We fall,
and hard,
and in the shadows,
***** ourselves on snags,
that tear our clothes;
grazed and cut,
we stagger on -
Impressions, ideas, fancies!
Of these have we been disabused.

But is this spring,
come again?

Lovely,
yesterday,
in the bright sunlight,
to see you,
felt green hat in among the photo clouds,
apple suedes on the gallery's dank floor.

Melvyn,  
and I,
merrily circling with you the light cloud images,
my nostrils full of pollen spikes.
The pictures:
wisps of trailing dreams churning in ‘scapes of infinite blue;
dark clouds,
in amongst them,
too.

Photographs in two time places
caught;
at once, all:
the other and t'other.

So excitement swells,
and everything besides us quells,
because the knowing of itself,
knows,
and dares beyond the frames;
to skirt knowingly the unsaid;
to want beyond the wounded past,
to pull things,
once again,
inside out.

In whimsy’s currents flow these thoughts,
these feelings,
these drives;
swirling in eddies,
so that as you sit,
on a summer’s day,
it moves,
a mirror to everything above.

The wavelets on the surface,
hammered into shape,
burn, bite and dazzle;
the sun’s flames leaping and dancing on ripples.

In the basement,
on the concrete,
your Y proneness shifts,
releasing knees on black-clad thighs;
two pendulums swinging,
brushing;
yawing metronomes in the cool,
coolness of my desultory thoughts.

Oh, what am I saying?
Feelings like reveries walk along these silver lips straying languorously.
These myths are too soon made,
carried one to the next,
one-on-one,
until contained no longer,
become new truths.

the crust on the bread we break
chafes the palm homely
as we twist the loaf of our repast
releasing the heat of hot embers
growling in the brick womb
of our rustic ovens...
crumbling aglow, after the dough
has risen like a Christ
to a crisp.
long after the yeast has spat hollows
in the flesh of our sour toast.
it burns unburdened
beneath a barren  grill, inconsolable.
croaking smoke and ash.
pitching cinders up the plume
Promethean.

it is the morning.

so our wolves will have
their rabbits
as our pendulums,
our mortality.

but the feast is not our bread...
it's the crumbs.

I have nooses hanging from my ceiling
I’ve made all of them
With fumbling fingers in the rain
I’ve strung them to the rafters like a one hundred stringed guitar

When I get home I’ll make one more,
There’s one for every night I’ve spent in hiding.
It’s raining; I keep my lips closed.
Maybe I’ll get the rope wet,
It will rub harder between my hands.

I think it’s you,
My hands muddle in between flannel,
I’m frayed at the edges
And it hurts good.

I light up the rain
Refracting all over the window
In my corner sheltered in hopeful wallpaper
You keep me secret.
                                                                                          Hi

I keep my lips closed.
It’s cold you know,
My wrists don’t like showing themselves.
                                                                             It’s been too long

Tonight I’ll add to your waterfall
All wrapped and waiting
For a thousand pretty birds.
Lovingly stealing my breaths away,
Tiny ****** roughly holding on.

                                                                              It really hasn’t
No
It really has,
Since you’ve been away.

                                                                     I’ve made stars for you.
I should stop,
Every night I say I should.
But counting my splinters reassures me
I’m good at something.

                                                                           I need to tell you,
                                                                                   I’m done.
I’m good at ending,
But you’ve beat me to it.

I have all the time to choose from,
Hidden away safe, with me.
Suspended in the air, I am at risk
From myself, from my pendulums.
                                                                                *Goodbye.

When I walked in I didn't know what to expect.
Each room highlighted in light.
A oral tradition. To make ourselves at home upon request.
In reciprocation we do.
The rooms we gather in, the ones we walk past.
The objects we fill to take up space.
The rooms a clear reflection of Spring.
The molding painted white.
I was told that some rooms are not to be visited.
Everything has it's season and this isn't one of them.
Placing blame on the rooms.
I want to explore them most I said.
The ones that go unseen.
The things we rarely shine light to.
The places films of dust continue to grow.
These are some of the best places to go.
The beauty of things we walk past day to day.
The smile unknown destinations can bring.
Cultivating the ideas we keep cluttered.
Gasping for air.
These are the rooms I want to explore most.
The parts of you that you strictly keep to yourself.
Only when you are comfortable to share these rooms with me.
To kiss the floor with our feet.
To dwell in the past staring into our future.
We are the pendulums trapped inside the clock

