"thready" poems
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.
3.2k
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
Aug 14, 2013
Aug 14, 2013 at 6:02 PM UTC
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
Feb 11, 2013
Feb 11, 2013 at 12:22 AM UTC
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.
Sep 4, 2016
Sep 4, 2016 at 12:35 AM UTC
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
Jun 19, 2010
Jun 19, 2010 at 9:50 PM UTC
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.
Apr 27, 2016
Apr 27, 2016 at 5:42 PM UTC
we've fought over so many things
*the reason you won't come home
how the rock in the ring is a stone
how your beady eyes like to roam*
we've fought over so many things
*like how the meal is not ready
like how the chair upon you sit, unsteady
like how each conversation is thready*
we've thought over many things
*like how you think I'm a mistake
like how I think you're rake
like how we both would love to make*
***a new start
with a different heart***
we've fought over many things
we've thought over many things
we've cursed a blue streak that's royal
but I'll never let you have the one thing
that has only ever been to me
loyal
Aug 28, 2013
Aug 28, 2013 at 5:54 AM UTC
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.
Oct 14, 2023
Oct 14, 2023 at 4:56 PM UTC
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
****** off,shot off more shot,missed again
must remember
take careful aim
sometimes forget
it's just a game
of cowboys.
Oct 28, 2013
Oct 28, 2013 at 1:46 AM UTC
spread out under open skies
stars and thready clouds
the only witness
to how we end this day
did you choose to spin the stars
into circles of light
or lay
and let them turn themselves
as I turn to you
Nov 25, 2017
Nov 25, 2017 at 6:56 PM UTC
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?
Dec 22, 2015
Dec 22, 2015 at 11:51 AM UTC
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.
Sep 22, 2017
Sep 22, 2017 at 1:23 AM UTC
If that small headed spider
Knew the fate of web
Built Days and nights
For his comfort and rest,
Would on day
Turn out
To be but his 'caged deathbed'!
He'd never ever think of making a web.
If we new our expectations,
Were not more like this
Spiders Thready glimmering web,
We sure would be free,
From remorse and regret.
The spider makes it web,
And we make our expectations
Unquenchable instead.
Knowing not the truth,
That we are sure born free,
But a chain webs us,
Ironically here and there
Much similar like the spider's web.
Oct 23, 2017
Oct 23, 2017 at 2:43 PM UTC
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?
Jul 19, 2017
Jul 19, 2017 at 7:59 PM UTC