"newsprint" poems
Windex mice squeak through the windows,
biting newspaper as it scrapes across.
Soap from a new age fills the kitchen,
sheeps' fat long forgotten,
the sod-house of Laura Ingalls Wilder left behind
with its crumbling Lincoln logs,
the ceiling that drops dirt crumbs like a gritty pastry.
Our world is shiny,
so blinding that even the cough of newsprint makes it brighter.
A bottle sneezes across the counter, spurts those
bubbles of ammonia, gathers with the
rivers and tides that surge with ethanol,
it bursts the air with a neon smell and erases
everything that has come before.
Feb 28, 2012
Feb 28, 2012 at 1:01 AM UTC
*Inspiration pretty much finds you
even when you walk outside
to await the newspaper.*
A summer poem for a winter's day.
___
morning slow sleep walking,
reviewing my
evening sleep attire,
am I appropriately dressed,
to publicly receive
the somber weekend
Wall Street Journal?
which is hopefully waiting for
my rational embrace
where
the driveway meets the road.
as I walk, I note the:
seamed stitching
on my shirt,
a series of
crisscrossed stitches,
pattern of acute angles
stitched in Thailand,
or perhaps Bangladesh,
and when machined,
did the seamstress dream that
with a single blink,
dream metamorphosis
stitches become
crisscrossed out entries
in the diary,
that I don't keep,
the notations naked and rendered,
I don't want you
to know about,
so scratched into oblivion
but in a orderly fashion
before spilling them freely
to any misfortunate innocent Joe,
nice enough to ask me,
how ya doing...
impatiently waiting on a country road
for recycled newsprint
impressed into the service of the
Canadian Pulp Navy
a paper mache arrival overdue
via a technology of delivery
some what quaint, a photo dated
impish young boy
upon bicycle,
with angel wings
who when he passes,
winks at me, seeing my impatience,
(his cheek delighting my cheeks!)
and with robust throw, salutes,
Mission Accomplished.
as I wait
the muses attack,
a formation of
no-see-ums insects bite
ruminations brain-inserted
war correspondents now embedded,
a fifth column
to betray me
and I wonder about:
newspaper printed words
stale seconds before
they are writ,
which makes think
about time,
about making plans,
to do lists,
about how fast my coffee cools,
about how slow my skin colors,
About the first time I put words
about doubt & certainty
on paper
summoning up the courage
to look foolish and
how great it felt,
at the time.
**I fresh slap realize
these "poems"
are my diary,**
so for the record,
let it be duly recorded,
the paperboy delivers to me
the New York Times,
in error,
a cosmic sign
that this is where this
deuce minute walk
into the mind of a gnat,
should randomly end,
and be
crisscrossed into
oblivion.
summer 2012
Jan 21, 2014
Jan 21, 2014 at 12:16 PM UTC
Stars of tragedy.
Stories of their untimely demise
Told soberly in newsprint.
Stretching from Africa to Mexico,
Victims of natural disasters, crime,
And of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What was here is lost.
What was warm is forever gone.
These envelopes that remain can be stamped with anyone’s address.
In the end, it’s all the same
Dust
That settles in the melting ***
Empty shells littering beaches,
Dried-out husks,
Vacant houses.
Oct 16, 2016
Oct 16, 2016 at 7:33 PM UTC
Ah yes,
fresh starts,
like
fresh white sheets meeting
fresh black newspapers,
doomed to the inevitability,
groomed for the probability,
that their intersection
will be
newsprint contamination,
a black and white
condemnation,
So, a clarification:
this poem,
just like this moment,
a black and white surrogation,
a seventh day progeny
a sabbath moment,
must and will
and by definition,
be explained as an
interlocutory.^
fated to be
jubilee ended,
a pre and post
sabbatical
of but a
minute,
by law and custom,
destined to go up
in a smoking trinity of
white flame,
red wine,
and a cloud of
myrrh and salt incense.
Sigh with me.
