"striped" poems
big sweaters, ghibli, acrylic paint, cafes, knit blankets and unplanned afternoon naps on the couch, gardens, bananas, vanilla almond milk, soft yarn to crochet into ****** scarves, candles after midnight, the big trees with bulky roots, patio furniture, pianos in random buildings, the internet, manatees, the boundless colours of nail polish, peanut butter & honey, rubber boots, pens that write well, fresh new notebooks, skylights, american netflix, mothers that understand, tête à têtes, one glass of sweet white wine, awkward eye contact that turns into comfortable kissing, airplanes, fresh air, baseball caps, the female collective, the really good dark chocolate, flowers, pumpkin spice lattes and ***** chai lattes, candid laughter, yoga, oceans, high waisted shorts, striped t-shirts, docile cats, playful pups, french presses, integrity, sunscreen, meerkats, penguins, chameleons, autumn leaves, fall fashion, ruby woo mac lipstick, osho, dynamic meditation, compassion, siblings, scrambled eggs, smart phones, garageband, metronomes, hot glue guns, quinoa, ferry boats, soft hands, bicycles, real people, fat snowflakes in ample, graceful ********** backpacks that don't hurt your shoulders, hair conditioner, multi-vitamins, soft sand under bare feet, people that own up to lies, clarity, samsara, satori, samasati, visions, echinacea, lavender oil and frankincense, ambrosia apples and ripe avocados, authenticity, Morgan Freeman's voice, good kissers, ******* iced tea on a hot day, curtains, the smell of beeswax, art galleries, hand massages and foot massages, reiki, plums, mild thunderstorms, soccer ***** good surprises, when birds don't **** on your head.
Oct 9, 2013
Oct 9, 2013 at 7:24 AM UTC
Cold, blue, wet, fragile, brittle, hard, steam solidified, water hardened, anger, fear, white, tensile,
steam solidified,
water hardened; you lie
in her wintered veins.
why?
"If she's awake, I'll **** you."
staccato words spoken
like a knife blade thrown...
...with malice and intent.
Her father's voice
from the bedroom next door
no sound of her mother.
The female child cowered
under her candy-striped sheets
their usual soft comfort
unnoticed
footsteps
door handle moving
light seeping into her sanctuary
her heart thudded
trying to escape her chest
as she held her breath.
"Please, please don't hear me."
a silent plea as
fear snatched her in its icy grip.
She could smell him
smell the cigarettes
smell his power.
She waited.
He backed out
returned to her mother
between her heartbeats
she heard the slap
"You are lucky this time,
***** She sleeps."
Heavy footsteps down the stairs
punctuated by her mother's tears.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The girl child had only ever blamed her mother
decades of anger and bitterness
the memory of this night buried deep.
Crazed hard ice beneath the tundra of her life.
In the third decade of the girl child's life
her mother died
alone
never forgiven for what she hadn't done
nor for what she had.
The ice remained in the girl child's veins
If anything, thicker...harder.
Then in her fifth decade this ice became water
as with the passage of life the tundra thawed
and rising with it to the surface
the truth.
Then what?
The girl child worked hard at staying warm
at keeping the ice at bay.
Not easy.
Nothing was ever said to her father.
In her sixth decade the girl child's father died
embraced in his daughter's arms
forgiven for what he had done
and for what he hadn't.
The woman had finally thawed
she was properly warm
her own love
finally able to flow
Feb 29, 2016
Feb 29, 2016 at 1:39 PM UTC
Willets cull the seawall
snapper on the grill
rock ***** swoon
in shallow lagoons
long boats pass
under quiet
palm shade
Plovers dance and flutter
handrails frayed and torn
graffiti spots
at lovers rock
frigate-birds fall
from a high
noon sun
Thatched roof on a mud wall
fish flags settle score
anchors arch
in front line march
pillar cracks form
under rust brown scars
Elegant tern and grebe
watchmen fall in cue
children play
on crested waves
whimbrels and notchers
perch above Tentaciones
Striped pelícanos
the bandits of the sea!
merchants grow
in steady flow
siblings jostle
in a tide cooled sand
Heerman gull and boobie
durango smoke in yurt
boiler shrimp
and puffer blimp
castle buckets and scrapers
under a dusk light cheroot
Six pulls on a lead line
painted toes in sand
shearwater run
in a rainbow sun
the portly mexicano
flaunts his tacos
and wares
Rooster house for swordfish
bamboo shoots and sails
broken shells
and ocean swells
rise
on the
perfect
La Ropa bay
Apr 14, 2017
Apr 14, 2017 at 2:22 PM UTC
Lady, your room is lousy with flowers.
