"unfastening" poems
The distance ever so touchable
Yet you're still far afield
The glimmering glitter in your blissful
Translucent almond irises
Waiting to deviate from them
Yet they have imprinted themselves
Now affiliated with my heart
Seeing your lips brimming brightly
Rejuvenating your flawless visage
Embodying my love
Not even half your beauty
Inwardly made you mine
Realistically destined for another
Drastic jaundiced waves
Crashing the shores of heartbreak
Sentiments
Thus the eminent work of
Patience
Silence
Benevolence
Enshrouds my blooming admiration
For you
Unfastening my feigned ethos
For you
I comprehend the significance of dignity and family
But my love
Ceaseless and eternal
But my love
Yours only
Jan 22, 2014
Jan 22, 2014 at 1:30 AM UTC
Seasoned Love's silent discourse,
Dusk of the long distance,
Beneath the mantle of lament
The peak bloom, gnawing decay,
Obscure
The weight of favor;
Annealing fire, moulded by
Winds of duration
Unfastening the raw surf of sorrow.
Incipient caprice, theft of occlusion
Colored by common defiance,
Vile tremors of privation-
Native enclave,
The province of
Vacant, age-eaten elucidation.
The tangled weave, pathos and ethos
Vested
Interior acquisition,
Furrowed paths of countenance
Evincive and drawn,
Affinity found, inhabiting the palisades
Of Immersion.
A furtive glance harbors
The trained gaze whose
Immanent flame-
Emergent
Serous source,
Imbued piercing latency;
A taste of
The fountainhead.
Unprobed theater of the absolute.
Thin supple pith
Identity sealed in skin
Perambulator of meaning and
Lineaments of cure.
Bearing the image of ubiquity
Perceives in the other,
Immortality.
Sacramental Eros,
Subsumes the
Capacity to treasure.
©2013 W.S. Warner
Mar 11, 2013
Mar 11, 2013 at 2:51 AM UTC
When my grandfather passed away, my brothers and I held my dad with slanted eyebrows and stiff, silent upper lips. Because we are young and foolish and still learning. Because we’d never really had to do the holding before and, as far as we knew, this is how men mourn.
We dusted antique left-behinds with delicate, moth-wing hands that fluttered here and there and never stopped trembling -- dead giveaways that within the corridors of our arms our heartbeats went stampeding, arrhythmic. We couldn’t quite bend them into the proper shape for prayer, so instead we ran them, with touch somewhere between float and feel, along every ashtray and age-stained picture album. In that moment I think we each wished that memory read like braille, but no one ever said as much. Because this is how men mourn.
We honored our patriarch with whiskey, hidden away for what must have been twice my age, between the carved out pages of old stacked books.
We drank like secrets. His portrait played witness.
We promised between our teeth with tinged lips tight, keeping words in that might otherwise crumble us like great ancient empires.
We singed and smoldered in a burn that coated our throats, quelling a choke that kept climbing its way up from a chest that never quite stayed sunk. Boys grow up loving the clinking twist of unlocking deadbolts but men peek through keyholes. Because this is how men mourn. Silent and straight with head only slightly slanted.
But when my father betrayed his rigidity with words that clicked clean like unfastening locks, we traded this stale air in for wind laced with the electric taste of thunderstorms. We forgot how men mourn.
When my grandfather passed away, my brothers and I held my dad with lightning behind bleared eyes. Because we are young and foolish and still learning. Because we have umpteen days left to dress in bittersweet vestiges and, as far as we know, this is how men live on.
Jan 5, 2014
Jan 5, 2014 at 2:32 AM UTC
walks on tiptoes; an arachnid of sorts
with ballet legs and great white jaws sinks its
teeth beside the collar of your jacket,
unfastening the buttons to expose
a healthy beat beat beat but the shame creeps
in, carressing a bare torso, looking;
searching for the fat in which to feast.
