steeply angled eyes

supported by hollow cheeks

stare from a semi-circular mirror

with a dark consequence of outrage

like a constricted sunrise

that appears to float

a pictorial cryptogram

defying a resisted

notation of gravity

they are eyes that

momentarily fascinate

then frighten

for you can see yourself

falling through a deep hole

in their vision

causing a complete

dissociation of identity

steeply angled eyes

are watching, watching,

watching.....................

The first settlers to the area called the Lumber River Drowning Creek. The river got its name for its dark, swift-moving waters. In 1809, the North Carolina state legislature changed the name of Drowning Creek to the Lumber River. The headwaters are still referred to as Drowning Creek.

Three p.m. on a Sunday.
Anxiously hungry, I stay dry, out of the pool’s cold water,
taking the light, dripping into my pages.
A city with a white face blank as a bust
peers over my shoulder.
Wildflowers on the roads. Planes circle from west,
come down steeply and out of sight.
A pinkness rises in my breast and arms:
wet as the drowned, my eyes sting with sweat.
Over the useless chimneys a bank of cloud piles up.
There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Another is dead. Fentanyl. Sister of a friend, rarely seen.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.
A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now sunless and black.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
I paddle in the shallows, near the wooden jail.
The water reflects a taut rope,
feet hanging in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
A part-white fugitive with an extorted confession,
loved by the poor, dumb enough to get himself captured,
lonely on this side of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.

1871 - Henderson Oxendine, one of the notorious gang of outlaws who for some time have infested Robeson County, N. C., committing ****** and robbery, and otherwise setting defiance to the laws, was hung at Lumberton, on Friday last in the presence of a large assemblage. His execution took place a very few days after his conviction, and his death occurred almost without a struggle.

Today, the town square collapses as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself,
folds itself up like Amazing Grace is finished.
A plinth is laid
in the shadow of his feet, sticky with pine,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the broken oar floated and fell.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes
and cotton studs the ground like the cropped hair of the buried.
Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart.
Where barges took chips of tar to port,
for money that no one ever saw.

Tar sticks the heel but isn’t courage.
Tar seals the hulls -
binds the planks -
builds the road.
Tar, fiery on the tongue, heavy as bad blood in the family -
dead to glue the dead together to secure the living.
Tar on the roofs, pouring heat.
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon,
obtained from a wide variety of organic materials
through destructive distillation.
Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.

Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Parliament $22.50/carton
Marlboro $27.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner,
rush into the cool of the supermarket.
They pick clean the vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.

Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A girl with a grudge in her eyes slipped a razorblade from her teeth and ended recess.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
I burn with the desire to leave.

The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the girl's blood, inert, tickled by opiates,
not the masked arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall as it rots,
or the door of the safe falling from its hinges,
or the chassis of cars, airborne over the rise by the planetarium,
three classmates plunging wide-eyed in the river’s icy arc –
absent from prom, still struggling to free themselves from their seatbelts -
the gunsmoke at the home invasion,
the tenement bisected by flood,
the cattle lowing, gelded
by agriculture students on a field trip.

The air contains skin and mud.
The galvanized barns, long empty, cough up
their dust of rotten feed, dry tobacco.
Men kneel in the tilled rows,
to pick up nails off the ground
still splashed with the blood of their makers.

You Never Sausage a Place
(You’re Always a ****** at Pedro’s!)
South of the Border – Fireworks, Motel & Rides
Exit 9: 10mi.

Drunkards in Dickies will tell you the roads are straight enough
that the drive home will not bend away from them.
Look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear a friendly command:
boys loosening a tire, stuck in the gut of a dog.
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher,
sharing the airwaves of country dark
with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Taste this water thick with tannin
and tell me that trees do not feel pain.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

I sealed myself against the flood.
Bodies knock against my eaves:
a clutch of cats drowned in a crawlspace,
an old woman bereft with a vase of pennies,
her dead son in her living room costumed as the black Jesus,
the ***** oil of a Chinese restaurant
dancing on top of black water.
A flow gauge spins its tin wheel
endlessly above the bloated dead,
and I will pretend not to be sick at dinner.

Misery now, a struggle ahead for Robeson County after flooding from Hurricane Matthew
LUMBERTON
After years of things leaving Robeson County – manufacturing plants, jobs, payrolls, people – something finally came in, and what was it but more misery?

I said a prayer to the city:
make me a figure in a figure,
solvent, owed and owing.
Take my jute sacks of wristbones,
my sheaves and sheaves of fealty,
the smell of the forest from my feet.
Weigh me only by my purse.
A slim woman with a college degree,
a rented room without the black wings
of palmetto roaches fleeing the damp:
I saw the calm white towers and subscribed.
No ingrate, I saved a space for the lost.
They filled it once, twice, and kept on,
eating greasy flesh straight from the bone,
craning their heads to ask a prayer for them instead.

Downtown later in the easy dark,
three college boys in foam cowboy hats shout in poor Spanish.
They press into the night and the night presses into them.
They will go home when they have to.
Under the bridge lit in violet,
a folding chair is draped in a ***** blanket.
A grubby pair of tennis shoes lay beneath, no feet inside.
Iced tea seeps from a chewed cup.
I pass a bar lit like Christmas.
A mute and pretty face full of indoor light
makes a promise I see through a window.
I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true,
in this nation tied together with gallows-rope,
thumbing its codex of virtues.