Join in and
inhabit my eyes,
enjoy the unsullied
white blanket
of fresh snow
that humanizes my insights,
and for this moment,
share my peace,
my unedged relief that
the levees have broken
and I am awash in
waves of drifted snowflakes composed
of salt sanctified water
I may be thin and
clarified,
but my visions are still
less than limitless,
my sabbath poems
are but
momentary evaporated residuals of melted snowflakes, heretofore, salty tears, that become
rivers
that become
oceans,
upon which no
Poet-Envisionary
can truly walk,
see his tomorrows,
or even,
especially even,
his past days,
with perfect
clarity
Nov 16, 2013
Nov 16, 2013 at 10:01 AM UTC
Just because I’m reclusive, doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Above you stand only second-hand crossword puzzles chucked by gods, their errors in ink. The newsprint covers your head and you fill in some blank squares to make words shorter, how you want them to be. If you had your way, you’d be a philosophy major. You’d submerge yourself in knowledge like a child who spiraled from heaven via twirly slide in a pit of plastic ***** Your way would lead to fortune cookies filled with morbid maxims and hand-picked lucky numbers because computers are so impersonal. You’d call the absence of ignorance death; but until then, bathroom wall banter must do. **** what goes on in bathroom stalls. I touch myself in a public restroom thinking of you, my eagerness a shaken bottle of ginger ale. Two hours later, they start peering in the stall, asking if I’m alright in there. I feel the way I did when Jessica Serber ripped out my braid in second grade when we were playing Marco Polo. I told Coach Fish and she asked, “What am I supposed to do? Glue it back on?” I hated her ever since. And yet it’s not just hatred, but also fear, like the fear of killing spiders in case their family chooses to avenge them. I can never get over it; I can never live it down. So forgive me for never telling you this. Forgive me for never telling you much of anything. Just because I’m reclusive, doesn’t mean I don’t love you. But if one day you decide to leave me, I’ll hire a hustler who looks just like you.
Aug 2, 2012
Aug 2, 2012 at 9:47 AM UTC
I think
I've seen it all:
****** turbans,
Mosques riddled
With bullet holes,
Bus stop bomb shelters,
Bad aim.
I've been out of the loop
Recently—haven't
Had the time to
Stop and smell the
Newsprint on
The coffee table but,
I see pictures.
Paper maché
Leg casts,
Wine-stained
Hello Kitty bandages,
Slit wrists,
And a ground out cigar.
Lonely engines,
Browning fires,
And balsa wood.
Gas masks,
A judge's gavel
And traveller's checks.
House of cards,
Plane ticket,
Ukrainian flag.
Smoke bombs,
Sandpaper flares...
Rocket ships filled
With bags of sand.
And cups of coffee:
Wake up.
Jul 21, 2014
Jul 21, 2014 at 4:42 AM UTC
In a memory, in a postcard, in a corner, in my mind.
I tuck it there and wrap it well
old newsprint to mark its date.
In a bottle, on the bottom, in the lake, in winter,
I ship it there and throw out anchor
and watch it as it bobs.
In a place I won't remember
as soon as I remember to forget you-
I'll have shelved you
and stocked you
inventoried and packed you.
And then I'll say,
"just where did I leave that thing,
that heart of mine?"
And then I'll say,
"What was that thing I remembered to forget?"
In a thought that I won't think of you
when I think enough to think again
Is where I'll banish you to.
Yes, In the that place where the lost things
stay lost.
In that place where broken pieces stay broke.
I will take you
and your soft way-
long kiss, tired eyes, weary heart.
No. No, I'm remembering again.
Infested.
I'm infested.
Sahn
9/18/14
Sep 19, 2014
Sep 19, 2014 at 7:58 PM UTC
If a wrecking ball fell through the ceiling right now, I wouldn’t run.
I’d relish the scramble, apt as a totem pole amidst a school of fish.
If you don’t want to get hurt, just go around me.
You should know by now I’m always in the way.
If I were a totem pole amidst a school of fish,
I’d hope to be crushed at the center of a dance floor.
You should know by now I’m always in the way.
Disaster only strikes when we write it off.
I hope to be crushed at the center of the dance floor.
The ones who never knew me would reuse my obituary.
They’d know not to write off disaster.
They’d wrap their dishes in the newsprint when they moved uptown.
The ones who never knew me will reuse my obituary
for the thousands of others just like me.
They’ll wrap their dishes in newsprint when they move uptown.
They never pray for wrecking ***** to crash through ceilings.