We're like two Pendulums
Made from the same source
     Once One
Split through creation
Drawn together
     Recognizing
          Reconnecting
               Realigning
Each swing moving us closer
Writing our destiny in the sands
Magnetically pulling us back to Unison
    
     Syncing
          Becoming One Again

WHOLE

Harmonious with the Universe
And Purpose

©Tina Thompson 2017

Poppies blossom like open cuts.
Ripe and red, they fill the air
With a cloying sweetness
So potent anyone downwind
Must shut their eyes and breathe
Through open mouths.  Tasting
The breath of flowers, they grow
Nauseous and afraid.  

The fields sway in the hot breeze
Until they resemble an ocean aflame -
It is here, among these poppies, I have
Found the blood of the Earth.  
It is moist and toxic, an acid eating away the soles
Of all that wade through it.  
How many gaunt, pale bundles of bone
Rest below these soft, red petals?
No one dares to count.  

People do not fear such
Lovely things - if they’ve only seen
Pictures.  How nice it must be
To know nothing of poppies
But their color, their shape.  
They seem almost beautiful -
But you know better.

You have stood waist deep in the
Malignant fields, breathing the air
That slowed your limbs -
Turning your arms and legs into pendulums
Swaying to the beat of the buds
That encircle them -
Until you knelt, weighed down,
Nearly submerged by saccharine terrors,
And cried, hoping the water leaking from your heart
Would put out the fires you find yourself embracing.  
After all, during the darker hours
Any light is better than no light at all
(Or so something whispers in your tired ear).  

You know the horror of poppies -
But  still you have yet to plunge
Past the black eyes of those red beasts -
For when the wind blows clean, cold
Air to you what do you do?
You raise your arms and let yourself
Feel as though you can fly -
And one day…one day
You will look down
And see yourself above
A ground free of poppies.

It feels unbounded,
expanded beyond wrinkles,
hammered by swinging pendulums;
hardened, with time slipping by...

I feel bound
by forgotten promises,
lost and unfounded;
with tearful, tired eyes.

In the dark, I find words I can barely see,
feelings I can barely contain;
falling through the cracks,
overwhelmed with disdain...

I see no end to this depthless void...

I am in love with an invisible string
as it moves around in motive motions
swinging my heart to extreme lengths
singing a song in definitive heights
tounging it's mouth in unknown breadths

I am in love with something peculiar
it moves in people and street pendulums
in cities it drives a longing restless soul
it's inside the trees and soaked in barks
It's paradise taste is an eternity paste

I am in love in a dream that will settle
as we chase to the end of broken seas
where we wrestle, crest in chutes we rest
as we make love soul to soul, word on word
on the cross of pens and canvassed fends

I glanced fancily upward, taking quick notice at the 5 bladed ceiling fan that had always resembled the most crooked demeanor. Dust had been caking on her old worn blades for decades, building towers of particles of all sorts on the oak finish wood she was given at the factory she was produced in. Without the slightest mince of doubt, I would confirm China to plead the fifth. Shaking, this fan has never shook it had not been used since last summer. I heard ear splitting low toned roars as if boulders were forming an army only to be dropped from high jacks in the clouds. As I figure, these trains that run through this nearly vacant ghost town were shifting from one track, to one of the other six sets. Young, lying amongst my spring filled bed, the roars should have terrified most kids, but for me that signified life in a lifeless, sub-cultured society. Those roars had put me soundly to sleep.

My dark brown, small gritty eyes received a bit of that ceiling in them on the average August day of trains and mirages down the road. Determined to productively put this tired body of mine to good use I begin to scramble around the house for handy-man looking objects. Hammers, wrenches, nails, these things are hard to come by with two females under one roof alone. A ******* child I am, but ever long have accepted that. Luck had struck my view as I finally found myself in the parasitic garage infested with cobwebs, and every insect relevant to Kingdom Animalia. Running with all of these essentials may not have been the smartest decision, but hesitantly, in abrupt nature, I stopped. The roaring had been a continuous cycle of low blows against the hot sona air. It seemed like pendulums gaining momentum the closer it rose. I thought so keenly at the fact that a single human pair of ear drums should not rightfully pick up such low, non chromatic scale frequencies without crouching helplessly in fetal position.