It always intrigued him how a group of people entering a room for the first time made decisions about where to sit. He stood quietly by a window to give the impression that he was looking out on a wilderness of garden that fell steeply away to a barrier of trees. But he was looking at them, all fifteen of them taking in their clothes, their movements, their manners, their voices (and the not-voices of the inevitably silent ones), their bags and computers. One of them approached him and, he smiling broadly and kindly, put his hand up as a signal as if to say ‘not just now, not yet, don’t worry’, or something like that.

This smile seemed to work, and he thought suddenly of the woman he loved saying ‘you have such a lovely smile; the lines around your eyes crinkle sweetly when you smile.’ And he was warmed by the thought of her dear nature and saw, as in a photo playing across his nervous mind, the whole of her lying on the daisied grass when, as ‘just’ lovers, they had visited this place for an opening, when he could hardly stop looking at her, always touching her gently in wonder at her particular beauty. In the garden they had read together from Alice Oswald’s Dart, the river itself just a short walk away . . .

Listen,
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
­it

As he finally turned towards his class and walked to a table in front of the long chalkboard, half a dozen hands went up. He had to do the smile again and use both hands, a damping down motion, to suggest this what not the time for questions – yet. He gathered his notebook and went to the grand piano. He leafed through his book, thick, blue spiral-bound with squared paper, and, imagining himself as Mitsuko Uchida starting Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, fingers placed on the keys and then leaning his body forward to play just a single chord. He held the chord down a long time until the resonance had died away.

‘That’s my daily chord’, he said, ‘Now write yours.’

Again, more hands went up. He ignored them. He gave them a few minutes, before gesturing to a young woman at the back to come and play her chord. Beside the piano was a small table with a sheet of manuscript paper and a Post-It sticker that said, ‘Please write your chord and your name here’. And, having played her chord, she wrote out her chord and name – beautifully.

He knelt on the floor beside a young man (they were all young) at the front of the class. He liked to kneel when teaching, so he was the same height, or lower, as the person he as addressing. It was perhaps an affectation, but he did it never the less.

‘Tell me about that chord,’ he said, ‘A description please’.
‘I need to hear it again.’
‘OK’, there was a slight pause, ‘now let’s hear yours.’
‘I haven’t written one’, the reply had a slightly aggressive edge, a ‘why are you embarrassing me?’ edge.
‘OK’, he said gently, and waved an invitation to the girl next to him. She had no trouble in doing what was asked.

Next, he asked a tall, dark young man how many notes he had in his chord, and receiving the answer four, asked if he, the young man, would chose four voices to sing it. This proved rather controversial, but oh so revealing – as he knew it would be. Could these composers sing? It would appear not. There was a lot of uncertainty about how it could be done. Might they sound the notes out at the piano before singing (he had shaken his head vigorously)? But when they did, indeed performed it well and with conviction, he congratulated them warmly.

‘Hand your ‘chord’ to the person next to you on your right. Now add a second chord to the chord you have in front of you please.’

Several minutes later, the task done, he asked them to pass the chords back to their original owners. And so he continued adding fresh requirements and challenges. – score the chords for string quartet, for woodwind quartet (alto-flute, cor anglais, horn, baritone saxophone – ‘transposition hell !’ said one student), write the chords as jazz chord symbols, in tablature for guitar, with the correct pedal positions for harp.

Forty minutes later he felt he was gathering what he needed to know about this very disparate group of people. There were some, just a few, who refused to enter into the exercise. One slight girl with glasses and a blank face attempted to challenge him as to why such a meaningless exercise was being undertaken. She would have no part in it – and left the room. He simply said, ‘May I have your chord please?’ and, to his surprise, she agreed, and with some grace went to the table by the piano and wrote it out.

A blond Norwegian student said ‘May we discuss what we are doing? I am here to learn Advanced Composition. This does not seem to be Advanced Composition.’

‘Gladly’, he said, ‘in ten minutes when this exercise is concluded, and we have taken a short break.’ And so the exercise was concluded, and he said, ‘Let’s take 15 minutes break. Please leave your chords on the desk in front of you.’

With that announcement almost everyone got out their mobile phones, some leaving the room. He opened the windows on what now promised to be a warm, sunny day. He went then to each desk and photographed each chord sheet, to the surprise and amusement of those who had remained in the room. One declined to give him permission to do so. He shrugged his shoulders and went on to the next table. He could imagine something of the conversation outside. He’d been here before. He’d had students make formal complaints about ‘his methods’, how these approaches to ‘self-learning’ were degrading and embarrassing, belittling even. I’m still teaching he thought after 30 years, so there must be something in it. But he had witnessed in those thirty years a significant decline in musical techniques, much of which he laid at the feet of computer technology. He thought of this kind of group as a drawing class, doing something that was once common in art school, facing that empty page every morning, learning to make a mark and stand by it. He had asked for a chord, and as he looked at the results, played them in his head. Some had just written a text-book major chord, others something wildly impossible to hear, but just some revealed themselves as composers writing chords that demonstrated purpose and care. Though he could tell most of them didn’t get it, they would. By the end of the week they’d be writing chords like there was no tomorrow, beautiful, surprising, wholly inspiring, challenging, better chords than he would ever write. Now he had to help them towards that end, to help them understand that to be an  ‘advanced composer’ might be likened to being an ‘advanced motorist’ (he recalled from his childhood the little badges drivers once put proudly on their bumpers – when there were such things – now there’s a windscreen sticker). To become an advanced motorist meant learning to be continually aware of other motorists, the state of the road, what your own vehicle was doing, constantly looking and thinking ahead, refining the way you approached a roundabout, pulled up at a junction. He liked the idea of transferring that to music.

