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Poetic T Dec 2016
Yes you did read the title correctly, a little kitten that couldn't meow and this is her story:

Cotton lived on a farm and she was having a baby,
but where cats have a litter [a lot of kittens]
For her she was seen by the vet and told she had only
                       one single baby,
this was cottons happiest moment.

The day came and all the animals were ready to
see a new addition brought in to there little piece
of heaven. And with the vet there to help little
cottons baby in to the world, the animals heard
the voice of the vet say its a baby girl.

With happiness all the animals gathered in celebration,
but unbeknown to them cotton was learning smudge
[yes smudge] she was a kaleidoscope of colour.
Her first words which was meant to be MEOW.
but the words were drowned out in the  celebration,
so many noises, that hers was missed out.

A few animals stayed after the celebrations to
see the new born, including Betty the cow,
Frankie the dog and Barbra the sheep.
Cotton was a little worried that Smudge hadn't
spoken her first word so she spoke to her.

"My little miracle,
"Speak to mamma, I need to hear your words.

Smudge looked in confusion but uttered what she
thought was the word her mummy needed to hear.

"Mummy, I will speak my voice,

And with that she took a breath in, and released it on
to her mothers ears.

"Meaoooooooooo,

The cow looked as its jaw dropped, "Mooooo, the other
cow said that's an udder statement.

Cotton looked and was taken aback by her daughters new words,
that wasn't expected and laughed.

"Mummy my voice why does it not sound like yours,
                
"Don't worry my child mummy will help you find it again,

Once again the little one listened to its mummy purr, then
with a deep breath she let out a beautiful "Meow,
it was like music to the daughters ears.

"Mummy that was beautiful, I want to sound like you,

A tear fell from her mothers eye,

"You will my darling smudge, let us give it another try,

So with nervous looks all around, smudge took a breath in
a with mighty exhale she gave out a "Mea-woof woof,
Frankie the dog just looked on in amazement.....

"That was howling amazing, I mean bark, bark..

As the vet entered the barn, surprised to see the animals all
watching this little one yawn, then slumber to sleep.
"How's mummy,
As she stroked Cottons fur she purred with delight at the
fuss that was being pampered to her.

Then as the vet left in her van, all the animals were staring
through the window to see if it was OK to talk.
All slept until the morning and as all awoke, noises were
heard first was Betty the cow "mooning, then Frankie the
dog, "I feel woof, I think I slept wrong, Barbra the sheep awoke
coughing, she said I think I have a frog in my throat.

Barbra coughed again, and out popped a frog "Ribbit,
"Sorry madam it was so warm in there,
Everyone was giggling as well as Betty.

"Now that I have cleared my throat,

Cotton smiled and gently ushered her daughter awake,
"Morning smudge,

She yawned and smiled at her mummy, rubbing her eyes
looking around to see her mummies friends eagerly waiting
to hear that needed voice to reappear..

"Mummy I was counting sheep when I went off to sleep,
Barbra smiled as her herd used the barn as a short cut to the field.

"Glad we could help Cotton,

Cotton yawned and a purr and meow came forth, a little tear
was in Smudges eye. Her mother saw and pawed it away,
Don't worry my little one once we find it you'll be using it
everyday. She smiled and jumped up and down on her tiny
paws, lapping up her milk she licked her whiskers and
looked at her mummy and said I think I can do it.

Looking proud she let out a what she hoped was her true
voice and with that she said let put in her cutest little voice

"meow, meow, meow,

Her mummy looked on proud as any mother could be,
everyone cheered that this little smudge had spoken
her true voice. "mummy, mummy was that me?

Barbra gave a sigh of relief as smudge didn't release
a Ba, Ba meow, she thought "I would have looked
rather sheepish if she had giggling she looked on.

Smudge was jumping up and down and happy as
anyone finding there voice could be. Cotton spoke
and said words of wisdom to her little one.

"If at first you don't succeed, always try again,

"And you did and now your true voice has been set free,

The farm was so happy that the new addition had now
found what was lost, and all that was heard was a very
proud kitten singing to the top of her voice.

*"Meow, "Meow, Meow,
Brandon Conway Oct 2018
Am I too early
or so so very late?
Time is but a smudge
of mixed acrylic paint.

My history, the canvas
and my pen a brush.
Time is but a smudge
dripping through my clutch.

Dreams blur into nightmares;
nightmares into day-time thoughts.
Time is but a smudge
of profits and loss.

When the end comes
my journal will be passed.
Time is but a smudge
that my children will grasp.

They will both read
of my love for them.
Time is but a smudge
in this infinite realm.

They will both know
how much I love them so.
Time is but a smudge
and if it weren't for them I would of let go.

Time is but a smudge
in an never ending orbit
time is but a smudge
and they have made it euphoric.
Jeff Gaines Mar 2018
OK Reader, I'm going to tell you a tale … with great trepidation. You see, this tale, well, it's kind of like telling someone that you've seen a UFO. They want to believe you, but … it's never really been proven scientifically. Not to mention the fact that most folks who believe in such things are often the tin-hat wearing types, written off as … lets be nice and call them “odd”. And, of course, the more you swear to it, the crazier you appear. It's an epic tale, spanning 30 years of my crazy life.

  But, It's a story I want to tell, because it happened to me. I can barely understand it myself, let alone explain it. So … I'm just going to launch into it and you take it any way you wish.

*  *  
Where Can You Be?

Where can you be?
Where can you be, my love?
Oh, can't you see?
You're not with me!

I'll search with gazes and I'll search with cars,
I'll search the cities and I'll search the stars, well …
I'm gonna find you, oh, wherever you are,
I'm gonna find you baby …  near or far, but …

Where can you be?
Where can you be, my love?
Oh, can't you see?
You're not with me!