Nov 2, 2011
Nov 2, 2011 at 4:27 AM UTC
My muse, my muse,
She’s here right now
She just took a shower and her hair is still wet.
She's wearing a bathrobe, she walks up to the bed and sits
When she crosses one leg over the other I catch a flash of her thighs
Inviting thighs, long legs
She has pretty feet
And pretty ankles,
I always look at feet.
She has delicate wrists
She has long thumbs, here she is
Now leafing through a magazine
With those long thumbs,
Long fingernails.
Her shoes are on the floor, shoes that she wore last night
They've fallen over on the carpet,
My eyes find my way back to her
She seems to have found something interesting in the magazine
Here she is, concentrated on it, her back is straight
In this light, this natural light,
Without make up,
She looks impossibly lovely,
Renoir would paint her.
I get out of bed and walk into the shower.
There’s something strangely intimate
About taking a shower in a girl’s bathroom,
Shampoo bottles and hair conditioners all around me
Water cascading down my bare chest
Recollecting and replaying scenes from the night before:
Unbuttoning her jeans, pulling them off
Seeing her Hello Kitty underwear
And laughing, and thinking it was cute
And saying, umm… so how old are you again?
Humour always works, yes, humour always works.
I love ********** this girl.
It seems as though I'm always ********** her.
At night in the living room, on the sofa
Unfastening her stockings and slowly rolling them off,
Next her skirt, then her underwear…
Sweet parting flesh
I begin thinking of how it’ll be, how it’ll go down
She's always in something classy,
But man, it seems as though I'm always ********** her.
Sometimes I strip everything off her body,
But I ask her to leave her earrings and heels on; they confirm her nakedness
Hoop earrings
Red lipstick
Red heels
I lie in the middle of the bed, lights are dim, she climbs onto the bed
Curls up between my legs, begins by kissing on my stomach...
Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says.
Great lovers lie in hell.
I'm falling asleep afterwards, but not her
*** invigorates me,* she says, tying her hair in a ponytail
This girl, she has the effect of lighting a matchstick in the dark.
She lays beside me and begins to read Jeanette Winterson
And just before I succumb to a deep slumber I remember something and tell her,
Baby, baby, baby, your Morse code interferes with my heartbeat.
Nov 3, 2013
Nov 3, 2013 at 4:45 PM UTC
he leaned over, breath hot against cool skin
and it didn't feel like fire, but it felt like a burn. and i closed my eyes, rapid moving things
nudging for an escape,
and thought i could hear heartbeats flooding my lungs
but from where wept, it sounded like anger.
and from where i heaved, it sounded like ripping flesh, like the slow drag of a zipper and the whip of an unfastening belt.
i could draw out the shape of him
without staring, without studying. he wanted me to remember.
& i remembered
It felt like fire then, and it burned like a flame and i opened my eyes, and kept them steady.
while, the train shook the house.
while these bones were cement things, laid out beside me.
don't cry, don't cry, my, darling, don't cry.
and for the most fragile moment,
swore his hands wound around my flesh, were there to mend me, not break me.
and for the briefest moment, i swore this was more than just
a broken body tapered to the mattress like a stain.
it wasnt raining, but it felt like it.
wait wait
the train is too loud and i feel like im being ****** right underneath
Wait
Like all flesh rubbed raw,
Everything stays a shade of pink
Sep 14, 2022
Sep 14, 2022 at 5:55 PM UTC
As I stand,
With Pimms in hand,
Your perfume I do sense,
(It was always pretty intense).
I fall into a trance,
As you make your entrance,
And I stare in awe,
At your fascinator.
Such exquisite taste
- surely not bought in haste -
It certainly fascinates,
And is sure to spark debates:
"Too much", "just seeking attention",
"She thinks she's Kim Kardashian".
But I think it's ace:
It accentuates your face,
Really brings out your ears.
So ignore all the sneers
Have a good night
Under the disco's light,
And I'll see you later,
For a closer look at that fascinator.
