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Michael W Noland Sep 2012
[A] is for
An
Archer with
An
Arrow through his
Adams
Apple, very
Applicable, to the
Ample
Amounts of
Amiable
Attitude,
Adorning his heart, in
After
Action
Attributes, that impart, the
Admiration, of
*******, in this
Acting out of
Arrogance bit. he is,
Astute, in his
Allure, and
Aloof, in the
Air, of
Aspiration, in which, he was
Alienated in the
Agony, of
Asking
Assassins, the
Aforementioned. lights, camera,
Action. recipe of the
Ancient
Admirals of
Avian
Aliens, that
Attacked, with the
Arms and fists, of
Arachnids, now
Aching to be
Activated in sudden
Allegiance to the
Answers, of the truth.
Accumulating wealth for
Anarchy's of
Abating
Angels in
Atrophied,
Alchemical
Academies of the ever
After life .. . of silence.
****** strengthens in these
Accolades of violence, in
Alliance to
Appliances
Appearing in the
Arson of
Apathy, happily, to
Anguish in the
Amputation of my
Abdomen, if it meant i'm a real
American, even, when, only
Ash, remains.
Acclimating in its remains
Attained, the
Articles of my pain, in
Affluent shame, next time ..
Aim... oak
[A]?

[B] is for the
Bah of
Black sheep, and
Big
Bit¢hes, fat cats,
Bombarded in the
Blasted,
Bastion of
Blackened
Benevolent
Blokes,
Berating the
Blasphemous,
Be-seech, of
Brains, to feel
Bad, about the
Blotching of
Binary codes, erroding, the
Blanked out
Books, of
Belittled
Bureaucrats,
Bowling
Back the
Bank rolls of
Betterment, from the
Back of the
Blackened
Bus, as i'm
Busting guts, in the
Bubbling
Butts, of *****
Benched, but
Beautiful, in the
Battle, in the
Bane, of existence.
Baffled, in the strain of
Belligerence, in
Beating the
Beaming
Butchery into
Billy's
Broken
Brains, in
Bouts, of
Battering
Bobby's for
Bags of
*******
Before, affording to
Build
Bombs, is just
Beyond
Breaking
Beer
Bottles on the
*******
Benefactors of
Boulder
Bashing with the
Beaks, of
Birds, with no
Bees. just a
Being, trying to
[B]


[C] is for the
*****
Courting the
Choreography, in
Computerized
Curtains,
Circumventing the
Cultured,
Contrivance of
Chromatic
Cellars,
Calibrating, to the
Contours of
Calamities,
Celebrating the
Cyclical,
Cylinders of
Cyphered
Calenders,
Correcting the
Calculations, of
Crooks
Coughing, in
Courageous
Coffins of
Canadians,
Collecting
Cobble stones, from
Catacombs, in the lands of the
Conquered,
Capturing the
Claps of thieves, sneaky
Cats, of greed. its
Comedy. oh
Comely, to my
Cling of
Cleanliness, and for your self
[C]

[D] is for the
Dip *****, as they
Delve
Deeper in the
Deliverance, of
Deviant
Deities,
Dying to
Demand
Dinner
Delivered in the throws of
Death,
Deceiving
Defiance of
Darkened
Dreams,
Demeaning that which
Deems the
Dormant of the
Dominant, to be
Demons of
Deviled
Devilry,
Dooming us for
Destruction.
Deploy the,
Damsels in
Duress.
Defiled and
Distressed,
Detestable and
Dead. in the thump of
Drums,
Dumbing down the
Debts of,
Dire regrets.
Dissect the
Daisies of,
Disillusion, in the current
Days,
Diluting night into
Dawn,
Disconnecting the
Dots of the
Dichotomy, and arming me, in the
Diabolatry, of,
Demonology, as i watch me
Dwindle away, the
[D]

[E] is for
Everything in nothing,
Eating the
Euphoric
Enigmas of
Enlightened
Elitists,
Exceeding in the
Extravagant
Essence of
Esoteric
Euphemisms,
Escaping the
Elegance of the
Elements in the
Eccentricity of
Eclectic
Ecstasy,
Exhaling, the
Exostential blessings, of inner
Entities, and renouncing the
Enemies of my
Ease,
Easily to appease
Extraterestrial
Empires,
Extracting the lost
Embers of
Enlightenment, in
Excited delight, but to later
Entice, the fight, and
Escape, like a thief into the night of
Everywhere,
Entering the
Exits of
Elevators leading no where, to
Elevate, this useless place,
Encased in malware in the
Errant
Errors of
Every man,
Enslaved, of flesh and
Entrails,
Enveloping the core of
Everything, that matters,
Enduring, the chatter, of
Evermore,
Ever present in
Everybody
Ever made to take
[E]

Funk the
Ferocity of
Foolish
Fandangos, with
Fanged
Fanatics,
Fooled in the
Fiasco of
Fumbled
Fantasies,
Falling through the
Farms of
Freely
Found
Fans,
Flying in the
Fame of
Fortune.
Fornicating on the
Fallen
Fears of
Fat
Fish getting their
Fillet of
Fills.
Feel me in the
Frills

Granted with
Generosity.
Giblets of
Gratitude and
Greed,
Greeting the
Goop and
Gobbled
Gore,
Gleaned from the
Glamour of
Ghouls in
Gillie suits,
Getting what they
Got
Going, in the
Gratuitous
Gallows of a
Game
Gaffed by
Giants.

Hello to the
Horizon of
Hellish
Hilarity, in
Hope of
Happy, to
Heave from
Heifers, to
Help the
Hemp
Harshened
Hobos in
Heightened
Horror, to
Honor the
Habitats of
Hapless
Habituals,
Herbalising the work
Horse, named
Have Not, in the
Haughtily
Hardened
Houses of
Happenstance.

Ignore the
Ignorant
Idiots, too
Illiterate to
Indicate the
Indicative
Instances of
Idiom in the
Irrelevant
Inaccuracy of
I,
In the
Intellect of
Idle
Individuals,
Irritated with the
Irate
Illusion of
Idols
Illustrated upon the
Iris,
In the
Illumination of
I.

******* the
Jobless
Jokers, and
Jimmy the
Jerkins from their
Jammie's, in
Justified,
Jousting off the
Jumps, in
Jokes, and
Jukes of
Just
Jailers,
Jesting for
Jammed
Jury's to
****
Judgment from the
Jitter
Juiced
Jeans of
Jesus.

**** the
Keep of
Khaki-ed
Kool aid men,
Kept in the
Kilometers of
Kits,
Kin-less
Kinetics,
Knifing the
Knights of
Kneeling
Kinsmanship,
Keeling over the
Keys of
Kaine, with the
Karmic
Karate
Kick of a
Kangaroo.

Love the
Levity, in the
Luxurious
Laments of
Loveliness,
Lovingly
Levitating in
Level,
Lucidly.
Living in
Laps, of
Lapses,
Looping, but
Lacking the
Loom of the
Latches
Locked with
Leeches of the
Lonely
Lit
Leering of
Lightly
Limbs, that
Lash at the
Lessers in
Loot of
Lost letters,
Lest we
Learned in the
Lessons of
Liars.

Marooned in
Maniacal
Masterpieces,
Masqueraded as
Malignant
Memorization's of
Motionless
Mantras, but
Merrily
Masking
Mikha'el the
Mundane, who is
Musically
Mused of
Monsters,
Mangling the
Monitor, but
Maybe just a
Moniker of
Marauders.

Never to
Navigate the
Nautical
Nether of
Never
Nears.
Not to
Nit pic the
Naivety of
Nicety.
Notions
Neither take
Note
Nor
Name the
Noise of
Nats in the
Nights of
Neanderthals
Napping in the
Nets of
Ninjas

Ominous in the
Obvious
Omnipotence of
Oblivious
Obligatory
Opulence,
Of
Other
Oddly
Orchards
Of
Offices,
Ordaining
Orifices in
Offers of
Ordinary
Ordinances in
Option-less
Optics,
Optionally an
On-call Oracle, in
Optimal,
Overture.

Perusing the
Pestilent
Pedestals of
Personal,
Parameters,
Pursuing the
Petty
Plumes of
Piety with the
Patience of a
Pharaoh,
******* on the
People with the
Penal
Pianos of
Port-less
Portals, in the
Paperless
Points in the
Palpal
Pats of
Pettiness.
Poor, but
Prideful.

Quick to
Qualify the
Quitter for a
Quick
Quill in
Queer
Quivering of
Quickened
Questioning,
Queried in the
Quakiest of
Quandaries.
Quarantined to a
Quadrant, of
Quagmires.
Questing the
Quizzing of
Quotable
Quartets.

Relax in the
Relapse of
Realizations, and
React with
Racks of
Rolling
Rock to
Rate the
Rep of the
Rain-less.
Roar in
Rapturous
Rendering of the
Random
Readiness in the
Ravenous,
Rallying, of the
Retinal
Refracting of
Reality.
Realigning, the
Righteous
Rearing of the
Realm, and
Retrying.

Steer the
Serenity in
Sustainability, and
Slither through the
Seams of
Slumbered
Scenes.
Secrete the
Solo
Sobriety of
Sapped
Sassys,
Salivating upon a
Slew of
Stupidity,
Steadily
Supplied in
Stream,
Suitably
Slain in the
Steam of
Sanity.
Sadly, i
Still
Seem,
Salvagable.