Running to the front gate, mounted and bound by wires and steel, setting foot on the end of the premises of my humble abode, I felt utter desperation for everyone around me. The neighbors, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, all our town’s elders that had been scornfully slothful over the years, were shifting about frantically. Leaping in panic-like modes into there vehicles. Into other neighbors vehicles. My mother, that had been off working four towns west, away from the commotion, makes the predicament that I will do just the same. But I boycott her judgment…as always.

The day had come. Finally, a vacant ghost town of my very own for merely minutes seemed like the longest, most eventful lifetime I had fulfilled. How badly the urge set upon my mind to grab wooden spoons and the biggest stew *** in the pantry I could possibly find. Just to gain and take name of my own sound while the calm was at its most content. For that piece in time, I would cherish every second. To warn no living thing, just me and the atmosphere, that I am here. I am the only one here. I am every characterized town in one. I am the law, I am the doctor, I am the city inspector. I blink as I erase my silhouette from this illusion. The roars are now visible. I can see how white and violent there pitches are. I see every color in the nearing explosions because the whitened bomb bends and blends them all together, and holds them firm. They begin to paint the sky gracefully on its pale blue canvas on the mid-august summer day.

I grab my essentials of handy-man objects that I almost lost feel of. Slowly returning to the home I know best, I intended on removing that dust covered fan and I did. Without ever knowing any father figure I would give him that fan, the only token of my existence he would submerge over. I own up to the simplicity and humorous thought of doing everything without him.

Reminiscing back to when I was young, lying amongst my spring filled bed, just as I am now. I thought, the roars should have terrified me like the town, but for me that signified life in a lifeless, sub-cultured society. The roars had put me soundly to sleep.

Pulsing beneath
My skin
Is a heartbeat
That pendulums
From anxious to placid
And more often than not
Doesn't know the meaning
Of steady.

their spines are straight -
two different trees in two different woods.
people like them are not meant
to come face to face.
is this the first time the distance between them is silent?
emptied of political din, hoarse
shouts of protest in market squares,
flags unfurled not in love for a country
but in hate for the other.

are enemies still enemies when they are of the same space?

the two girls recognize
that their hair curls in the same way.
they don't reach out to touch
but a curiosity forms a thread between them.
a thread. their fingers tingle, flutter
spooling and unspooling
this new connection, this new thread.
their eyes swing like pendulums.
how new, how strange to breathe
in air that is clean of artificial hate.

they are curious, spooling and unspooling.
what will happen to this thread?
for threads are too easy to break.
and each knows the power of governments,
their ability to dangle them
then break
and break and break.

the two girls wonder. the two girls stare.
they look. they look and look.

but their spines are straight -
two different trees in two different woods.

Steady the relation between us

For now...

But what of then and now?

When my loss and salvation lie in hand

A pendulums swing from collision

Speeding up as we approach impact

Preemptive...

Too eager to just let me go

I fear upon my flight's return roost's sanctuary will house me no longer

I will fly away, pausing restlessly...

Wonder is all I am

Until again we feed

*Will I ever be free?

Up above.
Church bells that vibrate with resonance.
Down below.
The solid earth that grapples with the fear of an apocalypse.
Grass that grips and pulls.
Luminous moonlight from my distant dreams pooling from my pores.
This over growth is my home.
Down by the creek,
you'll find me if I am what you seek.
Turning water into wine.
When I close my eyes I know that there is no difference between this land and me.
Break the darkness.
Break the veil.
The green ones with their seeking limbs, filling up the air, filling up the forest deep.
The leaves and twigs that collect in the drifting yellow suns.
As the deer stood high on the cliff a delicate rain of golden tears shed light on solemn hidden faces.
Seeking light on this path of mine.
Dangling dark vines that swing like pendulums collecting lost souls.
Those that do not make it through left to perish,
left to die.
In tomorrow they restart.
High fidelity voices that press insecurity into them like fists in dough.
Repeat.
Repeat.
The voices in their heads.
They're slippin',
trippin'.
Shaking their heads trying settle down the storm of razor blades within.
There is no return from this far off tear filled island.
All that we see.
All that we are
is wandering souls lost in time.

When I was born,
Mother named me “Novina,”
and I was to be both
the prayer and the answer.
I was to be both god and servant.