What he found disturbing was that there were a body of students who believed that a learning engagement with a professional composer, someone who made his living, sustained his life with his artistic practice, had to be a confrontation. The why preceded, and almost obliterated, the how.

In the discussion that followed the break this became all too clear. He let them speak, and hardly had to answer or intervene because almost immediately student countered student. There evolved an intriguing analysis of what the class had entered into, which he summarised on a flip chart. He knew he had some supporters, people who clearly realised something of the worth and interest of the exercises. He also had a number of detractors, some holding quasi-political agendas about ‘what composition was’. After 20 minutes or so he intervened and attempted a conclusion.

‘The first rule of teaching is to understand and be sympathetic to a student’s past experience and thus to their learning needs, which in almost every situation will be different and various. This means for a teacher holding to an idea of what might, in this case, constitute ‘an advanced composer’. I hold to such an idea. I’ve thought about this ‘idea’ quite deeply and my aim is to provide learning opportunities to let as many of you as possible be enriched by that idea. You are all composers, but there is no consensus about what being a composer is, what the ‘practice of composition’ is. There used to be, probably until the 1970s, but that is no more. ‘

‘You may think I was disrespectful in not wishing to engage in any debate from the outset. I had to find a way to understand your experience and your learning needs. In 40 minutes I learnt a great deal. My desire is that you all go away from each session knowing you have stretched your practice as composers, through some of the skills and activities that make up such a practice. You all know what they are, but I intend to add to these by taking excursions into other creative practices that I have studied and myself been enriched by. I also want to stretch you intellectually – as some of my teachers stretched me, and whose example still runs through all I do.

Over the next seven days you are to compose music for a remarkable ensemble of professional musicians. I see myself as helping you (if necessary) towards that goal, by setting up situations that may act as a critical net in which to catch any problems and difficulties. I know we are going to fight a little over some of my suggestions, the use of computer notation I’m sure will be one, but I have my reasons, and such reasons contribute towards what I see as you all developing a holistic view of composing music as both a skill and an art form. I also happen to believe, as Imogen Holst once said of Benjamin Britten, that composing music is a way of life . . .

With that he walked to the window and looked out across that wilderness of green now bathed in sunshine. He felt a presence by his shoulder. Turning he suddenly recognised standing before him a young man, bearded now, and yes, he knew who he was. At a symposium in Birmingham the previous summer he had talked warmly and openly to this composer and jazz pianist in a break between sessions, and just a few weeks previously in London after a concert this young man had approached him with a warm greeting. Empathy flowed between them and he was grateful as he shook his hand that this could be. She had been with him at that concert and he remembered afterwards trying to recall his name for her and where they’d met. She was holding his arm as they walked down Exhibition Road to their hotel and he was so full of her presence and her beauty no wonder his memory had failed him.

‘Brilliant,’ the young man said, ‘Thank you. Just so much to think about.’

And he could say nothing, suddenly exhausted by it all.

Oh deep, dark depression,
my uninvited guest,
the persistence of oppression
is precluding my life’s zest.

The dark before sunrise
of a dawn that just won't break,
suppressed by a thirst for my soul
that only sorrow can now slake.

The wisps that you are weaving
are clouding my damp eyes,
a cold and cloying shroud
that’s covering all that I desire.

A void, with sides so steeply etched
and burning with cold dread,
I’m trembling now with fragile fear
and wondering if I dare tread.

Your shadow wraps me in its arms
to hold me once again,
a old familiar friend
that’s feeding fast upon my pain.

A symbiotic succor
and reluctant shield of sighs
from the turmoil of a life
that turned to tears before my eyes.

And the sleep within my veins
now washes over silent souls,
a mind numbing response
to a desperate, lonely call.

I’m crying out from within the prison
of this decaying fragile frame
and I hide my face behind a smile
from relentless passionate pain.

Oh deep, dark depression,
my uninvited guest,
the darkness you are dealing
leaves my soul with little rest.

Now your fog has engulfed me
to the edges of my world,
I hope and pray that one day soon,
my wings will be unfurled.


Written by Darren Scanlon, 2nd June 2014.
Revised 20th August 2015.
©2014 Darren Scanlon. All rights reserved.

y speaking breath
                       l                                take
                 p                          timidly
              e                                   (yearning sweltering swelling fire
          e                                                          and cut languidly
       t                                                                    the shape of subtle
   s                                                          carnal clangor;into the passive
                                                                 mound of my coffee hard
                                                                      embolism) an anabolic
                                                                    shriveling eruptioning
                                                                 testosterone fountain


                                                   i,m not my own. at this quivering
                                             plussing of my heady gobble
                                                            i,m
                                                      only stone softly
                                                  ungently
                                                                  an engine
                                                           of pure
                                                        *****
                                                                     pumping

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little ***** behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me.  He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas.  The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky *******
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

platinum your blonde is hair bristling 'neath
fingers you're perched
bob is

              head, baby

your mouth full is and throat
steeply

                 climbs into

tight

release

deepest length, a truncated obesity, abruptly gradual: a stem pops gently to present colors damp. a pavilion of ugly columns, the streets a budding promise; akimboing in gross pleasure. and the jostling laughter of serious music says to languor apathy a locomotive steeply belching roses.
. .
               ?

