It is later than late,
the simmered down darkness
of the jukebox hour.

The hour of drunkenness
and cigarettes.
The fools hour.

In my dreams,
I still smoke, cigarette after cigarette.
It's okay, I'm dreaming.
In dreams, smoking can't **** me.

It's warm outside.
I have every window open.
There's no such thing as danger,
only the dangerous face of beauty.

I am hanging at my window
like a houseplant.
I am smoking a cigarette.
I am having a drink.

The pale, blue moon is shining.
The savage stars appear.
Every fool that passes by
smiles up at me.

I drip ashes on them.

There is music playing from somewhere.
A thready, salt-sweet tune I don't know
any of the words to.
There's a gentle breeze making
hopscotch with my hair.

This is the wet blanket air of midnight.
This is the incremental hour.
This is the plastic placemat of time
between reality and make-believe.
This is tabletop dream time.

remember the last great
unpredictable summer
deluded by codeine and cigarettes
pulled by lunar cycles toward reproduction practice
interconnected over coral reefs
before real estate won the forest
we slept untouched on the beach
encouraged by chemical overuse
with our hair tied together in knots
and seagulls flocked on long leafy wings
their beaks pointed out passed the big rubber sun
and i struck your vein with a needle
and you struck my strange heart like a runaway slave
you danced naked in the florida sun
and i stood behind you on tall stalky legs
laughing, getting high like an osprey
sweating into a shrine, wringing out my heart
on the banks of that lazy river in my hometown
when the sun went down we chased each other
through the thready umbrella of vines and pine roots
under the old abandoned bridge
a mile long

You can ride on my oldie bike for free
Yesterday I called in the double price
For the spark in her eyes that I see
Mellow on inside but tinted sharp eyes
Like a ripple in the water in calm night
Moony thoughts, paper like thin ****** cuts
Her careless thoughts meet her eyes
She created words that I seldom felt
She sways her thready hair as I knelt
As this lady gently cleans the kettles
I listened to her rush, the whistle, and her lips
Like the leaves flutters over a gentle wind
On the shadow of a butterfly over the lilies
A sun inside a drizzly morning and evening glory
Like a cuckoo singing from an early winter tree
A dream passed me by unknown to her
A desirable woman, a lover, a passionate peer
A moment of clarity, a blink, a wish to be there

The woman who stands behind you in line presses her shopping cart
against your hipbone until you wince and tell her to
stop. She makes a face at you as she pulls away. You sigh.
You stare at the magazines that surround you;
you read something about the president having a gay affair-
(That can't possibly be true! you think,) and even though you
know better than to trust the tabloids,
you're very gullible. God. The person in front of you in line is taking
forever to check out, and you're tired of reading, so you hum
Fritz Reiner's Concerto for Orchestra until a man behind you tells you to
'Please stop humming, thank you very much.’

Well, **** him. **** all of this. And you can’t help but
wonder why they only sell weight loss magazines by checkout counters when, really,
they should be selling Harper Lee, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway. You like
Edgar Allan Poe, too, but you figure that
he's maybe a little bit too dark for the supermarket.

Ah. Finally. After what seems like forever,
it's your turn to check out your groceries:
you place your items onto the conveyor belt-- milk, cheese, spinach, bread.
The woman behind the cash register scans your
credit card and asks you for your signature. Your mind is, for some reason,
stuck on some poem you memorized in high school, something about
disappointment and depression, and even though
you’re distracted, you sign your name on the little screen in front on you.

For a moment, your life feels thready and
vulnerable. But the feeling soon passes, and then you're back to
carrying groceries back to your car. What was that
poem you were trying to remember? Somewhere in the back of your
mind, you can recall the feeling of a woman pressing a shopping cart against your
hipbone. Something about desperation and desolation.
Ernest Hemingway? You shrug your shoulders. In the end,
you guess,
nothing really matters.

You come to me on the ends of thoughts
ones that have nothing to do with you
or so I so mistakenly believe
However, you were never that simple-
in looking at those dim times
the spectre of what you were then
intrudes on all the adjectives of my now
There is always something
some small, nearly senseless filament
of simile that leads back
and yet again am I tangled
breathlessly flailing through webs
of undesired reminisces
woven by the thready remainders of you

4/27/2016

It is spring,
and outside my window when
I woke up i found a bleachwhite dogwood creeping outside up onto the wallboards-
I was scared it would get in,
its vines creep through the cracks
with the green woods in the back cheering it on

My skin danced with the fleas of my
uncertain past, the thready stinging reminders of my yesterdays
and the one hour storms at night and late mornings that come with spring


I cursed my living in a forest
when I stepped outside, carefully
so as to not be seen by the woods
and the syphillitic robins
that sang disgusting little hymns
and the frogs that muttered at night.
the air was sharp, it smelled like a dripping faucet

My blood dripped into the laundry
sink, carefully twisting itself when it hit the water
it looked delicate, creeping and soft.