Yes, I'm my wife's traitor,
As I hope later
To be unfastening the
fascinator's fascinating fascinator.
Nov 16, 2018
Nov 16, 2018 at 6:23 AM UTC
I never claimed night fathered me.
that was my dead brother talking in his sleep.
I keep him under my pillow, a dear wish
that colors my laughing and crying.
I never said the wind, remembering nothing,
leaves so many rooms unaccounted for,
continual farewell must ransom
the unmistakable fragrance
our human days afford.
It was my brother, little candle in the pulpit,
reading out loud to all of earth
from the book of night.
He died too young to learn his name.
Now he answers to Vacant Boat,
Burning Wing, My Black Petal.
Ask him who his mother is. He'll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us
joins night's ongoing story
wherever night overtakes him,
the heart astonished to find belonging
and thanks answering thanks.
Ask if he's hungry or thirsty,
he'll say he's the bread come to pass
and draw you a map
to the twelve secret hips of honey.
Does someone want to know the way to spring?
He'll remind you
the flower was never meant to survive
the fruit's triumph.
He says an apple's most secret cargo
is the enduring odor of a human childhood,
our mother's linen pressed and stored, our father's voice
walking through the rooms.
He says he's forgiven our sister
for playing dead and making him cry
those afternoons we were left alone in the house.
And when clocks frighten me with their long hair,
and when I spy the wind's numerous hands
in the orchard unfastening
first the petals from the buds,
then the perfume from the flesh,
my dead brother ministers to me. His voice
weighs nothing
but the far years between
stars in their massive dying,
and I grow quiet hearing
how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.
Mar 13, 2014
Mar 13, 2014 at 11:50 PM UTC
* The Glass Menagerie
*She was ethereal in her beauty.
I always loved her of course.
But only from a respectful distance.
She collected glass animal's.
I always gave her one for birthdays.
She would kiss my cheek in thanks.
Not the kiss I craved but a kiss.
Her perfect French braids
Framing her lovely face.
I fantasized unfastening them
Slowly so her hair flowed
Like the soft spring rain
washing my bare skin.
She would show me the
intricate color mix
in her glass menagerie.
But I only saw the colors
of her hair her eyes her lips.
When the sickness came.
Her skin became
taught and translucent like glass.
The weight loss showing her frame
She looked more and more
Like one of her beloved
glass collection.
Then when we lost her
She left her collection to me.
But the one
I wanted and treasured
Was on a high shelf
Beyond the clouds
Far beyond my reach.*
Feb 3, 2016
Feb 3, 2016 at 10:46 PM UTC
The makings of slave
The makings of a slave
He treated me like a farmer tending land
He praised me nourished me
gently raked his fingers
through my soft brown soil
Poured forth affirming words like oil
SIGH
Spoiled
Then suddenly those kinds words stopped
Everything besides the unfastening of his zipper
from the bottom to the top
Without warning he'd
****** me up into his arms
till and toil my heartbroken soil around the clock
CELEBRATION
APPRECIATION NO WHERE TO BE found
SILENCE
NO SOUND
just that zipper from bottom to top
Thought it was me
So my heart I did unlock
In vain
steadily tick-tock tick -tock
We were
Distant planets drifting farther apart
I tell you the truth
It's the start of:
THE MAKINGS OF A SLAVE
Feb 28, 2014
Feb 28, 2014 at 4:40 PM UTC
I carefully stitched your name
embroidered each memory,
each beautiful piece of art
into the delicate walls
of my beating heart.
I put aside the threat of pain,
the tearing apart,
the risk of scars that would remain,
in the hope that I would never
have to
unpick, unfasten,
you, again.
How I was wrong.
And the unstitching never gets easier
and the short sharp scratch
Each time, you work your way back
Hurts just as much as the last.
Jan 9, 2015
Jan 9, 2015 at 10:27 AM UTC
I.