When the pebbles started flying,
no one told me to hide,
to cover myself or to wrap
my own arms around my chest,
with my head tucked in so that I resembled
a balled up sacred vessel.

I stood, in the backyard,
with the simple man from next door
who still lived with his mother,
who was still the prayer, but could
never be an answer.
He towered over me,
smiling Mona-Lisa-stupid
in the face of civil war.

When the Jackel-monkey rode in,
on his lowrider chariot, he laughed
and made the simple man dance,
and dance,
and then sleep.
Eyes open,
crying Mother Mary tears as
he fell redwood-heavy before me.

and I whispered “Madre de hijos,”
but that's not a prayer, jackel-monkey said.

And you know prayers? I spit back,
my baby teeth and his flying pebbles
meeting in the middle,
before the pebble flew past the tooth,
to me,
into me,
and into the cinder block behind me.

He rode away on a dark horse,
and I yelled after him, my diamond eyes-turned-dangling pendulums in 2 quarter time,
“judge me and die. Judge me and die. I am Novina whom Mother loves.”

Lost the key

I dance in desperate movements,
stepping on toes as I go
Spinning out of control as faces grimace in my wake,
changing scenery like mirrored ball illusions,
tiny reflective squares blinding as they move
Still you stare, questioning gazes,
not making eye contact
but sensing my heart through the song…
playing in steady repetition

Fingers in your ears for fear
that it might touch you
in rhythmic hypnosis, shining pendulums
swinging in reverse tempo, challenging these feelings
you hold but still can not admit the lyrics
Prideful walls of bricked fortitude
built around your emotions sing of
locked entryways and barred windows
and it seems I have lost the key

Misplaced along out of tune wavelengths
while pitchy corridors of doubt
fill in the shadows of this that I desire
Still I extend a hand, “would you care to dance?”
Dark eyes squint as you focus, looking beyond the bandstand,
finding mistakes of the past playing in three quarter time,
heading towards the stage door exit,
tapping your toe in cadence with the drummer
who now stops…along with the beat of my heart

scavenger bride,
she counted periods
before the children came along,
but never suspected
eyes like bottles
beginning to blue,
a tangle of scars
hermetically sealed,
the new order of
a broken romance,
dead love cassettes
in the glove compartment,

her cold and empty
constellations,
like cold breath
passing through a beam of sunlight,
grid of points, pendulums,
the ratio of freckles to stars,
no subtle countenance,
martinis and bikinis,
soft ******* and ice cream,
slight, elusive things, on a beach
with no more meaning,

the repeating pattern of
her mistakes and reliefs,
a preservation of decay,
sustained by the tiny
human fault line
in that oneiric hinterland,
between dreaming and waking,

she draws around the noise
and the clearings,
she creates within that sightline
the way her sadness can feel
comfortable,
an extension of loss that turns
her ruins into a home.

“have you masturbated yet”
no i haven’t
“do you even know how to”
yes i understand the mechanics of it
you put a couple of fingers in and
wiggle them around

“why haven’t you masturbated yet”
i lied when i told you that there was
a short answer to this
either answer involves yelling
and screaming so loud
that a fire blossoms
in the middle of my chest
and my voice cracks
and people can hear me on the
other side of the restaurant

this is not a quiet answer
it is not a quick one
it is the pull of a trigger
right into who i am
and it is a cruel
slash at my insecurity

have you ever heard of
****** autonomy
or maybe personal space
questions that
a grown man
an elderly man
should never ask a teenager
let alone a transgender teenager

and the age gap
42 years
a year younger than my mother
doesn’t make this a friendly thing
it makes you a pervert

(but i will answer this again
so more people than you
can look at me like i am
even more of a freak
than they originally thought

i do not *******
because looking at myself naked
even before getting into the shower
when i brush my teeth
and my ******* swing
like twin pendulums
over the basin of the sink
i want to cut it all off

and no
at this point
i do not care if i bleed to death
i have been bleeding for years
since that first person asked me
if i was a girl or a boy

and no
you do not understand
because you were not born
in the wrong body
you have the hanging anatomy
between your hairy thighs
and the biologically male on
your birth certificate
as proof of that

there are no
scars on your arms
or on your chest

parts of you are not going to
be cut off
and scooped out
so people will see you as
and address you as
male

so do not pretend that
you understand
because you do not
and you do not try to)

How
I retry
Backside Pen Slide
Lyrics spirits quips glide
Elbows Shins Blood Blot Dried
When Wind Blows Wicked Words Rise
Idioms Soul Grind Infinite rails Applied
Thoughts Ollie Pop Manual quill Pipe bomb
Ultra Stick Ink Drips 360 Plot Shov-it Twist
Push Kick I Pedal Prose Skate Tricks, Morphemes Stick.
Perpetual Pendulums Prop People to Place Peckers in Potato Grits

Times Up!