A dozen years, the length of feline days:
compared to human lives it may appear
the cats lose out. To be a human pays.
I think on this, and on companions dear:
Successive cats whose whiskered lives touched mine
Have lain upon my lap— do you suppose
Their tiptoe through the years is but a sign?
I measure out my life with kitten toes.

As they and I pursue the hilly ways
that fill our lives, "Beware! The end is near!"
"Your death is nigh!" or some such friendly phrase
will tell me that it's all downhill from here.
And soon the ***** more steeply will incline,
And drop away as quickly as it rose.
You trace the arc? My life is on the line:
I measure out my life with kitten toes.

Though now, my cat, we feel the sunshine's blaze—
your windowsill is warm, the skies are clear—
yet still I feel the sun's all-seeing gaze
remind me of the coming day, I fear—
the coming day I cannot feel it shine,
and on my face the smiling daisy grows.
I only have the one, where you have nine:
I measure out my life with kitten toes.

Prince, lord of cats, may endless meat be thine!
O grant that thine immortal princely doze
may evermore upon my lap recline!
I measure out my life with kitten toes.

A star has stowed away
In a part of my heart
The sky being this large, blunt chart
With the bright backbone: a strip of powder cloud
And the fussy dust beneath our boots
The chaparral under foot
Blooming purple, dry, splitting the cough drop earth
Red rock by rock
Our talking warms me
The taste of mint julep and tea
We, sweet past times: all they matter
Had a nail between us to hammer faster
There could have been curtains in our home
Were we grown;
Cantaloupe soaking in the sink
To string up at the brink
Think of how dry it got
The plants in their ***
Unwatered, untouched
Living as such--
Meanwhile, the clock combusted
Pounded out notes upon every hour
Its golden limb swinging up, lilting, wilting in its tower
Life deployed beyond this, grazing every flower
Their implicit movement stalls;
My nights wrapped in my shawls
Dark timber bark laments
In the fire so well spent
Rocking, I have remained here;
From the farthest port
You came with teeth and things
That fringe
Deliberate and outward bending, which scorches
Retires on porch swings
Shares time, stolen from what silent world may be out there
Bundled, told: "Handle with care."
But I do not care to pick at straws, or to stare
Between your eyes,
The lines beneath them
The calligraphic flourish
Touring deep, steeply descending
The tiled smile, pretending
Creaking, scarcely there and perishing;
I have not uttered your name
In the dark of this home
I have printed it, though, on occasion
In the pictures I hang
On the walls of this tomb
Painted path, fire we fashion
All the bits of compassion lodged like salt in my bones
Only thinking of your thoughts
Sipping slowly from your cup
Shuffling to the border in the corner of the world
Where the blooming sky is hastened
In its spatial recreations
That has fallen falls again,
Calling back, fiercely contend
Dynamics of a spark
A black hole tears itself apart
The where we are, the where we start;
Oh, Come the Day we might
Give less regard to light
Were I to move to where you are
Across the room, one room too far
It seems to me that I, in staying
Have distended what was fraying
Yet I stay- at least today
And may tomorrow bring the rolling, cetacean clouds back into orbit
May the sun fall with the rain
May my love call back again;
Once more, I think,
Once more.

Like two stars in the night sky
They are two glimmers on my heart
I hated to say goodbye
I miss them when we are apart

My love for them abided deeply
Now with them gone I miss them steeply

My love for them has and does not end
They are more than family and friend
Adopted, coalesced, part of my heart
You are not in my heart, you are my heart

I will care for you always
Love you forever
Remember you like sun rays
Always and ever

My little hearts
I hate to part
Loves of my life, little and dear
I'll always wish you to be here

I'll see you again
We will never end
Even in everafter
We will have our sweet laughter

Listen,
I wanna embrace a blanket of your sensuality.
I wanna abandon all rationality and create our own boundaries.
I wanna become in tuned with the vibrations of each other's souls.
Want you to climb so steeply within me that you can't find the way out of me.

See I don't wanna make love, I wanna  create precious poetry.
While breathing the same rhythm.
You **** every stanza out of me.

Two pair of eyes undivided, two bodies *****, vigorous, exuding of familiarity.
Make a story out of me.

Feed it descriptions of true beauty.
Not shrewdly,  but do it smoothly.
Let's co write a poem based on our union.
We can be a masterpiece.

Ink stains left in my bed sheets.
I'll lend you my body to use as a diary.
Release all frustrations as you lay your fervor out on me.
Send a chill of suspense intensely towards the inside of my thighs,
just where the margins would be.

Our minds are deadly.
Their correlation, deadlier.
We're writing words so compelling, while releasing showers from hearts too heavy.
Our poetry is nothing to compare to the regular.