When you kick me out, that's what I'll remember,
Me, sitting here bored as a loepard
In your jungle of wine-bottle lamps,
Velvet pillows the color of blood pudding
And the white china flying fish from Italy.
I forget you, hearing the cut flowers
Sipping their liquids from assorted pots,
Pitchers and Coronation goblets
Like Monday drunkards. The milky berries
Bow down, a local constellation,
Toward their admirers in the tabletop:
Mobs of eyeballs looking up.
Are those petals of leaves you've paried with them ---
Those green-striped ovals of silver tissue?
The red geraniums I know.
Friends, friends. They stink of armpits
And the invovled maladies of autumn,
Musky as a lovebed the morning after.
My nostrils prickle with nostalgia.
Henna hags:cloth of your cloth.
They tow old water thick as fog.
The roses in the Toby jug
Gave up the ghost last night. High time.
Their yellow corsets were ready to split.
You snored, and I heard the petals unlatch,
Tapping and ticking like nervous fingers.
You should have junked them before they died.
Daybreak discovered the bureau lid
Littered with Chinese hands. Now I'm stared at
By chrysanthemums the size
Of Holofernes' head, dipped in the same
Magenta as this fubsy sofa.
In the mirror their doubles back them up.
Listen: your tenant mice
Are rattling the ******* packets. Fine flour
Muffles their bird feet: they whistle for joy.
And you doze on, nose to the wall.
This mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.
How did we make it up to your attic?
You handed me gin in a glass bud vase.
We slept like stones. Lady, what am I doing
With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,
Knee-deep in the cold swamped by flowers?
14.7k
What we have named Fire Escape
(an ordered, angular tangle of ladders and rail)
had made picture geometries in my west window
well-framed and flat--set foreground and background
in two dimensions, as the sun hid,
and my round eye opened.
What we have named Fire Escape
was flaked-paint brown orange, as if
first it had been born of a flame
and then had taken up living as metal--
tempered itself into usefulness,
which I should trust now, in case of the yelling
and the engines.
What we have named Fire Escape
was happy Jungle Jim or Jungle for Jane
for the sparrows I saw this morning
which flitted and wildly played
within, rising up
arched and back again.
Made of the square pairs of ladder rungs--
a tunnel entrance or ducking posts,
or highway bridges to clear;
the birds like small plane, daredevil pilots
each following each, going under.
No sparrow would ever crash.
And what is this I remember now?
How one bird eased its engine and perched there to stay?
As if to offer me, with a little turn of head gesture--
a thank you, for the bread I'd left on the sill? Or to say
I'd better shut the curtain and make my exit?
Either prideful guess gets me nowhere fast.
Failed even is speaking in any sparrow languages
from my recline stuffed chair; again, but now imagined,
to draw beady eyes to fix on me, telling me much less.
That morning, with the very last sparrow gone,
I remember that nothing in my sight moved,
save an American flag at a distance in the wind,
with its one red-white striped wing
waving toward the cold north,
as the white church spire,
framed in open quadrilaterals,
held its position.
