"whitely" poems
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
20.6k
and what were roses. Perfume?for i do
forget…or mere Music mounting unsurely
twilight
but here were something more maturely
childish,more beautiful almost than you.
Yet if not flower,tell me softly who
be these haunters of dreams always demurely
halfsmiling from cool faces,moving purely
with muted steps,yet somewhat proudly too—
are they not ladies,ladies of my dreams
justly touching roses their fingers whitely
live by?
or better,
queens,queens laughing lightly
crowned with far colors,
thinking very much
of nothing and whom dawn loves most to touch
wishing by willows,bending upon streams?
9.7k
When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.
At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.
But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.
He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.
"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."
10k
if learned darkness from our searched world
should wrest the rare unwisdom of thy eyes,
and if thy hands flowers of silence curled
upon a wish,to rapture should surprise
my soul slowly which on thy beauty dreams
(proud through the cold perfect night whisperless
to mark,how that asleep whitely she seems
whose lips the whole of life almost do guess)
if god should send the morning;and before
my doubting window leaves softly to stir,
of thoughtful trees whom night hath pondered o’er
—and frailties of dimension to occur
about us
and birds known, scarcely to sing
(heart,could we bear the marvel of this thing?)
9.2k
XXIV
Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,
Shut in upon itself and do no harm
In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,
And let us hear no sound of human strife
After the click of the shutting. Life to life—
I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,
And feel as safe as guarded by a charm
Against the stab of worldlings, who if rife
Are weak to injure. Very whitely still
The lilies of our lives may reassure
Their blossoms from their roots, accessible
Alone to heavenly dews that drop not fewer,
Growing straight, out of man’s reach, on the hill.
God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.
7.2k
Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.
He is recuperating from something on the lung.
The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing :
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.
There is a dignity to this; there is a formality --
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.
They bow and stand : they suffer such attacks!
And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.
6.6k
If I were mild, and I were sweet,
And laid my heart before your feet,
And took my dearest thoughts to you,
And hailed your easy lies as true;
Were I to murmur "Yes," and then
"How true, my dear," and "Yes," again,
And wear my eyes discreetly down,
And tremble whitely at your frown,
And keep my words unquestioning
My love, you'd run like anything!
Should I be frail, and I be mad,
And share my heart with every lad,
But beat my head against the floor
What times you wandered past my door;
Were I to doubt, and I to sneer,
And shriek "Farewell!" and still be here,
And break your joy, and quench your trust--
I should not see you for the dust!
4.2k
A hundred threads
Whitely pass
Into the red curve.
The sea of grass and I survey.
Delicate folds shape the mass
As a cobweb napkin.
I sip daintily at
Stark faces in
The brilliant musk.
This is a struggle to
Recover my black bones
From velvet soul-eating sleep.
Here, inside of a glove
Which always seems to
Have an extra finger or two.
Continuing in a serene orbit,
Just a figure on a rail,
And silver day is an idiot greyhound,
Bounding instantly afterward
Rather like a run in a stocking
But not at all.
Jun 9, 2010
Jun 9, 2010 at 2:48 PM UTC
Weighing brutality's candour is taxing
Feeling the certainty, heavily dark,
Sonorous mutterings echo in twilight
Whitely, loquaciously, utterly stark.
***** ***** in a temperament simmering
Stalking through rage in a judgemental way,
Lurching for conflict from deep in the mindset
Locked in a skirmish of consequence play.
Searing white pain of brutality's candour
Reeling from obvious lack of control,
Obliquely collapsed beneath blue jackaranda
Flaccidly spent, I surrender my role.
Marshalg
In absentia
7 December 2011
Dec 8, 2011
Dec 8, 2011 at 12:15 PM UTC
As a maddened beast it charges
Emanating with expanse
Brute techtonic plate reaction
From the epicentre’s stance.
Huge concentric rings diverge
Expanding at horrific rate
Black, titanic, towering waters
Ploughing to a deadly fate.
*Kneeling in her bed of roses
Pollinating bees abound,
Morning sunbeams kiss her shoulders
Peaceful garden bliss surrounds.*
Surging to the coastal shelf
The black gigantis rears on high
Claws toward the placid beach
Seabirds scatter to the sky.
Tide receds to bare the reef
Stranded mackerel whitely leap,
Enormously the massive wave
Attacks the land and they who sleep.
Death comes fast to they who loiter
Violence in the tangled purge,
Massive pressures, crushing debris
Broken buildings in the surge.
