"sessile" poems
Her brilliant ocular orbs persist beyond the occasional glance
averting my focus just after her curious stare brings a gentle smile,
beckoning for our distance in the room's expanse to diminish perchance
as her heartening gestures attempt to avert my stance from sessile.
The magnetic pull of this inspiring scenery tugs me from my position
each forced step resisted as I cross the floor towards this distraction,
every warm, reassuring nod has filled my arsenal's ammunition
and causes a craving to quell the disturbance that has forced my reaction.
As her fingers delicately caress her soft lips I swiftly turn away
she knows not the consequence that her simple mistakes would bring,
I gather all my strength to fight the magnetic force enticing me to stay
leaving this alluring siren with nothing but her song she sings.
Though drained of will I flee with a vivid memory of what will never be
a siren so pure should stay near the shore and never reach the depths of sea.
Jan 26, 2012
Jan 26, 2012 at 10:08 PM UTC
still to ferry out depths
no petty parrot poems
to divvy up the score
nor ramp-up efforts
climb into lightning
totally unafraid of the scalding rods
feet out to sand dollars
cool as cucumbers
like walking on the spiny surface of an outer moon
crinoid wishes crumble like walls of an ancient civilisation
as saddle wrass masticates half-born ideas with Aristotle’s lantern
rendered sessile, bloodclotting measures kick in
as emergency repair kit carried on the sidelines
brittle stars are bandaged and fossilised as ambulacra pull tight
overgrown daisies fail to fly free and loosening pollenseeds are all caught
lick up that salty brave snot
and brace face to that taut wind
this urchin with star backed burden
bears no cretaceous page
just bobs on hope
in relatively quiet waters
Oct 26, 2013
Oct 26, 2013 at 12:05 AM UTC
Obdurate and profligate from years of anomie,
I have become hallow due to this sessile pons asinorum
Incurring solely affliction, I know only discontentment;
My existence is damnation, and damnation is my existence...
Enmity and sorrow are the sole tenants of my heart
No matter my anguish, these demons nevermore will depart
Presiding within my occult and dingy soul;
Anon my antipathy will irrecusably attain control
For hope is naught but an opaque postiche-
A whim that dissipates, even when you beseech
-The Bagatelle
Mar 20, 2014
Mar 20, 2014 at 5:42 PM UTC
wild dogs inebriated to the last breath
mutual respect john and i share
he was busy speaking to himself
a beautiful woodshed recluse
i'm on one
as assured as the fermented fruit
off the branches of our tree
salt dogs can't help themselves
hauling back brine
like a tidal flow drafting draught protein skimmer
ridding waste from the ocean
the detritus has been enough
tastes good to humanoid bivalves
sessile staring out from
terra nothing
magnetic limestone scrape
Jun 26, 2015
Jun 26, 2015 at 10:43 PM UTC
Two days into being back in Van Lear upon onset emergency,
I feel trapped in my childhood home and engulfed by jingo lobbyists who have posters of Ronald Reagan,
And I read about Pascal's Wager in an essay by William Buckley to realize how anyone, in annoyance, could fall into conservatism.
I come home and all the farmers are talking Communist uprising,
But back in the university the Mormon professors are talking up our structure and that we should roll with the punches.
Noting that everyone disagrees on something,
Everyone back home is too sessile to talk or debate the issues.
I must leave at once and argue with tact about the grander schemes of life and money,
I'm just getting started.
///
This is not a place where you can accumulate *** and alcohol,
And thus not a safe space for creative expression and thought...
In the dormitory halls I would put on my Aztec print sunglasses and parade the hallways declaring myself the most immortal of men from third to fourth floor.
And then you inevitably get trapped in a two story country house,
Cry for the fact that the sky is too calm.
Nothing happens here.
Nothing happens here...
It makes me uncomfortable.
Let me sit in the corner of room 403 and meditate with more excitement than a shouting match here,
Or how everything is so quiet and we're waiting for a phone call of awful news.