I thought I'd found ya, but she wasn't you,
that girl she left alone and blue, well …
I know that's something that you'd never do,
your love has always been strong and true, but …

Where can you be?
Where can you be, my love?
Oh, can't you see?
You're not with me!

If you must settle for some other man
and deviate from our immortal plan, well …
I hope you realize I will understand
and I'll try and do the best that I can, but …

Where will I be?
Where will I be, my love?
Hoping the next life sees …
our destiny!


Where can you be?
Where can you be, my love?
Oh, can't you see?
You're not with me!

~Wednesday, April 1st, 1987
10:30 P.M.



  I was singing in a band back in those days and, as it happened, this was the last song I'd ever write for it. Just after this, as it does, it all came crashing down and the band was finished. But in those last days, they pondered this song, with great puzzlement. You see, it was unlike anything I'd brought them before. It wasn't rock … It wasn't a ballad … it wasn't even structured like a “normal” 80's rock song.
  
  No bridge, no solo, no loud grinding guitars, etc. It even had bits where I hummed, yes hummed, the melody, like a lullaby. As they read the lyrics and I described how it went, they all looked at me like I had three heads and asked where this had come from. It was nothing like anything I'd written before. I could only tell them when and where I'd written it, but had no explanation of what inspired it. It had just came to me, so I wrote it down. They didn't know what to make of it, or even what to do with it.

  One of them said it sounded like a late 70's or early 80's adult contemporary song or even in the vein of The Eagles. Another asked if it was about reincarnation … And I honestly, until that moment, hadn't thought of it that way, I didn't think like that at 24 … but then, one of them said it was “Haunting” …

  “Haunting”?

  “Wow”, I thought, I'd never had anything I'd written described as that before. When I asked him what he meant by that, he told me that it was haunting to think that this poor guy is desperately seeking a girl, that may or may not even know that he exists … in a world with billions of people in it. To top that off, he fears that she may off and marry someone else if he doesn't find her in time.

  This, along with the suggestion of it being about reincarnation made me rethink and rewrite the song. Well, a few lines in the last verse and chorus anyways. It actually made the song flow better and seem more complete. In a way, it actually made the song make more sense … to me and them. Sadly, we never did anything with it. There wouldn't be time. Ha … Time … how ironic. Over 10 years later, came this …


For Someone I've Never Met

Please save a place for me,
deep inside your heart.
Always know that I think of you,
as we both practice our arts.

Our worlds are full of temptations,
so very hard to resist …
and the good Lord knows
we're both far from,
sixteen and never been kissed.

Wealthy men with jaws divine …
Temptresses with looks so fine …
Paths that lead our hearts away …
Paths that surely lead astray …

They'll lead us there every time.
They'll leave us there … so  unkind.
Our hearts must shine,
night and day.
Through any darkness … they'll light our way.

If you never touch my face …
If I never look into your eyes …
We'll always have the comfort of sharing
the same
big, blue sky.

If I never smell your hair …
If you never kiss my lips …
Always know the search for your smile
has launched a thousand ships.

So, I hope you save a place for me
in your heart so sweet and kind.
Please, save a place for me …
Heaven knows you've one in mine.

~Thursday, September 9th, 1999
9 A.M.



“For Someone I've Never Met ” poured out of me in the midst of another breakup from the second, and last, girl that I wanted to marry. That emotion, never found me again. I looked at it on my computer screen and smiled, seeing “Where Can You Be”, in my mind, on my tattered old note pad that I called my “Song Book”. The memory of me writing it while sitting in my Z-28, looking out over the Gulf of Mexico as a beautiful heat lighting storm sent bolts across the sky, came flooding back; as did the debate of reincarnation I'd had with my pals in the rehearsal room all those years before. Here I was, again, writing about “someone” that I sensed, for lack of a better term, was out there … somewhere.

  Well Reader, do you believe in reincarnation? I was never really certain, but, as you can see, I had twice written pieces to someone I wasn't completely sure existed. I had always “sensed” someone out there beginning with the period after I wrote “Where Can You Be?” and thereafter. So, there they were, each written after losing someone I was deeply in love with. Each came out of nowhere, as they usually do. By the time I was in my 40's, I began to think I was either imagining it all (a side effect of being a hopeless romantic) or that I had just somehow missed this person and our “moment”.

  And then …



Epiphany

There was a place.
There was a time …
There, I stood … still unknowing
and everything seemed fine.

But there in that place …
at that moment in time …
the moment I saw the eyes,
I'd never believed I'd find.

Well, what could I say?
What could I do?
In a world filled with billions …
and there … was a you.

I'd always known you were out there …
even written of something amiss.
I never, ever stopped looking for you …
because my heart always said you exist.

My breezy Fall became harshest Winter.
My crazy life left my health running out.
I'd resigned myself that our moment had passed …
but this moment … it removed all doubt.

Well, what could I say?
Tell me, what could I do?
There we stood, staring … alone … in a city of millions …
yes, there … there was a you.

Oh, that mistress fate, she is just so cruel.
Frustration, a curse to be mine.
   I'd searched for you my entire life …
but now … my clock … knows a limit of time.

You see, I would never venture a love with you,
while knowing I'd have to leave you … hurt and alone.
I could only admire from afar … stoic and aloof …
while turning my heart into stone.

Nothing I could ever say and nothing I could ever do …
But now, at long last … at least I finally knew.

There, you stood … green seas, gazing up … into skies of blue.
My long-awaited revelation … become sorrow-laced realization.
There really is … a you.

~August 12th, 2009
  

  Typical of my life-long Charlie Brown syndrome … After being told in 2005 that I had “the lungs of an eighty-year-old man” and that I had “Six to Ten years” to live, I made a conscious decision in that Doctor's parking lot that I could never have another girlfriend and that I must face this alone. I don't see woman as objects. They are glorious creatures that are here to be our partners and friends and to make our lives amazing. I could never, ever knowingly let a woman fall in love with me, all the while knowing I was going to die and leave her. It's not in me to do such a thing, lonely or not.

