"slats" poems
There is a hole in the world
All the doors are painted
a shade of liars faces
their colors while arriving
are also fading
but we are still here..
Where corroding slats of
63 year old wood
sound like the screams
echoing across
the crumbling pages of days
burnt yellow beneath the
fire of eyes
The purple pouring through unseen waves in the dusk sky as Janis joplin sang gray star clouds
into my heart
she sewed my wounds
with the ash of
of bodies adrift of lovers
living only in the mirage
air disguised
as smiles everlasting
glass of the
empty kind of love that lies,
and never breathes
yet forever dies
dreams devour you with
tears remembering the terror
in Janis's eyes,
she poured herself out
across the floor of the perishing world
while performing
"work me lord"
"live at stockholm 69'"
to the dark,
we were never there
we were born
into hands that were dying
we breathed our last breath of freedom-
then we were born,
It was then that
I heard the darkness cry.
we are dying..
because we have forgotten
the free gift given,
our lightless bones
loose around the spine
of every bolt we never knew,
strengthened our stance against
the murderous long night.
Choosing blindness,
over looking without sight,
The invisible mountain,
that breathed in our corroding
dusty hearts,
weilding love
against the demons behind
our mirror eyes..
Refusing to call his name..
we have lived for each one of us
just for ourselves ("selflove")
so it is this then,
we have sold
our freedom
to the lie
named death.
Apr 18, 2020
Apr 18, 2020 at 2:42 AM UTC
How long the day,
Delivering letters to friends,
And cranky, bald dog feeders. Home
Is forward, past those poplars.
Always I’ve been in love with
Their almond scent, just as I catch
Past, dragging feet and who knows
How many heartfelt "Thank-you's".
Home is... where the wife is sitting.
She's not keen on laundry, but,
I’m an exception.
Always are my blue shirts blue,
She likes to make sure. Just in case I meet
With him; that carrion shaker,
Mr. Reaper.
“Hello.” I'd say, and tip my cap,
Along my silent nightly rounds;
Perhaps he'd humour me, if he could
See me. He's searching. For me? No.
That’s not right.
The lamps are thickest
In the dark, and that's just how
he likes it.
Even if I tip-toe, tip-toe, tip-toe around
Him, he'll still turn his hood toward me.
A courteous, creaking greeting.
That chill I get.
Matches only the fear
From losing fingers, as I push envelopes,
Catalogues, and restless dreams
Through many metal slats.
But even I, can't quite see,
When the sky turns milky-grey...
That perching, questioning hand
Placed gently on my shoulder;
Pushing down as I bend my back,
Kicking over milk-bottles, sometimes
accidentally. I shake it off.
Get to bed! I say to myself, mostly
Always, to myself.
Slap on some cream
And
Get to bed.
Jan 15, 2012
Jan 15, 2012 at 5:56 AM UTC
We spread our blanket on uneven
ground, bodies embracing in descent,
They lay on the boxcar floor,
fingers twisted, clutching slats.
Transfixed by the spell of evening,
limbs entwined, interlaced,
Barbed wire punctured palms
faces creased as in old photographs.
We stretched in dawn’s light,
poured coffee out of cups,
and left as it merged with the dust.
Bones upheave ground
unsheathed fingers
clotted with soil.
Copyright © 2003 Gary Brocks
Aug 28, 2018
Aug 28, 2018 at 9:45 PM UTC
There’s a broken heart sitting on a park bench waiting just for you
Bleeding crimson down the wooden slats and metal railings
Like a collapsing scarlet avalanche I wait eternally for you
Sep 21, 2011
Sep 21, 2011 at 5:50 PM UTC
Distance brings proportion. From here
the populated tiers
as much as players seem part of the show:
a constructed stage beast, three folds of Dante's rose,
or a Chinese military hat
cunningly chased with bodies.
"Falling from his chariot, a drunk man is unhurt
because his soul is intact. Not knowing his fall,
he is unastonished, he is invulnerable."
So, too, the "pure man"-"pure"
in the sense of undisturbed water.
"It is not necessary to seek out
a wasteland, swamp, or thicket."
The opposing pitcher's pertinent hesitations,
the sky, this meadow, Mantle's thick baked neck,
the old men who in the changing rosters see
a personal mutability,
green slats, wet stone are all to me
as when an emperor commands
a performance with a gesture of his eyes.
"No king on his throne has the joy of the dead,"
the skull told Chuang-tzu.
The thought of death is peppermint to you
when games begin with patriotic song
and a democratic sun beats broadly down.