Topple
The
Titans in
Tightened
Terror.
Torn
Territories
Turn
Turbulent in
The
Teething of
Totality.
The
Telemetry of
Time,
Tortured of
Torrent
Theories,
Told in
Turrets of
Transpiring
Terribleness, from
Tumultuous
Tikes unto
Teens,
Trading
Toys for
Tea.
Thrice
Thrusted upon by the
Tyranny of
Tanks.

Unanimous is the
Ugliness in the
Undertones of
Undreamed
Ulteriors
Undergoing the
Unclean in the
***** of
Utterly
Upset
Users,
Uplifting the
Unfitting
Ushers in
Underwear-less,
Ulcers,
Undergoing the
Ultra of
Uberness.

Venial in
Vindictive
Viciousness of
Vindicated
Venom,
Venomously
Vilifying the
Vials of
Villainy in the
Veins of
Vampires,
Validity of
Valuable
Violence, is
Valiant in the
Vaporous
Vacationing of
Vagrant
Vices.

Why
Whelp in the
Weather
When you can
Wave to the
Whirling
Wisps,
Whipping Where the
Whimsical Were
Way back in the
Wellness of
Whip its,
Wrangling my
World,
With
Waterless
Worms, as
War shouts are
Wasted in the
Wackiest
Walks of
Waking
Wonder.

Xenophobic
Xenogogue, of
Xenomorphic
Xeons, turn
Xyphoid, in the
Xenomenia of my
X, my
Xenolalia of
X, to
***. im lost in the
Xenobiotic zen of
Xerces, on a
Xebec to the
X on the map.
Xenogenesis, in the
Xesturgy of my
Xyston
Xd

Yelling
Yearned from
Yelping.
Yard
Yachts
Yielding, to the
Yodel of
Yeah
Yeahs, to the
Yapping of
******
Yuppie
Yoga
Yanks, over
Yonder.
Yucking it up with the
Yawn of a
Yocal.

Zapped from a
Zone i
Zoomed with
Zeal in the
Zig and
Zag of my
Zapping
Zimming
Zest, upon a
Zombie-less
Zeplin.
Zealot,
Zionist, or
Zoologists,
Zeros or ones, just
Zip your
Zip locked. and
Zzzzz
Zzzz
Zzz
Zz
Z
Zero
this is a work in progress
Meena Menon Sep 2021
Flicker Shimmer Glow

The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.  
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.  
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.  
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.    
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.  
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony  
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.  
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.  
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.  
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.  
I saw the beauty of the light within.  
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.  
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.  
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.  
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.  
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.  
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.  
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.  
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.  
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.  
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .  
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.  
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.  
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.  
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.  
I thought I was manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.  
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.  
I stayed healthy.  
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.  
I knew I wasn’t manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I told my parents when they came home.  
They thought I was manic.  
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.  
They thought I was manic.  
I was outside of my comfort zone.  
I moved to California. I found light.  
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.  
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.  
The light turned the car signals left and right.  
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.  
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.  
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August  I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.  
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.  
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.  
He threatened me.  
I called the authorities.  
They left me there.
He laughed.  
Then the violence came.  
****:  stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.  
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.  
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.  
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.  
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.  
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.  
I worked through ****.  
I worked to overcome trauma.  
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.  
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.  





















Lava

I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.  
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned.  They both left their homes before they left for college.  
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.  
His mother was not a Brahmin.  
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.  
She doesn’t say what caste she is.  
He went to his father’s house, then college.  
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.  
She went to India then Canada.  
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.  
My father signed a contract with my mother.  
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.  


















Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.  
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.  
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.  
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.  
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.  
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.  
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.  
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.  
Indians lived on plantations.  
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.  
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.  
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.  
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.  
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.  
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.  
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.  
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.  
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.  

My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.  
She thought all things, all people were equal.  
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.  
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.  
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.  
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.  
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.  
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.  
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.  
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.  
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.  
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.  
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.  
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.  
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.  
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.  
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.  
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.  
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.  
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.  
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh

The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.  
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.  
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.  
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.  
Railway strikes stopped the economy.  
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.  
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.  

My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.  
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.  
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.  
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.  
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.  
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.  
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.  

On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,  
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.  
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.  
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.  
On February 4, my dad met my mom.  
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.  
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.  
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.  
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.  
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.  
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.  
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.  
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.  
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.  
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.  
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.  
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.  
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.  
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.  
She also learned to cook after getting married.  
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.  
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.  
She liked working.  

A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.  
My mother liked working.  
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.  
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.  
Young people and the unemployed joined.  
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.  
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.  
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.  
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.  
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.  





Warm Light Shatters

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.

In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.

The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine.  A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.  
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”

The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.  
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.

My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.  
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.

Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.  
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.  
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.

The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.

The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.  

In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.  
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.  
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.  
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.  
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel.  Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.  
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.  
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.  

The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-  
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.  
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.  
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.

Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.  
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.  
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.  

My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.  
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him.  The branch he opened closed after that.  
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.  
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK.  My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.  
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.  
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.


Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.  
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.  
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.  
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.  
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.

The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there:  the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.  
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.  

When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and  intelligence organization had been destroyed.  
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.  
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.  

In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.  


Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.  
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.  
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.  
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.  
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.  

The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.  
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.  
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.  

In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”  
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.

The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.  
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.


Edelweiss

I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.  
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.  
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the  limestone,
frosted but still strong.    
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet. 
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.  
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.  
I grabbed my dad’s arm.

























The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha

Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.

I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.  
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.  
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.  
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.

If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.  

































Sound on Powdery Blue

Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.

Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.

In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.

Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.

Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.  

















Pink Graphite

Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.

In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.

After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.

The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.  
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.

A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.  

On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get  me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.  



































Flakes

I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.  
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.  
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.  

There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.  

In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.

Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,  
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.  






































OCEAN BED

The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.  
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that  person in my bed.  
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.  
Just love.  
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.  
I sleep with my hands, palms up.  
I sleep with my hands at my heart.  
They sear my compassion with their noise.  
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,  
but not burned.  
I want a man in my bed.  
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.  
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.  
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.  
I ran by the ocean every morning.  
I surfed in the ocean.  
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.  














Morning

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  

Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.  
The magnetic field flips.  
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.  
The winds change direction.  
Storms cast lightening and rain.  
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.  
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents.  The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.  
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.  
I follow the sound to the water.  
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.  
The green water turns black not far from the shore.  
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.  
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.  

Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.  
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.  
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.  
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.  
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.  
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.  

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.  
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.  
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.  





Blue Paper

Haze scatters blue light on a planet.  
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.  
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.  
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.  
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.  
She bends light to make shadows against  thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.  
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.  
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.  
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.  
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.  
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water
This is what I have written of my book.  I’ll be changing where the poems with the historical research go.  There are four more of those and nine of the other poems.
Larry Potter Jul 2013
I was hungry enough to eat the **** end of a skunk.  I felt like gobbling the whole mound of concrete that is half an hour closer from becoming a part of my room.  Make that a quarter. I guess my tummy has had enough grumbling, like a seething network of volcanoes ready to devour Hawaii.  I am sure as exhausted as a zombie after a “battle of life and death” handling a plethora of carpentry tools which I have managed to rummage from our dismal basement.  I’m quite serious with the phrase “battle of life and death”.  I get to have this Obsessive Compulsive Syndrome which gulps a huge amount of my rhythm compelling me to put things in place especially in my chamber.  At times, a weltered pen could instigate an emotional havoc.  Or perhaps an inappropriate collaboration of curtain hues and mattresses would be ample to spin the color wheel concept out of my brain.  But now, my walls have done it.  Well, it was just a microscopic sight of a divine crevice, but how in the world could that escape my eyes?  Without a second thought, I approved an avid proposal from my subconscious – a full concrete room renovation.  And that’s how it brings me here, smothering the last square inch of the genius blueprint with this porridge of lime and clay, the hell with chemistry!  I have found out that my room has achieved the piquancy of a sizzling summer noon, thanks to the mist of dust and the precipitating drops of sweat that come tingling down my overheating body.  Ah! At least my system tells me that I’m not a promising patient of ****** dysfunction.  When the last patch has been perfectly planed in place, I drew my last ounce of pure strength and plunged into my most formidable bed, congratulating myself for a job well done. Alas! A thirty-minute nap and I’m ready for a superb coffee and doughnut delight.

I woke up from a cat’s screech. I peeped through the window. The nap breaker was a Cheshire, one with a dimmer fur, the stripes of gray suppressing the darker color.  Its tail enjoyed dancing around its rear, connoting either fear or excitement. It sure has a distinctive mischievous grin.  The feline was on the verge of climbing up the roof by jumping from a gutter about five feet away.  It seemed to have slipped but has managed to bring its **** next to the roof tiles. It stared at me with intent, giving me the macabre look from its glaring eyes.  It’s as if I’m being watched, stalked and examined in a way I couldn’t see, bringing me that feeling of guilt, of remorse.  Urgh! That’s why I hate cats.  Though I’m planning to keep one, I’ll reconsider it.  But what pains me more is to discover that my alarm was not able to do the job and so I slept three hours more than planned.  I looked down and saw the city lights flashing one by one, the beams glowing like a barrier of radiance diffusing into the gloom of the night. I guess this was the price I have to pay. I traded my snack with a peaceful hibernation, turning the coffee into a glass of iced tea and the doughnut into a great dinner with me, myself and I.