Every inch of my body manifesting your touch readily.
I recede as you synchronize my private visions of a flawless fantasy.
Basking in this radiance as you guide your pen to an astonishing ******.
Inducing my body to impasse in ecstasy.

Leaving me dripping with your artfulness.
As if announcing all expectations surpassed.
Drowning me in words that mirror ardor.
Each line so passionate,
I have no such memory of felicity that neither compares nor contrasts.

Every part of my skin left sensitive, tender, and fragile.
My body fluently floating, light as a feather.
Skin now designed and decorated with such puissant letters.
And God forbid we begin to forget the significance of our coalescence.
You can lay me down,
As you read it back to me.
This way, we can reminisce on the angelic medley.

Listen,
I don't just wanna make love,
I want our bodies to intertwine and invoke aesthetic  poetry.

My foot sinks deeply into the snow.
The boots leave giant holes in the land,
while I follow the smaller fox prints.

Stumbling, for I have lost my way.
The sign for Bethlehem snow covered;
perhaps it is somewhere in east Vermont.

The trees are all barren from the cold.
The fox’s glare is often pitiless,
as pitiless as winters frozen touch.

Prophets and apostles migrate south now
along with the fowl of the air and Jews;
to where the signs are not snow covered.

New England longs for the warmth of spring,
but I pine for the deep Florida heat.
I want to watch the heron rise steeply.

If I were a wise old fool
Or a duck out of luck
Would I count my money
by thimble or by a dumping truck

I'm glad I have no such problems
I broke the rules and bank
I own a four cornered mansion
On every street with steeply sloping banks

I have no problems eating
I mark every foodline on a map
I own stock in Salvation Army
I bought off this persuasive chap

I worry not for tomorrow
Today is good enough for me
I've been told I have no future
So say the fortune tellers that is all they see

Oh well , oh whale , oh wail
It doesn't matter me
Time now for a free lunch
Then in your alley I will surely go to ***

Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die.
Outstretched in the sun’s warmth upon the shore,
Thou say’st: ‘Man’s measured path is all gone o’er:
Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh,
Man clomb until he touched the truth; and I,
Even I, am he whom it was destined for.’
How should this be? Art thou then so much more
Than they who sowed, that thou shouldst reap thereby?

Nay, come up hither. From this wave-washed mound
Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me;
Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown’d.
Miles and miles distant though the grey line be,
And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,—
Still, leagues beyond those leagues there is more sea.

Widening banks laden with grass
And the river runs calmly by
The birds of nature talk the talk
Whilst the mice scurry along
Trees that spiral into the sky
As the hills are steeply sloping
The once flat land that broke away
Now stumbles into the ground
And the river mouth consumes it prey
Whilst water mingles with earth
The sun bears naked its searing heat
Onto the weeds that tangle below
Making then wild and desperately restless
And clumsy under trampling feet
It's just another page of history
Falling beautifully by the landslide

Light setting in
The bedroom window open slightly
I gaze upon your face
Our chests are moving lightly
There's stubble on your chin
And the words that cloud my mind
Flow deeply to my lips
To my lips, they fly steeply
As we kiss
And I'd lay here forever, knowing this.

she sinks to her knees like the setting sun
all reds and golds and streaks of purple-blue
and weeps for the things and the places she has lost
just a child, steeply barefooting around gnarled upturned roots
afraid that if it rains again
she might never be able to find her way back.

On the fir-clad hill of my childhood
rocky outcrops grew where roses should
green with moss
lit by lichen

Solid ground tumbling steeply
Past the painted white shadows of a large wooden house
the silky feel of a best friend's hair
Past the shop now closed
where we bought milk and sweets
past the beer by the till with its ****** aroma
Past the station still quiet in dark before dawn
bundles of newspapers ready and waiting
Past the sharp fresh cold
then my soft warm bed
Past the lingering scent of soap and of newsprint
Past these sensuous delights

Past even the smoke of my first cigarette
how nauseating, how hard to inhale
how hard I still tried
for smoke rings

Past smooth warm stone gliding into the sea
phosphorescence glinting in silky depths

I still see the world from my cherry tree
a blue expanse of fjord and sky
my generous tree and I
its darkening buds kept their sweet scarlet promise

How steeply solid ground can tumble
barely stopping to catch the yellow leaves in fall
barely solid ground at all

I,ve unclosed
                      (and
                             ­   i
                                  will speak
                                                      slowl­y
                                                               ­    trees

steeply uncrooked breathing 'gainst
the racing moon over the valley bending
swiftly thoughts of ungiant sprigs puckish
in the frailing summers wings

a wig of tender incandescent drops cavort
in silent wetness on petals the)

a cadence of caving murdered light
seamless fluid winsome dusting upon
the unserious lips of night flexing effortlessly
by their touch, and flaccid, upon mine
i am drugged
   of lilywhite tubes; crumbs of hushed love
a draught of limpid steam.    i

laced and foamy the jaw distends

i will die.
the sun,
and by the way
did you know?
(i do)

in the summer it
leaps wholly freshness
into the sweating backs of knees

a yowl


a dream


a distinctly arousing



a corded and steeply ***** shyness.


it peters sharply
from girl cuts
into niceness
a cringing of night
to less darkly foil
the trees

(amongst 'em
where will sleep
me when i
cease my hands to try) roots


reachness of worms
and the rushing of oceans

wind

wind

wind


coolly teasing
with teeth so
cruelly pleasing

(upon which rise
the curving hushness
of body's plummet
isthe
falling of darkness' lushness

There's a fine dusty line etched between the sands of time that attempts to separate the correlating traits of my native abhorrence and naivety.