Ships and cars are tossed asunder
Inexorably it slams
Far inland to slay those fleeing
Locked in highway traffic jams.
*Strange roar at the garden wall
Terrified, she finds her feet,
Roses, bees, sweet girl engulfed
As black entombedment swamps the street.*
Far inland the chaos flows
Wreaking death's destructive bands,
Halted now by highland hills
Where souls in horror, wring their hands.
Slow retraction leaving ruin
Desolation far and wide,
The smell of new death in the air,
Heartbreak in the countryside.
Marshalg
For Nippon
18 March 2011
Mar 17, 2011
Mar 17, 2011 at 4:44 PM UTC
How is it that I am now so softly awakened,
My leaves shaken down with music?--
Darling, I love you.
It is not your mouth, for I have known mouths before,--
Though your mouth is more alive than roses,
Roses singing softly
To green leaves after rain.
It is not your eyes, for I have dived often in eyes,--
Though your eyes, even in the yellow glare of footlights,
Are windows into eternal dusk.
Nor is it the live white flashing of your feet,
Nor your gay hands, catching at motes in the spotlight;
Nor the abrupt thick music of your laughter,
When, against the hideous backdrop,
With all its crudities brilliantly lighted,
Suddenly you catch sight of your alarming shadow,
Whirling and contracting.
How is it, then, that I am so keenly aware,
So sensitive to the surges of the wind, or the light,
Heaving silently under blue seas of air?--
Darling, I love you, I am immersed in you.
It is not the unraveled night-time of your hair,--
Though I grow drunk when you press it upon my face:
And though when you gloss its length with a golden brush
I am strings that tremble under a bow.
It was that night I saw you dancing,
The whirl and impalpable float of your garment,
Your throat lifted, your face aglow
(Like waterlilies in moonlight were your knees).
It was that night I heard you singing
In the green-room after your dance was over,
Faint and uneven through the thickness of walls.
(How shall I come to you through the dullness of walls,
Thrusting aside the hands of bitter opinion?)
It was that afternoon, early in June,
When, tired with a sleepless night, and my act performed,
Feeling as stale as streets,
We met under dropping boughs, and you smiled to me:
And we sat by a watery surface of clouds and sky.
I hear only the susurration of intimate leaves;
The stealthy gliding of branches upon slow air.
I see only the point of your chin in sunlight;
And the sinister blue of sunlight on your hair.
The sunlight settles downward upon us in silence.
Now we ****** up through grass blades and encounter,
Pushing white hands amid the green.
Your face flowers whitely among cold leaves.
Soil clings to you, bark falls from you,
You rouse and stretch upward, exhaling earth, inhaling sky,
I touch you, and we drift off together like moons.
Earth dips from under.
We are alone in an immensity of sunlight,
Specks in an infinite golden radiance,
Whirled and tossed upon silent cataracts and torrents.
Give me your hand darling! We float downward.
2.4k
Her novelty has faded.
The stars hang back, distant ladies-in-waiting.
The night sky, their palace, is eclipsed by cities
Exploding with neon lights and grotesque trees.
She is too romantic.
Inch by inch, the black sheath is drawn back,
Revealing her smiling crescent.
She keeps a faithful orbit, and stirs
Blue oceans with long white fingers.
In her full sphere
She is a perfect spotlight,
Turning quiet snowy fields into
Illuminated empty stages.
She plays peek-a-boo, uncovering lovers
Gleaming whitely in the mouths
Of beds.
The beauty of entwined limbs
Exposed in her milky radiance.
She is the sun’s soft reflection.
He is never dim, and the black
Silk bag, a sort of corset,
Is ready to devour her again.
The wine is drained from the glass.
Her smile has become a slit.
The single pearl
Gulped,
Cloaked in shadow again.
Oct 24, 2016
Oct 24, 2016 at 7:47 AM UTC
Music
by Stephen Vincent Benet
My friend went to the piano; spun the stool
A little higher; left his pipe to cool;
Picked up a fat green volume from the chest;
And propped it open.
Whitely without rest,
His fingers swept the keys that flashed like swords,
. . . And to the brute drums of barbarian hordes,
Roaring and thunderous and weapon-bare,
An army stormed the bastions of the air!
Dreadful with banners, fire to slay and parch,
Marching together as the lightnings march,
And swift as storm-clouds. Brazen helms and cars
Clanged to a fierce resurgence of old wars
Above the screaming horns. In state they passed,
Trampling and splendid on and sought the vast-
Rending the darkness like a leaping knife,
The flame, the noble pageant of our life!