The thousands of others like me
never knew that expecting the worst could save lives.
I always pray for wrecking ***** to crash through ceilings,
but this is not the answer.
Expecting the worst only saves lives
if your death is a surprise party that never happens.
This is not the answer.
You cannot think like this every day.
If your death is a surprise party that never happens,
you will stop believing that it is possible.
You cannot think like this every day.
Your fear will become the moans of a woman who’s not wet.
You will stop believing that what you want is possible.
If a wrecking ball falls through the ceiling right now, I won’t run.
I will moan through the fear even though I am not wet.
Just go around me if you don’t want to get hurt.
Jun 13, 2012
Jun 13, 2012 at 9:28 AM UTC
•••
"on some days, I love you more than others,"
an early morning uh oh
IROLO
(instantly regretted out loud observation),
of the potentially ruinous kind,
spoken with malice towards none,
*and obviously,
no forethought,*
firmly but modestly muttered
over the modestly rumpled
courtroom battlefield
of sheets, newsprint, mugs
and Bocelli on low
smockingly,
(a slow spreading smile of mock),
she turns her gaze upon
the presumed guilty, querulous,
soon-to-be-ruined ruminator (me),
and asks with
disdainful derisive decisiveness
is your first cuppa too hot darling?
has your uncommon sense of non-sense been burnt?
t'is true I reply,
I feel the burn!
for am I not sworn
to tell the whole heated truth
and nothing but?
my love for you is simply
a mathematical additive,
progression series
every new day I love you
is forever
a mighty mite more
than the prior,
a smudged smidge of a penciled line,
taller than the
higher higher notated
upon ancient yesterday's doorpost
ergo,
ip so factoid,
and therefore,
by definition
on some days I love you more than others
•••
p.s. never have conversations like this in the presence of within-reach newspapers,
for they be
easy rolled and revised
into fearsome weaponry,
suitably for handy smacking"*
Feb 6, 2016
Feb 6, 2016 at 4:46 PM UTC
I've read the news, and it's red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumbprints. They're not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don't
read or write such things. They may
bleed, them, but the blood isn't red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn't that,
at least not until it's too, too late
to stanch. The bully's standard is to take
it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn't come. Not like we
were used to. I'm told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,
that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I've been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There's no upside to the up-down
and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It's fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the paper. I don't
get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I've read and I'm reading.
Jun 10, 2012
Jun 10, 2012 at 6:25 PM UTC
Jailed with all the other squawking birds
confined, it never flew and barely grew
& never knew the mimicry of words
sanguine, foul molting cockatoo in the corner
lowered, bloodied, the lowliest in a pecking order
his owner's a loner, a collector of tinged newsprint
entombed in brick & mortar - nomad minus footprint
and his birds, perched across wooden dowels
proceeded to empty their millet'd bowels
onto sheets of unfinished poetry
correctivewhiteoutmisery
so, he, being miserly, wouldn't shell out the reader's fee
to the greedy posthumous publishing company, yet
another relic in a mortuary of literacy
he was just another faceless, bearded bard
and with the old coffee grounds
he would discard
piling mounds of compost, broken bound
his compositions decomposing in the attic
warbling hiss, winding tape spool. ghosts
searching for signals amongst the static
he awaited revision of his works
ill, amidst the scattered ruins
red ink, gold leaf & carets^
he, impetuous, slumped further into his doldrums
though, all public grievances were withdrawn
crass, he prattled on to his dolorous birds
still oblivious to his defunct words
He lied dormant, comatose
in the 3rd degree infirmary
there was once a pretty lass
who could exhume the pristine
glass contents of his tinsel'd tomb
His malady, he once named Gamine
lived in a stretched-white canvas room
she eyed his burnt pile of vile-dirge verse
as mayflys & junebugs, & smoggy dirigibles
fluttered gently out of her empty purse
she grew on him like a cancer
for she was God's embellishment
pallid and perfect, and he cursed
her love as it ebbed and flowed
her aureole glowed, safely stowed
in an airship's overhead compartment
she was flying home for
there was no other answer
Jul 13, 2015
Jul 13, 2015 at 12:01 AM UTC
I buy a shirt, a blue shirt, a button down.