Apr 15, 2013
Apr 15, 2013 at 5:18 AM UTC
At the beginning the oldest man sat on the corner
of the garden wall by the road under a vast
walnut tree known to have been there always
he came back in the afternoon to the cave of shade
in his broad black hat black jacket the striped gray
wool trousers once worn only to church in winter
with a cane on either side resting against the stones
he said when your legs have gone all you can do
is to sit this way and be useless I believe God
he said that is what I am doing I am thinking
and things come to me now when nobody else knows them
he was visited by the dazzling of accidents the boy
who caught his hand in the trip hammer and it came out
like cigarette paper the man with both crushed legs
dangling and the woman murdered and his father the blacksmith
forging the iron fence to put around the place
out on the bare slope where she had fallen I could never
be the smith my father was as he always told me
I was good enough you know but I never had
the taste needed for scythe blades sickles kitchen knives
we preferred to use carriage springs to make them from
in the forge outside the barn there and his were sought after
oh when he had sold all he took to the fair the others
could begin I still have the die for stamping the name
of the village in the blade at the end so you could be sure
10.1k
I walk through campus wearing
black leggings and those faded, leather
boots. I’m even wearing an
infinity scarf I bought full price at
Anthropologie and a pair of tiger-striped
cat eye sunglasses. **** I look good.
On top of it, I’m smoking a Parliament
menthol, my red-lined lips whipping
smoke into the dead air, creating
a grey cloud that some would call cancerous and
others, ****
But no one notices me, and, candidly, I
am okay with that because I notice me, and
I am a big red dance button that demands to
be pushed. So, I push myself and
groove down the brown brick road all the way
to classroom 114 in the science building.
Jan 9, 2016
Jan 9, 2016 at 3:42 PM UTC
My frail glass bones shattered with the windows.
We walk on yellow striped tightropes and dance
with impossibility until his grasp becomes to tight.
I fell into a river of metal droplets wheels rolling as
Mr. Impossibility connected two infinities.
Glass fingers tapped on a glowing glass screen.
Metal clashed, my scream was lost with sirens into a
echo of blue and red lights.
There was a silence that pulled me into the casket that
sat open in the passenger seat.
Jan 19, 2016
Jan 19, 2016 at 9:58 PM UTC
In bed, I lay
upon my cushioned existence I stay
but outside the world's at play
birds swimming in the sky
and trees that gently sway
dancing the day away
and I continue to lie
the distant sounds
of yawning grounds
two parched lips
as the Earth does rip
let the rain come
so we may take a sip
heavens nectar
falls upon a discarded deckchair
striped like candy cane
blotched with the rain
scattered upon sandy dunes
could this be a monsoon
ironically late
but still worth the wait
paid patience admission at the gate
one ticket to wet wet wet
this is what patience gets
just need a raincoat
so I can appear in the matrix
how can you hate this
a neopolitan sky
dripping with colour
if I were a scholar
I could espouse on its many virtues
instead, I turn up my collar
and tip my hat
a little milk won't hurt you
an umbrella swung round a lamppost
and now I'm Gene Kelly
still wearing a raincoat
but dancing
romancing the moonlight
for night has snuck in the back door
like an absent teenager
but this too shall pass
soon the dunes turn to grass
and I too return to task
a new day
at play.
Oct 7, 2018
Oct 7, 2018 at 2:35 PM UTC
There’s no other choice but to wear them,
The drawer offered nothing but these.
An odd pair of socks might be quirky,
Odd sizes don’t normally please.
The one at my ankle was spotted,
The other was striped to the knee
The latter two sizes the smaller,
The former quite large by degree.
This mismatch I thought to keep secret
And cover the dissonant pair.
I chose from the wardrobe some trousers
And shoes, with considerable care.
My ruse would conceal the divergence
From prescribed social standards of dress
And none would be any the wiser
My discomfort I’d have to suppress.
Now, it’s harder to mask discomposure
When physical pain has attacked.
The small sock had cramped my toes tightly
That blood didn’t flow, was a fact.
My colleagues regarded me strangely
For they could see nothing amiss
But I could feel cold perspiration,
Anxiety I couldn’t dismiss.
It was then that I felt a strange itching,
The striped sock began to descend
And round my right ankle it wrinkled
And bulged at the trouser leg end.
Dismayed at my great consternation
But clueless to what was awry
My friends made comforting gestures
Need of which I could only deny.
The moral of this story’s transparent
Socks are always best worn as a pair
Their nature is in the relationship
Which provides a well-balanced air.
