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1.
Mother, my Mary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
a photostat of your will
arrived in the mail today.
This is the division of money.
I am one third
of your daughters counting my bounty
or I am a queen alone
in the parlor still,
eating the bread and honey.
It is Good Friday.
Black birds pick at my window sill.
Your coat in my closet,
your bright stones on my hand,
the gaudy fur animals
I do not know how to use,
settle on me like a debt.
A week ago, while the hard March gales
beat on your house,
we sorted your things: obstacles
of letters, family silver,
eyeglasses and shoes.
Like some unseasoned Christmas, its scales
rigged and reset,
I bundled out gifts I did not choose.
Now the houts of The Cross
rewind. In Boston, the devout
work their cold knees
toward that sweet martyrdom
that Christ planned. My timely loss
is too customary to note; and yet
I planned to suffer
and I cannot. It does not please
my yankee bones to watch
where the dying is done
in its usly hours. Black birds peck
at my window glass
and Easter will take its ragged son.
The clutter of worship
that you taught me, Mary Gray,
is old. I imitate
a memory of belief
that I do not own. I trip
on your death and jesus, my stranger
floats up over
my Christian home, wearing his straight
thorn tree. I have cast my lot
and am one third thief
of you. Time, that rearranger
of estates, equips
me with your garments, but not with grief.

2.
This winter when
cancer began its ugliness
I grieved with you each day
for three months
and found you in your private nook
of the medicinal palace
for New England Women
and never once
forgot how long it took.
I read to you
from The New Yorker, ate suppers
you wouldn't eat, fussed
with your flowers,
joked with your nurses, as if I
were the balm among lepers,
as if I could undo
a life in hours
if I never said goodbye.
But you turned old,
all your fifty-eight years sliding
like masks from your skull;
and at the end
I packed your nightgowns in suitcases,
paid the nurses, came riding
home as if I'd been told
I could pretend
people live in places.

3.
Since then I have pretended ease,
loved with the trickeries of need, but not enough
to shed my daughterhood
or sweeten him as a man.
I drink the five o' clock martinis
and poke at this dry page like a rough
goat. Fool! I fumble my lost childhood
for a mother and lounge in sad stuff
with love to catch and catch as catch can.
And Christ still waits. I have tried
to exorcise the memory of each event
and remain still, a mixed child,
heavy with cloths of you.
Sweet witch, you are my worried guide.
Such dangerous angels walk through Lent.
Their walls creak Anne! Convert! Convert!
My desk moves. Its cavr murmurs Boo
and I am taken and beguiled.
Or wrong. For all the way I've come
I'll have to go again. Instead, I must convert
to love as reasonable
as Latin, as sold as earthenware:
an equilibrium
I never knew. And Lent will keep its hurt
for someone else. Christ knows enough
staunch guys have hitched him in trouble.
thinking his sticks were badges to wear.

4.
Spring rusts on its skinny branch
and last summer's lawn
is soggy and brown.
Yesterday is just a number.
All of its winters avalanche
out of sight. What was, is gone.
Mother, last night I slept
in your Bonwit Teller nightgown.
Divided, you climbed into my head.
There in my jabbering dream
I heard my own angry cries
and I cursed you, Dame
keep out of my slumber.
My good Dame, you are dead.
And Mother, three stones
slipped from your glittering eyes.
Now it's Friday's noon
and I would still curse
you with my rhyming words
and bring you flapping back, old love,
old circus knitting, god-in-her-moon,
all fairest in my lang syne verse,
the gauzy bride among the children,
the fancy amid the absurd
and awkward, that horn for hounds
that skipper homeward, that museum
keeper of stiff starfish, that blaze
within the pilgrim woman,
a clown mender, a dove's
cheek among the stones,
my Lady of first words,
this is the division of ways.
And now, while Christ stays
fastened to his Crucifix
so that love may praise
his sacrifice
and not the grotesque metaphor,
you come, a brave ghost, to fix
in my mind without praise
or paradise
to make me your inheritor.
RyanMJenkins Jun 2013
The sound
The look
The taste
The touch

It's all a perfectly painted portrait you privately processed, patched with hope.

The certainty
The promises
As the days pass us

The roundabouts regularly revisiting rocky ravines reassure us to hold on to that rope.

The visions of fantasies
The feelings combust

Passionate portrayals with punctual pauses providing positivity to possibly promote premonitions

In truth we trust

To transcend temptations of trivial trickeries by treading on tip-toes through troubled trebutaries

To let go, seems a must.