The Inner Journey seems unjudgeably long
when small boys purchase cups of ice
and, distant as a paradise,
experts, passionate and deft,
hold motionless while Berra flies to left.
4.6k
Sun slits in through slats
of kitchen window blinds
and she is alone.
The art major is cooking
spaghetti,
pretending her thrifted T-shirt
bearing a cotton copy
of Campbell's Soup Cans
is not stained with tears and blood.
Oh, but that's hysterics and
hyperbole;
art has a tendency of making its worshippers
melodramatic...no?
The blood is only tomato sauce
and the tears...
well, what are tears but
water and salt?
After all, dramatizing the
mundane is just one awkward shade
of artistic temperament.
Visualizing life through
a heavy silk screen.
The art major sighs and
stirs.
The spaghetti is redder and
redder as she cooks.
Just as
her paintings bleed more blood
as she dangles a brush over them -
the teary-eyed watercolours.
The art major has decided
that drawing out extremities
of colour
might transform
her own life into
a pop of a Warhol painting.
The art major sighs and
stirs.
She thinks, tries to
think
in technicolour.
Today's thought-pencilled thesis
concludes (like a brush stroke of uncertain finality) that
love is the red of tomato soup cans.
Anger is the boil, passion is
the gulp,
danger, caution, warning,
the hot breaths, fleeting warmths,
the burn and sweet and tang.
She looks down at the
scarlet of
Warhol's soup cans,
blooming in worn out cotton
on her chest.
It might as well be blood, she
thinks.
It is,
it is,
it is.
Blood red love -
tomato soup cans.
Sun sets in slits
through kitchen window blinds
and she is still alone.
The art major sighs and
stirs.
The spaghetti is ready.
Aug 2, 2015
Aug 2, 2015 at 6:41 AM UTC
rain dripping through the slats above
landing, each time, somewhere new.
my feet were bare.
you always tell me I should wear shoes,
sometimes you offer me yours,
but I like the way
the mud feels between my toes -
by now I think you know.
thick smoke
lingering everywhere
broken by raindrops,
brought together by wind -
dancing away
to some far, distant land
we gaze through the squares
in front of our faces,
watch while cars speed by
in the unrelenting rain.
pizza?
pizza’s always good,
you know, when I was in Italy...
....the sentence trails off
you know.
and we step fearlessly
into the unrelenting rain
make our way inside
and like always you're sure
my feet are warm
your pizza is on the floor
and my laughter is coming
like the rain falling outside.
the look you give me
makes me laugh harder
until there are tears
running from the corner of my eyes
and my cheeks are warm and happy.
that’s when I know,
as I finally calm
and wipe the tears from my cheeks,
that there is no place
in the world
I would rather be than here -
giggling at pizza in the floor.
Oct 4, 2011
Oct 4, 2011 at 2:33 PM UTC
I sit upon a park bench
mentally piecing together
a utopia
You steal along silently
to sit upon my throne
of wooden slats and cement
I quickly turn and look at you
and say inwardly,
"your tree is not my tree
with squirrels that scamper about,
but a table top or a chopping block
even tooth picks lined in a row."
I bend to feed the pigeons;
a saintly feeling fills my soul,
to be abruptly taken from me,
by your sudden pounding feet;
a turbulence of wings
that nearly touch my eye
I finally begin to rest
in reverie,
a peaceful rest
of blue and white
You even steal this rest
and talk about muggers in parks
I hide my ears between my hands
to stop your thieving voice
I suddenly SHOUT at you
but you leave suddenly as you came
FOR YOU STEEL AWAY YOURSELF FROM ME
to take from you
YOUR STEALING BLAME!!!
Aug 30, 2014
Aug 30, 2014 at 11:19 PM UTC
The girl in the black
bathing suit swims
through my dreams;
her orange eyes warn
me that summer
is coming.
An inescapable
swelter of air
threads itself
through the slats
of picket fences,
crisping insects
and terrifying
an army of black birds
bivouacked in the trees.
I hear the soft explosion
of hibiscus, red petals as
bright as belly wounds,
and the heartbeat
of the dog panting,
stupefied by the heat
of a relentless star.
Up and down the street,
abandoned children call
out from the bottom of
empty swimming pools.
I slouch in an aluminum chair,
trying to get black-out drunk
on warm gin and tonics.
The tidy rectangle
of grass around me
ignites in a legion
of slender flames.
I remember the dark room
and my father’s deathbed,
his whispered, final words:
dying is thirsty work.
