"rosettes" poems
Like a gazelle she ballets with gracefulness
Like a ballerina
Dancing to Dance of the Little Swans
With beauty and grace
Oh let me see thy fair face,
Sweet sister of mine
Let me watch you ballet gracefully
Through woods, fields, and meadows
She sleeps soundly in a bed of ferns
Oh sweet sister of mine
With the most prettiest satin wings you ever saw
And a pretty pink flowing gown
And soft pale pink ballet slippers
With the most pristine pink ribbons
Tied around her delicate ankles
She ballets, Oh sister of mine
With a crown of baby rosebuds on her
Head
And rosettes on her gown
She dances with delight, Oh, fair sister of mine
She dances even more beautifully
And gracefully
Than the yellow sunflowers
Of gold that waltz in fields and meadows
Dance for me, Oh fair sister of mine
Dance to me on hills of sublime green
Dance, Oh, beautiful sister of mine
Ballet for me gracefully like the
Lotus ballets upon the sapphire lake
Ballet Oh, sweetest sister of mine
Waltz for me in a field of dancing flowers
Waltz for me, Oh, dear sister of mine
I love you, oh, graceful sister of mine
~Marian~
May 4, 2013
May 4, 2013 at 12:46 AM UTC
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green **** hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
4.2k
I’m the smallest of the four big cats,
Not many of us left,
They destroy our land and hunt us down,
All to build their useless towns,
I can travel at 36 miles per hour,
I’ll consume all that I hunt and catch with my power,
I don’t have spots like my Cheetah friend,
But rosettes of blackness and live 21 years from start to end.
Aug 28, 2012
Aug 28, 2012 at 6:21 AM UTC
When the writing is going well,
I am a prince in a desert palace,
fountains flowing in the garden.
I lean an elbow on a velvet pillow
and drink from a silver goblet,
poems like a banquet
spread before me on rugs
with rosettes the damask of blood.
But exiled
from the palace, I wander --
crawling on burning sand,
thirsting on barren dunes,
believing a heartless mirage no less true
than palms and pools of the cool oasis.
3.2k
The yucca plant from my mother’s garden sits
unattended and on the verge of death next to her
eldest rose bush, now wildly overgrown and lightly
blushing in the cosset of the midmourning sun. Its
withered rosettes droop down to its bed of maroon-stained stones
in crisp, harum-scarum patterns as if the plant is spending its life
like currency trying to touch its toes. I oftentimes
find myself wondering if the reason behind this
slow rotting of mother dearest’s garden is hidden within her
five-year absence. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say
her nursery missed the d
i
g
g
i
n
g
of her weathered hands.
She was the biosphere of my world; I suppose that
it only makes sense for the earth to match my thirst. We
sit side by side, that yucca plant and I, as we struggle to
nod our heads towards daylight while we rise on
the side of the house that is more or less
cloaked in shadow; the side that she would sunbathe
on during scorching late afternoons. Perhaps without her
body giving shelter, all her garden is doomed to
atrophy like muscle in the sunlight.
I find irony in the way that my mother’s favored plant
was the “ghost in the graveyard;” a perverted parallel
to the game that she never wanted us to play. I think it to be
sort of sardonic that her pride swallowed the possibility of
a cure being found within that ****** plant’s roots. She,
a third generation American girl,
had blood as muddled as the mud
that buried that yucca’s heart.
The boundary line between Mother and
nature coalesces into one:
Gaea
six feet under
melting into soil
I hope she becomes seawater.
Apr 5, 2014
Apr 5, 2014 at 1:41 AM UTC
*A soulless body she was
Pale skin, chapped lips, dreary eyes
Her ribcage filled with soil
Flowers sprouting from her mouth
Her veins like vines,
Wrapped around her legs
Her skin, ripped
Corrupting was her flesh
Worms coming out—
Out of her senseless ears
As unfathomable as nadir—
She buried herself,
The insignia and rosettes,
The books she read,
The verses she chanted,
Her dreams, her fears—
A forgotten temple she was
Hidden in the middle
Of a busy city filled with people
She never knew
And at night, she would write
About nothingness,
Her cats, the mustiness of her youth
Tasting the divinity from the salt
Flowing from her eyes
She wanted god, she wanted sin
Pondering on the elusive thought
Of life and of death—
She just craved for sleep
Lay her body on a casket,
Be one with dirt—
So she drank the ink,
Poisoned her senses
And with her pen, a dagger
She stabbed her core
Rejoicing as she bled magenta—
She decided to die,
She decided to die
Before the monsters inside
Would have feasted on her meat*
Nov 6, 2015
Nov 6, 2015 at 2:58 PM UTC
I'm building a cathedral out of
Needles, hope and wire;
Cast-off iron, nickel, tin
And coins of low denomination.