And take the trouble to remember
Be congruent in all that you do
For disparity will often bring discord
And that path, you’ll certainly rue.
Oct 11, 2009
Oct 11, 2009 at 6:43 AM UTC
Scars of tear-streaked shame
Or proud tiger-striped strength.
Which are they?
Tonight let's flip the coin.
May 15, 2013
May 15, 2013 at 2:52 AM UTC
She’s cracking eggs.
“What are those?” she asks, pointing to white and red specks in the bowl.
Once I’d have told her it was shell-
but she’s too old for that now
so-
“Where the eggs started to grow”
“Into chickens?”
“Yes”
“Oh” she says, staring intently at a gooey mess in the palm of her hand.
I finish weighing out the ingredients,
wipe her clean-
“Which colour icing do you want?”
She’s carefully spooning cake mix into bright-striped paper cases.
“Can we make angel cakes instead?”
I go into the kitchen to pre-heat the oven,
steal two minutes silence.
Deep breath.
“No. We'd be cutting up perfect little cupcakes to make the wings”
Choked.
I can’t tell her why
I don’t do Angels in December.
Oct 19, 2011
Oct 19, 2011 at 3:55 PM UTC
let's make
a tiny little place
a quiet shady spot
under a
striped umbrella
for you and me
to watch
the world go by
Sep 9, 2015
Sep 9, 2015 at 6:43 PM UTC
The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering --
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
When I wormed back under my mother's heart.
Small as a doll in my dress of innocence
I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.
Nobody died or withered on that stage.
Everything took place in a durable whiteness.
The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.
I found your name, I found your bones and all
Enlisted in a cramped necropolis
your speckled stone skewed by an iron fence.
In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead
Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower
Breaks the soil. This is Azalea path.
A field of burdock opens to the south.
Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.
The artificial red sage does not stir
In the basket of plastic evergreens they put
At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,
Although the rains dissolve a ****** dye:
The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.
Another kind of redness bothers me:
The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath
The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry
A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;
My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.
The stony actors poise and pause for breath.
I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
It was the gangrene ate you to the bone
My mother said: you died like any man.
How shall I age into that state of mind?
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father -- your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death.
6.6k
"Murica" "Murica" "Murica"
chants of patriotism ethnocentrism
nationalist sentiments lacquered in blue red white
spangled with stars and candy striped
"enemies both foreign and domestic"
the roar of jet engines accompanied by
crackling sparklers
summer sunlight
glamorous fireworks
red meat burning over charcoal because
the chef is being kissed
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
the roar of jet engines accompanied by
dying children
systematized ****
internment camps
the division along the 38th parallel because
the evil's communism not McCarthyism no never
"my government has a firm policy not to capitulate"
not to terrorists
not to the UN
not to common sense
not to popular opinion
not to love in all it's forms
but
to corruption
to the oil lobby
to racism
to ***
to the Almighty
dollar
"we have reason to believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
No.
No, you don't.
Lying ********
You *******
You ruined everything.
*****
Sep 28, 2013
Sep 28, 2013 at 11:57 AM UTC
There was nothing I was ever so ashamed of
that I dumped it in a river to drown,
but one time my best friend accidentally tossed my pink fishing pole
into the bayou when a spider dangled from the line.
We were eight, everything was wishy-washy
because she called herself a mulatto like it were an insult
and my older friends kept mentioning that my mom walked herself
to a liquor store very late at night
twelve-packs bruising her German-colored shoulder.
I did not tell them my father had hidden away her car keys.
Girls teased me and I still wanted to kiss their cheeks at goodbyes,
The Little Mermaid featured at our sleepovers
saying, “kiss the girl,” so I did
but we stopped talking when I bought my training bra,
it proved what was in my skirt, my lips could not touch them again.
You cannot kiss a girl if you are a girl,
even if Disney movies say it is okay because Mickie Mouse
has no ***** to be ashamed of though a wife of the opposite ***
I learned important things until I turned ten
and Hurricane Katrina unraveled the bayou into my house
and I existed in four different classrooms in my fourth grade year
where nobody had enough time
to learn my name, much less the way it is spelled.