Between the polar points of my timeline lies a multitude of flags that mark the many shades of personal integrity that were once plainly labeled by prying eyes internalized as "Me".

I've been defined as numerous things, many of which I claimed to be indigenous to the nature of which I've inherited.

When I hear people call me Pat now I think they're in the middle of calling me "Pathetic".

I don't want to "re"do that aesthetic that I was upset with when the "P.H" of me brains was chemically unbalanced.

Letters in groups of two surrounded by apostrophes arranged in a similar view;

The first has taken to using many faces which has developed into a case study of Mistaken Entity, or in other words (but still pronounced the same) A classic case of:  Misplaced Identity.
"Me"

The second group, when added to my misinterpreted title in the form of an overzealous prefix (or perhaps a premature suffix) would alter the meaning of the initials of my initial name which creates a title whose exaggerated truth is slightly waning, but still sleeps in a bed of accuracy.
"re"

The initial name was not mentioned, but is instead embedded in my genetic strains giving new meaning to the last acronym used previously to describe acidity.
In this context it lends power to contracts when inscribed upon loose-leaf to indicate my consent to relinquish, or relish in, freshly indoctrinated responsibilities.  
"P.H"

Patrick Hurley
Ingrained in the earliest states of living the characters now combine and slowly unwind as the darkness steeply inclines to bind together the letters that now define me as:
Pat Heretic.

This...this is my heritage.  
I'm doubtful that the surname will be passed down through marriage,
by that I mean I hope to abandon the ******* that carries it.  
The transformation has seen many stages, ranging from simple pumpkin patch to ritzy coach carriages.
Returned to the depths of humble beginnings after smashing to bits the glass accessory that brought me to be what I kept wishing for with such carelessness.

Alas, I know now what causes the despair in this...wait...I had this...
It's because of the duality we experience in this existence through the resistance
That pulses between what we have and what is given to us.
Karmic retribution in the form of poetic justice.

Unhugged
7 JUNE 2021

Unplugged and disconnected,
Estranged the viral way.
Time lost forever,
Socially astray.

Unarmed by sadness,
Care  by stranger names  ,
Forgotten days of gladness,
Life is rearranged.

One day the doors will open.
Never be the same.
Age line steeply sloping,
Most not in the game.

Clock slowly tocking,
No one can it tame.
Some are still talking,
Don't know who to blame.

her it
the soporific
very dreaming
split of
easy night
falls so lovely
brushed of balmy
hair short
in tender heap
of girlness heat

it the deftness
of a wrist
hangs
softly loose
uncurled
lightly the fingers
in

her such steeply wonderful brain
a song is me
by love's lips it
i
the earth the
night
echo primly
kissing

and
couth
so a fancy
is all the world
to her in lovely slumber's keep

such as i would like to enter
and of its beauty reap

a flower on who would rise
all youth in me to crown

and lay my *******
in crimson parting's drown

of the knit of life let's say there is something.

something so wonderfully to touch.

so beautifully easy.


Let's say of it fingers,
between its hair,
laughing.


Let's say of it,
with minute teasing brutality,
a slendering of being. instantly

which shudders
steeply into breathtaking darkness. let's

say wide our mouths to eat it.

(each morsel turgidly serene)

let's say dying(and let's).

die easily into it our bodies
as wan incredibly infinite destroying.

the dew of some mornings is a thing which is not unlike the kind nuisance of my lady's graceless feeble miraculous fingers. who are not unlike the starting end of day where **** and silent and hulking quiet tremble viscous muscles
of pure unlight, teeming with wondrous gleaming follicles, pimpling the
evenings tummy lapped with luna's rapid fortunate tongue. the chittering
globs of arms waxing ferocious. in climbing steeply valleys feet middle in
strange streams. the common streams. the unerring crooked and corpulent streams. in there, between between, 1and1 (you and i) our ventricles beat
insatiably voluminous leaves. from trees of amorous fruit bearing fronds
slapping silence(whileWeBeneathThemIntoEachOthersMe'sDepositSlushyViteWeWe­remore than god's unfound children returning into the cherished cherry red
steaming glue of our very and very clanGlorious howls repeatedly again angain andgain and gain: an earth wholly more to the liking of "which is not unlike us")
                            1
                          !    I:,.

Living alone and broken-hearted
In this lover's world
It deeply saddens me
Steeply maddens me
Until all I see is darkness
In the blue sky
Regret in the roses
And hope in things
That die.