In my world there is iron and concrete.
There are rusted pendulums and mute birds
There are time bombs and dictators.
There is faith and there is reason
subjectivity
objectivity
And there, out there, is reality,
But none of us can see it through the barbed wire and the
Iron and concrete.

white
I wait at the window and I watch her sitting out there in the air, empty and open to the early morning.
 
I am motionless and I wonder if I went out there and stood looking at her if she would feel in that moment that life and death themselves were the simplest things anyone would ever know and that questions were more fulfilling than the answers. That our brokenness was our only claim to existence.
We would be aware, but untouched. One second would trip on the next and we would surface and the roar would fill our heads again.
 
She blinks and focuses, she sees me. She looks at me with an apology on her face, waiting for something readable on mine.
 
Well, I guess I always thought it would feel different in the moment when someone saved my life. I thought I would feel more than this, but all I feel is white.
 
 
red
a touch to skin
a fingerprint on blush
on memory
 
anxious anticipation, the space between my blood and yours
crossed with all that I know to the only thing I have ever felt
in an inch of movement
 
the press of your life against mine
white, adored
soft, the subtly of a sunrise
rushing into splendorous day,
your lips hot on my neck
burning that fills my hands and my legs and everything
twisting and tortured
an explosion in the dark
one star joining the night sky, falling to pieces
and melting into whispers
 
the pause of time locked in the space
where my skin pours into your skin becomes
our skin becomes glimmering
light
 
 
blue
We are
up late in the static dark, and we are
together
laying in your bed perfectly still,
our limbs filled with movement
Pressed down onto the floor with the weight of imperfections in the air.
Hands and face
filled with blue blood
a silent grin.
 
can’t sleep
 
So
we go
our laughter stumbles out into the dark
pulls us out, as we follow currents of sound.
The wail of atmospheric jet planes, lonely crickets,
the boom of empty 3am freeways
a chorus of ***** angels
brings us to stillness.
 
Laying in the dirt
stars arch overhead from the bottom of my chin to the back of my neck
emptiness like falling
and if you close one eye
 
you whisper
against
my skin
 
you can reach out and touch them
so I try it
it feels like nothing
 
And with a glance
time shifts
the earth tilts
your silent face
open to mine.
 
 
yellow
August motionless
like a deep sleep.
One long deep breath that we took together
exhaled with images of green and blue,
sunlight dancing heavy on a water’s surface above my head.
The sound of slow heartbeats in a warm room filled with open air and drifting light.
 
Your voice,
whispering aloud to me the words of your favorite authors,
the weakest wind pulls the curtains into the room like phantom arms reaching out for us
from the wild expanse
that spreads away from us outside, just outside.
 
Expansion to be consumed, to be found out
to find the sun and let it fill us
before it falls away from the earth
before we shut the windows at night
before we wake up.
 
Walking up away
through green forest away from our nothing
to that lake laying there in the rocks staring at the sun
with an empty face
shattered into a billion silent sparks.
 
The heaviest moments of September
glittering in your blue eyes
as they slide
and sink
into cold depths of memory.
 
 
Orange 
if I were there,
In the beginning, God
at the birth
watching the spore become airborne
, acquired perhaps in the
grocery store you worked in you called lucky
 
singing* lucky in my orange vest
my little bird
 
(like life, death too, grows
the damp mold of anxiety)
 
if I had watched the shift and seen
your eyes too
wide open start to fill too fast
with life
 
with such as
 
when fashion passed from runway to retail to thrift store and finally became silly enough to repeat
when getting older started to make sense
(laughing at your first gray hair, we were still children)
When the second law of thermodynamics practiced itself
and energy passed from warm to colder; normalized, equalized
and things fell off shelves and the attic windows broke and we
let it be
 
eyes wide open when your childhood home dilapidated
and Alzheimer’s consumed your grandfather's stories
sitting by (him) the window on the day after new years
(melting snow shed from tired trees) waiting to leave
holidays are when you love your family
then you go home
 
when hope became the eternal sacrifice to the only god they taught us in school
the only god that could be confined to our reason,
survival
yet quoting the bible to put the weight of god into our words
 
bottles breaking and re-breaking on the shoulders of a new highway
a new monument to mankind's ancient gloriously hideous innovation
to continuance
to getting up
and trying again
And getting up and
Trying again
And words
 
if I were there standing
in the rye field
                                                  my little dove
could I have caught you?
 