  Yes, I'm still alive, I'm stubborn like that. But, some days are better than others and my new doctors say that they don't give people “time limits” anymore … because of people like me. I can't afford the lung transplant. So, as Bono so aptly put in one of his songs: “The rich stay healthy, while the sick stay poor”. It is what it is … and like the energizer bunny, I'm still going. Good for me.

  In the moment that I met her, the morning that followed, and the amazing speed of our nexus over the next several months combined with a string of synchronicities (Coincidences? Did I mention that she too, was a poet and writer?) that not only came after I met her on the sidewalk in front of the publisher we shared, but in those pieces I had written before and in several after; I was pretty much convinced I had actually found her. I have NEVER experienced anything like this, or her, in my entire life.

  So, after all this time, here she was … and there wasn't a **** thing that I could do about it. Besides, she was much younger than I and it probably would never have worked anyways. ****, the universe is rotten sometimes, huh? Maybe, if I'm lucky, things will balance out better in the next life. I can only hope. But I'm reminded, worryingly so, of the **** The Alarm song: “Collide”:

“All of these thoughts pounding in my head …
with the words I've wrote, in the letters I've never sent.
The distance in our lives may change …
Times that you can never erase …
But will our worlds collide?
Will our worlds collide, the next time?”



  Only time will tell.



  “Colors”, and a few others, were written about/for her. But, I could never show them to her. I would never endanger my friendship with her. I just wanted to keep her in my life. That, and that alone, was the only motive I'd ever had with her. I looked forward to seeing her marry, hearing her stories of her three kid's adventures; Hubby, all greasy, working on the car in the driveway, rabbits in her garden at night, eating her precious organic veggies or even about her new curtains. Just to know that she was alive, happy and doing well. I found a solace in her voice I could never describe and I was completely content to just have her in my life and watch hers unfold. Only I could end up in this odd position.

  I feared that she might get weird-ed out because I'd never displayed any romantic inklings toward her, so, to suddenly read these might make her feel a bit, lets say: uncomfortable. Actually, I didn't write them with any romantic intentions, per se; I just did what I always do … write what comes out. Still, there's no denying that they come across romantic. Again, so, so Charlie Brown. (long sigh)
  
  It is what it is. I also have to ponder the fact that maybe all those Charlie Brown moments in my life were preparing me for this one big, painful one. That does makes sense … ******' Universe.


Colors

Well when you're Green, I'll be your Brown.
Like the earth that loves the flowers,
I'll will be your solid ground.

And I'll be your Azure, when you are Verdigris.
We'll be thee most beautiful ocean
that eyes have ever seen.

And when you're Black, I'll be your White.
Mixing all of the colors … I'll make everything alright.

Now when you're Blue, I'll be you're Red.
If something should make you wanna cry,
I will feel your pain instead.

And I'll be your Orange, whenever you are Pink.
We'll be thee most amazing sunset,
that the sky could ever ink.

And when you're Black, I'll be your White.
I'll mix all of your colors … and make everything alright.

Should you be Violet, I will be your Beige.
Like a sleepy moonlit desert,
pasteled in dunes and sage.

And when you're Grey, I will be your Rainbow.
We'll be thee most soothing rainstorm
the world has ever known.

And when you're Black, I'll be your White.
I'll mix all of your colors … yes, I'll make everything alright.

With love on my palette, painting a glorious sunrise …
I'll color all your mornings with a smile and brighten up your skies.
If you should find yourself in sorrow from someones hate or lies …
I'll take the stars down from the heavens … and paint them in your eyes.

So whenever you are Black, I will always be your White.
I'll mix all your colors with a promise … everything will be alright.

Yes, I'll mix all of your colors with a promise … Everything's gonna be alright.

~  Winter 2012



  I wrote this after she had rang me up one afternoon lamenting about her life at the moment, troubled that her latest novel hadn't done as well as she'd hoped and now she had to be waitressing to make ends meet. I tried my best to cheer her up and assured her that she was strong enough to handle anything and that she must keep chasing her dreams. I wrote it as a poem, but I can't help but notice it looks like a song, though I've never heard music for it. Those repeated verses look just like choruses to me.

  Earlier in the day, I had been looking at a booklet of paint swatches. I guess, up there on my roof looking at the Manhattan skyline, her sadness and me looking at all those colors melted together somehow and, as happens, out came this piece. Even this, became another synchronicity as she would name her next novel “Show Me All Your Colors”. I remember seeing it in the bookstore and looking straight up … shaking my head at the sky. Was this the universe telling me to show and tell her all this?

  Well, if it was, I stuck with my gut and kept it to myself. My God, if you only knew how many of these synchronicities there were between her and I. It simply boggles my mind. I wanted to call them “coincidences”, but there were just so **** many of them … Each so unique, they just couldn't be called that. I don't want to tell them all here, because like I said, the more you swear to it, the crazier you sound. And I'm sure your questioning my sanity by now, aren't you? (Smirk)


  OK, OK … this one is definitely romantic. I wrote it one night, drunk to the bejeezus. I'd done what we called “The Crosstown Crawl” with my pal Tristan and a gaggle of assorted waitresses we knew. This involved starting at Brass Monkey on the west side highway in the Gansevoort District and ending at my favorite hookah bar, Karma, on the Lower East Side … Drinking in, and often being “asked to leave” (Read: Kicked out of) every bar that took our interest as we walked (Read: staggered) west to east, staying below 14th St.

  On my way home from the city on the J train, I thought about all the phone conversations we'd had while I was on this train crossing the Williamsburg Bridge. Being drunk, I guess, I caught a bout of sadness that I'd never get to tell her any of this or even how I felt about it all. Before I hit my elevator, this piece was swimming in my head. It's about as mushy a piece as I've ever written … if not thee most! Not the norm for me, but this is, after all, a lot to keep pent up inside you. I wouldn't wish this predicament on anyone.