I have learned to cook since I was ten.  My mother believed that culinary prowess could be inherited from generation to generation.  And so, she put her trust on me and I haven’t failed her ever since.  This gourmet brilliance proves to be very useful at times of solitude when you got bored of ordering other’s recipes and decided to make your own buffet.  I remembered her telling me that all food would taste good if there is the chef’s heart flavored in it.  Cooking is an art, combining the loops and the whoops of seasonings and spices to the medley of meat and herbs.  Tonight, I decided that my dinner would equal breakfast, satisfying the grudge that I got from skipping my  diabetic snack attack.  A beef stew and a side of paella made my stomach die in joy, appeased at last that my gears are energized for my routinely nocturnal bookworming activity.

I normally hide under my sheets at nine but tonight, I shall break the rules. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll fix the rules next time. Just this time to spare for I have gained interest on this book entitled “100 Years of Solitude”, talking about how one could live happily even alone, just by creating the world you have ever dreamed of. Gabriel García Márquez is dumping the “no man is an island” concept which anyway sounds inspiring to me.  Finally, I jumped into bed thanking Him for letting me outrun another day living alone in a comfortable apartment, free from all sorts of vexation.  I wished for a better life at school, which gives me an imagery of dull monochromatic memories.  I am not that famous but I can be someday.

A heavy beam of sunlight pierced through my window, refracting on the ***** white floor and creeping up to the mahogany table just right at the corner.  It intercepted with the glass pyramid and created a beautiful prism that glittered all around my room.  It was a really majestic scenery, one that I luckily happen to see every morning, a good optic background, I guess. Two hours before class time – that’s where my pattern starts.  Take a bath, eat, brush teeth, groom, check the doors and power, then I’m off to go. Everybody follows a certain kind of pattern, that’s for sure. Whether you wear different types of clothes everyday or use competing brands of toothpaste, clothes are clothes and toothpastes are toothpastes.  As humanity finds more and more complexities in life, they become wired to doing the things and involving the events which they think would give happiness to them and simplify their equation of life.

As a proof, there’s Mrs. Lanny Honeycut from the house next door. She usually sprinkles her daisies every ten in the morning, wearing that friendly neighborhood smile. On their patio, you could never miss a day seeing her husband, Mr. Blake Honeycut reading the daily papers with a round of tea, jam and bread spread on his table.  On the busy intersection stands traffic enforcer, Red Mayer, waving his arms to and fro while wearing that aura of valor, never seem to get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. Thousands go out for work and go back to sleep everyday and that's the status quo we're talking about. Even inside the academic arena, you can still hold on to that thought; I mean the size of the population doing the same pattern at the same time – my schoolmates, enemies and… friends? Well, I’m not quite sure with the last one, but it’s this: they all make a fun of me.  They say I’m a dork, a nerd, a geek, a freak, and etc.  I wonder if they mean everything that they say or say everything that they mean.  Either way you put it, I’m not buying it. I am not what they say I am.  I just like being alone and that’s where I do best.

And as always, the school is crowded with busy people rushing through the corridors. Others are beating the deadlines while some are happy they could breathe for another break. But no matter how busy everybody could be, there is always a time spent for “information dissemination” or chitchats. But only this time, the topic discussed is the same.  I could hear it on the entire campus, everywhere in the perimeter. Another student in the university is missing leaving no trace of existence.  It’s been going on like this for over two months now and the university council has taken their best courses of action to unknot this mystery while campaigns have been running on TV’s and vigils were spent. Not that I don’t care but it seems that this is also happening to other places, I mean, this is not the only school where maniacs could exist and become professional serial rapists in the making. By the way, this is already the 12th case on the record. Weren’t people overreacting to the issue? Isn’t the case overrated? Did they reject the possibility that these people ran away because they got pregnant, messed up or something like that? Soon, the university area was covered with security troops roaming around like a swarm of bees, buzzing and sometimes boozing all the time.

I guess that’s what happens when you hang out too much with friends who are just jesters plotting your own jeopardy. I don’t think it would be good at all to be bothered with things like that because sometimes, it’s also useful not to have any use at all.  Like the king being admired by his kingdom amidst his sloth and compromises.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not friendly anymore. Actually, if it happens that I got company, I would magnanimously offer a treat at my place.  But the thing is, who would likely do that? I’d cross my fingers on it.

Wishes do come true even for a loner like me.  I think I have a fan. No, that would be too sublime. She’s hot and she’s hotter when you’ll know she’s so cool. Quite a paradox, but that’s just reality.  We came to know each other on our lab class. Her name’s Athena, fitting for her twisted logic and good humor. It makes me burn a lot of calories when I talk to her more than a 5-mile marathon could squirt. We were lab partners and we get along well. I just couldn’t figure out where she got the courage to befriend me. I do regard myself as unwelcoming species, but I might work on it when someone tries to knock the door. We juxtapose ideas. Yes, that’s what makes our conversations spin like a merry-go-round. But we enjoy it nevertheless, evident by the crescent smile we both generate out of the craziest topics in store. Once, she interrogated my way of settling wars with enemies. Well, I told her it was my habit of treating them to my house and giving them souvenirs to show how sorry I could be. She snickered and her eyes glowed like the Andromeda and her face shun the whole universe. Oh, I can do this all day long, if only I got hold of time and space.

Today, she asked me if it would be okay if she’ll stay at my place till nine when her dad could be home and she would be able to call her and ask to pick her up. She reasoned out that otherwise, the night would be scary because she’ll be alone in their house, no company, no security. I was puzzled how the thought of being alone could scare her. It is like freedom from any constraints, no ties, and no limits. But I couldn’t blame her. She’s too fragile, too vulnerable to handle it with herself.  With the speed of the light, I accepted the favor.  Well, that goes even without saying.

It was past six thirty when we arrived at my immaculate apartment. It’s great to be an“ OC” sometimes, I said to myself.  I thought of a winner dinner, one that would make her visit worth reminiscing. I preferred Italian.  I cooked her lasagna and drenched the dinner with sherry. We talked a lot until we run out of resorts. I guess she planned it, or I planned it, synergy perhaps.

The clock ticked nine and there’s no sight of her father’s getaway car. But there’s no sign of worry in her countenance either. I surmise it didn’t reach her inkling yet to phone her dad.  She was busy dissecting my kitchen and living room with her very playful eyes. That doesn’t trouble me though. That’s just as instinctive as any other first time guest could get. She grappled her attention on my antique collection of prehistoric movies, like the Scarlet Letter, The count of Monte Cristo and the likes. She happened to love them too. Well, that makes her more beautiful to me, other than the satin white dress she wears. Suddenly, she got the impulse of going to my room. She said there’s nothing more exciting to see than a gentleman’s bedroom. I startled from the request, but before I could say anything, she leaped straight to my chamber with the gestures of an imp. It’s weird to be in this kind of circumstance because I don’t often invite a lot of visitants to my room. I ain’t no hotel crew, bowing down and waving his hand to the chamber’s destination and leading the VIPs to their cabins. Yet this time, it’s the other way around: it’s my cabin.

But now it’s too late to stop her. She molested the **** and I giggled for some reason. Finally, the door opened a crack and a bend of light escaped from inside. She stepped in, and I followed. She was filled with awe not because my room is all made of gold nor did it resemble a royalty’s den. It was the exaggerated neatness and order that greeted her. In some unknown vortex of my deepest imagining, it made me feel like I’ve been through this instance before. The flashback is not so vivid as it appears, but something tells me this isn’t the first time. Deja vu could be working on it, I infer,although I don’t really believe in those forms of conceptualizations. Perhaps it’s the sherry’s spell infiltrating my mental prognosis. But something, I guess, isn’t really right.

I caught her opening a red box that was hidden behind my cabinet. I tried to steal it away from her but she fought back and it came tossing down the floor. Numerous items spilled from the case. A purple head band with the glittering initials ANNE, a ruby embedded bracelet, and a Nokia handy phone exposed the secrecy. This isn’t going to go along well and fine, I guess. A strong surge of desire came from my core. It tried to envelop my entirety and control me like a lifeless puppet. I felt the tip of the pyramid glass in my hand and I succumbed to lose my consciousness.

Morning came and it felt better than ever. It was a ***** Saturday. There she lies beautifully on the deck, like an immortal bud of red rose trapped in golden amber. The cellophane fits her well, and there’s no doubt she’ll be complaining anymore. I already prepared a cozy place for her deep sleep: A 5x2 feet wall engravement which I was busy molding last night. It wasn’t easy making her go to bed but still it ended up smooth and sound. I helped her get up and fitted her in place.I turned on the radio as I reached for my dear carpentry tools. The news was still nailed on it. But this time, the missing case struck for the 13th turn. Ahh, the hell with society! They never really get a way to deal with it.

I was busy patching the last mound of concrete that is half an hour closer from becoming a part of my room. Make that a quarter. I guess there’s no end to this divine crevice issue. It must be following a pattern too. But I can handle it, thanks to this vicarious personality. I wonder if I could get the chance to invite another visitor in my place. But if I do, I would certainly offer the best treatment they could ever have.
Mariam Paracha Oct 2012
The warmth of the sun settles, hugging the lake.
The dragonfly flies low, hovering above the tranquil water
the light seeping through the paper thin skin,
it hums across the lake, refracting light off its wings,
An array of colors make patterns on the wings,
wearing it like a cloak, a rainbow embedded within.
The colors tilt and shift as the dragonfly gracefully cruises through life,
laying close to the water but letting the air propel it forward,
floating between two different worlds,
it is like a dream where our thoughts are separated from reality,
and are scattered like refracted light for us to assemble.  