Hallucinations from a lack of sleep, are leading me into a field of dreams. There I find that *anything's possible, and nothing is really what it seems.
anger....worry...fear..mistrust.  It's danger hurry and make it disappear, we must.  Don't rush, slow down,  and carefully craft guiding each piece of string unto that gown.  Let the walls fall, and seize your call.  Never let a moment persist in which you regret it all
RILEY Mar 2013
And she talks while my hands shiver
She’s a lie
She’s a lie
She’s a live representation of untruthfulness
A great portal of unworthy in-transparency
A grand stand of podiums and microphones
Flat screen tv’s
With radios and horns pumping your blood to your brains
Blocking your sight
And vision
Rocking impure notes
Of Dead metal
She’s a lie
My love is a lie
My love is a lie
Shedding tears on what she stole
Breaking my heart and taking it all
Spring time flowers and I fall
Beneath the trees

of beautiful regret
And powerful surrender
Trees that I used to climb
To look at her window
And see the angel of death never so beautiful
She’s a lie
My love is a lie
My love is a lie…
She turned out to be a democratic state
A hypocrite dictating my heart
Controlling my thoughts and my work
My wild imaginations…

Deciding my past
Exiting my present
Ending my future
She’s a lie
My love is a lie
My love is a lie
All the big people we are
And we accept our lies
The created trickeries
To satisfy our needs
To be taken care of
While we take care of our own commonplace matters
And one of them is you
Because you’re a lie
Everyone’s a lie…
Amy Grindhouse Apr 2014
You lived in my old house.

You greeted us with
a warmth that
matched the touch
of soft simplicity
and the antique heirlooms
you so often
dressed your life in.
After the others left
and the wine bottles
fell empty to the floor
you smiled that lazy
knowing grin
that so often
told me I was loved.
Just as I pulled you into my arms
the world filled
with that telltale haze
when we are seeing
what is not real
and I felt
the impending sorrow
That so often comes on
As we begin to wake
from these longing mental trickeries.
You died in the fall
and every time the leaves
crumple and wither
I do the same
as we so often do
when a part of us leaves this world.

In my dreams
You still live in my old house.
Tapan jena Nov 2017
Beginning to think is beginning to be "undermined"
To take the final flight, away from light
Into the dark environs of one’s state of mind

Just a careful analysis of letdowns or mere trickeries of deceiving soul
What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable?

An act like this is decreed upon within the silence of the heart.
As if a great work of art.

Sidelining hopes for a better tomorrow,
the man prefers a fatal evasion

Powerless to realize the transcendent,
Incapable of exhuming the depth of experience

The man deify what crushes him,
depriving him forever from the divine existence
Sacrificing his intellect, the believer immerses within darkness
In his failure, the believer finds triumph
The Taste
The Desire
The Sexuality
    Am I amusing you?

The Craving
The Lusting
   Am I the woman you visualized?

Did you come to me
To fulfill your Foolish Trickeries,
your Fantasies,
To be performed before your eyes?

Did you ever think
That I'm going to be
exactly what you want me to be ---
   A Burning Heat
   A Soulless Lustful Treat

Tell me ---
    Does your heart really beat?

And if that heart reveals your truth
Like a mirror that reveals the truth
Will you ever wonder ---
Do you really have a heart?

I wished you came to see
My Truth,
My Purity,
That's here inside my heart

But it's just not what you seek from me..

                                                  - Ella Salvador
(c) September 2019
TitaniumInks Feb 2019
He was cruel like an animal
He dragged me endlessly
Into a jungle full of thorns and wild animals
The jungle is now painted in my blood red.
Find me, and fill me with blood again.

I gave him my hand
When he was in a well deep and dark
He held my hand
And pushed me far in a well deeper and darker.
Find me, and show me the light again.

With lashes of trickeries, he ripped off my skin
My pain was his food
I will never be a doormat again
Even if he shows his good
Find me, and show me how to love myself.
Påłpëbŕå Sep 2020
There's a man I love; There's a woman I crave.
There are feelings I have; There's a thought I save.
There was a sight I saw; There was a sound I heard,
There were things to say and not just a few words!

There was a future I had; There were memories I clad.
There was a book where I lived; There was a chapter where I was killed.

But like me she was too proud to stay,
And like me he was the best player of the game we played.
She was the purest sin I ever committed;
He was the darkest dress that ever fitted!

Her beauty was a drug, her brain was my undoing,
But like all other addictions, it ended up *******!
His touch ignited my demons, his laughter filled my misery,
And later he ****** magic out of our love like one of his many trickeries.

She built me once and broke me twice,
She was the only virtue among my other vice*
He held me close and made me dream,
Then left me alone in shock and scream.
And all this time I sit here and wonder,
What would life have been with her still under!

And all these years I've been as cold as ice,
Thinking about the storm that promised warmth in disguise.
She was and will always be mine,
In hate, in love, in redemption and crime.
Her heart shall beat for me because mine still does,
Her mind and soul, her body and fuzz.
All of her has my name imprinted,
Even though she remains hidden behind her windows tinted.

My body still trembles for him,
My locks still know his fingers even as they stand trim.
My lips can feel his- every time I close my eyes,
He is still remembered- even to my own despise!

Forgetting the past should have been easier,
Falling for someone else shouldn't have sounded sleazier!
We both know who we are and whom we want,
And that is why our history still haunts.
And then there's a future we will die to flaunt,
With us, with him, with her. And that fact shall always daunt.
Charlie Harman Oct 2023
Propellers of propaganda participate
dubiously within the American diaspora.
Depending on the angle taken, pushing
and or pulling a particular group of people
towards some penultimate 'prize.'

Believe this or that they say, but there are
two sides to every tale. Truthfully
I don't, or can't, know the truth. And
thus, truthfulness becomes a travesty
to me.

When media misinforms
and the TV tells trickeries
and schooling is suppressed-
supposedly we are
'Making America Great Again'

But truthfully?
I doubt it.
No rhyme? Huh.

— The End —