Our limbs
(winter - bared
to the cold)
paled
* orange peels in the pillow case *
against the duvet (snow littered with tangerine skins)
feet spilling out the window into the garden beneath our bed
* where hands nurture fruit grown in smoke and unfastening *
bunched tendons in our hands
compound torsos with the submission into, clawing for gravity of
(yes, love)
Of please - yes, love (love, love),
Of marbled - quaking , tongue - in - my - mouth - down - my - spine, sun - in - my - eyes - when- we - touch love,
{feeling}
Rose -y yellow
II.
Periwinkle artifice
Interspaced with
Drip
Smear
Blur
Of cloud (silver gray)
Sun-splash on James Joyce
As February’s finger
Blushes spring
III.
(You and your lustful multitudes)
Feb 26, 2018
Feb 26, 2018 at 10:54 AM UTC
darling i have meat stuck in my teeth
i have not a wreathe on my dome
i have a long measure of water
rammed in my throat, hemmed in like
your body’s canopy in the stream of me
i chase the silence like a tractable beast
in this hollow den of nothing
darling
i have not hands but chains
i have volcanoes and not moons
i see past the banners, an army of light
unfastening itself from the poles of foreverness
I have in my eyes again the frail azure
and the gyration of clouds mangling themselves
to figures, assumptions, colloid
endless snow, frayed beings moseying towards
rows of lengths and the autumnal abode of hills
turning green, brimming with the sex of pastures,
feasting in this fill of such heaviness, a name of what I cannot recall
darling the yellowbell darling the lignified amaranth
darling here at such meeting I am starved
with little movements of flesh
Jan 8, 2016
Jan 8, 2016 at 6:59 AM UTC
i wear my baseball cap backwards
so that everyone around me
can see all of my
half-way decent face
and then I pin
paraphernelia
in the shape of buttons
all around its duck-bill mouth so that
everyone around me
that doesn't care
knows that I care
about
something,
if not
everything.
and in due time
I lose some things
that surrounds my head:
the people, the relics.
Safety pins unfastening
from its worn fibers,
and fluttering
behind my arched back.
My mind,
therefore there is no
organic thought
vomitting through me although
arguably,
I very well might be thinking in
my purest form,
and so I settle in that comfort,
leaving behind a trail of buttons
so that everyone around me
that doesn't care about anything knows that
I can be just like them.
Mar 28, 2014
Mar 28, 2014 at 1:55 PM UTC
i was thinking of a love divined—
or an amaranth held close to the Earth.
i tossed it into the graveyard of names
and when i start to cut
a dozen more of flesh,
it will then begin to rise
yet i bequeath it no unction.
it is never a clock nor a pendulum-sea,
spindrift sloshing forth creases
of fabric, spinning a cataclysm
leaving all solemn in a torpor like a
tractable animal wounded behind
the bush.
i was thinking of eyes unfastening
the lovelorn, arriving with an image
i have long feared—
i walk with no clothes seething
with a bulge of life.
it's a cold room, this peregrine of silence.
i see mouths reduced to creases
on the wall. hands unscrewed to
loose hinges drifting apart.
teeth biting the lip of days in disquiet
as surf takes on multipliedly by the shore,
a hoard of wave-rustle.
i was thinking of something pure
when all yesterday's tumultuous memory
tumbled down like a reared on avalanche,
tossed to a basket, folded,
poised to be sullied once more.
Nov 25, 2015
Nov 25, 2015 at 8:39 AM UTC
*This dinner party is formal
like all the ladies
I am wearing my gown
my invite was for me
and plus one.
but its just me here.
all the gentlemen
are in tuxedos.
the man seated to my right
is deliciously, attractive.
I nightdream of him
unfastening my gown
and drowning me
in his wickedness.
The heady fragrance
of his cologne, adds
to the dream.
I wonder over the hum
of voices in the room.
is he the one I have
searched for for so long
the one I know is out there
in the big somewhere.