I strip to my underwear
and fantasize about ice.
I pray for the neighborhood
sprinklers to spring to life.
Apr 24, 2017
Apr 24, 2017 at 12:40 PM UTC
satin slats
plumped slick
sepal pearls
Elysium entreats
welcoming warm
Mar 14, 2017
Mar 14, 2017 at 11:55 PM UTC
The green combusts, the cherry sclerotized mask dances above
the invisible paper carapace.
Stuffed full with Rotten skunk innards and burning,
tongues of heat sweat away its crystalline hairs.
Aren is hunched and crooked, all teeth and lungs,
under the mixed halogens of suburban porchlight,
being bathed in bluescale waves from the
strobe of the neighbor's telescreen.
Ropes of smog pour from the slats between his picket fence ivories and get frayed.
I drink the filth, choking down the viscera of the vermin.
It doesn't seem to get easier.
Stumbling inside, my feet detach and I throw myself on the door
until I've locked out the sickly tide pool light of dawn,
and I'm rolling toward his bedroom.
Jolting and sputtering, and
grasping at the hands of the clock,
listening for the steady metronome to
count me through.
And then numbness.
I know the feeling, and next come the
pins, digging into my
fingertips and the pads of my
toes, and then I'm all body and silent prayers.
And I'm whispering sick thoughts to Aren -
*"Those adrenaline demons
will do me in,
and if only I could relax,
and my dear mother
used to have a stalker,
and I almost got run down
by a car on the highway when I was five,
and asthmatics are five times as likely to have a
generalized anxiety disorder."*
The adrenaline demons gather my tendons in pincushion palms,
tugging at the strings,
panicked arthritis and my fingers are
twitching and curling backwards
while I glare on with shallow breaths and cataracts.
The organs moan in the cavern of my body,
with thick wet air pouring from the opening.
I'm standing now,
a fetishized devil doll,
shaking out the pins
and the needles
and the sick splinters of glass
and the long holy skewers
and I'm breathing again
and I sit and
I breathe.
Nov 1, 2013
Nov 1, 2013 at 3:05 PM UTC
Dawn stretches and yawns
in yellow, poking fingers
through vertical blind slats;
into my horizontal eyes.
Startling
like an ice cube slipping down spine,
painful and exhilarating
at the same time and maybe
I’m not ready to shove myself out.
Let me be metamorphic for awhile,
lie back in this brightness
and soak it in; let me radiate
warm throughout the morning,
cheerfully light at noon
and erode to dust in the night
so that it all may cycle again
like moon chasing sun,
serpent slurping tail
or a dog whirling circles in the dirt.
I want to swirl, right here
in comfortable cotton, nighttime
peace and the wreath that early Dawn
weaves into me. Let me be centered
in the centrifuge: the stone in the storm.
Sep 10, 2010
Sep 10, 2010 at 2:36 AM UTC
Through tight slits in wooden slats
I catch the three-legged wind chime
Which hangs by a thread from
An overhung roof, by the gutter.
The owl - whom keeps watch,
Double sided, double gazing
At the goings on in the garden and
Mirrored happenings on the wall -
Sits quietly at the centre of his universe
With knotted thoughts so intertwined
For years he has neglected
Or perhaps forgotten how to
Play the jingle resting on the breeze.
The legs which dangle from the
Moon with noisy knees have
Lost their tone or dulled to make
Their silent stand against my wanting ears -
A fitting punishment.
The only steps to stifle my regret are
Toward the watching eyes to
Shake the clapper;
Summoning a tempest to end an age
Of silence from the much too long
Forsaken keeper of the chime.
Jun 27, 2015
Jun 27, 2015 at 5:03 PM UTC
Streetlights illuminate early morning fog
as night passed it's song down river
to the open sea.
As the curtain lifted
in this center of town,
those who are curious
peer through broken slats
to catch his eyes fixated on possibilities never realized.
Within this thick aired and desperate
theater of the round,
he was a tall man even lying on the ground.
Sep 17, 2013
Sep 17, 2013 at 2:40 PM UTC
Ha ha doesn't do it.
Ha ha can't be it.
Nothing like Nihilism
Enlists the whole lament.
Slack relief in disbelief
mine of God
I just figured
No halo
finished
Time
Next line no using
phones please and no
cursing please think
that's going to ****
off the young,
when all they read
How mellow
Now trees?