 
 
 
 
black
I was right outside
when she pulled the trigger
 
and I remember
 

crashing sound, in my head
my knees, my shoulder blades. A turbulent din
heart beating like a cave collapsing
air desperate to escape from my lungs
 
and silence.
 
Light falling away,
slowly like snowflakes
with the weight of dusk
and me standing
staring at the holes that were in everything.

 
Suddenly, everything was a mountain.
 
and I remember it
 
------------------------------------------------------------­---
 
I sit here and watch as if I couldn’t reach out and touch it
Can I?
The decay is not in your heart or your mind, it is in your soul.
Its coming out on your face. Gray stains forming around your eyes.
How do you get rid of that?
Your playful (terrified, i’m so scared, i’m scared) voice.
 
In 3am empty
sitting on the floor by the window gasping for air.
How can I reach out and touch that?
I watch the nights wash you pale with insomnia.
Strings of black hair. White face. Cold morning light.
How can I reach out and touch that?
 
I sit here across from you at the table, watching your eyes look through me.
Words are coming out of you that I don’t understand.
Words that don’t fall on deaf ears
but on deaf hands
making me suffer like I was paralyzed.
Your lips barely move as you speak.
 

There’s a sharp edge to this
its cutting the line between consciousness and sleep
you’re saying
The days have been good to me
you’re saying
I am just going to get older.
 

I can feel it in me
death is in me,
and I cannot
get it out

 
For a moment it is quiet. You sit there, like something meant to be on its own \
and I sit here, like an empty chair.
How could I reach out and touch that?
My mouth opens
Be okay.
I’m saying
 
Please be okay.
 
-------------------------------------------------------­--------------
 
its gradual , the darkness is invading me
filling the back of my eyes
the depths of my ears
the pores of my skin
until I die.
 
I take another dragging breath.
feel my bones bend the wrong way
too far
 
These days feel so old
this sky is so heavy
this wet air tastes so much how it did
last winter sinks in.
 
and I remember it so well
 
---------------------------------------
 
today, a new offense
I could not believe it
the sun pulled itself up out of the ground
without you
 
january sun
light without bright
day without warmth,
burning as dull as a nightmare remembered
following a shallow line that is far from equinoctial
 
time passes like strangers faces on the street
 
already, fall falling falling
a falling scattered hush
night, again
 
 
gray
It hurts worst when I'm sitting in a cafe and a song I know comes on the radio. By instinct I turn to the chair next to me. I turn to your empty chair. Dismayed, I look around for someone to share it with. But nobody there knows the song. To them it's just the gray background. And I drop my eyes wishing I could make it exist.
 
Or worst when I'm walking through an empty parking lot at midnight and yellow light is dripping out of the street lamps and washing all over the pavement. The sound of it is deafening. I can't hear it but I can feel it. The weight of it pulls my shoulders down towards my own starving black shadow and makes me think of how the white glow of your skin pulled me down into your arms and made my eyes shine.
 
Or worst when I'm on the street corner waiting to cross and the rain is pouring over the skyscrapers and down into the canyons of the city. Cars pass like phantoms floating through the fog, their headlights flashing on the wet pavement. The sound of harsh laughter and flooded gutters invaded by creaking busses reaches me as if from the past, and for a second I can hear your voice, humming a song about the rain. And I cross, begging out loud underneath the roar of raindrops for the cars to hit me.
 