My rosettes dress the sunlight up in
Dripping gems, like royalty;
With scarlet slows the sounding bells while
Amber makes the dust motes lazy.
Seven halls, eleven arches
And eighteen darkened booths
Hold a single breath - an unfinished
Thought with a heart of dripping water
And legs made of undressed marble.
The steeples dip their faces in the rainclouds
As I crouch among the shingles with
A wooden mallet and a mouthful of nails.
Nov 29, 2016
Nov 29, 2016 at 10:25 AM UTC
The lusters of Spring is upon us
Inspiring a rainbow of lovely colours
As it blossoms into an abundance
Of distinctive flowers
Slowly maturing, in their seductive scents
Into natures natural beauty
Uncovering in its amazing
Unique shapes and sizes, quite pretty
On splashes, of smooth blankets of greenery
Neath its striking silhouette
As the ember sun embraces, releasing fluorescence
And embellishing lilies, orchids and rosettes
Apr 28, 2014
Apr 28, 2014 at 3:32 AM UTC
I swallowed
the sound of your name
like it was a star--
five points,
the type they
teach you to draw
in kindergarten.
It hurt
on its way down,
stalagmites of constellation
catching on my uvula,
hanging on with
astronomical strength.
But this is no cliffhanger.
Do you know what happens next?
I stopped breathing.
You've never deserved
your name,
you know.
"Light giving,"
it means.
Oh,
and how I gave into
the sublime
fallacy
of it.
Because
all you ever did was steal
the moons from my irises.
You treated me like
I was the dirt beneath
your fingernails
(you forsake
the dust on your windowsill--
but don't you know
all dust comes from
the wondrous galaxy that
dwells before us?)
I reached out to you
only to get
c u t
o f f
at the hands
Still,
I couldn't let you
go,
didn't know how to.
Even when my flame
was reduced
to these weeping cinders,
even when the idealization
I held between my palms
found itself exiled
to this mausoleum
of severed trust,
hatred blossoming
in rosettes against
crumbling tombstones.
The epitaph reads,
"At a loss for words."
Tell me this:
what sort of
"light giver"
doesn't believe in
in the possibility of magic--
in the pinnacle of light itself?
You always thought me
a foolish girl
for dreaming--
naive girl,
silly girl,
wrists blooming
in paper cuts,
always one fairytale
away from insanity.
Until
one day,
I stopped believing
altogether.
And all it took
was a single glance
from those eyes--
glacial sapphires,
your grandest seduction.
Hell itself would have
hardened itself to tundra
at the sight of them.
You always had a way
of contaminating
the things I loved
with a frostbite so lethal,
I would have
gladly dismembered
every hypothermic part
of myself
(every fragment of soul
you ever touched).
Like a shooting star,
I fell for you--
hopelessly.
Catastrophically.
And then the heavens went
dark.
Mar 17, 2019
Mar 17, 2019 at 12:27 PM UTC
Fountainhead
by Michael R. Burch
I did not delight in love so much
as in a kiss like linnets’ wings,
the flutterings of a pulse so soft
the heart remembers, as it sings:
to bathe there was its transport, brushed
by marble lips, or porcelain,—
one liquid kiss, one cool outburst
from pale rosettes. What did it mean ...
to float awhirl on minute tides
within the compass of your eyes,
to feel your alabaster bust
grow cold within? Ecstatic sighs
seem hisses now; your eyes, serene,
reflect the sun’s pale tourmaline.
Published by Romantics Quarterly, Poetica Victorian, PW Review, Nutty Stories (South Africa), Inspirational Stories, Poetry Life & Times
Keywords/Tags: Fountain, love, heart, pulse, bathe, kiss, sun, marble, bust, tides, sighs, eyes, sun, tourmaline
Mar 16, 2020
Mar 16, 2020 at 6:03 AM UTC
Turning circles and dancing
on blue depression glass
rosettes under my toes will never wilt
they'll never fall, never fade
never bloom
I'm turning circles and turning
back around to the last place
I saw you
the wind in my hair will be the same
every sight and sound the way I left it
But I'll turn circles and hear
all the chinks and tings of my miss-stepping feet
caught on the echo of your absence
and falling gracelessly over the cut-glass of cold blue rosettes
Jan 23, 2014
Jan 23, 2014 at 2:58 AM UTC
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green **** hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
May 28, 2015
May 28, 2015 at 12:58 PM UTC
How the sunlight throws textured shadows on forested mountainsides.