Through a screen of our dreams, a world can be seen.
A world of hopes and desires that is dormant within
The light of life just soaks us bare,
our skin turns frail,
under the scorching glare,
the glare of eyes that want you to be,
someone that is accepted by society.


the dragonfly bathes itself in the sun,
the iridescent colors shine on its skin,
flying and floating, he’s determined to win
a predator, determined to get what it wants
nothing blocking its way or paving its path
making the most out of life and never holding back

spread your wings like the dragonfly
that hums its way through life,
dipping its wings in the sun to shine,
breaking free a life of colors,
that we leave locked and forgotten,
behind a reality made of black and white,
the black ink seeping through our minds,
injecting us with ideas of the 'ideal life'
where money and fortune, and status define.
Bathe your mind in the wonders of the world,
soak your heart in life's warmth and glow,
and pave your own path,
with the dreams you sow.
Life
Lux
Those who were marginalized by the braids and serpentine lights, devotions were made in San Juan allowing electromagnetic discharges from the imperceptible space-time of Vernarth's parapsychological quantum; alluding to clarities that achieved everything by having Patmia in the material and incorporeal from the start of the stained glass windows and archetypes by Transfer Quantum that burned the chins of hominids who believed to be immortal as if they were looking in this position for the direction between the eyebrows and the chin , for the Euclidean incidence crossing all the pools that are between quantum means of transfer of ions and cations. The oscillations of the sparkling field of consciousness of the containers were of ethical variables that became perpendicular to the space of draft or levitation of the designations that originated with accelerated electric charges on Patmos, developing albiceleste skylights over the harmonic equations as they elongated in proportions of quanta that They argued greater than those that circulated elliptically from Grikos to Skalá, and then to Profitis with assiduous progenitors of long-wave quanta. The magnificence of the halo became rectilinear up to the high altar that was atomized from the unskillful penumbra to reabsorb the inclinations of physical life in the Macedonians and the Achaemenides when they were trapped by the loss on the propagation of the Lux, which was imposed in hemicycles where they were they reclined to relax in the lux of rest of the path of the reasoning that made pederasty in the links with the minuscule obtuse lights, reeling from the clothing and its finite speed of what measures the ability to be undetermined in the margins of error of the antagonists when originating flow rates, greater in his dermis to regenerate towards any other that could be clothing of greater speed.

Thus was the scenario of dimensional magnitude between the powers that did not have contact, but their dimensionless energies on a surface that reached absorbent to the one that rectifies the concretive of the error that partially abused them. Their legacies would pass to a supplementary electromagnetic plane, separating their masses and retaking orientation from where they returned, where if the ideal of the final rational was refracted where everything would be vivid darkness. The obstacles classified them in the closure of the average height and the average surface, to then redirect to the maximum height and maximum surface propagating in irregularities of the Ego "Believing that they were never overcome in the diffuse perception of the metal mirror." The incident rays of the Lux would go to meet the multi-incident plane of the Mashiach, the wave angles were refracted throughout the sinuous law as radiosity passed over the greater mass that was normalized from the tangent that was projected 180 meters above the eyebrow. and Vernarth's chin, along with the recharged electromagnetic strengths of Alexander the Great's reactivation bezels, which at times seemed to levitate over the Lux's high frequencies and vary independently with its crowded functionalities, among scattered restraints that it presented to both weightless behind. from the decayed marble sawdust, separating from its phosphorescence that bounced between the rigging of solid surfaces and semi-solid ones, when realizing that the sea and the silica were confessed to the Pronoia of Delphi. Inducing Vernarth for the first time into a Pronoia versology on the Athena of Delphi, prompting them to separate from the world and it's holistic to divide into three portions of the dissociation of consciousness from the end of the Lux of Parapsychology, which had hosted them for centuries and centuries. . The Pronoia conspiracy systematized the reaction that would reunite them after this oracular parapsychology, making the adversaries believe that they were discrepancies of clinical parapsychology, equating warlike causes in the containment of Delphic neuroscience. From this quantification, the predominance of Vernarth's Lux de Pronoia was announced, linking peculiar segmentation of submit logical historicity in this work as a starting thesis, which speculates the same for those who have to make an analysis of historical dogmatic imperialism as a justification for mythological normality. The Lux thesis aimed to show that the dimensions of the mythology and the submitology, when exposed in physical quanta, made a tendency of irresolution in the abode of spiritual Tractatus reasoning and not in the instinctual one, which watches over recitals where history and its collective memory indicate outbursts of moderation. The role of the submithology  is to pretend that this normality is made close to the instruction after yours temporary for causes of your deep patrimonial, that makes them captives from the social complexity, with the disambiguation of certain criteria by maximizing the hidden truth of the ascending opposition forces that they have generated great conflagrations, intuition being the unreflective pseudo-reality with historical formalities that stumble into the terrified directionality of the myth that was to be reality. The tiny spaces of the verve left by the silent mechanics of the Persians became defensive when they saw their emissaries incoherently in the verticality of Allah when they saw that the confusing world with anxiety exaggerated predictions and failures invulnerability of a lineage that always had. been condemned to the desert.

Everything conspired with a Pronoia of siege, before the exegesis that sought purification and that was how they headed and misdirected their mistakes in the active train of the recess of their abstracted retreat, in a universe that also abandoned them after the subsequent train of Aurion waking them in their illusions with swords, and stealthy spears in dreams that specified safe rest. The ferocities of the proto-souls of assault carried away the translucent bodies of the Persians, and the Hellenes in acts of honor made such congenital paths of the understandable vocabulary that he did not speak. The prism was located in the cautious measure of its contractile dispersion with white separations of mantles, earth, and water scalded by dynamics that formed colorful activations with their withdrawal phenomena in the immaculate albino Lux that dissolved all of the facet optics that it made. Lux's great brain in the instant that the Thuellai airs transfigured the nuances of the Atros monastery, with objects that refused to be absorbed by the black hue, generating mechanical waves of equivalence in their identical interference that caused two opposing forces to distill the coherent differential that had to be overexposed in the category of historical Submitology. The two inverted waves separated, the Hellenes moaned and hiccupped for having to become identical when separating from their immaterial bodies, doing wonders that would house additional souls that would complement a transitory becoming towards the garden of the angels that provided them with identical beams of light, interfering in what animated the lights of pageantry, with the antithesis of interference where they resided in constancy knowing that they felt possessed of benefits of the eternal length of existence, but with pressures of mutable in some involuntary constancy and amplitude of having parallel directions with Saint John the Apostle and the Siblis. The phenomenon of polarization of both empires was denatured in a transverse way in all the electric fields after this feat, inciting unique fields of the pure and selective ascending ecosystem, which generated polaroid substances at the angle of ninety degrees above the browbones and chin of Vernarth, to approach the Pronoia of concatenation with Alexander the Great refracting unscathed hyper-vital and transcendent faces of infinity. Like any other phenomenon, the Lux crossed both bodies like two Xiphos swords that processed the electromagnetic valve, by iridium that converted with all the coarse Lux that crossed the succumbed immateriality and stopped the shaft and the nail that hang in the typology of electromagnetic radiation from the Hellenic world between them, making an ominous redemptive fire that was regimented to leave them both in the middle of a farm where there were farmyard animals, stockpiled pastures and a house that absorbed them as parents who would love them as beings of Lux. Thus, this primary parapsychological quantum network penetrated the level of the archangels that made them be together in planes of manumission, and that does not admit bi-quantum personality or bi-parapsychology that can cancel out the portent of the helmets and the lineage that does not dazzle if they are not made of iron.

The life of the other world began to be encompassed in all the Subtraigus beings that would correspond to the astral plane that was confirmed after the Kalidona Romantics deduced the Unicorn Uilef or Uilef Monókeros after Pronoia. Kalidona being an uninhabited island and the Uilef sleeps in between copulating with Spinalonga and Kolokythas along with other smaller islets, plus two hundred that will make up six islands of the twenty-six tetragram of Alef. Here Drestnia went with her consort of Etréstles from the Koumeterium of Messolonghi to find fateful encounters of Pantheism based on the majestic copulation of beauty, among twenty-six numbers that prevailed in virtuosos who took refuge in Kalydon or Kalidona, preparing for their rampage with grafted grotesque derived bodies of the Falangist Hellenes who were arranged of their musculature, so that they directed the finesse of the civility of Hesiod, Terpando, Archiloco, Baquílides, tragic like Etréstles, Aeschylus Sophocles, Euripides and comedian like Aristophanes.
Lux
Alice Wilde Oct 2017
She was a wilting flower,
Delicately fading
Into the depth of her sorrow.

Her eyes-pooled gossamer stars
Falling from constellation webs.
Bouncing on the tile before losing shape
In the atmosphere.

My soul was swallowed into
Her sorrow,
And stayed there.

And when I held her,
It was like trying to hold on to refracting light.
Marge Redelicia Oct 2013
Squeeze your feet into synthetic fins.
See the world in big rubbery lenses.
Don’t forget the snorkel, of course! Bite tight.
Hobble to the shore,
Where the two worlds meet.

The sea splashes gently on the sand.
It hurls itself forward
And then recedes back.
Its motions are like gestures,
Telling you to draw close
And closer.
Its peaceful surface is an invitation itself,
Painted blue and glittered with sunshine.