These are the loneliest days and the longest nights. These are the moments when I can feel my lungs caving in every time I exhale. The seconds where a tiny black line dancing to the pulse of time is the only movement in my cold apartment, replacing the warm rise and fall of your chest.
 
night is coming and I'm sitting at my window watching the sunset die and I don't want to give up  I don't want to and it's getting dark again
 
 
green
it is nothing I could begin to say to you
for it came to be without words
without sound
but not quiet
 
it was with the sound of something as you look upon it
The hum of tiny waves
shadow   not shadow   and the space beneath, that is to say,
between
 
life without a need to be
without purpose,
failure and not failure so close together because (finally I saw) they are not separate
 
it was steps that unfolded to infinity around the block
and around again (sic transit gloria mundi)
it was arms swinging like pendulums past ribcage clock faces
waving away the concept of time
In this small corner of the world
it was saying thank you for handing me over to solitude and meaning it
dying in order to let me heal you
it was following the jet trails with fingertips touching them like you taught me to
it was letting the poetry come in and pass through and move off
not holding it in, anymore
When I learned for the first time, to write.
it was when I heard something behind me
it was       I am.
it was when I drove on the freeway and the cloud broke and we passed out into the sunlight at 67 miles per hour, even though I was alone
when I was disturbed with the thought
today (dei gratia) I am happy to be alive.
 
Green was your favorite color.

Tomorrow night, you’ll sleep walk into your lover’s dreams.
You’ll open the gate to hell, where you’ll find the poor ******
souls of a lost generation. Their lust, recklessness & drunkenness
will come as no shock to you. You’ll find your people trashed;
***** bottles smashed & abandoned, intoxicated girls balanced
on their Jeffrey Campbell Litas floating through social groups.
Boys, barely men, will be seen beaten down to the bare bones
of their existence, cigarette blunts piercing their open chests;
stinging & burning, red & yellow ash sparking flames on
the black lingerie of their lover’s.  

Tomorrow night, you’ll wish you were not sleep walking into
your lover’s dreams. In the days you spend there, you will not
find the lover you know. You’ll find a lover who is invaded
by body snatches; emphatically dominating every white cell.
You’ll find a lover, cast away with the ghosts of his past.
You’ll bear witness to pendulums of excessive desires
swinging to & fro – where time stands still, & not even
the ticking of a clock can be found, to count the days til
the grave he will fly.

© Sia Jane

projective geometry used to get me *****
all those positions

,palmately pink and ever green
breathing vasts of void my dark heart laughs in gulping wholes
moaning plenums, hooded over boundless venus-vim

now i'm tired of infinite lines
too many shapes to fit in
too wide, too tight, sharp or empty

,too many ways to come

this was meant to be a disclaimer before a collection of poems

,a way to unclutter
                angst of public  
                              lexicality,
years  after  ­ 'explaining'
                  Samir's 'polygonal me'
                                                to only-me-myself-i-was,
to then indulge this analogic soundlessness...
             
        as i disengage

i can't write without planning on it
i can't write about  writing  without feeling like a fool
                                                            ­                 (,Lear is the only one
that saves me now
                       as now i am the Fool,
                                                 dividing hearts along
in storm-***-love-like railway-*****
                                 steaming full of fiberoptic nooks,
chaining spectra-cogs of a good-will-spirit-****:
                                       concatenated hard-ons every word
each thought a pulsate vulval dream awake,
                                                redichotom­izing lives
                         of shining mons my Athene forehead
                                                      forging fountain thought,
                          urethral letting-beings-be...
freely, my chubby comes back to me
                                         prone before the prostate god)

,in other words
              the same,
                     i cannot write as other than a fool
for
why should i repeat the abject horror of the world?
isn't despair a bit.. overdone at this point?!
and why should i write just the happy!? i'm not in denial, am i?
or am i in denial
about insisting on being in denial absolutely?
--like mind-only schools...
(O the uselessness of words, dismissing patriarchal vigor with yet another wave, the 'brine-milk' ends unending,
forever Femen liberating us of words,
replaced with Fragilaria,
wasting diatomic seas and waterways,
depleted algae gone, extinct: metaphysiCalListo-craticality aborted on a broken Amazonic spear,
our bodies, bodied-hearts, finally won as ours, across Alternaqueeria, fully lucid human-species spanned
i blink my tears and blur my gaze at weeping Pleides

the plan was this: painful poem, pleasure poem, painful poem, happy poem... **** poem, sterile poem, carnal poem, priggish poem, punk poem, open poem, confessing poem, eros poem, **** poem, 'obscene-attractive' poem...
to cleanse inverted mainstreams of my steady-rhythmed pratitpaksha-bhavanams; not "poem, poem, poem, poem..."
but a taut poeming in and out of poems of poemed poiesis prosing poets free to **** again in Issa's snow, or *** on Chiera's cumaholic Shards.