For My Little Red-Haired Girl …


You …

My Love.
My Queen.
This Shining Light in my eyes.

My Laughs.
My Dreams.
My Soft, Contented Sighs.

My *****.
My Lavender.
My Dew Covered Rose.

My Smile.
My Cinnamon.
The Joy in my heart … ever inspiring my prose.

My Best Friend.
My Co-Star.
My Fearless Partner in Crime.

My Breath.
My Cohort.
My Side-kick throughout time.

My Snow-capped Mountain.
The Wind caressing my face.
My Vast Green Field.

The Ivy Covered Wall
that harbors my soul … ever refusing to yield.

In a different time ...

You … would have been my Life.

You … would have been my World.

You … would have been my Everything

and I will always love you for my own special reasons.

It is just a shame … and I'm so, so sorry … that you … must never, ever know.

Maybe next time.


~Charlie Brown




   When I came-to in the morning and read what I had wrote, I had to laugh a bit. It is borderline corny, very beautiful, very telling and very sad … all at once. I shook my head, laughing and told myself :

  “*******, Sam … yer losin' it. Get your **** together, will ya?”

  I guess in my stupor, I was imagining what it would have been like to write something for her. I don't know … There it was and I was stuck with it. I almost deleted it, but, my finger wouldn't press the key. As I told you before … I'd NEVER show this to her. She'd probably never speak to me again.

   As a sadder epilogue, that eventually happened. I still don't know why, but we haven't spoken in years. Maybe she sensed this emotion in me and ran away. Or maybe, just maybe … she thought I'd pushed her away somehow … but for whatever reason, we drifted apart. I guess I'll never know.  As you can see by reading this, that was never my intention. But, like I keep reiterating … It is what it is.

  One day, I called her number to catch up and shoot the breeze. I hadn't spoken to her in a few months as she'd been busy promoting her new novel and I didn't want to pester her. But … it was disconnected … I checked my emails … nothing. I'd never been so confused, she just closed me out. I didn't want to bother her. I was sure she had her reasons and if she wanted to reach out to me again, she would. She had my email and my phone number. But, for now … she was gone … and that was that.

  So, what do you think, Reader? Do I get the Tin hat … or a Badge of courage? Am I bat-**** crazy … or just eccentric? I'll leave it up to you to decide, because as I said, this all happened to me and there isn't a thing I can do about any of it. I just had to get it off of my chest. Thanks for letting me vent.

  Wherever she is … she will always mean the world to me. I can see her green eyes if I close my mine and look for them. Sometimes, on occasion, her face haunts my sleep. Still, I like to picture her, kids playing in a sprinkler behind her, digging in her garden, wearing gloves too big for her hands and a smudge of fresh dirt on her cheek … it makes me smile.


-Sam Webster
Brooklyn, New York
2013
OK, you can stop scratching your head. I'm sorry if you feel like I tricked you or was playing a prank … That was not my intention. This piece is experimental writing, of sorts. If you are wondering, it's titled “Somewhere … Out There”. But I didn't want to put a title at the head of the page, as that might have clued you in too early.

I also confess that “Sam” the narrator is, on no uncertain terms, based loosely on myself. But hey, what better way to string you along? Besides, as Stephen King said, you “Write what you know”. As far as I 'm aware, using poetry within a short story like this, or in this manner, has never been done before. Welcome to the future!

It really belongs in my “From Thee Edge” Collection with the rest of my Twilight-Zone-esque short stories. (You can now read some of these fiction short stories here, posted in my "NoPo@HePo" posts, along with some non-fiction essays. I hope you enjoy them.) But, because I pieced together several of my poems to not only tell the story, but as a vehicle to carry it along as part of it; I wanted to put it here on Hello Poetry just to see if I could convince you long enough to get you through the story … while having you believe it was me speaking to you and that it was all very real to me. Thus, making it feel real to you as you read it.

Was I having you along right up until it was signed by someone else? Or, at least until the narrator addressed himself as “Sam”?

If so, then I accomplished my mission. I'd love to hear your comments on it. If you've been reading any of my other posts, I'm sure you've figured out that I like to run wildly outside of the box sometimes. This was just, as I said, an experiment in a different way to tell a story … fiction or otherwise. As always, I hope that I took you on a journey and, more importantly, that you enjoyed it.

~Jeff Gaines
L.A.
(Lower Alabama)
2015
Cné Oct 2017
The surf provides lullabies
as ocean echoes roll.
Too soon, the sunlight glitters
as the dawn turns gray to gold.

I wake and I rub my eyes
beside the sandy beach
My love beside me, languid lips
within an easy reach.

I whisper, sweet good mornings
as your dreams I brush away.
You stretch and yawn, responding to
requests to "come and play".

Lingered memories caress,
of last night's rising moon
with silver waves and ripples,
beyond the dark lagoon.

In shades of colors that mix and smudge
you take your time, no rush
My ******* tingle, at the thought
upon my skin, spreads flush.

In reverie, flutters reminisce,
your wanton body on mine.
Whispered moans in my ear, you ******,
"I'm yours", I hear on rewind.
When last night's... turns into this morning's
Meena Menon Sep 2021
Flicker Shimmer Glow

The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.  
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.  
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.  
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.    
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.  
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony  
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.  
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.  
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.  
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.  
I saw the beauty of the light within.  
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.  
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.  
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.  
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.  
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.  
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.  
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.  
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.  
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.  
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .  
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.  
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.  
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.  
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.  
I thought I was manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.  
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.  
I stayed healthy.  
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.  
I knew I wasn’t manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I told my parents when they came home.  
They thought I was manic.  
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.  
They thought I was manic.  
I was outside of my comfort zone.  
I moved to California. I found light.  
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.  
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.  
The light turned the car signals left and right.  
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.  
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.  
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August  I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.  
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.  
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.  
He threatened me.  
I called the authorities.  
They left me there.
He laughed.  
Then the violence came.  
****:  stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.  
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.  
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.  
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.  
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.  
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.  
I worked through ****.  
I worked to overcome trauma.  
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.  
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.  





