They all must think I eat nothing,
I subsist on nighttime ghost stories, or something,
I'm a creature of the night,
Then who are you,
Man of American with your European jaw,
Or King of all men who dare to call themselves free,
Why is it that in a decade of invention and creativity
That it's the appeal of brawn that wins out continually?
We are regressing.
Eastern Kentucky is the center of the wound,
The eye of barbarism and I am not welcome.
I will move west to spite my family and then become successful to spite society.
Sep 10, 2016
Sep 10, 2016 at 7:25 PM UTC
Still they lie on the river-bed.
Unforgotten; daughters of the sun
their itching, prickling, stabbing beams
And dusks that ran ran red
But tread on, the circus just begun,
The ripples— mote by mote— by seams
The sands stir and rocks twitch
Dull-eyed creatures still non-living go
Roses bloom, say, roses rise
Once lively dawns to sacked towns switch
Body and body and body we sow
Roses bloom, say, roses rise
Say, still they lie; still sessile
Of tens a blooming heart we plucked
Still some more we knew as our own
Stumble on we desperate while
Lie we still in the river-bed tucked
Oh, those parched pieces that once shone
and these wretched blooms undying
Oct 14, 2021
Oct 14, 2021 at 12:42 PM UTC
Alabaster hands
I paint like I know you
but I am afraid
I paint like I know
the hours of holy songs he sang
when chip by chip
he broke his David
out of stone
but I mumble with a brush
polluted a tomb
with thievery and doubt
if I return to you
I will do so stollen
rolled up in bay and --
my Florence! I couldn't see you
I was lost
I could not be him
he unleashed, I hold
and now you wear his hands
like a beloved scar
and then you haunt my sleep
with your eyes of old
I am sessile, sterile - I doubt.
I cannot speak.
stone carved inadequate, for
I do not know hands
the venules and the etchings.
I could not learn
fiddling like a cricket
in the arms of leaf
I see him leap through ages
to come and observe
I am an artefact flaw
and him the sound perfectionist
he inspects fingers
as they stumble in paint
ever-looming, giant, bearded
with a broken nose
you, Florence! He steals
movement, instill it, gifts it
you wear it, then you watch me
with museum eyes
Good love,
I am no David
do not ask that of me, I may weep
stone in my hand
I sling stutter over my shoulder
and watch the forever tyrant grow
Dec 17, 2022
Dec 17, 2022 at 3:34 PM UTC
she held hands with a bouquet of sunflowers on the ride home today.
maybe she isn’t so lonely after all.
Dec 17, 2020
Dec 17, 2020 at 9:20 PM UTC
Besotted winged pollinators
roistering barrage drowned
amidst general insectivorous cacophony
indistinct auditory signals communicated
intermingled with bounteous wafting fragrance
midwifed edenic floral pullulation
sensate admixture viz colored spectrum
amidst unrehearsed extemporaneous
orchestral suite bedded lambs
amorous ewe man like bleating songs
nature all aflutter actively socially vociferating
profuse living color rainbow pastiche
teeming soundgarden smorgasbord
cornucopia ignites mordent Utopian aural swath
visual vistas stilling spellbinding
spilling riotous carpeted web
uniting doubting Thomas's existentialism
despite unanswered queries
asper diverse modalities each specie evolved
to survive despite countervailing destructive forces
generating plethora pandemonium ironically
promulgating harmonic exemplary convergence
Highland Manor concourse aflame with new life
parented by instinctive imprimatur anonymous patents
now genetic mapping usurped with untold outcome
analysis bred crispr discovery Earthlings fiddling
glorifies honied indemnity Judeo-Christian kudos
leaves of grass kudzo resistance mutation immunizes
biosphere once prolific differentiation shrinks
becoming monocultural setting virtual stage
catastrophe plus food shortage would become
global debacle predicated, sans virulent
viral and/or bacterial strain renting asunder
tripwire unspooling delicate webbed whirl
already widely compromised more so
since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring
**** sapiens population explosion
pits profligate predilections planet Earth in extremis
dire crisis cavalierly dismissed humans
in hot pursuit racking up superfluous wealth
***** deeds done dirt cheap - tricking
mother nature, who will unwittingly
spring scrumptious feeding off scrimmage
forcing capitulation or total extinction
meanwhile fostering long tall floral inflorescence
a composite having sessile flowers
apiary abuzz, cuz queen bee
can no longer wax bereft of royal jelly.