The burning seal that stamps man's high indenture
To vain attempt and most forlorn adventure;
Romance, and purple seas, and toppling towns,
And the wind's valiance crying o'er the downs;
That nerves the silly hand, the feeble brain,
From the loose net of words to deeds again
And to all courage! Perilous and sharp
The last chord shook me as wind shakes a harp!
. . . And my friend swung round on his stool, and from gods we were men,
"How pretty!" we said; and went on with our talk again.
2k
She doesn't recognize it at first
The image on the DVD box with a DVD about boxing inside,
Reflecting the dim daylight whitely from its dim corner.
At first glimpse, she cringes - emblazoned on the front is a wound
More scab than face,
Of course meant to titillate brutal boys
Who want to see the blood fresh.
Then she thinks of good taste - no one just buys blood -
That curve there, blocked by sunlight, must be the seam of a punching bag
A brown one,
A symbol of the adrenaline-and-sweat Cinderella story inside.
Yes. That's it.
She shifts just a little to the left, away from the window, to discover
The glass slipper she's imagined
Is a black man's ear.
Jun 19, 2012
Jun 19, 2012 at 4:05 PM UTC
I used to love
the ripple
of her.
I Cherished
placque suns.
I walked amongst
the withered oaky clouds
reaching to the earth
in capillaries
of lightning.
I made
****** on journeys
in the night
to the
licquor store.
I could take refuse
and morph it
in my hands,
because they were
her
hands.
She was the gravity of neutrinos,
I spun
and
spun,
and threw off layers,
as her bra
lay on the floor
and the laces
of her ******
lay
whitely
in the corner of the room.
I could've been anywhere
in those final seconds,
the club with it's thousand
orbitals of dancing brilliance,
the park
with it's millionaires
of hate,
the senseless
desert
of my
heart.
I was in the rainforest
feeling the universe
in droplets,
and my pores screamed.
Destruction
is something to reminisce over,
and I moan
like a cat in the night
with it's broken leg.
I moan
like a dwarf star,
getting smaller
and
smaller.
Apr 2, 2012
Apr 2, 2012 at 7:57 PM UTC
i live inside a bubble, fly with me into this bubble
life used to be a hustle, but it ain't anymore
gotta make summin' or gotta take summin'
come fly with me, my cubies are shining whitely
i reside on a planet which is full of whole ones
re'in up for all the phantoms, their fandoms
art nouveau balcony, bluely shimmering rooms,
you enter the hallway like dreams, embers in ya eyes
brother, i am all-night like owls, heavily religious
by the end of the day, i will be ******* the devil
we call that fly night, for everyone staying on it
luridly white marbles, everybody trippin', trippin'
our bubble is like frippin: frippin freely
and i'm skating through the garden, jeezy
today's my birthday: 500 peace of cake
my heart's racing, amg, i'll be waiting in the snow
fly with me, into this bubble, bubble
i wanna be higher than ever, higher
with me, there is no struggle, struggle
i'll take you with me, bubble, bubble, bubble
i'm praying, while i'm driving, and when 'm praying
i am thinking and i talk myself into a coma
raising in a 911, our bubble, bubble
stay with me inside that bubble, bubble
i am trustworthiy, since i been dealing with souls
but sometimes i freak out and jump out of my window
cause i read my palm lines and learned, when i'll die
so i grew myself a plumage, like birds, for our bubble
don't come lookin' for me, i'll be waiting in the snow
or under miami's sunset, nuns will be sinning
dem lyrics are for dogz, dem lyrics are for sinners
i want to come right now, just like a coup d'etat
cubies filled with magic, come into my bubble
the crowd is filling the castle and stars
are raining down, you close your eyes
you close your eyes, escaping into the night
fly with me, into this bubble, bubble
i wanna be higher than ever, higher
with me, there is no struggle, struggle
i'll take you with me, bubble, bubble, bubble
Sep 5, 2020
Sep 5, 2020 at 2:48 PM UTC
Two hours earlier
i whispered to Whitely
"go, if you must..."
My dog Moe
is sad
his father, Whitely
just died.
how do i tell Ashleigh? Beatrice?
they're still in school...