Lava

I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.  
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned.  They both left their homes before they left for college.  
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.  
His mother was not a Brahmin.  
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.  
She doesn’t say what caste she is.  
He went to his father’s house, then college.  
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.  
She went to India then Canada.  
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.  
My father signed a contract with my mother.  
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.  


















Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.  
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.  
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.  
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.  
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.  
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.  
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.  
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.  
Indians lived on plantations.  
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.  
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.  
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.  
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.  
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.  
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.  
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.  
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.  
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.  

My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.  
She thought all things, all people were equal.  
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.  
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.  
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.  
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.  
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.  
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.  
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.  
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.  
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.  
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.  
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.  
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.  
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.  
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.  
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.  
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.  
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.  
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.  
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh

The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.  
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.  
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.  
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.  
Railway strikes stopped the economy.  
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.  
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.  

My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.  
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.  
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.  
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.  
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.  
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.  
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.  

On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,  
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.  
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.  
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.  
On February 4, my dad met my mom.  
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.  
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.  
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.  
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.  
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.  
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.  
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.  
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.  
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.  
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.  
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.  
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.  
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.  
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.  
She also learned to cook after getting married.  
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.  
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.  
She liked working.  

A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.  
My mother liked working.  
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.  
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.  
Young people and the unemployed joined.  
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.  
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.  
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.  
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.  
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.  





Warm Light Shatters

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.

In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.

The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine.  A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.  
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”

The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.  
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.

My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.  
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.

Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.  
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.  
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.

The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.

The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.  

In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.  
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.  
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.  
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.  
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel.  Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.  
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.  
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.  

The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-  
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.  
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.  
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.

Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.  
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.  
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.  

My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.  
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him.  The branch he opened closed after that.  
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.  
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK.  My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.  
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.  
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.


Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.  
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.  
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.  
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.  
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.

The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there:  the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.  
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.  

When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and  intelligence organization had been destroyed.  
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.  
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.  

In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.  


Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.  
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.  
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.  
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.  
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.  

The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.  
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.  
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.  

In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”  
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.

The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.  
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.


Edelweiss

I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.  
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.  
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the  limestone,
frosted but still strong.    
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet. 
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.  
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.  
I grabbed my dad’s arm.

























The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha

Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.

I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.  
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.  
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.  
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.

If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.  

































Sound on Powdery Blue

Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.

Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.

In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.

Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.

Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.  

















Pink Graphite

Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.

In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.

After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.

The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.  
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.

A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.  

On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get  me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.  



































Flakes

I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.  
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.  
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.  

There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.  

In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.

Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,  
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.  






































OCEAN BED

The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.  
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that  person in my bed.  
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.  
Just love.  
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.  
I sleep with my hands, palms up.  
I sleep with my hands at my heart.  
They sear my compassion with their noise.  
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,  
but not burned.  
I want a man in my bed.  
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.  
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.  
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.  
I ran by the ocean every morning.  
I surfed in the ocean.  
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.  














Morning

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  

Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.  
The magnetic field flips.  
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.  
The winds change direction.  
Storms cast lightening and rain.  
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.  
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents.  The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.  
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.  
I follow the sound to the water.  
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.  
The green water turns black not far from the shore.  
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.  
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.  

Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.  
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.  
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.  
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.  
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.  
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.  

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.  
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.  
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.  





Blue Paper

Haze scatters blue light on a planet.  
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.  
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.  
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.  
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.  
She bends light to make shadows against  thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.  
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.  
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.  
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.  
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.  
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water
This is what I have written of my book.  I’ll be changing where the poems with the historical research go.  There are four more of those and nine of the other poems.
Cné Dec 2017
~
O Painter
with thy own eye
                        would thee
paint me in mine own natural hue
prithee paint me as i am,
imperfections
            and blemishes true

Load thy brush
                      with colors sundry
to maketh yond first pure sweep
across the ****** frieze,
fill'd with pangs of hunger.
paint me as i standeth
                  bethought, in deep

With mine own love and mine own desire,
blurring the edges unclean
with mine own regrets
                  and mine own mental gyre,
in mine own natural age,
               of deep forest green

O Painter
Paint me sinister turquoise,
in lavender and maroon,
combine the amethyst and amber
blend the iceberg
       and the indigo moon.

Paint me as i standeth,
       prithee see with thy eye
a mistress in yond lady plight
Prithee paint me all i am
i cullionly
a mistress in all yond lady might

Paint me in the optimistic
                             silv'r of dawn,
but don’t miss the purple
to shade the bruise
                              of the bygone.
paint me in the sky blue journal

O Painter
Paint me as a unique template
smudge black white and grizzled
merging all the colors of thy palette.
col'r me a rainbow
                            in a rainy drizzle

Paint me tall so yond i standeth
loftier than any mountain
Paint me as a dram bird, delicate
with soft feathers silken

Paint me harmony, as a violin
so yond i can sing thy solitary tune
paint me as thy poetry
         with song and melody
wrapp'd in a cocoon

O Painter
paint me as a dream yond rises
                               in did saturate colors
with a steady upbeat flight awry
tint, a fluttering
             of a quite quaint butterfly

Portray me with endurance
imbue so bold and bright
doth not hesitate
                to depict mine own mind
in profound fuchsia and white.