Accept the invitation with gladness.
Don't be afraid!
Let the briny waters embrace you.
Let the cold tickle your skin.
Let the waves rock you back and forth.

You have entered a grand ballroom
Illuminated with a majestic chandelier of refracting sunlight.
The colorful corals with shapes of mounds, disks, and crowns,
Sway with the rhythm of the current.
The fishes dance around and about,
Each beaded with scales of various vibrant colors.

And then the reef ends.

The colors abruptly plunge into a black abyss.  
Look down and allow yourself to be
Filled with fear, terror,
Or maybe
Insatiable curiosity.
Now let that curiosity stir discontentment in you:
Discontentment with snorkeling.
Let it ignite a craving for
More thrill, more wonder.

It's time to go deep sea diving.
vircapio gale Jul 2012
she is my nihilistic god;

i am a stag leap.
the fainter wind-caress
felt deep in trunks and boulder bed.
i am delight for loosened thorns
that piercing underfoot will spur to run
my naked body's open-air embrace
atop the callus of my seasoned fun,
skirring flora shadow-dancing bright
descending mountainside of noon
in blurrs refracting sightful bones.
i am the sense of
transtemporal glacial moans,

the heartbeat of the soil breath
to puff from feasted log a mycophile's awe
or want for all placental webs in view
for naming earth a seeping sorrows tithe:
my consciousness of things alive.

the stinging lungs atop the path
are emblems of a winging truth
to overcome her nearing death.
i am the lingham of creations' race.
i am the sensate reeling blow by empty blow.
the gravity of light and dark;
gray theopolis of fists and falls.
envelopment of massive meanings filled
in nether-branchings' net
and mediatrix scorn: the wider world absorbs my self as ~ all~
~. .all. . ~
prating some nepenthean law
to sour our poetic hate
and deeply bury seismic seeds she wants to sow, like
ancient clues of metagender fact:
hermaphroditic **** to 'normal' eyes.
icecaps to resize and singing moralize;
a dolphin midwife toning yoni love
for labor certain nuns call "gift"
as crown of pleasure heights
on par with mysteries;
regrowing infant fingertips,
to pi recited over days,
to vaster mindscapes drawn in ways
'beyond the genius of the sea'

why wait for ease of shame?
thin veils of culture lift
and family bonds anew to tow
the peace from out irratic weight of nation rifts;
instantiations burst beyond the tunnel course~
rhythmic doomsday yearnings line the halls of humantime:
prophetic visions of a sea to come,
Utnapishtim keeps himself alive
to garden with his wife a thriving mortal line.
Quetzalcohuatl finds himself *****
to bloodlet savior sexuality,
his heart a morning star, a Mayan Venus shine.

i see the standing trees
entwine slow-love to sky
so i can swing and heave
my universe above the words,
to carry thorns as well as petals, doves.
the vision ends. the new begins
to filter dyad lies through
inter-
corporeal lens.
embodied ivy climbs the tree of death
to rewind love and deepen love,
to bound the loss with goddess wisdom ends and other ends
of ouroboros shedding clear
of limits insight thrives to near.
sunglance peeking is the hovering of me,
steady comfort crosses floating lotus feet.
the softest rock has melded under thee
to join a forest pausing here.
a berry soaks itself of all i am
while nutty chipmunks chirp in whirls;
the clouds are girls you've been,
Nephelae to tease in quenching gowns
the verdant book of men we've known, who leaf
the air to taste another form of fairness lent.
silver is the sun in times of stillness overached.
sifted tensions drift to lie awake, but
drowning in a stream of glowing calm,
i am the woody balm.
the scent of bark unnestled dry
and leaves remembrance when
the breathing stops, the final
fleshing in of nowhere, never then.
you are transcendent of transcending
pure. end, endure and lucid ending live again
in empty worship ringing plenum om.
Nina Messina Oct 2013
Outwardly I am a titanium barrier, inwardly, a net of strings hold me together within confining my true self to my mind. The metaphoric needle posed between thumb and forefinger, sewing patch after patch across my ruined skin, holding in the things that threaten to burst. The thread is my self value, thin and dissolving.
Watching in the shattering mirror, who I am, as tears and blood slip past trembling fingers.  Reaching upwards towards light, but I drown in the darkness. I am swallowed by hopeless misery.
Floundering and toiling in the shadows of my own faith and nearly forgotten beliefs.
Sorrow floods me, consuming in a cold fire that doesn’t burn, but freezes to the core.
Refracting shards of light that escape like a song. They fall like a melody from my lips.
While the heat of the world swirls around me in shades of blue and black. I am bruised and ask "why do I hate myself?"
I never have an answer. Only the memories of a life so beyond dysfunctional that I have to resort to story writing to make believe a happy ending, never truly believing in it.

What were these whispered words that squirmed and infiltrated my mind, what are those lost secrets and memories left to fade away. Tormented, still I remain silent. Suffering quietly. Wondering if I'll go down without a fight, or would I take my own life. It is the loss of my humanity. I transcend in definition, no longer resembling who I was.  Silver tears, dripping from the eyes of the moon, as if such a cold distant satellite mourns for and with me.

Fear remains, as it always does, clutching my heart in an iron grasp. Despite the freedom of a new life, my knees are buckling, I’m poised to run, as if there were a place to escape to. Walls arise on all sides. I am locked in a box, where I hide away from the world, and I become, cold and distant as the moon. Fighting myself endlessly.
Hide everything I am from the world, and put it out of sight of myself, I don't dare to confront it.
I ask myself again. "Why do I hate?" I know a vague answer to it this time. I have allowed the evil and cruelty of a despondent life before this one to shape me, even after my resurrection, despite my belief and faith. I had let it consume me.
My heart, a thousand splinters of ice, would once break, even if it was looked at, or touched, cracked and shatter repeatedly. I only watch, making no attempt to heal myself. Content with viewing my own nails clashing with soft flesh that gives way to pain and agony. Slicing into cold abysmal depths, bleeding a metaphoric spectrum of ****** colors into my veins that then spill down the drain of my heart.

I wonder if there is any capacity within me, for the remnants of a shimmering soul to return to hope?   I'd abandoned love and hope for so long, had they dissipated completely. Do I dare to uncover such a startling miserable revelation?
My voice catches in my chest, as I sing halfheartedly for my freedom. To be released from my anguish. My voice not carrying past my lips, stolen by the wind of despair circulating around me.
I had changed, believed myself worthless and ugly. Melancholy, a kaleidoscope of emotions contrasting with one another. Dripping together to create the painting of my life. Magnificent, yet lonely and sad. Like forlorn splatter-paint tears down the side of eroding walls.

I was told once that I was shiny on the outside, and dull on the inside. Gilded. I want to change that. I cannot hide the scars I have been dealt, nor can I conceal the ones I've inflicted to my own body. I remember each slice to the skin with shame. That I had knowingly marred perfect flesh.
"What value could I possibly have if I'm constantly looked down upon?"  I pose questions like this to myself.
Everything they say makes me feel worthless, like I'm not supposed to be here.
Maybe I'm not, I wasn’t supposed to live was I?
“Worthless. Freak. Stupid.”
Do these words define me?
Are they who I am?
I am a shadow, As I sink into the depths of my own insignificance I stare speculatively, emptily up at the opalescent translucence far above me. I’ve always been worthless,  but now I am nameless. I’ve never been to solid in my own emotions, right now I don’t know what to feel anymore. Where and what is joy? What happened to the light?
I dissolve into toxicity and an almost chemical stasis of depression, seeping into my heart with the thickness of sick black tar, dragging me farther than I’ve ever been beneath the surface.

I become nothing, for that is what I presume I always was, nothing. Only a mirage burning holes into the fabric of lonely hearts longing, a haunting memory left to torment into seclusion and sorrow.
An empty shell of what once was a girl with dreams, is all that remains to decay in the dark. While the shudder of sobs dies down into a tempest of self loathing.
An incandescent nightmare, flares out like the petals of a blossoming flower, they unfurl and cover the dystopia of eloquently disfigured words that curl and uncoil, only to surround the wounds of me that pour from a inky black liquid that has replaced the blood in my veins.
The push and pull of the sorrow and hope mixing into the discordant symphony of life. The sound that is the melody of me.
Kt W Feb 2013
This wilderness beats from my bones.
The air,
Tangling through my hair,
Bells, ringing from long lost homes
Soul
Tumbling down an empty rabbit hole
Like alice.
My mind is ebbing away at
Short-lived thoughts and fantasies
Like light hood dreams.
Sunlit rays refracting past
Leafless, souless trees
Tiny watered boats on misty seas
Squelching; muddy puddles in
A rainy morning haze
Baked hot heat, dewy grass on
Lazy summer days
Pristine, soft-capped mountains
Last angle to explore
Sand, rock, pebbled beaches
(Tacky matted gloss on plastic)
Gravelled paths well trodden
Donkeys, camel, horse
Talking, shouting, screaming, morse
code on docks and oceans
Cities: loud, tall sleeping
women, men, children, babies
The noise, the love of crowds is seeping
Through my heart.
Insomnia from all these places
(People everywhere)
I cannot stop nor start.

Inside doors i feel i'm trapped
Like lion in a zoo
Around the world, i've gone and mapped
I'm wild
Through and through.
Matt Sol Jan 2019
A second sun
peaks and flutters
in the color-dust
of virga
refracting light
of false idols
shading skies to
new horizons.

