"rawboned" poems
I stretch forward, elongating my neck, making the hairs that grow down onto my nape prickle,
envisioning
my true horse-nature.
I’m hooves clopping on river rocks. My mane combed to one side, my angular muzzle huffing.
I’m strong and sturdy – muscle and a soft steel kind of strength. And yet at the
whistle of a windblown reed,
I’m gone,
scattered and spooked.
I trace the angles that connect weakly on my rawboned face. Strong lines
never broken never snapped,
just shifted and sifted easily.
I stand before others, pulled loosely together, unsettled in my people-clothes.
Loyal – love me.
Wild – but not too tightly.
I sit for sketches
sometimes hours sometimes minutes sometimes seconds sometimes months.
I look like a human,
solid to the fingertips of others pressing in – but
I’m a ghost.
I’m burned by the red clay of a canyon wall, shiny from the sun. My sweat reflects ribbons of
wet diamonds
at the bottom of a cold, fast river.
Jan 18, 2013
Jan 18, 2013 at 12:42 AM UTC
Your travel has given me freedom.
But what is freedom when
you possess a soul divided?
What is the chronic sea without
its unfathomable dominions?
My soul is thirsty for you.
My cold and naked ankles mope
around your desolated castle;
Jinn, dust, and piercing silence is all that echoes
in this darkened dungeon that I have succumbed to.
And then there is me.
A heavy-laden wasted artist with
Spiny paintbrushes and faded color.
I refuse to leave the spaces that you read and play.
I refuse to exhale the memories of your sky painted blue irises.
My skin hungers for your delicate surface.
My teeth long to bite into your fleshy thighs.
In the hour of the noontide I feel you most
For our souls sahasrara blooms colorfully in the hour
Of the sun-the ancient mother of our roots weaves
Love with all of loves children and meets us with pneumatic cosmic kisses.
This is when I feel closest to you.
Without you, the world is just as it seems;
the sun burned into cinders,
Leaving the crops belonging to the sacred
soils of my flesh to prune and wither .
Ay! the droughts that you spread with your distance.
These are the days of my reaping
These are the days of my sulking.
The gardens are now closed and the
black raven cries out to a mournful mothers son.
Your scent died along with the laughter of the flowers
And the butterflies wont even flutter
Without your lovely eyelash kisses.
To live another day without the energy
Your presence fills my heart with,
Is to live an eternity hugging
Your coffin with sobbing rage;
fain would I take deaths hand.
The suffering of your glorious dawn
Wedded the universe deep beneath my skin.
You are the light,
And the absence of your holiness
leaves me opaque and hollow.
In my solitude I have watched the hours burn
And in each hour your fragrant sighs
escape with the dust motes
Surrounding the beaming light that
breaks through the cracks of the curtains.
I sit in the depth of myself
And listen for the echoes of your sounds.
A mother am I and a pitiful one too.
Like the rawboned mother with sunken eyes
carrying a baby in the womb, draining all of
the nutrition her body has to offer,
Your distance maps a massacred trail
Of my health and happiness.
You are the mother of patience
And the descendent of beauty and love.
You are the tsunami, and the still waters.
You are the uprising cub leading and mending.
You are the sap that feeds the giving tree of life.
You are the prince of wisdom.
You are
My flesh
In purest form.
- Arizona
Jan 12, 2013
Jan 12, 2013 at 8:37 AM UTC
\put your feet on the land/
His name, according to the scrawl on the cover of his journal, was Viele. His build, according to everyone he'd ever met, was a lazy mosaic of withered limbs; veins snaking like cracks in pavement.
His intentions, according to hindsight, were regrettable.
\and see/
It is the gospel truth that man is the expert of denial.
As sure as the dead stay dead,
The Graverobber will prefer the term 'opportunist'.
Viele was a "professional",
took pride in his "art".
He dug, dug, dug,
'til the wood did part.
Stripped the cemetery to its bones (or, if you please, of its bones).
\ain't no grave/
Then Viele snags his shovel, about three feet deep.
Somehow the handle asphyxiated by the stalk
Of a Morning Glory, which flowers a defiant blue -
swallowing whole, the rusting ***** as its spiral buds take
their first breaths - against, of course, the tarred lung
of their rawboned abuser.
And lo!
(the image befits the phrase, as does the Earth "empty of form")
the deadyard stood guard,
erupting
like it was suddenly attacked
by an impressionist's paintbrush.
The deadyard, and Viele
Van Goghing, Goghing, Gone.
\gonna hold my body down/
In Lieu, In Bloom:
Baby's Breath and Bells of Ireland and Daisies and Hydrangeas and Lace of Queen Anne and Sunflowers and
God, ad nauseum they arose,
arching upwards from graves.
Leaving no gravestone unturned,
in the pursuit of the place
where footnotes become headlines
and headlines turn to deadlines
and deadlines turn to soil.
For in the morning,
when Viele returns
and Glory, ironically, stands down
(slash-stands-us-up)
we will know to wait.
Tucked away behind our rejected Heaven's gate,
for the show to return.
Where there's Life in the urn.
Apr 23, 2018
Apr 23, 2018 at 1:36 AM UTC
Summer and Autumn and Winter and Spring
Processed through the dale one day, to sing
And convene to discuss again
The sun, the moon, the stars, the rain.
And Summer led, bright, strong, and sure
Her hair golden with sunlight pure,
Her bare feet rooted in rich Earth,
Her wild eyes wise with age and mirth.
And Autumn followed, quiet, grim,
With hollow gaze and rawboned limb,
Cloak flashing yellow, orange, gold,
Voice vibrant, rich, exhaling cold.
And Winter walked with footsteps light,
Her ermine cloak a glistening white,
And gliding, floating, on tiptoe
As gently as the fallen snow.
And Spring skipped last, her wide eyes shy,
Her slender legs nimble and spry,
The air around her turning sweet
As flowers bloomed beneath her feet.
Summer and Autumn and Winter and Spring
Clasped hands and leapt, to dance, to swing
Along the shadows’ wax and wane,
The sun, the moon, the stars, the rain.
Jun 4, 2020
Jun 4, 2020 at 2:17 PM UTC