Legion, O the sleeping of your flower is October
many fewer than everyday fewer and many

O slumber, your October is a legion of flowers
hairless kissing bulbs that bend oh just bend
in the grey bluster steeply bend and oh just

O flower, your slumber is the legion October
who marches cruelly through miles of trees
picking of them each their every jounce and bobble

October, O the flower of your sleep is Legion
many always fewer and always fewer many



(grey cruel blustering and through miles of
trees picking bobbles and jouncing marches
hairless kissing bulbs that lean just bending)

December, December
Now, I remember
You're the annual pilgrimage
On a road steeply cambered

"by the way," i thought, "you looked real nice
pierced (thigh barb) by a." mouth that should
instantly lingers

                                   down your hip
                                   on its bladed heap, my wholly *****
                                   love stands on end

leans more steeply into them and like vague
intense teasing tenses at the scalloped fringe
of madness, stings soft pink lipped rivers of
gasping(fingernails in my                                    shoulders)in yours

an army of smallsharp, agilemuscled, and into colored
chips of searing spend a long
ruddy

                 scratching

Between you and me,
I see it;
Ink black, can't-take-it-back,
-Indecent.
Words you'll later swear you didn't mean,
But I'll feel them,
Sinking deeply,
Steeply,
Creeping in between each of the promises you made to me,
Infinitesimally small,
Like the space between me and the wall you broke your fingers on.

I am not the idealistic dream you fell in love with me to be,
And I am not breaking your heart by breaking the frame you pushed mine into.

I am a living, breathing, incandescent human being

-and I need you.

feeling burdened—it tends to happen
particularly when meddling impressions run rampant
swarm circles in my hefty head, ignore the next exit ramp, and
let devils' advocates covet the cove i donned my dome once upon never

although i know this may be chalked up to intelligence
and subsequent ignorant claims that swear it's heaven sent
i swear it’s not for me. so tell all the hell-bent docents to leave
and let live my cognizance dim—to do what i can’t. to let it be.

it is what it is
and what it is
is it’s
excessive

i don’t need no informants
playing mentee won’t mend me
i’m torn sufficiently
far as i can see, it seems

don’t mentor she who beseeches
by way of screams and screeches
me and my strings are beat
by ****** and needless needles’
stitches and ventures heedless

i’m piecing my torn fabric
it’s grown so thick
it’s a feat, recognition
when simple addition alters
fact into fabrication

like my elation
in inebriation
guards sorrow
from knocking at my door
knocks my guard down
and has me floored

it hits my inhibition too
and i’m home-free
no guilt signaling
and i pull singles
i switch with tickets
i use to ticket my skin

no appointment
nor disappointment
walking in walk-in clinics
and sketchy shops
flickering the light
it sheds on both
my faces. i can face them
only with this double vision

i watch mark
as his sketches mark me
like stretch marks,
remarkably

in hopes of realizing on the double
the vision i envision into reality
he lets me let him put his hands on me
seemingly steadily
and we feel as our arms stretch

he draws me in
fills me ink
and vibrant me pends
his vibrating steel
and sharp pens
as they liven
my limp existence
reincarnating me instantly  

after sweet sleep
i wake bitter for some reason
feel dull but also sharp-ied
peeping the nonsense i let seep steeply
into my skin last night when i was peaking

now i can reminisce
on the pain of squirming
wallow over it instead, and
not the overflown gore of streams

and catastrophic waterfalls
that break through my largest *****'s walls
they leave what makes me, me,
with breakthroughs of which it can only dream

if only i can fall like the tears asleep
that crash and wave and overshadow my role
in turn leaving without desire
to turn over no stone
nor use any for stepping on
like the ones more close to normal
do coax

i do it all wrong
like they did me
i walk on coal
though from here
it appears
as though i'm an anomaly
only my sole seethes

when on the rocks
my walker, he makes me so strong
he lets me drink him from dusk to dawn  
he says he’d **** for me from here on
i love how foreign i am to him like heron

not the bird though it’s true
us three often see hues blue
we soar blue skies when our hearts fume blue
and they feel too sore like brews do
when they're too soft to heal each bruise or
make room for pain to grow and strength to bloom
so i walk on water as walker

kills me
he’s to die for
imploring in notes low
that i not stop, so i hop on
and once it’s well thought over
he can tell
overthinking’s my problem

i stand alone in the corner,
my core knows
all my o’s and woes
can be all gone
once one o centerfolds corner
and in comes the
coroner

who walks and rear-ends me
and e-r lose hope and leave me
when he cores me from his soul
and i let my breath roam

but he sends me
soaring over the moon
soon as he shows how he listens
and soon we both know
blinding luminescence

my eyes when they glisten
make all my mourning go missing
like the overthinking overkill
i hit when morning rays missile

and he curtails them at curtains
blacker than the blacklist
my man drenched
my nemesis in
deep sleep
with the fishes  

eventually, however
again and against my will, i endeavor
on reading the biography i penned
block my own writing
and let writers block lock me in
i get stuck on the same page
thought no force impedes
the power i home in my palms
nor my thumb's ability to thumb
through the page
yet i somehow flip it
and become my own victim

i did it.
it tells the history of tears
now extinct due to me overbearing
leading to drainage that came as
the very last bead beat me
for forbidding fibs
and calling dibs on *******

still, ringing in my ears
leaks empathy
for crocodile tears
trickling
as they salivate
over their next meal,
me

i swallow my tongue
not realizing fully
i’d just had my last meal
because they consumed me
quietly
with quibbles
and plots of consuming me
openly

ignorance is less so whats lacks
and with no inkling of doubt
worse in terms of that
which the mind keeps
then refuses to release
when need be
hence: me