See ya later
with a question            (x2).
I forgot how
to say goodbye,

A second sun
peaks and flutters
in the color-dust
of virga
as thunder rolls
down a stale sky
into the fray
of a twilight.

See ya later
with a question.             (x2)
I forgot how
to say goodbye.

A second sun
peaks and flutters
in the color-dust
of virga
refracting light
of false idols
shading skies to
new horizons.
Nat Lipstadt Apr 2016
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Infinity's Mirror by Nat Lipstadt

Two mirrors, set in opposition observe created notional blending,
a reflecting pool of bonding's of unglued, contrary compositions.
Mirror to mirror, his imagery, fuses to Sylvia's images, hers,
faintly recollected, now living face, face to face, with his past insurrections, alters his future visions.

From cold water lake she's drawn, impaled by refracting regrets,
retrieved, drawing her words upon him, an awakening slap to drink,
beloved, tragic magic, infinitely captive.  But this old man's tiddlywinks, land-locked words, blunted instruments, needy for release & salvation, are neither silvered or exacting, just stains on a dulled, tarnished brass spittoon, except for the brunt'd bunting of lines across his roughened terrain'd face, black and white, pen and ink etched illustration of howling agitation.

His words worn down, hardened, red faced, purloined speckled pellets, damp to roll on down her rutted, almost ancient, tear streak paths, disbelieved superstitions, sacrificed for one of her living morsels of words.

Man, here to her, pledges allegiance, audaciously defiling her poetic sanctity, a visage endless repeated, delivers her shiny poem-poised countenance, even though no forgiveness from time can a mirror afford for either, from her words,  confession born, terrible truths beyond, beyond the finite.