May 27, 2018
May 27, 2018 at 12:35 AM UTC
1. i spread like butter on the sidewalk.
sessile;
like the moss that took root in the cracks
in the pavement
i decide too late i want a little girl.
i'll name her vada jane,
and you can kiss her when im gone instead
metal screeches
drivers stop to
rubberneck.
they don't see me.
they see my vada jane.
she's kneeling over me-
she's beautiful, right?
she shines like oil on asphalt
im dull like blood on moss
(when i think of you
i can breathe
you are real)
2. She died a few days ago. I went to the funeral, saw all her terrible friends with all their moon sized pupils and cracked teeth. The body didn’t even look like her—I wouldn’t have known it was her if it wasn’t for the scars. They didn’t cover them.
Mosses persist, despite their size, because of their biological resilience. They are structured to survive in the most extreme climates, able to retain enough water to keep them alive even for years of drought. Even a 50-year-old dried moss can be revived with just a splash of water. She reminds me of moss. I kept thinking, if I could just sprinkle a little bit of coke in the casket her carcass would soften and shoot up like a tulip in spring.
This whole thing has made me realize that humans are not as resilient as I’ve come to believe. Things are different when you bleed. The last drought killed her. Once you dry out, you are dry forever.
Aug 3, 2021
Aug 3, 2021 at 4:10 AM UTC
Sessile and connected,
I'm sat here to ponder—
To draw the parallels
Of my own roots of understanding
And touch, once more, the slumber
Which heartbreak does not send.
We should only gauge our maturity
By the scope of the circumstances.
All things glowing,
Yet all by ourselves.
Landscape void,
Yet setting all but bleak.
You squeeze the hand of love
Sometimes in thinking
You can teach a tighter grip—
Deciding that carpal tunnel syndrome
Is sure to fade...
That writer's claw grips just as tight.
It does not.
The sonnets, I could not recite,
But sighed at the single fact
That it signaled my memory fading,
And so too might all the flowers.
II.
The buds that haven't grown
And won't.
The dark I've both loved inside and cursed,
The central city which accepted the trade for my soul.
All drifting now.
I hope you cannot relate.
You'll recognize it all in waves of belonging.
I'd bet they'll pass us by.
III.
Where has the plot gone?
Slung the ink from well to wall,
Because this Earth is completely canvas,
And all the Earth will feel it with great objectivity.
From cries of heartache
To cries of triumph,
And extremism in both,
And with joy lying off the spectrum,
All to behold.
Nothing moving forward
As we choose to read in lefts and rights
And restrict the privilege
Moving only backward.
Time travel is simple,
Don't you do it with thought?
Restoration to my smile,
Reduced me to dust.
IV.
Not my call and not in fact,
With strong mind to senses
The world was very teal.
Looked, felt,
The aura,
All distinctively teal,
Just as gentle and forgiving.
No mind to the fact that you've done wrong
And been terribly wrong
Toward the center of judgment.
I'd posit the scales
Are already in balance,
And I'd advantage you greatly
On the weight of your hope.
All in harmony,
Yet the water receded.
I must confess, I'm awful at predictions...
But you broke my calendar stone,
Tolled the bell with no rhythm
And never did you discourage it...
Of course I'm guilty,
I've found it in my nature
And I've been worshipping in your temple...
Excommunication carries the feeling of death.
Jan 7, 2016
Jan 7, 2016 at 7:50 PM UTC
bound
to an immobile detrimental entity
determining this shallow heartbeat
it does not seem to belong to me
but the pulsating must mean
I'm breathing
hardly intake air
barely exhale
I've been trying hard to feel it
but my chest no longer knows
how to fall or rise
comes as no surprise
my time is wasted
struggling to penetrate
the membrane of a dying cell
searching for a way
to become what I once was
Sep 7, 2014
Sep 7, 2014 at 9:22 AM UTC