrap my hands around his neck
just stand there while the world moved around us.
I find the trajectory of the mania, the nights where I just tried to lay as still as possible, not breathing too heavy or looking him in the eyes. How triggering it could have become if I would have
crossed my arms, sat up, or spoke.
I think of how the smoke enveloped most of our time together
blurring our vision
clouding our minds
viscerally
I didn’t need to see much further than his skin
I didn’t need to look over his shoulder
Just closed my eyes and soaked it all in.
Sep 23, 2017
Sep 23, 2017 at 2:31 PM UTC
Today I feel like a snail
who took forty years
to cross a road to find
that the other side was
the same. And you don't
want to deal with the rage
of a tired snail.
It is sad to find yours is
such an unglamorous totem.
Tomorrow I will feel
like an old philosopher.
I might even go as far
as to offer advise
(tiresome and languid),
and will talk about my
great and epic drift
through the great gray dessert.
And you will say,
here's a wise man,
without knowing that
everything was a mistake.
That it still is.
I warn you, I can change
expressions, seamlessly.
Remember this, cats can't
smile, they can laugh or
destroy it's world,
with the furious sorrow
and as slowly
as a tired mollusk.
And they will try.
Oct 11, 2017
Oct 11, 2017 at 10:43 AM UTC
He hates writing poetry,
as boys like him often do,
he hates books,
and science fiction
and generally most everything I like.
He clings like a mollusk,
is none too smart,
and often I'm bored with his very existence,
but lord he is sweet
as he spends an hour
writing a fantastically ****** poem
to repair what I keep breaking.
Poem in hand,
he lays his heart at my feet,
and in one swift motion
I stomp on it.
Mar 5, 2014
Mar 5, 2014 at 2:44 PM UTC