                                                
~~~~~~~­~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
with gratitude for the inspiration from, to:

"Words are his instrument, poised to deliver, sometimes
infinity's mirror,
sometimes a word or two for you,
reality is on its way...going to come through and fit for you."
SJR1000

for Patty M, who swore me to never, and only, give up to you, my best.

for Sia, who loves her Sylvia so.

Born on April 24~25, 2016

and of course, for Sylvia
Claire Sep 2014
would the stillness of the earth
be any stiller
if it stopped turning?

starry eyes are more than just
celestial
they are kaleidoscopical
refracting streetlight and splitting street lamps into galaxies

severed souls
carefully clustered
and then rapidly freed
amongst widely spread space

it wasn't their kaleidoscope eyes that had their broken hearts
falling apart at the seems,
but their lack of capability to
reflect another pair;
to reciprocate
emotion

perhaps the stillness of the earth
would be stiller
if we all stopped moving
to feel it turn

and perhaps your eyes are stars after all.
not sure if this even makes sense, really, but neither does anything else in the world
Lamar Lewis Oct 2011
It all happened so fast. Like most good things in life--the really monumental moments--it's like you float out of your body and come screaming back just soon enough to realize the moment had passed.

I didn't know how many miles were behind me now. It seemed like a thousand but it didn't really matter. I wasn't going to be one of those mindless wanderers--blindly probing my way through life's misery and defeat to one day wake up wishing I was young again.

I'm taking my youth back from the government, the bankers, the Wall Street gamblers and racing toward the horizon like there are commercial airplanes in my blood and skyscrapers burning in my chest.

You can only go to the same god forsaken place to have your soul ****** out of you for so many ******* days in a row before you either become one of them or make your own revolt and

collapse
                 *into a sea of ash

                                              slithering like snakes along the city streets.
You just run as fast as you can.

I chose the latter.
__________________­__


I'm going to do the cliche thing I suppose. Do as many drugs as possible, do as many women as possible, keep chasing the next good time until I get high enough to slap a saddle on my car roof and ride off into the Atlantic--fireworks shooting off in every direction to *** up the stars--refracting radials within the iridescence of the shimmering sea.

>explosions echo endlessly<
[wrap around the ambient rhythm of the TidePuller]

touch! caress! make love!--stare through eyes into deep blue souls and find something of yourself there.

That's how I'd like to go anyways, I don't know about you--.

That might just be this narcotic cocktail talking. I take my pills ground up in a wine glass mixed with cheap scotch. Then I chase with cups of watered down coffee--chugging until ceilings start to undulate and shake me loose. That's when I know I can start the day.

It's usually my most productive days when the ceiling tiles arrange into piano keys. Then I get to create my symphonies and soliloquies before I try to go get laid.

Now that I'm out here on the road though my mind is being blown.

Try waking to the same white black piano key ceiling everyday, to then finally feel the colors of the sky--for the very first time!

A never ending metaphysical canvas for the thoughts and longings of a drugged up DaVinci who just woke up in his time machine to start the 2nd Renaissance in the clouds. It all makes me wish I would have left years ago.

__________________­_


You see, I'm your typical twenty-something passionate kid trying to turn a ****** past into some kind of salvageable foundation for a chance at catching up with the rest of normal "adult" society. But I've got some problems with this whole "reality" thing people are so adamant at upholding.

Last time I visited my human family around the world they were all drowning in debt and poverty; trying with every fiber of their being to find that one bright spot. Stuck. In the deepest, darkest, most cavernous rotting excuse of a day to day life.

All because some meaningless number
on some computer
in some bank building
with their name on it
either is too small or doesn't exist.

Most of my human family know things are bad,

But most in the impoverished third-world are so deprived of basic human needs that they never get the chance to ponder who really holds the key to their cage.

So they are inclined to accept the status quo and the system and try to live inside of it. Failing to find sunshine within the deepest depths of an erupting volcano; mistaking the heat, the burning alive, for some kind of sign that the brightness has got to be somewhere close. So we will just try to sink a little deeper with the rest of them.

Here in America:
Sure, let's go on back to ringing registers for minimum wage all day until my ears bleed and my head wants to fall off so I can go home to watch some television!

Yes, God Please just let me relax here with my box of flashing pictures and scintillating sounds. The only truth I'll ever need.

Just let me relax here with my reality being defined for me by the volcano directors--telling me that I didn't just come in my house dripping with magma all over the carpet.

YES GOD, just let me relax a little before I have to go to my volcanic, skin searing hell again tomorrow morning. Where they tell me on T.V. that I'm going to find that sunshine I desperately long for. But It'll always

*collapse
                 into a sea of ash
                 to scar the sky grey, silence the sun's rays, blot out the stars, and darken our days*

You just sigh and say "Tomorrow's another day..."
_________________­__


Yeah, I was right there with them yesterday. I was with them for years. Getting brainwashed and ***** slapped by advertising--getting barraged with constant reminders that all I was meant to do was to work my life away--decide to be some tiny insignificant cog in this "economy" they call it.

Looks more to me like I signed up to be some mindless consumerism *****! Sheeping my way along... buying and wasting; buying, wasting; buying again, a bunch of **** I don't need and throwing it away.

We're Living in a society infected with some sort of capitalistic contagion that pretty much siphons off the Earth's life force.

We are conditioned into a reality that the richest & most powerful would like all to believe.

Art-full hearts are stomped on, told to get a job, and plan for retirement. Told to slow down and be reasonable rather than speed up. Velocity of the heart may as well be an act of terrorism unless it's for marriage--and LGBT is on the no fly list.

This is a reality set up predominantly for the endless profit of a bunch of trans-national corporations who won't be satisfied until they hold complete and utter dominion over their ***** and pillaged planet.

Perhaps then they'll be rich enough to fly away in spaceships to **** the next Earth and leave all us sheep here with bargain sales, social networking and reality T.V. as distractions...

Too bad for them some people still read. So I'll learn the different strains of herb from my local library and become a ***** of feeling good, freeing love, and accepting all artistry.

Have you ever seen a painting in the sky? Or witnessed windy symphonies in trees? Hey, don't judge me,

you're the one addicted to killing everyone and everything with your mindless dollar bill.

kneel before almighty god,
mind your founders,
adore their wise countenance,
looking up at you,
re-assuring you,
comforting you,
taking the pain away,
but DON'T RUN OUT!
you'll be back for more.
you'll come crawling back.
You'll do anything for just enough,
just one more fix.

It's got its hooks in bad,
don't it.
___________________­_


PRODUCT-XA110357: Capitalism
DRUG STATUS: Still in Clinical Trials
TEST SUBJECTS: Human Race
PHARMACEUTICAL LABORATORY: Earth
INITIAL FINDINGS: Subjects not receptive, keeps causing: Anger, Greed, Jealously, Oppression, War, Ignorance, Famine, Inequality, Imprisonment, Slavery. Environment not receptive, will cease functioning in the future. Time of Earth Death is unclear. Thankfully it does seem capable to last through the next few fiscal years. A relief, as this is what our stockholders are concerned with.


Symptoms of Withdrawal
Users who are addicted to money and are going through withdrawals may or may not experience a loss of food, water, shelter, clothing, transportation, education, free-time, happiness, fulfillment, reverence of nature, beautiful moments, relationships with friends or families, and love.


FDA Warning
If you are poor, lazy, and uneducated it is your own fault. Being poor and lazy may or may not result in Debt. DEBT may or may not lead to SLAVERY, stress, illness, and an early death.


Poison Control Center
If you have ingested too much debt, slavery, stress, illness, and are fearing an early death please do not call any corporate buildings. Access your phone, computer, or go to your local library to find reputable resources and EDUCATE YOURSELF IMMEDIATELY. Get some nice speakers and start exploring ALL GENRES OF MUSIC. Look at as many paintings, sculptures, forests, and gardens as you can--as often as possible. Lay under the stars and dream about what YOU want to do to make a positive impact on this world. FIND OTHER POSITIVE PEOPLE and AVOID NEGATIVE PEOPLE. If you know someone that is poisoned who you want to save please refer them to the nearest Poison Control Center

-->Smile at the sun--feel its warmth<--

----------------------------------------------------------­------------------------------------------------------

happy hearts:--after love--not money--free from pain--sickness will surrender--
addicted to art, peace, compassion, and empathy--feel the sky get closer--.


-----------------------------------------------------­-----------------------------------------------------------





­




























"In a state of enlightened anarchy each person will become his(her) own ruler. They will conduct themselves in such a way that their behaviour will not hamper the well being of their neighbours. In an ideal state there will be no political institutions and therefore no political power."
-Mahatma Gandhi
Composed October 2011. Revisions (Lots of Them) February 2014. Blend of Fiction & Non-Fiction.
Martyn Thompson Aug 2011
There is a wondrous feeling of completeness
When immersed in the act of …
Cleaning a flute
The soft light radiantly refracting from
The slightly concave…
Keys

The shimmering of the shiny sleek skin
A perfect nickel finish…
It’s sexiness salute
A strangely seductive serpent stealing
My willpower; I submit to you…
With ease

The perfection of this harmonious union
As my trembling hands caress…
Your heavenly body
Gently working away until my eyes are
Illuminated by your brilliance…
Your gleaming sheen

Intoxicated, mesmerised by your lustre
The warm ambience brings out…
Your luminous beauty
Ready now for my lips to blow a refrain
A sweet tune is primed…
The flute is now clean

Let the melody begin…
r Jan 2015
light travels in straight lines

but truth often gets inverted

when worded through the pin-

holed window of closed minds

and blinds us with distracting

theories refracting on white walls

in a world of royals and riyals

and unnamed dark chambers.
r ~ 1/12/15
Kayla Ann Jul 2014
You are the centerpiece

All the crystal fragments of your perfect self
Refracting light like a thousand diamonds
Dazzling and mesmerizing me into a
Blissful trance

Strong enough to hold yourself up
A beacon in the vastness of the
Dance floor of my life yet
Fine and elaborate in design

You reflect stars into my eyes
Even though you aren't a galaxy
I'm ensnared in the cosmos
Of your radiance

Far above me is
Where you reside and I
Am but an onlooker like the rest
Continually startled by your brilliance

When all of the guests leave
My hall and take but a memories
I will remain spinning in
Circles alone
Unable to see anything but
The most marvelous part of it all
You
My chandelier
To the one I love
Eleete j Muir Jan 2012
Aeolian dour fire meridians
Unfettering enlightenments will
Together Scylla with authority
Howling, Charybdis in oblivians wake
Shenting spindel meandering;
The schism termagating sirens
Repasts (diabolic manna)
Refracting ambrosial in the
Lap of Gods eye sophically conjecturing
Ephinany- times charioteering,
The nocturnal triunes discordance
Contemplating consequence thistling
Opothecaric sigels permeating lots
Obstruse lathed cerebral skies
Ruthfully roil whittling indelible
Epitaphs of serpentine repositories
Woefully dawning eternity castening
Harmoniously asunder truths
Deifying yen die.


ELEETE J MUIR.
Ryan J Toll Jan 2016
You said we've all got cracks and blemishes
wrinkles in our character
the little crevices where the past is hidden
where the fear settles as a dust,
nibbling away at a fragile foundation

It's this Modern Age I said,
kids in the automaton state
profit slaves desperate to break their screens
and return to the fields
rise and set with the sun
like in the ancient golden seasons

But you smiled, it has always been so
men with eyes glazed recalling days long gone
when the real work was done
when love was grand and the food were rich
Roman hearts pining for halcyon Greek nights

Then we are born crooked it seems
fresh but weathered like newborn lava
set under pressure, too old for our years
just clumsy instruments
put to task in a china shop
every stumble a chip in our innocence

And in there lies our radiance you beamed
with every glass shattered, a million gems by accident
refracting light on an imperfect world
every hasty breath a powerful wind
destined for great heights
M Harris Mar 2017
Butterfly Desires & Fictional Highs,
Magnetic Spells In Her Emerald Eyes,
Bleeding Perpetual Fire & Toxic Cries.

Lucid Screams Of Her Plastic Love,
Paper Towns & Serenity Above,
Refracting Into An Apocalyptic Dove.

Postcards Of Her Estranged Serenity,
Diffusing Into Polaroids Across Infinity,
Rhythms Of Lusts Erupting Obscenity.

Bluest Shade Of Her Misguided Confessions,
Uncharted Fragments Amplifying Obsessions,
Profane Prodigies Detonating Desecrations,

Digital Dreams & Fictional Desires,
3D Symphonies Inside Her Crystal Wires,
Purple Streams Translating Fires.

Tunnel Visions Transmitting Reality,
Suicidal Trance & Static Eternity,
Molotov Solution Is Her Lighthouse Of Ecstasy.

- 04:19AM -
Amir May 2011
when i get lost
i find myself

in the most various of places
as the echo of my paces
reach outer spaces
i delve inward

like the whirlpool
at the center of a ripple
touching the banks of the pond