Now, in therapy, the certified insists
that I am a girl who kisses other girls because my mother
only put her lips on a bottle.
But maybe I wear striped dresses just because mold grew that
shape in my home on Camellia Street,
mud decorated the fallen refrigerator so it looked like
a cow some punk tipped over.
I just wish the sidewalk I use to rollerblade on hadn’t flooded.
May 16, 2013
May 16, 2013 at 6:50 PM UTC
Dusk. I won't paint you another sunset,
another beautiful striped sea; no, not today.
Picture instead a smooth discolored surface
on which a firmly gripped stone was roughly
ground, causing a painful chalky screech; the
misemployed rock left vague yellow scars and
lavender bruises on the horizon; the sun cowers
behind them fearfully, distraught by the undue
violence; this is the sunset I experienced at
your fragrant side, and wondered - not unlike
that astre - what could possibly justify the
yellow, spectral scars in my heart, the bright,
undue violence brought upon my pride, and
the slighted sunset in my soul. This is Dusk.
May 4, 2015
May 4, 2015 at 9:05 PM UTC
Genderless with scraped knees and
A lipstick crush on one who bore the same name as me
Uncut brown hair untouched by bleach and
Stealing kisses from my best friend while my parents lied asleep
Lying in the grass with a picture book on faeries
Listening to the wind whistle through our dying trees
Jumping on the bed with my ***** and my bubby
Giggling hand over mouth when my mother called him "hubby"
Daisy chains and he loves me nots
Unbrushed teeth beginning to rot
***** shoes and ***** shoelaces
Visiting imagined places
Pink striped socks and a skirt to mismatch
Waiting for robins eggs to fall or to hatch
O, to be a child and to live within a dream
To lie awake at ten past eight, imagination like a stream
Mar 9, 2017
Mar 9, 2017 at 9:31 AM UTC
Red tailed fox striped jewelry box,
but these jewels shine of coal.
I keep trying to feel,
but I got no hope
in my heart
or in my soul.
Red tailed fox striped jewelry box,
you sit next to the bearded elf.
Third from the right, seventh shelf.
I carry you around like a babydoll.
Ragged dress with a hooded eye;
you reek of destruction,
but like a prized possession
I'll carry you to my grave when I die.
Red tailed fox striped jewelry box,
may you spare me one key?
I beg of you to open up,
Please, please, please!
Shed some light for me.
Golden
Grown
Sewn
and
Shown.
That's how our hearts seem out to be.
Dripping wild, red cries of kerosine.
Their voice sounds of dusty rust
when they sing.
Tripping over the finish line
their broken back
CRACK
CRACK
CRACK
cracking.
Red tailed fox striped jewelry box,
but like a door
this box holds much more.
Much more than a box has held before.
The secrets that lie
rest behind
dark, evil crescent moons
like the sun reaching an eclipse.
Typhoon lips.
Untouchable kiss.
Half of a whole.
Red tailed fox striped jewelry box
shines of nothing
but a bunch of coal.
Feb 23, 2012
Feb 23, 2012 at 9:02 PM UTC
Samson-bound between book shelves,
in the New Aeon Section,
a pale youth nourishes his ego on
bombastic conjunctive adverbs.
(An imagined sea lion balances a
striped ball on the tip of his
snout & slaps his fins in
frenzied approval. Arf. Arf.)
Though absent, the ring master
smiles from the realms of irony.
He holds the bearded lady by the
burl & orders a reception for
the new act.
Oct 9, 2013
Oct 9, 2013 at 11:14 PM UTC
Because the thirst wouldn’t simmer; it ruptured cities into boils,
turned cultures into armies, an armageddon of cheeky stubborn Irish Catholics and thick veined Germans couldn’t imagine a world without their stout hearty headed pint.
Because white dry protestant angels thought crime existed in a vacuum, in a filthy saw-dusted saloon, the hub spawn of evil.