Frost that clings onto windows, curling into icy, sharp rosettes.
The way clouds glow electric white in a soft summer sky.
How music can unfurl or burst or soar or stagger or peal or boom from people's mouths in a vast spectrum.
Sparks that flutter sky-high off a fire.
The way the ocean ripples or roars, blending its ever-contradicting nature into harmonious beauty.
*There is so much breathtaking beauty in this world that I just can't help
but live in
wonder*.
Jun 10, 2018
Jun 10, 2018 at 1:32 AM UTC
Floating like Dandelion florets caught upon the breeze
Thoughts scatter to the four corners of the world
Lucid dreams dragging ecstatically at the seam of self
Unpicked nightmares rearing up and roaring
A lions roar, a cats purr fangs floating in a pool of perfume
Cannot obscure the golden tower of blow *****
Seed dispersal through rosettes
Disturbed paw printed earth receives seeds.
Nov 4, 2017
Nov 4, 2017 at 9:38 PM UTC
"All is fair," In-anna,
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth
A rose in her wisdom,
A rose in her hand,
Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth
Roses or rosettes,
Thorn scars or eternal stars,
Stabbing beauties or
Bright white hot
But all is fair in wisdom,
All is fair in blood
And Inanna, Inanna Queen,
She gives me roses upon roses,
Thorns amongst thorns,
Inanna, Inanna, my Queen
Inanna loft me high,
And cast me low,
Bruised and ****** love,
Bruised and ****** for love
"All is fair" In-anna,
Her echoing voice, just shadows,
Sweet shadows, wrathful shadows,
All is fair, Inanna, my Queen,
Queen of my heaven and my earth,
Queen who, in her wisdom,
In her wisdom holds flowering thorns.
Oct 2, 2016
Oct 2, 2016 at 10:32 AM UTC
Across silence
Rude stares
In equal measure
Provoking a quandary.
Voiceless words
And your invisible
Ink rests surely, printed
To my ear;
Likewise, in argue
And question
Our roughage will continue
To grow far over
Neighbourly walls and fences
To watch foxes
As they play
In the low sun:
Are you my fox?
Playing gestfully
Through the shaking weeds
Of deception in your heart?
I can write
Your ink, spelling your spell,
Juicing flower heads
Of their perfection.
No escape - all stems riveted
To the salty earths and float
As they're cut, like balloons,
Or spiralling rosettes, bleached
Then crisped by the sun
As your voiceless words stare
And watch my heart
Separate and drift away.
Jul 1, 2015
Jul 1, 2015 at 5:33 PM UTC
He raises his voice when you drop a plate,
water from the sink dripping-soap bubbles
foam on your wrinkled skin.
Shrapnel on the floor, you wait.
His skin is darkened from long days in the sun,
he labors dawn to dusk, forming callouses,
rough on his tarnished skin.
His grip is strong, you shrink away.
Peel away the fingers which puncture and
bruise the delicate skin-rosettes forming
in deep purples and blues.
You can only wear sweaters, it is summer.
The children in the next room begin to rustle,
they hear and whimper in fright-you try to
quiet the commotion.
He busts your lip, you remain silent.
In the dark, in the quiet after the storm,
you long to burst out the back door into
the mosquito filled night.
Your fears enter, he would find you.
He sets steel traps in the woods to grasp
the innocent feet of animals and steal their
skin to display on the walls.
He owns many guns, they lie loaded.
In the shadowy corner the barrel leans, gleams
in the yellow light of the overhead bulb-you stare
intently at it, finger twitching.
"Mommy!" you hear, and break gaze.
