"undecayed" poems
His hands are long,
calloused and inviting.
Scars tell stories,
scattered
across his knuckles.
He has one hand cradled in the other,
tapping and rubbing
his palm
with his fingers.
His mind is a jungle:
heavy, sticky, lush,
challenging to navigate,
surrounded by undecayed green
and unobstructed sea.
“Are you anxious?”
His hands are moving rapidly,
yellow parrotbills
flitting in and out of the tall tree trunks
and violet, epiphytic orchids of his mind.
Turning to face me,
he stretches his lips into a smile.
He assures me that he is fine,
but he doesn’t see any birds.
Jun 5, 2015
Jun 5, 2015 at 12:20 PM UTC
I lost my daydreams for a while.
The bounce, the charm, the myrth, the smile.
All locked within the sleeping child
That I buried deep in the wild.
And yet, my fantasies resumed.
The undecayed body exhumed.
My girlhood rose from her repose,
The bright side of life to expose.
May 12, 2021
May 12, 2021 at 2:49 AM UTC
the ecosystem that young children
wake up on Tuesdays
before dawn to try & save
treading muddy gray roadsides
spiriting away cigarette butts
faded azure beer cans
thin shopping bag ghosts
with tiny gloved hands—
this cracking frost-heave
pavement landscape
is my body
my body is the first gasping crocus
the first chanting insects,
the first murdered fieldmouse
after waking
is the first meal
of a young owl,
all fluff and down and bone,
high in a skinny birch tree
and still a-feared of foxes
my body is hot loam
is fevered asphalt
is a feeding garden
& my soul…
my soul
is the beating sun,
undecayed, though tarnished
by weeks
maybe months
behind curtains of Winter
my soul separate
from my body
for so long…
and yet
it could have dined with God
and married His Daughter
before anyone thought to go looking
May 4, 2013
May 4, 2013 at 2:31 PM UTC
The rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king's affairs,
Balance-loving nature
Made all things in pairs.
To every foot its antipode,
Each color with its counter glowed,
To every tone beat answering tones,
Higher or graver;
Flavor gladly blends with flavor;
Leaf answers leaf upon the bough,
And match the paired cotyledons.
Hands to hands, and feet to feet,
In one body grooms and brides;
Eldest rite, two married sides
In every mortal meet.
Light's far furnace shines,
Smelting ***** and bars,
Forging double stars,
Glittering twins and trines.
The animals are sick with love,
Lovesick with rhyme;
Each with all propitious Time
Into chorus wove.
Like the dancers' ordered band,
Thoughts come also hand in hand,
In equal couples mated,
Or else alternated,
Adding by their mutual gage
One to other health and age.
Solitary fancies go
Short-lived wandering to and fro,
Most like to bachelors,
Or an ungiven maid,
Not ancestors,
With no posterity to make the lie afraid,
Or keep truth undecayed.
Perfect paired as eagle's wings,
Justice is the rhyme of things;
Trade and counting use
The serf-same tuneful muse;
And Nemesis,
Who with even matches odd,
Who athwart space redresses
The partial wrong,
Fills the just period,
And finishes the song.
Subtle rhymes with ruin rife
Murmur in the house of life,
Sung by the Sisters as they spin;
In perfect time and measure, they
Build and unbuild our echoing clay,
As the two twilights of the day
Fold us music-drunken in.
2.2k
We
were once
the Spring
Easter voices climbing
from a namesake lane
Early risers,
Windmill limbed and finding
out our simple selves
Nimble, skinny
twitten skippers, wile-aways,
unburdened, burning, spotless
in our pheasant- feather gold.
One decade undecayed
brought all the stories ever needed
One decade undecayed
before the innocent
were sold
Mar 31, 2023
Mar 31, 2023 at 2:55 PM UTC
Overgrowth across your face
there's newness in the veins.
machinery has dragged away
your features....
Undecayed, sleep underneath
the leaves and age
cocooned- from those who walk, with those die
they all forgot...
the preachers, safe from sacred
weld breath into coins- some printed with your lips
and some with eyes.
your skin was taken as the ants carry the trees.
Now firmly empty, watching skies
remain in groves left lost for greed.
dear ancients, pity me.
Nov 25, 2014
Nov 25, 2014 at 6:19 PM UTC
Another clover. Three leafed and in dew and
silky webbed spider home.
Passed over for praise of wanting found,
and not plucked. So while flourish green and
undecayed,
here this clover does remain.
Stepped over or on,
once during dusk,
once during dawn,
and growing strong in the rain.
Wish it to be held highly as having four.
But it's me, a lowly clover, who is only having three,
no more.
Aug 5, 2018
Aug 5, 2018 at 5:01 AM UTC