there are the ones
that feel it climb up
the shadow towards the light,
hesitation on every rung,
each wave of the arising
      overwhelms  unabated ―
and woe betides those
who are on the run
from a storm's deluge


A rousing ocean breeze
stirs inside the memory
of an unframed seashell
lying on the hearth mantel;
heightened sensitivity
lapping soundlessly,
spindrift plashing
the shoreline
of another world's
feigned peace


Perhaps the muted voice
of guilty pleasures,
hushed by their own
hidden truths
Feeling the unfelt textures
of every stifled vibration
left unbreathed


The naked truth befallen
so cold and lonely
Running in circles,
volatile as all those
     unspoken excitations raging ―
and the whispers of those
who hear not
the voices in the wind


An emotionally enslaved  heart
tarries,  marooned high and dry
in a memory on a distant sand bar
     lain fallow for so long ―
stagnant darkness
of an unsated soul
gathered on the back
of a parched tongue
sullied wordless


Rising up through
a dusty hieroglyph corridor
through an unlocked
labyrinth gate;  vestige echoes
from somewhere left behind
in an incomprehensible
abandoned wake


It's getting harder and harder
   for an insatiable soul to breathe ...
   climbing up a tree trunk―
up within the silence
of the listening tree


  Toes dug into
the rough bark furrows ―
fingers reaching upwards
beyond their deepest known grasp


A shadow stranded
out on a hangin' bough
hearkening without ears that hear:
“perhaps they’ll listen now“  
the wingless bird sings
in psalms that fly away
on tattered feathers
over untamed waters roil


Back to nature’s waning youth,
the bough bends unbroken
to taste the freedom
of the wild absolving seas



Jesse Stillwater
June     2018

Slow wind,
hair raising
scintillations...
hands plashing
magenta pools.
Trying depthless
depths.

The title and body optional, they drag like loose map lines of a desiccate cactus, if its pins or thorns were the bones of the mule deer's alongside the highway where crimsony two-toned stretch marks were either allergic reactions or hives crawling across all of our limbs, and I aimed at ferocious. My polydactyl ferocity plagued by gorges, oxygen-loss, staying awake for the 36th or 37th hour until the stray humming between us is just another
Symptom of your childhood ploys to see Mercury ooze from your day away from school, out of the thermometer, droplets oozed out of your lips like trending sarcophagi-

The estranged catalyst carried with us through the archetypal and errant weapon-systems our brain stems plagued our visions with, mulish and recalcitrant undulates in a meteor shower of plashing death up I-89. We came for them.

Until the moon cleaved its feral African-eye, peddling its feline claws through every inch and synonym for itching skin could bear red too. Inside a grave, I was the color of fire. Inside a grave, you were the conflagration of histamines and cold orange hands, and we were left with our twisted interstices lashing into the pock-marked hide of the devil-skin rock torment,

And we prayed for the ghost moose, the albicant sinewy strands of disease
In an inarticulate heap of antagonist and agony. Blistery, curmudgeonly mumps, our cold lips braying for the plague, the bleeding from our eyes, nose, feet.
You say you'd take twos and threes of non-batted lashes, unsavory nomenclatures for names no one, not even a doctor in 1985 could mispronounce the diagnosis for, and for what, the cross'd black diamond thatchwork of icicles forming on our appendages, Earth words rocked in a cacophony of ungodliness and sorrowful malcontent. And for a moment of mute apathy, what use you and I would give shivers and trills for one another, what etherized and idyllic blaspheming poltergeist you could claw from my flesh, as I could claw it from yours.

To be free of this disease of winter,
Abolish it in a canonical ablasement of
Ferocity and suffering,

Where cleverly the ovivorous fold harmonizes,
Thwarting the immeasurable Gods to tailor a saw for your arms and my arms. Insects scuttling our carcass in lazy-fair, only to be haphazardly decaying in or without of the red flesh, belly up, without this systematic **** of skin tremors shot by the likes of a Peterbilt, cocked and bullied, readied to candy up another inane banter of horn-slivered antelopes dancing their ghost weevils up to an inexplainable and implacatable chivalry our
Carcasses lie, and our crimsony skins lay half-awake to die.