I drink a glass of wine, a red, a Malbec.
And I watch.
I stand still in the midst
of the St. Cloud Market.
The crowd—that singular being—
jostles and jockeys and talks
in broken English.
I chew gum, cinnamon gum, Nicorette.
I feel my habit inverting, bending, becoming mechanical.
And I must flirt and be moral
with the shopkeeper who looks a little
like me.
And I must revert to an irrational, emotional,
childlike state as I buy three pirated DVDs.
The crowd forms a circle instinctually.
Three women dance slowly in the center.
Paper falls from the sky, newsprint, a day old.
Gunfire, the sound of it, its slowing of time.
No one says a thing
and no one's feet make a sound and
every child is perfectly behaved
for one relentless moment.
Jul 26, 2016
Jul 26, 2016 at 5:54 PM UTC
who told you
you were not beautiful?
does that mean
not worthy of their time?
but anyway
they stated as such
if anything
their actions proved otherwise
but no matter
I’m trying not to mind
that I was never real
figment of imagination
whatever you cast me
I betrayed love
and cast heroes into new moons
beached jellyfish
I’m learning to gather bones
painting a canvas
instead of
reading newsprint
sculpture of messy clay
ultimate opus
good gold
honest trinket
bees’ honey
I recognize my self
ageless blue
flame
in all that is
ugly
small practice
sunburst navel design
Nov 23, 2016
Nov 23, 2016 at 8:40 AM UTC
The college kids still pump out poems;
my heroes haven't published a book in years.
The academics are moving to visual arts
kerning letters on the page, adding artist statements.
Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.
Passion fades with age, I suppose. A symptom of
the cult of happiness.
And I love to read poems
from twenty-somethings who just want to get ******
I picture my red pen exciting them as I destroy
their fine-tuned metaphors, all muddled with conflicting allusion,
as if juxtaposition alone adds meaning.
In school, it was all Cezanne and hydrogen jukebox birdsongs,
and equally interesting but useless adjective strings.
The academics are doing the same, but with form.
It bores us, don't they know?
Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.
**** these kids for having such easy means to publication.
I read their journals, their magazines, their "editions"
online, vivid, vomiting color and opinion.
I long for publishing classified ads and
scribbled chalk portraits of the women I loved
and the twenty-somethings who just wanted to get ******
and reflections of how I never mastered either craft.
I long to rub the ink off newsprint in my fingers,
smudge the words on the page and ***** my hands,
watch the chalk run into the red brick
during ten-minute monsoons, smell the library's adobe,
light a cigarette and remember that the stacks are filled
with ages of greater work than these ******* kids...
and these ******* academics.
Greater than me.
Jul 14, 2015
Jul 14, 2015 at 5:04 AM UTC
a talkative beast
spewing half truths
and half lies
confident as the kid
in your class who
always raised his hand
to mouth
the wrong answer
a kettle on the boil
whistling absurdities
shrill as
a woman who
has waited an hour
at the rusty tap
with a blue plastic bucket
to find the last drop
trickle away
a menagerie of vultures
salivating in unison
at moist corpses
in the street and
swooping on the dead
for a quote
like eager students
waiting for exam results
to be plastered
on the notice board
a mercurial mistress
who breaks
a different bed everyday
for limp men desiring
a high-decibel
performance for
a two paisa act
culminating
in a contrived
******
an electronically enabled
carrion crew
reducing pillage
to inches of column
on newsprint
a veritable feast
isn’t it
with Marie biscuits
and steaming tea
there is no escaping
this monster
of many heads
and one tongue
for it whispers
a worldview
its gait
insidious and stealthy
as it pounces
on sheep who
then bleat
its platitudes
as the truth
and nothing but
the truth
Jul 30, 2014
Jul 30, 2014 at 6:18 AM UTC
I’ve read the news, and its red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumb prints. They’re not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don’t
read or write such things. They may
bleed them, but the blood isn’t red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn’t that,
at least not until it’s too, too late
to stanch. The bully’s standard is to take
it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn’t come. Not like we
were used to. I’m told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,
that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I’ve been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There’s no upside to the up-down
and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It’s fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the print. I don’t
get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I’ve read and I’m reading.