I read Salinger that day- I always
do in the spring- it is something about the disenchantment that brings me back to peonies and azaleas, tulip sales
ecetera-

I heard your voice on the line and breathed
that I hadn't heard it in a while,
I said this with my nose
and you apologized

but I did not want it
because it is not fair:
they all  apologize to me for  things that they should not
but I should be the one that is apologizing eternally

eternally for being this
like a cicada,
that comes out after years for one thing
and then disappears all over again
and perhaps even dies.

this summer is supposed
to be the summer the locusts come
to visit the east coast and
If the apocalypse is coming, I am not scared- it has arrived many times for me before.

You did your best to shoot me down
put two bullets in my chest
but I ain't dead yet
got a thready pulse and
down in dry gulch, the doc done sewn me up,fixed me like a tenderfoot
and now
I'm back
sixgun packed
guess the odds are stacked the other way
gun play.
Bang
dang missed
*******,shot off more shot,missed again
must remember
take careful aim
sometimes forget
it's just a game
of cowboys.

It's Friday night, and we're snug in a bed
     With bedding that's very thready.
The weekend is ours, but I think of work
     On Monday, and I miss you already.

While you decide--

The weight of my tears are heavy.
The pulse in my veins is thready.
My heart aches, it's not ready.
But my lungs--my lungs remain steady.

My vision blurs as my heart splinters.
My lungs feel frozen, like a lake in winter.
Under the pressure I hear it creak,
I hear it squeak.

The traitorous ******* keep on going.
They open & close beneath the pressure of a broken heart, the oxygen still flowing.

I have weary heart syndrome.
The lungs supply its misery to the beat of their own autonomic metronome.

My heart is looking for the one whom my soul loves.
It is indeed a mourning dove.

A mourning dove inside a cage.
My atriums are fluttering, waiting to see what's written on life's next page.

Is it your name next to mine at the starting line?
I thought I was, but now I wonder if that was ever genuine?

You are the person I choose.
But also my favorite person I'm terrified to lose...

My heart is breaking.
My soul is aching.

Please, won't you choose me like I have chosen you?

Scritch, scratch, scritch
time is unmarked
by my efforts
as are you

i am scraped
hollow and thin
shelled
like tomorrow

eaten by tv
and talk radio
and old songs
played loud

musicians died
so you
could hear
yourself beating

underneath this hearing
of these words
and those thoughts
is you reading

for the blood
of virgins
and the death
of gods

He asked, 'already?'
expecting no reply
just
one more casual query
and another wondering
why.
  
but it was already
wasn't it?

the lights went off
the day switched on
and he wondered where
an age of time had gone.

It didn't seem that long ago.

Already came
such a shame
he
wasn't ready for it.

That's the kick,
my how he looks sick
and he's not too steady
on his feet
his pulse is thready
he looks beat

already?
and
It's only six o-clock.

The weavers of the plains are tireless workers
poor but honest, always trusting the generosity
of an unlocked door to let in a husband working
nights at the print and design shop, finishing that
last small sign full of eclairs glazed with the most deliciously  appealing serif  font for the new
French bakery off of main and twenty-third

or the plumber who heard about that
slow running toilet on the second floor
who leaves the bill neatly near the vanity
knowing the check will come with
the Wednesday amble and update chat

or the mechanic who can be trusted with the
keys and a blank check  on the front seat
of that old blue Ford that is leaking green.

The weaver mother with seven children,
threads pieces for their school newspaper,
spins fine clear aqua yarn showing other kids
how to swim, substitute teaches so that she
can bind their minds into a chalkboard panel
of good knowledge, even drives the school bus
if that is what the thread requires to be strong.

The weaver farmer sees the Nebraska soil
is thready, dry, hard to till,   harder
to water, that crops can’t be harvested
without the abundant help of others.

In it they see a tapestry,
the people it’s colors
everything needing a tight loom
for it to work, survive and thrive  
and bind forever together.


So, they are intentionally local knowing
machine yarn eventually unravels,
that good thread can’t be found online,
and that the best panels in the tapestry
are the ones that come from common life.

When did you become someone
whose presence I longed to feel
at my fingertips
more than my pulse?
When did you become someone
whose voice had a cadence
that I would sacrifice
my dusks
and dawns
to waltz to,
spinning in your arms
and falling into the rhythm
of your footsteps upon my concrete heart?
When did you become someone
who I allowed to paint on every inch of my body,
never becoming tired of swirling brush strokes
and passionate color?