after i head over
obvious traps
i let flash
atop my head

like clouds overcast
i’m convinced i tripped
on my own heels
like thunder that strikes
one man down twice
out of spite

but in spite
of everything, now that i know,
my eyes and i are drained no more
see, we’ve ever since grown more so
and metamorphosed
beyond words morbid

like those i anticipate
my gravestone
will go on
to hold

this is the reality of being kept cold-cut as meat
that heads *******, idiots, dunces, cons, and so on
those who bring forth obstacles that spurt in growth
inch by inch quicker than their thickening skulls

each time
the sage i pick thinks
my life needs spicing up, either
my screams of agony are mistaken
and my inseams nipped at the bud

or my spirits appear uplifted
and mistaken are my sorrow-filled tears
with joy-plagued wails,
each time
deep-seated sage seeds **** my green

lord knows that while i understand—to some degree
the world can’t come close or know what brews
in the disorganized chaos that is me intrinsically
i don’t fib when i allege that my angle isn’t deceit

nor right, necessarily
just dense as these
basins, wrinkles and dents
my tense cortex insists on heaving  

it would be obtuse of me
to anticipate that anybody
would watch my back
if not mine and me

it's all only a tactic
and i may feign obliviousness
to support this spinelessness
and keep it all in tact

insects fester
i feel each tentacle
extend incessantly
like these rants

they all ax my lumbar
no one's barred from my club
lumberjacks and jack’s slumber
i only lust after the latter

and jack's not all bad
he’s why my caps rested
soon as he hands it to me,
expressing the extent to which

i impress him
granted
my hands-off approach
that manages
to get hard jobs done
better than jills before

he’s a mild nuisance
when one of us isn’t speaking
but he promotes my irritability
with his attempts at weaving
our fingers together

it offends me
and all i long for
is knocking him out
like him and my neck's heart

or my kneecaps’ kneepads
the cap that’s my hat
can at last roll fast,
though no one should ask

i can’t say if i’m ok
jack ko’d my voice box
and i feel highjacked
but i insist, they insist
on the charm of the third

one i get him
like the lights, off,
that’s when i go on to hop off
tip toe off his tip top to get off
on the silence my mind writes off

none of it matters to me
mankind ramps up my love for luxury
the ivory warmth Mr. Browns rain
all over my cold windshield
puts me where i love to be

without them,
antidepressants
would depress and hail on
but their chocolate depressants
elevate me and i hail mary
when they hail hope on me
and i'm newly merry

when it’s all over,
i seek refuge and rush down
and on to the one and only John
where rest can be found
he’s bold as kohl and cold
as his marble floors call for

it's he who keeps my thoughts snowed in
and spares my teeth cracks no dentures can fix
suppresses my urge to purge like Snowden honing in
on how not one man cares less for one careless node in
systems nor the cancerous danger of no protests nor dents

it’s tasteless, the rice that is humanity
so i dine solitarily
in solemn grief
seeing the uselessness we
as crumbs and morsels have come to be

individuals in division
invincible in coalescence
bound to form solid solidarity
likely as the moment

satan and saint agree
to raise their satin
black and white flags,
respectively

to enwrap
two into
one
fabric. silky, smooth, seamless
as is the cocoon
          i once was foolish enough to assume
    would secure the very same wholesome skin
                         it would later go on
to help me consume.

cannibalism.

fingers(deeply)
who amongst dirt
suddenly moments
point

steeply through drunk summer

rain upon lips
(fluttering dismissively):

memory to imp
(by blind words)

such wings, heart
leaves(roots)body

grassAndgrassAndgrass

become. (my dear that i have loved beyond poems to say)

when i do looking(eternally)into
your eyes steeply
the complete
ingenious potion
of their
smallest
drunken dots
eat the entire fullness
of me
and i fall into them
                                                            ­                      


                                        ­                                         4ever

(I this very am a contradiction to itself)
this which is
the very thing i am
is not at all a multitude of singularities
but a single multitude of multiple singulars
i am large
                and small
                                and enormously
                                                           a colour daft as starry days
                                                                                                         and brightly nights
and with pale meter
my hards are soft
and softs are hard
                                         (and i am like an onion
                                          in petals of purple skin
                                          an acrid flavour imps
                                          my beam of darkly
                                          steeply cooler hotter
                                          breaths that buzz
                                          like wondrous flies
                                          in ample valleys or
                                          cotton pasted flesh
                                          in denim
                                          )your jeans were on my floorIfoundthemthismorning
and i woke up to call you just so i could touch your voice with my ears
and kiss the treble of its throat with my gangling soul waxing profusely
with sparks of verdant poems blossoming in the uncommon pit of the stomach of my gross futile blithe brain because you made them with the
errant tattoo of your slight and tremendous music bustling its enormous
yawn over the roof of (my) rainbow hard heart that would like to comment in Your plunk of navel ringing tiny glittering barely hairs my smooth and
pinkish crumpled crumbs of love and sprinkle you with careless *** sometime maybe SWOON.

your heart is
(so way).

the way it is, so.

it is to part blood
(the filling of my lips)
with your lips.

and its body is so clean.

it is the to pierce
by beating madly
tattoo of carry me forward.

(through darkness carry me forward)
and lurch upon the flowering of its heat
(my heat)

to tumble steeply up
in comely gouts of daftness:

my heart.