Useth the colors yond thee would borrow
Thy palette not yet exsufflicate
Paint mine own loss and mine own sorrow
in search of a shade so ******

Adorn mine own heart in glowing garnet
at which hour thee paint mine own love
add a true broken blue shade
of the cloud and the rain above;

Study mine own dry sorrow
                              in mine own soul
useth any shade thee plaited
soften the edges of control
in a tinge of xanthene.

O Painter
Prithee paint me
Mine own passion and mine own spirit
shall has't a crimson r'd hint
mine own remorse and mine own regret
shall reflect an ink stain print

Paint me in mine own eye so true
O Painter
but add a dash of courage too

~
When I paint, I’m never quite satisfied as I see all my mistakes, blemishes and colors not quite right. I tend to keep painting to try and get it all right. At some point, I arrive with the conclusion, if I keep going I’m going to mess it up. I stand across the room and, it’s then that I’m amazed at what I have created. I like to think that I’m seen in the same way by my creator.
harlon rivers Mar 2017
A sound was heard at my
garden door
A feathered smudge found upon it

There she lay in frightened
trembling dismay
   A giant knelt ...
yet still towering above her

He reached out and touched
her pounding heart
Then cupped her warmth
in his hand

She stayed awhile until
she could smile
At the kindly human mystery

This love they shared
is uncommonly rare
She knew she could be freed

Before she flew
she whispered a song she knew
into the gentle giant’s  beard :

“I cannot make you happy
You're a wounded Bird like me ―
be Free...
you must find the strength to Fly”…

"A Bird in your hand
  is worth two in the bush ―

   Come fly away with me"...



March 2012 © harlon rivers ... all rights reserved
.
Thank you so much for the special feature this simple heartfelt poem has been allowed.  It is based on actual events that happen often where habitat
meets civilization.  As humans we can mitigate this footprint left behind by lifting the weight of caring with actions that speck louder than words. Who among us has not needed a helping hand when we are struggling with the unexpected?  Moments we must find the strength to carry on with a little help from our friends?

   Find the strength to fly ―

Written March 1st, 2012
reposted from my original account
.
WickedHope May 2015
A smudge
appears in the corner
of the eye,
of the view,
of sight.
Wipe away
the tear-less dripping drop.
Amethyst coated
fingers nervously working
to achieve perfection,
hoping that no one payed attention
to the flaw,
the flaw that is one among many,
the flawed that is one among many.

Maybe her make-up is smudged,
maybe she sees herself as one.
A sad piece that came out of a good mood.
I'm just not going to question it.
Normally don't even wear make-up.
zebra Jun 2017
she loved thunder storms most of all
the crackle of white hot bolts ripping through the sky
the sheer immensity of power
she always thought it was him
her beloved God
big boy
Thor
with his flowing blond hair
blue aquatic eyes
washboard stomach
and delicately curved *****
finally a man good enough for her
even if he was fly by night

when the heavens thickened gray
like soggy cotton
she could feel atmospheres shift
it made her ******* pert
her mouth would salivate
like a lurid peach
her ***** swelled and dampened
tears of adoration and enchantment
filled her eyes

no longer able to contain her self
she would strip naked
fling off her *******
and run out to the lush verdant meadows
calling at the top of her lungs
yoooooooooo hooooooooooo

as the cool rain descended
she ran thrilled to the mud between her toes
seeing great claws of white lightening  echo
through the sky

without hesitation
she fell to the cool earth beneath her
wallowing in the delicious sloshing ooze
positioning her self on all fours
head thrown back
*** up high
calling to the heavens
come on, come on big boy
ive been waiting for you
let me have it good
her clitoral lips
drooled with anticipation
her ******
a pulsating aching

the sky rumbled
with stretching streaks of fire
like a great freight train
spanning infinity
while the earth shook like a
hollow moon
she swayed her hips
rhythmically to and fro
whispering a love song

oh sir
i need a man like you
wont you love me
adorations true

i kneel before
my sweet Lord Thor
where's that hammer
come on and score

you are so big
and im so little
how about it God
just a tickle

hit it now
give it to me good
kisses baby
like only you could


tears of desire cascaded
down her pink cheeks
as she recited her love mantra
her mouth naked wet

suddenly
a great bolt of lightening
shot down from heavens throne
entering her ******
splitting her in flames
her head turned dark mahogany
sent careening fifty yards
leaving her mouth
a yawning twisted smudge
of fossilized obsidian
with eyes
blackened flaring hollows

her tender pink ****
a charred flower
smoldering
like a
petite
grilled
calamari
Madisen Kuhn Sep 2013
I'm afraid to write about you because
Ink makes me feel everything,
And everything feels so much more real
When my cursive words smudge up against
The side of my hand and stain it blue
As my pen races to keep up with my heart

But it can't be real,
Because I thought I was moving on,
I thought I was growing up,
I thought I knew all of this was
Foolish and starry-eyed

I thought, I thought, I thought
But maybe I need to stop thinking
And just let myself feel;
Feel the butterflies you put in my stomach,
Feel the pure bliss you infuse into bloodstream

And maybe I don't need to know everything,
Like exactly what you're thinking
Or exactly how I feel
Or how all of this is going to turn out