Sally :(
Aug 17, 2017
Aug 17, 2017 at 2:44 AM UTC
Branches on the path did the rest of the work for me:
All I had to do was tear the rest of the canvas off my
Vans. The rubber sole floated where I threw it, bobbed
Whitely out of view. Now, tell me we can go
To my beloved 60s, the ones I know nothing about
While under umbrella’d leaves just touching the creek
We’re stealing kisses, my heart rides on box-car hitches
And rusted out Fords, all the way to absolute nowhere
But, something mauve glows down the way, utopias
And despots and kids who gave a **** knew what
They ought to fight for and did. Skip the ambiguity,
Stop all the foreplay, give me something real this time
While I drag my bones in a hometown I wasn’t born in
Praying the trees take back the concrete. I don’t know,
Say it’s the whiskey and cigarettes making me uneasy,
But there’s some elegance in the way I saw her move
That makes fidelity a hard, loving hand, just a little too
Hard then I’ll take my borrowed wings some vague
Direction north, past the towers of Lebanon,
Laid to rest with highschool friends, both dead
In wax and paper, tied in all these loose ends.
Jun 10, 2015
Jun 10, 2015 at 12:47 PM UTC
we were a certain
nothing
soaring on oblivious
pinions;in lonely plumes)blooming
accurate devotions
to AN azure benediction
riot whitely
steady disheveled
cumulus culmination
flap
flap flap
flap flap
your
exactly
featheredderehteaf
wings
May 8, 2010
May 8, 2010 at 12:57 PM UTC
*What ails us from knowledge
the flaw of being wised
is having less and less
things to be surprised!
Why bamboo groves creak
occurs ghost light
puppets can speak
stars fall at night!
How sun paints a rainbow
moths can make silk
summer sky is aglow
with whitely flowing milk!
Seems such a loss
death of ignorance
by effect and cause
hardly making sense!*
Feb 26, 2015
Feb 26, 2015 at 11:04 AM UTC
D
eath is a gray lady; waiting and.
she is whitely quiet but always niggling the
bones in our frameless panes. pale cheeks stained
onyx rivers or. ash skirt fluttering in no breeze. felt
but heard whispering in our.
dEath is a solid nothing. or green stems bent withering
petals dry under and stiff. blooming never more ever more.
a manure tree odoring better than.
death is a noise unheard blaring
but death isn't your delicate plush
perfectly imperfect perfection. in my cleft
stunningly dim. death is. waiting and.
a silent riot of colourless gardens frozen
infinite decay. a notion so sweetly bitter.
death is a gray lady!so cometo my sheets and spread
your legs and salty tears and feathers gently or.
peacefully scream deAth in the rapture
of
my
palms and.
Jun 20, 2010
Jun 20, 2010 at 11:02 AM UTC
w
w
wh
what loves
this
I?i
loves the
rushing of in girls
Summer when heat
does its lips in forked
seething.
I loves
the hush
of almost winter nights
and the concise
melancholy
of empty rooms.
I loves
the by
cherriest of wristness
to loosely
in vagrant slumber
stir whitely.
I loves
the brother of my brother, and
the little timid
of barely unviolence boys
(in fists very tightly which).
But.
w w ww what loves
Iis
the most
of life
and lessing
too
of it
into
primest daftness of sleep.
Nov 14, 2013
Nov 14, 2013 at 4:00 AM UTC
o
,
little star
with fingers
gowned nimble
fickles numbly
bickering the
night with
perhaps slamming
bruises off white
fast timidity
o,
simply dusting
forever lovely
without mortal
err ere the dull
mother of budding
s
-tupid unheavy
light
what slashes
night briefly
impeding
darkness flaky
flaking breaking
in summer
making
sorry ladies
who sleeping
fairies dote
'pon slick
penultimate
spheres
where
heaven
whitely moors ,
her softly
and her
deftly
marvelous ........................
4ever ,
and 4 '
ever . "
ever , '
ever . '
eVEr : '
Apr 5, 2011
Apr 5, 2011 at 7:31 PM UTC
the defined of nothing of chaste finite summer,
you of primrose heat
you of whitely stroked youth
you of pale and freckled dumb beauty
you of faultless poppied fields, sick with colour
you, Summer, neat of hands, sticky of lip
blunder sweetness: candied sighs of limp fragrant
earth, Summer, the deepest languor of thy supple
thighs, eat. laugh. die.
Jul 22, 2012
Jul 22, 2012 at 8:31 PM UTC
i speak let's say i speak and let's say i sing
whatthen?i sing; i say
whitely of your lips
i sing by them
i am lifted by them
they come beneath each foot
they come their strongness leaping
they come, and Dear, you
by them you charge
and Dear
against them Summer's dull
it shines not
it heats not
it feels not sudden or serene
for though it golden rushing thunders
your lips are far more perfect wonders
Jul 22, 2013
Jul 22, 2013 at 6:09 AM UTC