So you think getting
pregnant tired driving 40
on the night they drove
old Dixie down it
couldn't rain enough for
me I wanted to see
their Wagonwheel slats
stuck up to their humps
in dreams. It's easy to
get a palm trimming.
actually think they
read anywhere
can write some
One.
At least I have a
************* palm
yes I'm lying
in bed now get some
sleep it's who
they all say you're *******
my recording girl
you took my
only lighter.
Because
what God
touts God
Routs and tryouts
buy shouts
yet still
Doubts if
She is really out.
Ha ha! Nihilists won't expound.
Nov 25, 2014
Nov 25, 2014 at 6:28 AM UTC
DO you know how the dream looms? how if summer misses one of us the two of us miss summer-
Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long breath for the change to low contralto singing mornings when the green corn leaves first break through the black loam-
And another long breath for the silver soprano melody of the moon songs in the light nights when the earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains lighter than a goose down-
So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the laughter of slats of silver under a hill hickory.
In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imitations of slow sea water on the shingle silver in the wind-
I shall look for you.
1.7k
I sip on scotch and sit here
and secretly, I hope you'll appear.
At first, you'll glance through the crack in the door frame,
I'll look like the intellectual you were missing all this time.
You'll wonder why you ever left and how it was that you thought
you could do without me.
I'll feel the burning of one eye upon me,
so as to keep your furtiveness, your surprise,
but then a second reveals itself, and then your cosmic third.
The desk lamp will shadow your outline
when I slowly, intuitively, glance over my shoulder
somewhat unexpectedly, to you.
My eyes will pry, if only rhetorically, "Who's there?"
and you'll slowly, almost shyly,
though we were never shy with one another,
creak the door open to unveil your then-lit body.
Your radiant figure will send vibrations
through the wooden floor slats into my feet
and I'll begin to feverishly dance,
right then and there,
as if bitten by the largest of tarantulas.
I'll stare in disbelief
thinking that maybe it's the alcohol
which has created this image of you,
or maybe, in fact, I'm devastatingly sleep-ridden,
and so against my heart's common sense
I'll rub my eyes to clear the vision.
You, who haven't shown up night after night,
through all of my writing and pondering
and talking-to-self and drinking
and questioning and driving
and aimlessly-staring and searching
and forgetting and trying-to-understand
and resenting and hating
and loving and forgiving
and grinding and howling
and loving and missing,
but this one night,
this blue moon event,
I guess you could call it that
though it's already passed,
after consuming too much,
you'll appear.
Then I realize,
I am here
and you are nowhere.
Always I think I hear sounds
similar to returning footsteps
barely audible over the taps on my keyboard,
but it's never you.
And so, I continue on,
peeking over shoulder,
awaiting my cliché,
as I sit here and sip scotch after scotch.
Oct 20, 2012
Oct 20, 2012 at 1:49 AM UTC
I found your black tie
Between the warped slats
Of the dresser drawers
And a curled
Photo
Of you in Blackheath
Smiling
A hopeful day
Head filled with the universe
Limitless
But that was you
A dreamer they said
And all around you
Harder types
Their spades clanging
With symphonious legerity
For the few bob
They drank on Friday.
You left that place
And moved home
To the frozen sod
Of your birth
And still you smiled
Your fists knurled
Around a shovel
Splitting turf for the fire.
And all around you
Harder types
With reins and whips
They only sought to protect you
From the pain of wanting
What you could never have.
But still I loved your stories
You made me believe
That the cawl and grog
Was pheasant and port
And everyday an adventure
A bud on its axil
You made me
Into you
A dreamer
A sybarite
And all around me
Harder types
Eyes stuck to their shoes
So they can watch their step
And charge me to
Watch mine
Jan 17, 2010
Jan 17, 2010 at 1:42 PM UTC
The wall came first
then ivy grew.
Him wrought from stone,
her suckling dew
between the crevices and cracks
of broken brick and tattered slats.
All separated were their lives,
yet intertwined to hypnotize
all but a masons’ knowing eyes—
a wall of green, the best disguise.
A hundred years could pass and see
that verdant slab so beautifully.
Yet time ticks on;
reveals what’s true—
when he does crumble,
she will too.