and defining itself by them
i am
utterly interdependent
externally anchored
and implicitly bound
to the web of meaning
spun around me
and when you found me
lost
in the most various of places
as the echo of my paces
reached outer spaces
i delved inward

and i found me,
my lost self,
all around me
in everyone
and everything else

(it astounds me
how the pronoun 'he'
implies that
which surrounds the
not-so-isolated subject.)

so when i found 'me'
lost
in the most various of places
as the echo of my paces
reached outer spaces
i delved inward.

i delved inward
and saw outward
myself
a shard of glass
reflecting and refracting
the light bouncing
between so many shards of glass
and i shattered

and i dissolved
and i splattered
so many dots of paint
in an impressionistic painting
that got smudged
and delved inward.

so when you found me
lost
in the most various of places
the echo of my paces
reached outer spaces.

and when i
delved inward
i found myself
outside myself.
like the whirlpool
at the center of a ripple.
Carlo C Gomez Aug 2022
"Memory is more indelible than ink."
—Anita Loos

~
Europe, after the rain,
the sun lending warmth and comfort.
fringes come into focus.
shadow journal,
fiscal dreams,
becoming ****** lines on a page;
procession bells
for young brides,
veiled in lace.
a touch from her
outstretched hands,
this honeymoon phase
running up the thigh,
the holding quite still until
she smiles for pendulum.
at first light, breakfast in bed,
granting pastel wishes on
boxing night,
then a letting go of the kite string.

new fingers in the medicine bottle,
tiny geometries
inside a house of reciprocal numbers.
paradise in mnemonic children:
cartwheels and handstands,
coloring books of
neglected spaces,
future ruins.
one hundred violins
play to isles of ignorance,
stray embers settle
along the solemn Chemin De Fer (railway).
a catalogue of afternoons
on the bike path
thru propeller seeds and dragonflies.

arriving in the haloed flesh:
skin dive,
the place of couloir descent;
**** beach,
the place of odd glances;
gun chamber,
the room of secondary light;
all horizon variations.
an algebra of darkness,
this dense Roman twilight,
their exiles unreflected
in blind lanterns.
our brightness will become
refracting silhouettes,
a broken yolk in the incendiary sky.

~
Styles Sep 2014
I've come to see,
This daylight adrift; amidst.
Refracting my joyless abyss.
Shadows of doubt linger; restless.
Misleading my moral compass,
Distant places that shouldn't exist.
Darkest corners of a timeless eclipse.
The more emotions I emit.
This cloud's progress persist.
So remise, I dismiss fears that are amiss.
LC Apr 2022
a person barely within earshot
may absorb the cheerful ring in my voice.
they see me in glimmering gold
embellished with refracting glass -
always with crinkles adorning my eyes.

someone else may be right across the table
and see small smoke tendrils escaping my ears.
laughter follows the smoke, and it fades away.
they see dull gold topped with smashed glass.
the crinkles sometimes disappear,
only to return a few seconds later.

A few can see my heart whenever they like.
they hear unsteady tremors between words.
they see billowing smoke
emanating from my ears and mouth.
they know the wrapping is gold foil
with smashed hourglasses piercing my skin.
the crinkles appear whenever they want.
nevertheless, they see me rise, even as I ache.

I, the permanent resident of this body,
shed the itchy foil whenever I can.
my cells are clouded by smoke,
and the hourglass fractals
swirl into a tornado behind my sternum.
the crinkles have been starched.

But, I remember I am walking on diamonds,
and I slowly sculpt my armor.
I exhale, and the smoke clears, bit by bit.
I reach behind my sternum,
grabbing the fractals to line my armor.
I splash water onto my face,
and the corners of my eyes crinkle again.
Escapril Day 10! Prompt: magnification. I wanted to "zoom in," to the different ways in which people see me vs. my reality. This is my interpretation of the prompt.
I hope you enjoy this longer poem! I also hope the metaphors make sense. I'm not really sure how I settled on these descriptions, but I made an attempt 😊
Erenn Jul 2016
She's deluded to see what's within.
The lies she mirrored to what she believed.
Truth conceit in ways to bleed,
The fire that ignites the dark that breathes.
Moulded for greatness, to honour the heir to the throne.
But the kingdom has been long gone and doomed.
She hummed the lullaby that father said will never die,
"As long you keep humming in the darkest of nights,
Hope will light and brazen through"
Her eyes mimics emerald stones that bejewelled men that gazed.
They faze only to feast their heart's content
"Greed and power will only consume deranged men"
Her amity will shine through.
Refracting rays of hope to those in need
Rooted to her veins, her mettle heart
Will protect her through any storm.
The evil that lurks from within will perish.
**Once again,
She will triumph through
The kingdom will once again rise to greatness
And relinquish every darkness that resides
Its been a long a time:) HI guys:)
Universal Thrum Oct 2013
To ask you questions would be a sacred honor bestowed by the almighty King
In your presence my spirit rises like rainfall to be reunited with heavenly splendor
On this earthly plane, should our eyes ever again meet, gazes gliding into beloved depths,
pools of blue jungle oasis...lighting curiosity aflame with a way of cool delicacy,
a generous smile and grace

Oh, smite me now so that never again may I know another feeling than serendipitous bliss
Smite me again so that I may be twice smitten, and again and again -
Till every rule is broken and only we remain,
climbing every sensual step upward on the path into ecstatic delight,
Living as if born naked into a cold wind dancing...

This thing we are, creatures of tomorrow..
always hoping to seize the moment plainly emerging before us...as if in a dream...
awakened by the startling realization that reality is created by creators -
those brave souls willing to bleed to sing their song, to share a moment,
making the listener hear and understand -
those lovers of the trial coming through the fire with their hearts exploding,
confirming their existence as more than echoes in the night
The rest only watch as wishful children on a stream side bank,
following leaves swept away by the currents,
so too are our destinies like hidden springs
pushed forward by the force of our wills,
watched by these eyes of Man.

For you, whole egoic worlds shall crumble - come crashing,
magnetized by the Muse's universal command to Love and Be Loved
and in the debris of the old world shall come soaring a roaring pyre to light the velvet corridor to which a tired soul may recline,
easing into the wild nature of passion
with a carnal zest for climatic enlightenment.

Imagine a world ruled by passionate love
The focused heat injected into the heart,
striking the core of being with a burning coal,
defying the seemingly possible constraints of material nature, transforming into the world's most super symmetrical diamond, refracting God's pure light,
shining spectrum bending color into the mortal world,
an unanswerable riddle, the asking itself being the pleasure,
outrunning the crystallization of routine,
for ever-setting suns painting distant horizons,
as the sky welcomes our daily wonder.
Simon F May 2012
A scintillating ocean.
Refracting light across the spectrum,
colours beyond white, black, and red;
Mirror to the universal spirits.

Crystalline forms growing
like families of fungi across the horizon.
A mycological configuration
of salts and waveform reflectors.

A frisson of diamonds.
Seizures of globular light, elliptical rainbows.
Twice-reflected hollow moonbeams.
Creating.

Cubes in the molecular structure,
Silent carbon and quartz,
as from some distant caverns
unseen by any eye.
niamh Jul 2015
A beautiful swan
Of the finest crystal
Sat upon a shelf,
Wings poised
To take flight,
Refracting weak sunlight
To create a halo of beauty.
For years she sat gathering dust
Until one day she fell
In a graceful arc,
Smashing on tiles
With the sweetest sound.
Of freedom.
At last.
Carlo C Gomez Feb 2021
The rosy-fingered dawn
  bleeds excitation
and atmospheric trails
  for seeking out tomorrow

Are these stars like rain?

  Emitting imagination,
  refracting suggestion?

Perhaps a new art form swimming
about as cloudbursts?

In undulating waves
  war and peace
are colliding out from
  the center of the sun

Could they be
messengers from heaven?

  A signal from God?

Perhaps at magnetic midnight,
four horsemen shall ride?
Millions of minutely small scales
Cover its delicately sheer membrane.
refracting light scatters our sight
and only iridescent hues are seen.
Tearani C Jun 2012
I wonder how bright my tears shimmered
Refracting your flickering light,
I wonder what thoughts had filtered,
Through your changing mind that night.
Your smile builds me upright,
Until it quivers and I fall
To pieces under nightlights
Until morning sooths and calms.
But nothing feels quite as right
As crying in your arms,
While laughing at our fears
Pretending nothings wrong,
Pretending that you would stay forever,
Until the day you’ve gone.
Every night without your light
Just seems to dark and long.
Erenn Dec 2014
Translucent yet transparent 
Simplicity in its eminence 
Fragile yet fervid to uphold
Reflections sometimes blur to unfold
In any shape or size, manifold
Don't get blinded by the blinding lights
Beauty in its elegance, be mesmerized
Refracting spectrum of rainbows
Emmiting colors of alluring ardor
Rays of sun burning stains of tallowed sorrows
With H2O and soap, impurities gone

Akin to your heart 
That could break anytime
Fragile in its name, 
Maimed, stained with pain
Pumping but barely breathing
**Only you can choose 
To fill it full or to drink it all
To die or live again.
Just like the glass the heart could break anytime. You can filled it with all kinds of emotions. When it's too much you can either drink it all or don't. There's always a choice. Inspired by a Japanese film I watched. I can't remember the name.hha
Amanda Blomquist Jan 2013
Translucent lullabies
Tangled in endless efforts
A silver liner to the darkest dreams
                  and brightest days

Refracting waves of energy disperse
          against murky skies,

Elegantly connecting every being to everything.

From my roots to yours.

Truth in Spirit; Meeting soul.
island poet Aug 2020
pick a word, let it lead you astray, then (soil)


a poem to exclaim, refracting the sun rays emerging
from the curves of your chested heart, the waggle of
ten fingers conducting your inner song, the baton first
waved swipe to earth pointing, let us commence there:

think of yourself, entirety, as soil, you the potter,
what has been planted by others, nourished by others,
along sides of your ingestions, you the grower, seeded
anew, each word, hybrid edging with existing vocabularies

the sun from without, the sun from within, the rivulets
of water, the arterial pathways, feed the treasure chest,
and you, farmer, planter, grower, picker, plucker of the
produce, serve us, baskets grown on the fruited plain of

poems’ soil consisting of the writings grown in the
unique you,
all of you,
body & soul
birdy Jun 2022
two lovers in the rain
see each other
through a thousand new shades
each rain drop reflecting and refracting their love
into new beautiful hues
and shapes.
Filmore Townsend Mar 2013
walking into smoke shop,
hoping to find a girl named
Expectations. hoping she'll
have legs, eyes, all the usual
contrived sights. careful, con-
trolled tiny burns. no one's
blowing up the bridges.
no one is trying for attention.
hoping to catch it strutting like
a Bird of Paradise. strutting
isolated, too lazed to clear the
grounds. too lazed to give too
much of a **** for attraction.
lips broken by the winter wind,
lonesome travelling with
Expectations aside. she's waiting.
hoping. to rise, to strive, to arrive
at finality. and then onward. and
then **** Expectations after.
gripping hands, mine alone,
forcing friction to dry qualm'd
sweats. to remove embarrassment
of inaction in inexperienced persons.
citing her, citing everything
foreseen and predict'd. all in
hopes at removing consequence,
but Expectations' voice threw tog-
ether a string of words unbecoming
of her vocabulary. they were unbe-
coming for a girl in that place of society.

walking out, rebuffing time and ad-
vances. fighting this mortal fight for
invincibility. to be of highland descent.
amending to Expectations on the side.
amending for waste of sacred days. lights
cast where darkness was. and these thoughts
enlightened by Son of Vonnegut on his
northward journey for Nirvana.
spitting blood, searching for immortality.
******* Expectations. *******
up life in the blood-lust. throwing a second
pair of shoes in the trash. waiting to ask
questions of persons un-wanting when questions
unwanted ask'd by persons of a cloud'd past.
and the infection is in the heart, is in the soul,
is in the lungs. with each words' passing from
putrid mouth, with each word infect'd in entirety.
pushing into the world meaningless
****. these un-embodied words are only a
passing lip-service, and have never relfect'd -
never realized - on the recant'd lives they've
run thru. nor the current running. recanting,
redacting, refracting - a disease of distraction.
Expectations lurking by ruined road.
that chance to rise, to strive, never
let her more than some inch of give.

holding prejudices, clinging with
desperation. held by throat.
sacrificial lamb found through
re-imaged scapegoat. watching
hours fleet, awaiting death
of muscles strength. awaiting
ravenous claws at pit's bottom.
Expectations peeking through
slit'd fingers, avoiding direct
contact of vision. learn-
ing to forget promises.
her eyes shine hazel.
learning of life, roots grind the ground
as scapegoat - throat released - gnarls hair
in fingers. feet force avalanche of scree
falling in eyes of ones attached ravenous claws.

silent with-holdings. Expectations
with hand over heart. spitting blood,
and whoa. something's not right.
Expectations *******, partial nakedness
and truth of truth. tears of mud caked
mountains. weighing down, and stare
never longer leaves the ground. and
blood turn'd stone, spitting worlds
with creationist vigor. making some-
thing for sake of nothing and feet
fall to repetitive rhythms. Expectations
falling, Expectations *******,
Expectations' hazel-stained eyes.
Liam Jun 2015
outlined in shades of reality
replete with eclipsed potential
the morning moon in revelation
unaware of her ageless touch

the language of time is floral
the color of anachronism is sage
so asymmetric in its beauty
so linear in its dictates

but her silhouette defies projection
refracting moments into mosaics
collaging aspirations into awareness
as dreams clarify into appreciation

— The End —