Dec 29, 2014
Dec 29, 2014 at 3:30 AM UTC
dissolute neo transgressive
a fantasy lauded libertine
self mythologizer
writing ugly comments
on corrosive voids like black outs
broken verses sounded out
in mangled staccato
needing rearranged horizons
like olives without pimentos
and skies cobbled from
thatched metal bones
in moonless poems
with no dream life
no naked glimpses
no clawing
not even a drop of blood to whiff
and already cauterized
lust-less
anemic-scapes of thorn-less rosettes
emptied of black tongued gimps
and tattooed ******
no Lilliputians
swimming in marsh swamps
and no snarling brays
remember
there are mouths to fill
with pounding gristle
and ***** to bleed
like pull apart flake strudel
that squeal rapturously
shedding seas
of gagging exorcisms
so
widen your thighs
look into my eyes
Aug 19, 2019
Aug 19, 2019 at 12:31 PM UTC
The tide unturns
things got wild
words flung unmild
There can be little need of shoving harsh away
when rosettes of care are placed on your path
Time will mere churn on now
so slow - slow - slow
like thick butter needing urgent spreading yet
with missing slice only melting can be now
Turn away
turn away
Turn away
it is as you wish
Turn a way
Sep 18, 2013
Sep 18, 2013 at 3:18 AM UTC
Like men, from dust and clay she is born.
By men, her face and delicate form is made,
Through heat and glaze and Water she’ll soon scorn.
A fine novelty, A porcelain maid.
On her crown are luscious locks of mohair,
Adorned with rosettes, by masters no doubt!
And glass eyes tell the secrets she can’t share
For her lips are in an eternal pout.
Velvet and lace conceals her nakedness
Away from a stranger’s unwelcome gaze.
And this Belle who looks alive, is lifeless.
A sleeping beauty born by the fire’s blaze.
Yet a doll is not unlike a real man.
Both are puppets, Each to a different hand
Aug 27, 2017
Aug 27, 2017 at 3:49 PM UTC
a hound stretches on a stoop
frozen, lacking a cadenced pant
sun splaying its last beams against
skin, warm tin and damp rigor mortis
the letch inside stammers,
retches
his yellowed nails scratch scabs
on flaking elbows
dried snakeskin platelet scales
too much residue
of asbestos and mildew, of
burnt gilded pages for heat
'cause they were of little use
to illiterate plainclothe'd sleuths
and the crows outside caw
with anemic splendor as
their ***** broods grovel
the inebriate inside
draws open dingy curtains
for the sun was finally subdued
he opens the window
to a finicky drizzle
and was interrupted by horse & buggy
and the tangling of her rosettes
transfixing voracious, beady eyes
as objects of interest phased out of view
we heard all this through the grey horseshoes
trudging through forgotten alleyways
all too loud and dramatic
we watched from fog outside
the ****** tavern where they drank
blood straight from the stomachs of lampreys
downing life, agnostics proudly clapped, with
death and decay on a parsley'd dinner plate
lingering in the hospital waiting room
for an embellished platter of viscera
to fill vacancies, with burnt rot
with a sterile, surgical tang
and jagged accoutrements
all are gorging lovingly,
already anticipating dessert
each solitary phantasm of a person, slouching in booths, on stools
smirks knowingly at the song that's now playing on the a.m. radio
while positioning their utensils, scooping, filling cavernous maws
and they all smiled
as their eyes gasped
as those outside
chipped their teeth
on rusted forks, and sighed
the dead ounce of liveliness failed to
take hold of its slouching bags of bones
and the coyote howled at the sound of the siren curfew
so listen carefully to the inflection of static hissing
the joyful crackle of disembodied voices
Jul 13, 2015
Jul 13, 2015 at 12:19 AM UTC
What’s in an apology?
To me, it is simply
a torrential downpour of regrets
and just-kissed,
biting insults
wrapped in
1982’s dowry garments,
lacy and dainty and
full of holes.
To me,
it contains a
moth-eaten veil
smelling like
lily of the valley,
a rotten memory
of a sweet time –
piped rosettes of frosting
atop
a filthy sponge.
By any other name:
Surrender,
Atonement,
Vindication –
it is to none;
it is to none but
to soften the blow
dealt by
the concrete slab
of fault.
It is not any sweeter,
not even the gritty feel
of a Sweet N’ Low
between your teeth.
It is novacaine
to the muscles
in your cheeks
that have been scowling for so long.
So,
here it is.
I hope
that feels so much better.
Jul 20, 2017
Jul 20, 2017 at 9:08 PM UTC
The prosperous will grow from your left
palm
ravaging the earth skin of your hand
and becoming a volcano that bursts into a beautiful biennial
Your nails will know themselves as leaves and the misery will no longer undo you
You will feel the profoundness of your years
and calmly you will water yourself
and with the fecundity of your acquired patience
you will give rosettes
and I in that second year
will be back
to see you in bloom
Jul 4, 2019
Jul 4, 2019 at 4:09 AM UTC