Feb 25, 2018
Feb 25, 2018 at 7:43 PM UTC
Her backbone is a long stretch of American western highway
I trace my fingers eastbound/westbound across the slats of her ribs
pressed against the skin ready to pop
She left southside Midlothian Virginia as soon as she was old enough to make her own bad decisions
sick of being looked at
eyes grading like the big fat red D's stamped on her math homework
She left by foot
bus
plain
train
that grey jetta with the scratch down the passenger side from where she parked too close to that ugly Subaru
she left me
but she needed to breathe some air that wasn't stale with mediocre pretension and the frat house odor of stale beer and sawdust
so run wild
fly free
may your lips utter cliches without fear of derision
go make your life an incredible story
beautiful
ugly
hard to look at
can't look away
make your life a story
and I'll record it
Nov 14, 2013
Nov 14, 2013 at 9:25 AM UTC
Morning was sudden-made as an onwardness of hills,
Meant for donning crusade in chainmail glistenings,
The sun visored in misty slats of cold steel,
To glimmer fusty through the godded grove,
A holy sepulchre, earthly-dim to its rafters of oak,
Where the forest-fall of sunlight shed its rosework,
And a red-breasted bird, its song-flight of dappled gleam,
And in the meadow, where colorful whorled the tale of Saladin,
Wayside flowers shook beneath the destriers' cloth caparisons,
A sunny fullness of vales for the crusaders' forest-heartened lungs,
And when this furthering of sights was sunken from,
Still an onwardness of hills to Jaffa like steppingstones.
Apr 16, 2023
Apr 16, 2023 at 10:11 PM UTC
Guys.
Girl by the milk machine
(I’d milk her machine)
Fat stripes draped over trim curves—
Slats of blue, white, blue, white
Quietly surrendered to slender, silent
Black at middle-thigh; And *I –
****
[*Yeah dude her *** is big—
If you’re* into that]
Jan 6, 2012
Jan 6, 2012 at 2:11 AM UTC
I met an old woman on Leander Avenue
who told me, “Don’t breathe or the earth
will swallow you whole.” I
stayed very still and didn’t move.
A butterfly could have landed on my nose
but I sneezed so I may never know for sure.
After that I remembered that my generation
doesn’t have to follow their elders, so I
walked to the corner store.
I bought three candy bars that I would
never eat and tied my shoelaces on the front porch.
My neighbor watches old films. He calls them
Lumières, and sometimes invites me over.
I watch the hand-cranked film flicker
black and white over his screen.
A troupe of acrobats flip about and wave
the French flag, large women kneel and scrub
endless linens in the still river, the gardener
punishes the mischeivious boy. I smile every time
they look at the camera.
The slats in the blinds yawn widely
and seeing them, the melatonin strikes.
Flowing, forcing, endocrinal.
The wind whispers Greek words in my ear.
Helios, zoetrope, khaos.
The trees outside of my window
spell out foreign letters.
They only make sense one at a time.
I can’t spell a word but I speak and
realize I can still make a sound.
I fall asleep.
I never wake but dream
of exquisite lavender pillows doused
in holy water from the lips of a
spouting statue. A Carnevale clown waves
at me in the corner and takes off mask after
mask. Confetti rains softly from his eyelashes and he
quietly laughs into his palm. I want to hold your
hand but remember that I am just
a raindrop streaking down your car
window in a mountain spring storm. I
open my eyes.
Jun 12, 2011
Jun 12, 2011 at 6:05 PM UTC
How old I was I can’t remember well.
But too old for a vivid remembrance, of pain
for me, and death for you.
Whiteness of fur spoke of purity,
blood painted whiteness, Red--
rusted beatings you bore,
Whimpering, wriggling your body
tied on that rope, hanging on that “santol” tree,
bearing witness, wounding your skin,
In agony, you were wrestling
with metals, they folded, they bowed,
clasped to your neck, the rust.
Hide! said my Mama.
Don’t look, she added.
Hide I did and look I did.
In-between those bamboo slats, I saw:
the whiteness of your body;
blood painted the whiteness, red, like the rust.
Sweating.
On that bamboo stick I held, I gripped my hands
also brown, like the lining on your neck.
Tears unshed, sealing my lips.
Like boiling water, trapped on that *** that these brutes had prepared
scalding your skin,
Dogs fed on dog, these brutes were
singing in worship of “Tanduay”, a bottle, their god.
Drumbeats wanting, but laugh, and laugh they did.
Like a good master they called you, Azucena, an innocent girl.
Voice lilting, luring you to your death,
Azucena... not the provincial bus, that will transport you to your grave,
Azucena... not the white “liliums” that abound the heaven, or your grave.
But a name, a noun, to feed their protruding stomachs, stinking,
to wash their rotten soul, perhaps.
Azucena,
Asocena,
But that’s not your name.
Apr 11, 2016
Apr 11, 2016 at 11:23 PM UTC