When did you become someone
who held down my hands with the weight
of your shackles,
slowing my heartbeat to yours,
barely fluttering?
When did you become someone
who kept me in your poisonous trance,
hearing sweet fairy music
whilst dancing a fatal few steps?
When did your soft brushstrokes
turn to pummeling stones,
taking the beauty from my skin
and replacing it with a thready luminescence?

When did everything that I revered about you
break me into two:
the one who had it all,
the one floating a foot above the ground
with socked toes and lacy clarity,
and the one who couldn’t stand her reflection,
the colors laid upon me no longer bright,
but thrusting me into the concrete jungle
you had momentarily freed me from?
Just answer me this…
when?

The pulse is thready now
What once fed life is gone
The eyes and mind flit away
While the change is sown
And nature knows just how
To make all else carry on
As if it were just a day
As if it were never known

cradled in this heart
another heart bound in caverned Love
beats a rhythm on a seashore
so far distant that it left footprints
as guides

fallowed in this heart
another heart encompassed in shallowed love
boats its rower on confused melody
like a splooted animal
decides

to rest

a heart unites the divides
spools slowly slowly
its Love from a wheel
winds thready gossamers together on a distaff
knits the splooted with unsplooted
a generosity unanswered by the blind
and unlooked for by the unblind

how, then, is Love chimed?
how harmonized? how composed?
how, then, is Love sung?
spool it out deep into the Universe
to be unsung
as it is plucked on the Harp of Creation


c. 2024 Roberta Compton Rainwater

What is coming into being
in these bundles of thready
signalling winging at once
a wall of sound brick notes
wavering chafed and read
forming crumbling bling

Brown bottle's weeping
in the summer evening -
following the lawns to  
Kansas Avenue,

the night limps in
on starry crutch
over a heady glaze of traffic
riding the asphalt beam.

A woman walks a parrot
in the circle, and children
skip to avoid stepping
on cracks.
  
Thready breeze, brick slants
follow me back
to the thin javelin
of Gallatin Street.

Strangers came
to my grandmother's funeral.
They came to say goodbye.
To say goodbye to a woman
that I never knew.
Because legacy is this odd
thing full of surprises.
We plan for it but we
cannot be the hand that
guides a universe we
do not fully understand.
I knew her well.
Lived with her for years.
She loved me as a son
and I her as a mother
but these strangers knew
a woman, by given name
and I knew my grandma
and that they were the
same person is something
I struggle with to this day.
I don't know who will
or even who won't
attend my funeral,
should there be one.
I don't know if Grandma
knew, either.

It must be so quiet
at the end.
I've heard it's peaceful.
But these questions.
Unanswered.
Drives me up
a ******* wall.
All broken promises
clueless leads
and feeling all unsolved.

In endings there is room
to forgive the vilains of
the piece and there is
space enough to finally
breathe.
Heroes take their victory lap.
And over the face of the
fiction there is the deep quiet
of gods at rest.
At rest without total closure,
because often some threads
went unresolved.
Questions.
But the unanswered questions
plague only the audience.
The characters are at peace
with the thready nature of
these things.
They aren't looking to answer
every question, they only
ever wanted to slay the dragon
and win the day and ride
off into that sweet good night
never to be asked to lift
a hammer or a sword
toward unfinished purpose again.

But the questions plague me still.

Strangers came
to my grandmother's funeral.
To pay respects to a woman
they all knew that I did not.
I don't know what became of them.
I don't know what becomes of me.
Unanswered questions
but the deathly quiet end
is growing larger on that horizon
and I'm still all unsolved.

I am taken
out of context
by this thin
string of characters
pulled from solution
thready breathing
seething
clenched teeth
just let go
let me slip
back
down
there
ah

i don't know
                                                      glea­ming like an apology
what i want
                                                      ­your scraped pomegranate summerteeth
these winter days, i used to
                                                      a pointillist sunset,
wish i could inhale
                                                      d­on't tell me that muscle
the wide wide world
                                                      is made whole by breaking
just to breath it out
                                                      the thready beat made stronger
into your mouth, once,
                                                      if ravaged, then repaired.
i never really knew
                                                      ­could we salvage joy from each day loosening
strength
                                                      our ravenous hold on the world?
just that i wanted to be strong
                                                     ­ atlas was no gardener
for a nebulous reason i cannot
remember
                                            ­          to hold up is not to tend.
i'm leaving for
                                                      wher­e could it be written,
a very long time,
                                                      why would anyone say, why would
but you have to go
away
                                                      ­a poet teach the heart survives by breaking?
to come
back.
                                                     ­ *that in black ink my love may still shine bright