I guess what I'm saying is that
Everything isn't always going to be clear,
I may come up to "two roads in a yellow wood"
And not be absolutely certain which one I'm meant to take,
But I do know that whichever path I choose,
I'd like to be able to scan the trees and smile
Because you're there walking alongside me.
Amitav Radiance May 2015
As you paint a silent picture
With you inner feelings
Take care of your emotions
So not to distort the painting
And smudge with arrogance
Creating an antithesis
zebra Dec 2016
the ***** ghost
comes to those who have suffered long
the agony of torrid loves hunger
he is a savior that needs to be saved
a glittering pageant of ****** despair
his color sapphire
a weeping shell
a dark cloud of smoldering ash
that never burns out
he is heat and light
he can smell the musk between your legs
taste tears of want
as if they are his own
his ****
bursting like trees
bludgeon hard, substanceless
no you can't put your finger on it
your heart
a weeping furnace

your parched mouth dire
is his
the emptiness between your legs
is his
he comes to you a vacant smudge
then,
white attendant with black eyed gems
be not afraid
he was lost in life
a moralist
who could not find Jacobs ladder
nor free him self of false boundaries
set upon him by the good people
their minds spider bites and corpses
who imagined a god
who loved them by decrees
of thou shalt not not not
and did not know
that flesh needs flesh
and only human love could save him

then to the grave,
just a ***** ghost theory
to the living
My poems remain explorations of the subconscious ******
If i where a film maker or a novelist  you  would see me telling a story, not judge me, although i admit to my paraphilias  
These poems  are lunar anamorphic streams of consciousness from the deep chaotic subterranean glitz of transgressive  impulses we all share
Read them if you dare...You might find that part of yourself that you don't want you to know about and then again  you may feel more complete some how if you do....I always loved that dark thing that sleeps with in me
Nigel Morgan Dec 2013
A Tale for the Mid-Winter Season after the Mural by Carl Larrson

On the shortest day I wake before our maids from the surrounding farms have converged on Sundborn. Greta lives with us so she will be asleep in that deep slumber only girls of her age seem to own. Her tiny room has barely more than a bed and a chest for her clothes. There is my first painting of her on the wall, little more a sketch, but she was entranced, at seeing herself so. To the household she is a maid who looks after me and my studio,  though she is a literate, intelligent girl, city-bred from Gamla Stan but from a poor home, a widowed mother, her late father a drunkard.  These were my roots, my beginning, exactly. But her eyes already see a world beyond Sundborn. She covets postcards from my distant friends: in Paris, London, Jean in South America, and will arrange them on my writing desk, sometimes take them to her room at night to dream in the candlelight. I think this summer I shall paint her, at my desk, reading my cards, or perhaps writing her own. The window will be open and a morning breeze will make the flowers on the desk tremble.

Karin sleeps too, a desperate sleep born of too much work and thought and interruption. These days before Christmas put a strain on her usually calm disposition. The responsibilities of our home, our life, the constant visitors, they weigh upon her, and dispel her private time. Time in her studio seems impossible. I often catch her poised to disappear from a family coming-together. She is here, and then gone, as if by magic. With the older children home from their distant schools, and Suzanne arrived from England just yesterday morning, they all cannot do without lengthy conferences. They know better than disturb me. Why do you think there is a window set into my studio door? So, if I am at my easel there should be no knock to disturb. There is another reason, but that is between Karin and I.

This was once a summer-only house, but over the years we have made it our whole-year home. There was much attention given to making it snug and warm. My architect replaced all the windows and all the doors and there is this straw insulation between the walls. Now, as I open the curtains around my bed, I can see my breath float out into the cool air. When, later, I descend to my studio, the stove, damped down against the night, when opened and raddled will soon warm the space. I shall draw back the heavy drapes and open the wooden shutters onto the dark land outside. Only then I will stand before my current painting: *Brita and the Sleigh
.

Current!? I have been working on this painting intermittently for five years, and Brita is no longer the Brita of this picture, though I remember her then as yesterday. It is a picture of a winter journey for a six-year-old, only that journey is just across the yard to the washhouse. Snow, frost, birds gathered in the leafless trees, a sun dog in the sky, Brita pushing her empty sledge, wearing fur boots, Lisbeth’s old coat, and that black knitted hat made by old Anna. It is the nearest I have come to suggesting the outer landscape of this place. I bring it out every year at this time so I can check the light and the shadows against what I see now, not what I remember seeing then. But there will be a more pressing concern for me today, this shortest day.

Since my first thoughts for the final mural in my cycle for the Nationalmuseum I have always put this day aside, whatever I might be doing, wherever I may be. I pull out my first sketches, that book of imaginary tableaux filled in a day and a night in my tiny garden studio in Grez, thinking of home, of snow, the mid-winter, feeling the extraordinary power and shake of Adam of Bremen’s description of 10th C pre-Christian Uppsala, written to describe how barbaric and immoral were the practices and religion of the pagans, to defend the fragile position of the Christian church in Sweden at the time. But as I gaze at these rough beginnings made during those strange winter days in my rooms at the Hotel Chevilon, I feel myself that twenty-five year old discovering my artistic vision, abandoning oils for the flow and smudge of watercolour, and then, of course, Karin. We were part of the Swedish colony at Grez-sur-Loing. Karin lived with the ladies in Pension Laurent, but was every minute beside me until we found our own place, to be alone and be together, in a cupboard of a house by the river, in Marlotte.

Everyone who painted en-plein-air, writers, composers, they all flocked to Grez just south of Fontainebleau, to visit, sometimes to stay. I recall Strindberg writing to Karin after his first visit: It was as if there were no pronounced shadows, no hard lines, the air with its violet complexion is almost always misty; and I painting constantly, and against the style and medium of the time. How the French scoffed at my watercolours, but my work sold immediately in Stockholm. . . and Karin, tall, slim, Karin, my muse, my lover, my model, her boy-like figure lying naked (but for a hat) in the long grass outside my studio. We learned each other there, the technique of bodies in intimate closeness, the way of no words, the sharing of silent thoughts, together on those soft, damp winter days when our thoughts were of home, of Karin’s childhood home at Sundborn. I had no childhood thoughts I wanted to return to, but Karin, yes. That is why we are here now.