Feb 16, 2012
Feb 16, 2012 at 8:11 PM UTC
Every last breath
Noted on a bemusing script of flesh
Like a disease
Like an infectious—
Tell me.
If I could do it over
And kiss you whilst your lips quaked
Then grin alongside shy tears
That life you were pulling up,
With my eyes as your sheave to a dim-lit tapestry,
Would it be there yet?
Behind the curtain of magnanimity
Pit orchestra abashed
Forlorn and begotten
Words of heraldry ring through this kingdom
Existing only in my mind
A land beneath the stage
Worlds inside headspace
Turn the critic’s shadowy eye
Backward from this date on newsprint
Soaked in angry, puddled water soot
Oct 25, 2010
Oct 25, 2010 at 10:17 PM UTC
we read the paper together in bed
side by side,
electronically,
nary a smudge of newsprint
on our fingers or sheets,
nothing to stain
or indemnify,
that wet spot
we created with the
realized physicality
of our embrace
Jun 28, 2014
Jun 28, 2014 at 8:04 AM UTC
I know what it was before
it became what it is
I’m at a disadvantage perhaps
and must forget its ****** state
its absolute condition of whiteness
the purity of snow untrodden
unmarked except for the lines
woven in warp and weft
I don’t know how to look at this piece
if I had it in my hands I’d turn it about
this way that way upside down
even to lie on its diagonals perhaps
otherwise it appears like newsprint
smudged but I think for me its best
on its side so there are columns
not stories floors horizontal separators
There - now it has something of that
Annie Albers City Skyline
a tapestry seen together
on a January day you
blue-skirted with winter boots
grey-cloaked with stripy tights
a sketching bag on the shoulder
a camera in hand and I entranced
by every move you made
As though seeking an image
in a cloudscape I view a quintet
of panels on a painted screen
a Chinese landscape Han dynasty
stark trees slow fields low hills
rising to a darkening horizon then
a river flows a valley forms and I am
smitten by the accident of invention
as always my love as always
gathering myself into the pleasure
of it all dear artist of weave and print
Jan 9, 2015
Jan 9, 2015 at 3:36 AM UTC
Jailed with all the other squawking birds
confined, it never flew and barely grew
& never knew the mimicry of words
sanguine, foul molting cockatoo in the corner
lowered, bloodied, the lowliest in a pecking order
his owner's a loner, a collector of tinged newsprint
entombed in brick & mortar - nomad minus footprint
and his birds, perched across wooden dowels
proceeded to empty their millet'd bowels
onto sheets of unfinished poetry
correctivewhiteoutmisery
so, he, being miserly, wouldn't shell out the reader's fee
to the greedy posthumous publishing company, yet
another relic in a mortuary of literacy
he was just another faceless, bearded bard
and with the old coffee grounds
he would discard
piling mounds of compost, broken bound
his compositions decomposing in the attic
warbling hiss, winding tape spool. ghosts
searching for signals amongst the static
he awaited revision of his works
ill, amidst the scattered ruins
red ink, gold leaf & carets^
he, impetuous, slumped further into his doldrums
though, all public grievances were withdrawn
crass, he prattled on to his dolorous birds
still oblivious to his defunct words
He lied dormant, comatose
in the 3rd degree infirmary
there was once a pretty lass
who could exhume the pristine
glass contents of his tinsel'd tomb
His malady, he once named Gamine
lived in a stretched-white canvas room
she eyed his burnt pile of vile-dirge verse
as mayflys & junebugs, & smoggy dirigibles
fluttered gently out of her empty purse
she grew on him like a cancer
for she was God's embellishment
pallid and perfect, and he cursed
her love as it ebbed and flowed
her aureole glowed, safely stowed
in an airship's overhead compartment
she was flying home for
there was no other answer
Mar 19, 2016
Mar 19, 2016 at 4:18 PM UTC
We were holding hands in the summer
and the street was cracked
and the clouds were being greedy
even through their kindness
and their tears turned salty on my cheeks
when I looked at him
It became too much;
he slipped down the rabbithole and faded
like eighty year old newsprint
until there wasn’t much left but the tattered shoes
I told him to replace months ago
and the echo of his last breath
on a breeze that was
staler than the bread left out on the counter
this morning
I saw the things I didn’t want to see,
the things he didn’t want me to see,
and I wished at that moment
for a gallon of bleach to pour into my head
just burn it all away
but no one can fade like he can.