Our glasses clink in toast.
he bites sensuously into a
fresh summer strawberry.
its heavenly juices
leaving thier sweetest fragrane
onto his tongue.
He smiles at me
his eyes glancing
at my cleavage.
I feel like a spider
tempting him into my web.
The bait has been swallowed.
I smile back at him.
I wonder if he will taste
of strawberries later
when I loosen my hair
from its tight french roll.*
Sep 1, 2015
Sep 1, 2015 at 8:35 AM UTC
Into wonderment
Pondering permanence
Whether to weather
The cycle of storms
Am I even getting better?
Decreased desire to detach
But still unfastening the hatch
Going somewhere stationary
While still wishing I was withering
Where will I be buried?
And when?
Nov 28, 2017
Nov 28, 2017 at 9:37 AM UTC
*This dinner party is formal
like all the ladies
I am wearing my gown
my invite was for me
and plus one.
but its just me here.
all the gentlemen
are in tuxedos.
the man seated to my right
is deliciously, attractive.
I nightdream of him
unfastening my gown
and drowning me
in his wickedness.
The heady fragrance
of his cologne, adds
to the dream.
I wonder over the hum
of voices in the room.
is he the one I have
searched for for so long
the one I know is out there
in the big somewhere.
Our glasses clink in toast.
he bites sensuously into a
fresh summer strawberry.
its heavenly juices
leaving thier sweetest fragrane
onto his tongue.
He smiles at me
his eyes glancing
at my cleavage.
I feel like a spider
tempting him into my web.
The bait has been swallowed.
I smile back at him.
I wonder if he will taste
of strawberries later
when I loosen my hair
from its tight french roll. *
Aug 27, 2015
Aug 27, 2015 at 1:12 PM UTC
I feel constantly torn between laying in a grassy field,
surrounded by the morning dew,
in my best sundress,
and holding my breath until I pass out six feet under water.
I feel constantly torn between kissing his lips,
fingers entwined with the perfect fit,
bodies pressed together,
and unfastening my seatbelt as I drive into a tree.
I feel constantly torn between all of the beauty I want to indulge in,
and all the hatred I have for being alive.
Jun 19, 2014
Jun 19, 2014 at 1:59 AM UTC
*She was ethereal in her beauty.
I always loved her of course.
But only from a respectful distance.
She collected glass animal's.
I always gave her one for birthdays.
She would kiss my cheek in thanks.
Not the kiss I craved but a kiss.
Her perfect French braids
framing her lovely face.
I fantasized unfastening them
Slowly so her hair flowed
Like the soft spring rain
washing my bare skin.
She would show me the
Intricate color mix
in her glass menagerie.
But I only saw the colors
of her hair her eyes her lips.
When the sickness came
Her skin became
taught and translucent like glass.
The weight loss
showing her frame
She looked more and more
like one of her
beloved glass collection.
Then when we lost her
She left her collection to me.
But the one I wanted
Was on a high shelf
Beyond the clouds
Far beyond my reach.*
Dec 5, 2015
Dec 5, 2015 at 1:08 PM UTC
**Jude's version of the
Glass menagerie**
*She was ethereal in her beauty.
I always loved her of course.
But only from a respectful distance.
She collected glass animal's.
I always gave her one for birthdays.
She would kiss my cheek in thanks.
Not the kiss I craved but a kiss.
Her perfect French braids
Framing her lovely face.
I fantasized unfastening them
Slowly so her hair flowed
Like the soft spring rain
washing my bare skin.
She would show me the
intricate color mix
in her glass menagerie.
But I only saw the colors
of her hair her eyes her lips.
When the sickness came.
Her skin became
taught and translucent like glass.
The weight loss showing her frame
She looked more and more
Like one of her beloved
glass collection.
Then when we lost her
She left her collection to me.
But the one
I wanted and treasured
Was on a high shelf
Beyond the clouds
Far beyond my reach.*
Sep 8, 2016
Sep 8, 2016 at 9:56 PM UTC