Because twice as many of those saloons were ******* by unlicensed blind pigs, not through free swinging doors on the streets, but in the domestic sphere; in the dark crept crevices of household sanctuaries.
Because bootlegging capitalist princes turned the industry into a stenchy liability with their home brewed distilled poisons. Alky cookers wrapped the commodity fetish and dubbed it moonshine.
Moonshine – spirits for the poor and blind.
Because this social reform was a moral reform lost in the oblivion of politics, lost in the timeliness of progressive spring-cleaning referenda’s.
Because the ragged, toothless class had to be scold, striped clean of their traditional barings,
because wisdom is everything and they’re spirits ran vilely wild.
Sep 26, 2010
Sep 26, 2010 at 6:57 AM UTC
The pretty devil,
Dressed well,
Full pouting lips,
Cheap perfume smell,
Gets you every time,
All you need
Is to play divine,
Living in your own world,
Boys worship every step,
Although your striped stockings
Seem as if they'll curl.
Apr 5, 2015
Apr 5, 2015 at 12:17 AM UTC
(a conversational collaboration with Chris D Aechtner)
"remember the dream I had when we were 10?
(waves and waves of cornflowers everywhere)
about the boy and the closet?
(sunflowers, circle, glass house?....closet, yes)
cornflower blue
(the closet was cornflower blue?)
the light in that dream was cornflower blue
(the air, the atmospheric light?)
yes, especially in the closet
I had that dream for so long
I'll never forget
little boy blue and the kingfishers --
the blue and white china plates
with the bridge and the lovers; the two doves in the willow tree,
that made me look for japanese letters....horse.
the funny things we do as children
(you are writing a poem....)
catch the words, my love
*(you already wrote a poem up there; bridge it together --
I dried cornflowers with dandelions in a blue and white book; but it wasn't a dream.
Well, in a way it was, because at the time, I was floating in the clouds)*
he wore a blue and white striped top in my dream
and I remember him
when I look at the sky,
the clouds and the golden sun --
I caught the words!
(yes! did you string them all together?)
not yet!"
Aug 30, 2012
Aug 30, 2012 at 4:21 AM UTC
On my way to work,
Whenever I pass through
The Holy Trinity church,
After a brief prayer,
The tombstone of a martyr
My eyes never fail to search
As his eulogies sensitive cords
Are sure to touch!
I admire
The tombstone’s design
A flickering torch,
Whose tongue
Is the martyr ’s statue,
That talks loud his virtue!
“Holy Trinity
Till I crossed the river of death
Allegedly, striped of my health,
Poisoned by evil doers,
Who hanker
By unfair means
To amass wealth,
I had been
A public servant
Adherent to my faith! ”
“Holy Trinity
To abide by
Your commandment-
Don’t steal-
Was my desire
Also to pull out millions
From poverty’s quagmire.
Across the board development
Working better than one's best
Efficient resource utilization
Also drew my attention! "
“Holy Trinity
A generation
To corruption averse
Is all-out
The bad scenario
In my country
To reverse.
A generation for
A developmental ******
That has lust.
I have come to understand
The coming up of
Many a lass and lad,
Whose rights that demand
I need no more reward,
When in front of you
This way I stand
Justice to demand! ”
Children of Oromia,
Ethiopia’s elephantine branch,
You have to detach
Your state, your country
From the impudent
And the corrupt
That still exercise
The outmoded
Colonizers’
Divide and rule
As a fool .
A corruption fighter
Development’s workforce
Is also a hero
Like Ethiopia’s
Valorous and dear sons
Balcha Abanefso
Geresu Duke,Abdisa Aga
And Jagama Kelo.
Children of Oromia
Giving to divisive guys
A deaf ear,
You should hold your
Country Ethiopia,
A cradle of mankind
And civilization, dear
Do not forget
Adding up
Is the current road map
Evil doers
Killing a hero
Could not bring
The change drive
To zero.
As a poet what I can say
“Evil doers
Stop to opt for
Devilish way!
But if you
Keeping going astray
You will go
To the grave in
Ignominious way!”//
Jul 26, 2018
Jul 26, 2018 at 7:09 AM UTC