In an evening,
Washed with love,
Writing,
Tranquility and thunder in one afternoon,
Like fresh laundry,
Clean,
Newly refreshed,
Invigorated
New life's lease!
Raring and excitable,
As wild child plays,
Wallowing,
In styles novel!
Provoked into action,
While arrows fly,
Origami swans created,
Folded wings tinged with pastel tints,
Dripped from loves pipette!
A miracle constructed,
From twisted paper,
Origami swan can't fly,
Unless caught on gentle breeze,
Gentle breeze,
Brings allergens sneeze!
Captured in sunlight's mesh,
Studied through patterns from a picture book,
Designed with child in mind!
COPYRIGHT LIVVI KENT 27/05/2013,

She would make medicine
For the butterflies in their case;
Used tea leaves,
rose petals and water,
Which she would administer
With a cracked pipette
In the hope of waking them
From their slumber.

We keep our new baby in a box
pierced with holes.
The fresh-musty smell, familiar
to kittens, puppies and poults
wafts out when we lift the lid,
tinged with the sickly scent of fresh-cut grass.
Curled up in the grassy whorl within, he lies.
We pipette drops of milk into his mouth
through a straw, and bury him
on the compost heap a day later.

most nights
you decant into my head wounds
you suggest my makeup
orchestrate my being
and sometimes
for fun
prank me with ridiculous ideas
that inspire some absurd social pratfall

lure

you make me warm and sure of myself
struck and sense numbed
but
floss in the memory

tide

i am a Diving Suit
but in misuse
i am a suit
the pressure
the deep ocean
filled from the inside
cold
darkness
and nutrients  
but
i am filled from the inside

pipette
you tap drops
into special valves
along the sides of the aquarium helmet
you decorate my inner-scape
with harvesting monsters
and phosphorescence
you deteriorate the textile of my sadness
a thorough jettison

lull

via your Vegas
your adolescence
i follow your string of lights
deep sea
skiving mortality
embracing your malady
with no ill effects ?
sink deeper still
i am leadened
to your charge
and plumb to your will
deeper

'When you grow up, your heart dies.'
Allison (Ally Sheedy) in The Breakfast Club (1985).*

look at all the ways
there are to
stay in touch
to communicate
in a combination
of pixels or a line of
finely-cut black letters

now look at all the ways
nobody does
a life you were given
segments of
shrunken to altered pictures
pipette-fed but no real words
swimming into your ears

frosted glass nostalgia
former vivid events
gone hazy with age
and you
and everybody you knew
going on with names only coming
like a balloon in the wind

Show me your secret notebook
A reef under generic surface of water.

They've cut down my childhood tree
I used to climb.
                                      Pink Skies.



As she was walking away
from a car
The music gradually
Interrupted, like a radio
Losing its signal
And stopped.
S H E ' S H O T

As I drove,
I poured the music
out of the windows,
to mix it with
the sea of night.
Frogs of Winter.






O birds of spring,
You woke up too early,
your songs don't belong
in the winter's cold air.
You should have remained
silent and hidden
in your safe nests

I feel rather like
exploring self-caves,
Dark Mines of mine;
Dissolving under the blanket
of warmth and sickness
With my eyes closed.
(Do I?)
Definetly not fitting the machine.

Double-edged sword.
Endless wrestling with
Ego.
Say hello!



Once again(another day),
One more time,
She drifted into the night
and the music got torn
piece by piece
(Chopin, Nocturne op.9 No.1)
And I(We)
Were left in the brutal cold,
and dark, and silence
(Dead, pinned to the ground,
awaiting.)

     The moment a smile fades
     A switch that changes the masks
     Ancient greek theatre

Oh birds, you've found
Your small place
on a lake that froze
almost entirely.
Rejoy,
O lucky birds!



Veins of the city
remain silent beside us.
Conversations like ash
or leaves, or snow flakes
fall to them and dissolve,
but they don't cease to exist;
Remain hidden.

Old and new Things
got wed in an instant,
like wild thorny
carnivorous plants,
without us noticing;
Beyond the still line of horizon
-outshouted by the
Rush of Society.
Hidden old silent rooms.





I held a pipette
and gently instilled
the tiny sharp
drops of liquid Music
into the chill lake of Night.
They diffused in the black,
like a dark sapphire ink.

      Wind be a brush,
       for my long,
       slightly savage hair.

         Time drills and channels
          the canyons
          in the flesh of brain.

(Here is the bag with all the leaves
and withered twigs, rotten apples,
gray hair, used tickets, dried tears,
dirt and sebum scraped off the skin,
crumbled, tattered papers, alcohol
metabolites, angry emotions, *****
of thread, carcasses of birds,
feces, and rusty metal junk)

Thank you,
I am cleansed.

On my last day of solo travel
I made the split decision to take stairs down
A random, haphazard side street.
I sat down at a cocktail bar
All by myself.
The only patron in this basement.

I was greeted with a smile
Missing one tooth
In the dark room
Asked what liquors I preferred
There is no menu
I listed off what I had tried and what I wanted to
She would sip a bit of the drink
Pipette on my outstretched hand
So I could give my input
As we constructed the flavors together
Laughing, eagerly offering and accepting my
suggestions of what the drink needed
Childlike wonder, curiosity, and play.

We experimented with absinthe
And amaretto, cherry, lavender, banana, sake, gin
pickled *****, coconut *** and umami bitters
She made me my first tiramisu martini.
A total of 5 cocktails in 5 hours spent together.

Lightly
I asked her why she moved to Prague -
Darkly
She said the single word “war”
She had to leave Kyiv or risk dying there.
She said she is so broke that she buys cheaper shoes that don’t fit and pads them with paper towels but still gets blisters.
She lives in a one bedroom with her mother.
Men started groping her on the train as early as nine.
She sincerely wishes her uncle would die.
She has made no friends in this city since she moved a year ago.
She has gotten fired before for being unlikeable and standing up for herself.
She painted the cocktail bar walls sage green after hours for free because the manager could not afford hiring a painter and she genuinely likes this job.
She is a polyglot: knows French, German, Ukrainian, Russian and English.
She’s vegan but she tries the fish-based bitters and egg whites for work every night and likes their taste.
She has not been to a doctor in years because she cannot afford it.
She has overdue medical bills racking up interest she worries about.
She got fined once for having an expired train ticket - now she always checks the expiration when she rides and has a valid ticket.
She points out, in her embroidered dress and matching embroidered jacket, that there’s cigarette holes from the ash the wind blew that she doesn’t have time to mend.
She has a college degree and a virtual master’s degree.
She thinks she’s old at 31.
She doesn’t trust men anymore.
She thinks that she’ll never get married or have children, even though she really wanted to when she was a little girl.
She was eager to smoke a cigarette outside when I needed to use the restroom.
She never let my water glass get empty.
She doesn’t know how she’ll make ends meet next month.
She asserts that life is unfair but that these are the cards she’s been dealt and they’ve made her stronger.

She thanked me as I left and told me that the conversation we had made her evening better
It was the most freeing feeling she had felt in months.
Being able to share and lighten the load of what she has been carrying alone made her emotional.
She says typically tourists and locals won’t ask or listen.
She feels othered by both.

We agree with tears in our eyes that we don’t even know each other’s names:
Margarita
Maria
We laugh, our names are so similar.

how do you stop them,
these pipette-fed ruby furies?
it is the escape that paints itself
in a shade of night,
a chain of palms away.
thinking makes it so,
   so right.
look how they stay silent,
mouthless ghosts,
floating
     and
   never
          fully
     formed.

Ancient chemistry:

his pipette squirts elixir –


into her retort.