Apr 2, 2012
Apr 2, 2012 at 12:29 PM UTC
last night
dreams of neatly packaged anxiety
neatly parceled into my worst fears
planted themselves, grew their roots during my sleep.
i dreamt of irreparable scarring
a face no one could love
the pity of strangers
grief painted across my face in streaks of angry red
dry skin
red like your mother's old tea kettle
crackling like newsprint on a windy day
when you feel as if you are fighting a losing battle
with your own flesh
there is only so much war to be waged
face defeat.
skin will never be her flawless porcelain
will burn as deeply as your shame.
your teeth slightly crooked
sugarfree gum packed into a hesitant casing
leaning as if trying to escape the only mouth they will ever know
in an age of daylily smiles
women sculpted by their own reassurance
will you ever see my smile beyond all that i am not?
May 30, 2016
May 30, 2016 at 12:02 PM UTC
*Buried in the walls of an abandoned house
You will find my morality, integrity and values
How can I be holy in a holocaust?
Shame has stripped away my humanity
And left me with volumes of despair
Shuttered into my wrinkled world*
Watching her smile at me from yellowed newsprint
And creased photographs in which everyone looks
The same, except for her. A haunting spirit which
Possesses even the cellulose and ink I clutch
In my trembling hands. Trophies of a brilliant life
That once snagged on a sharpened shard, began to
Unravel amidst Hope and Happiness and Honor
I flagellate myself with memories of walks and
Trips and fights. No amount of self-mortification
Is sufficient to satisfy the demons which torment
Me, nor the angels which mourn her. No penitence
Can relieve me of the yoke I'm burdened with of
Anger, Remorse, and Resentment. No purgatory
Sentence can properly prepare me for a pardon
Volumes of thought left behind in word and
Picture offer little solace to my fractured feelings
Left here to reassemble this life alone
This daunting task of overwhelming breadth
Leaves me with no answers, only the question
How can I complete the puzzle with a
Piece lost forever?
Mar 14, 2015
Mar 14, 2015 at 11:40 AM UTC
Man, wraps his thin coat tighter, squinting at fine newsprint, smoking a cigarette. Lust thick she says: "Yes, please **** me."
Without grace he paces ***** streets, avoiding eye contact planning what next vice will fill his belly. Without tradition he sits before his television eating. "I am in the mood I think to drink until I become an ape." Without shape he storms about always with a shout. Fueled by rage, jaw clenched, he sniffs at every ***** fists clenched war bent.
He sleeps. He is lowered down into the belly of stone into a world of his own creation. He dreams of loading the magazine of his pistol and craves the hook of his finger on the trigger. His dreams are gray, barely lit through the smog. He reels through the pornographic cinema of his heart until a passing train wakes him. ****
Man, wrestles with his son, laughing at the end of a hard day. Beneath his nails, black soil, wanting not but for her.
She loves him because he could be no better. He treats his dog like his brother, no man above or below him. Peaceful, green hills and cloud in a shroud of birdsong. Leaning on the sickle like a mountainside he smiles, straight-backed, sun tanned. He watches a silver-chest buck forrage at the tree line the fawn nearby still sniffing at the doe. The man's kiss is like a flower and his voice like a lyre,
Forearms of stone and legs that rarely tire. At night they lie around the fire. He acts, he sings, and tells them again the stories of their ancestors, unforgotten. He says "There are heroes still if you look for them."
He dreams and sunlight fills his core. He stands upon a hill watching clouds roll. She kisses his brow, and the small warm arms of the boy wrap around his thigh.
Feb 28, 2016
Feb 28, 2016 at 4:32 PM UTC
At the brink of worlds I could
Hear hammer blows on coffin wood
Drink headline ink 'til doomsday falls
Taste newsprint paste on gray cell walls
Fissures deep in split flesh stung
With gritted teeth and muted tongue
Where endings chewed in unplacid fever
Slake only the fat of the world-eaters
Oct 30, 2019
Oct 30, 2019 at 7:32 PM UTC