pendulum left, pendulum right; then two pendulums, then none; then one that swings right and left at the same time; then one that spins all the way around, but only clockwise; then one counter-clockwise; then one both clockwise and counterclockwise; then one timeless, then one imaginary one... full of infinite little ones... to represent all the pendulata in the universe as experienced through minor parts of self.. itself as universal part-whole-parcel self-hood spanning star-births yet to come...
,
,
,but it's time to eat a 'square' meal
take off my job-search tie, my peddled lies
                   forget the sunrise vestibules we sipped from,
                                           sleeping by commoding cows

and pretend i'm not dicking myself over
                                                          by­ retreating
into cryptic spectionism-voids again
                                               all seagull-divert-adverts, play
of frozen youth abstrused,
                      self-referred referring loosed
                                          staggered worse than marginalia
no single species 'seagull' singing here

I will be peace
with head shaven
wrapped in monk robes
pacing my sanctuary
swinging emitting censers
placid with redemption
forehead crossed with oil
habit centered praising
under perpendicular rulers
and when I retreat
from the corporal worship
of the spirits
i won’t punish myself
not at that instant
for to be shaven
releases my past
and my prayers
drift from crystalline pendulums
to guard my steps
and the ruler embodies warnings
that I’ve ignored in surrender
while lapping fabrications
that stain my thighs
black and blue
permanent ink
helps my heart testify
that i was born accused
of worshiping your inspiration
I love to conceive
yet, conception
without accountability
has been my greatest sin
so, i seek atonement
through divine unification
and create for the spirits
as i become peace.

Grandfather’s Vespers

His rocking chair pendulums in the dusk
His coffee cup’s half-empty, what’s left’s gone cold
His newspaper’s folded and set aside -
In the evening light he doesn’t see so well

Mist rises from the neighbor’s new-mown field
Shy rabbits nibble along the old fence row
Grandchildren escape from supper into the yard
Chasing lightning bugs while Grandfather smokes

His rocking chair pendulums in the dusk
And so helps stabilize the universe

you’re the thought I can’t
wrap my head around
I’m the mess you never
thought I could be
collecting saturday
bouquets of silver
pendulums swaying
back and forth
with every sunrise
second but never
first

Summer calling in August, for the bird named after Saints.
There is a befitting proposition for them both, the season and the bird. She is offered to fall in love for a day, for less than a day, and in so many words, she does.

Two migratory birds dove into hopes and dusted dreams,
Picked the salt form old wounds, binding and mending, singing loss,
Crafting off of creational dust, making new things.

The their giving and giving, given into spent, like pendulums swing. Nature has tricks up her sleeve, and her hopes and promises are not the hopes of promises we keep.

Flying, looking for something over the water.
Wanting under depths of wanting, under depths of imaginations.
The two got stuck deep in the chemical dreaming of songs that played pretend.
The heat lost in the sun, and the season dies in a shell of milky
Indifference.

Birds swoop for signs in the air, flying and hoping that something would land in their narrow mouths so that they may go home and go to sleep.
They glide on. Hoping for ends to their broken songs, dipping and diving farther and farther away, with the batting of imagined wings behind their backs.

I’ve always been consumed with a sadness and heaviness i could never rid myself of
I wrote constantly.
I knew what heartache felt like and yet nothing could have prepared me for this.
I have not yet lost you.
You’re still here, you still love me.
But for how long?
My mind keeps running back to that sadness to that emptiness and i ask, “how much longer do i have?”
I’ve taken up tarot cards, runes and pendulums and i ask them all the time.
I ask them how things are really going.
I ask them if you still love me or if you’re only pretending.
“How much longer do i have?”
Why?
I want to be prepared.
I want to know you’re leaving before even you do.
I want to grieve before it happens so it doesn’t **** me.
I feel the anxiety burning in my chest already.

I find myself daydreaming about a future where I’m in a lonely little apartment late at night and I can feel your arms around me. However, when I roll over to face you there’s no one there and I remember that you’re with someone else and you’re happier with her.

I don’t want that to be real.

I don’t want you to leave.

I’m scared.

So I try to hope for the best but I want to prepare for the worst.
Please tell me how long I have. Please tell me before it ends.