In Grez-sur-Loing, on a sullen December day, mist lying on the river, our garden dead to winter, we received a visitor, a Swedish writer and journalist travelling with a very young Italian, Mariano Fortuny, a painter living in Paris, and his mentor the Spaniard Egusquiza. There was a woman too who Karin took away, a Parisienne seamstress I think, Fortuny’s lover. Bayreuth and Wagner, Wagner, Wagner was all they could talk about. Of course Sweden has its own Nordic Mythology I ventured. But where is it? What is it? they cried, and there was laughter and more mulled wine, and then talk again of Wagner.

When the party left I realized there was something deep in my soul that had been woken by talk of the grandeur and scale of Wagner’s cocktail of German and Scandinavian myths and folk tales. For a day and night I sketched relentlessly, ransacking my memory for those old tales, drawing strong men and stalwart, flaxen-haired women in Nordic dress and ornament. But as a new day presented itself I closed my sketch book and let the matter drop until, years later, in a Stockholm bookshop I chanced upon a volume in Latin by Adam of Bremen, his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, the most famous source to pagan ritual practice in Sweden. That cold winter afternoon in Grez returned to me and I felt, as I had then, something stir within me, something missing from my comfortable world of images of home and farm, family and the country life.

Back in Sundborn this little volume printed in the 18th C lay on my desk like a question mark without a sentence. My Latin was only sufficient to get a gist, but the gist was enough. Here was the story of the palace of Uppsala, the great centre of the pre-Christian pagan cults that brought us Odin and Freyr. I sought out our village priest Dag Sandahl, a good Lutheran but who regularly tagged Latin in his sermons. Yes, he knew the book, and from his study bookshelf brought down an even earlier copy than my own. And there and then we sat down together and read. After an hour I was impatient to be back in my studio and draw, draw these extraordinary images this text brought to life unbidden in my imagination. But I did not leave until I had persuaded Pastor Sandahl to agree to translate the Uppsala section of the Adam of Bremen’s book, and just before Christmas that year, on the day before the Shortest Day, he delivered his translation to my studio. He would not stay, but said I should read the passages about King Domalde and his sacrifice at the Winter Solstice. And so, on the day of the Winter Solstice, I did.

This people have a widely renowned sanctuary called Uppsala.

By this temple is a very large tree with extending branches. It is always green, both in winter and in summer. No one knows what kind of tree this is. There is also a spring there, where the heathens usually perform their sacrificial rites. They throw a live human being into the spring. If he does not resurface, the wishes of the people will come true.

The Temple is girdled by a chain of gold that hangs above the roof of the building and shines from afar, so that people may see it from a distance when they approach there. The sanctuary itself is situated on a plain, surrounded by mountains, so that the form a theatre.

It is not far from the town of Sigtuna. This sanctuary is completely covered with golden ornaments. There, people worship the carved idols of three gods: Thor, the most powerful of them, has his throne in the middle of the hall, on either side of him, Odin and Freyr have their seats. They have these functions: “Thor,” they say, “rules the air, he rules thunder and lightning, wind and rain, good weather and harvests. The other, Odin, he who rages, he rules the war and give courage to people in their battle against enemies. The third is Freyr, he offers to mortals lust and peace and happiness.” And his image they make with a very large phallus. Odin they present armed, the way we usually present Mars, while Thor with the scepter seems to resemble Jupiter. As gods they also worship some that have earlier been human. They give them immortality for the sake of their great deeds, as we may read in Vita sancti Ansgarii that they did with King Eirik.

For all these gods have particular persons who are to bring forward the sacrificial gifts of the people. If plague and famine threatens, they offer to the image of Thor, if the matter is about war, they offer to Odin, but if a wedding is to be celebrated, they offer to Freyr. And every ninth year in Uppsala a great religious ceremony is held that is common to people from all parts of Sweden.”
Snorri also relates how human sacrifice began in Uppsala, with the sacrifice of a king.

Domalde took the heritage after his father Visbur, and ruled over the land. As in his time there was great famine and distress, the Swedes made great offerings of sacrifice at Upsal. The first autumn they sacrificed oxen, but the succeeding season was not improved thereby. The following autumn they sacrificed men, but the succeeding year was rather worse. The third autumn, when the offer of sacrifices should begin, a great multitude of Swedes came to Upsal; and now the chiefs held consultations with each other, and all agreed that the times of scarcity were on account of their king Domalde, and they resolved to offer him for good seasons, and to assault and **** him, and sprinkle the stall of the gods with his blood. And they did so.


There it was, at the end of Adam of Bremen’s description of Uppsala, this description of King Domalde upon which my mural would be based. It is not difficult to imagine, or rather the event itself can be richly embroidered, as I have over the years made my painting so. Karin and I have the books of William Morris on our shelves and I see little difference between his fixation on the legends of the Arthur and the Grail. We are on the cusp here between the pagan and the Christian.  What was Christ’s Crucifixion but a self sacrifice: as God in man he could have saved himself but chose to die for Redemption’s sake. His blood was not scattered to the fields as was Domalde’s, but his body and blood remains a continuing symbol in our right of Communion.

I unroll the latest watercolour cartoon of my mural. It is almost the length of this studio. Later I will ask Greta to collect the other easels we have in the house and barn and then I shall view it properly. But for now, as it unrolls, my drama of the Winter Solstice comes alive. It begins on from the right with body of warriors, bronze shields and helmets, long shafted spears, all set against the side of Uppsala Temple and more distant frost-hoared trees. Then we see the King himself, standing on a sled hauled by temple slaves. He is naked as he removes the furs in which he has travelled, a circuit of the temple to display himself to his starving people. In the centre, back to the viewer, a priest-like figure in a red cloak, a dagger held for us to see behind his back. Facing him, in druidic white, a high priest holds above his head a gold pagan monstrance. To his left there are white cloaked players of long, straight horns, blue cloaked players of the curled horns, and guiding the shaft of the sled a grizzled shaman dressed in the skins and furs of animals. The final quarter of my one- day-to-be-a-mural unfolds to show the women of temple and palace writhing in gestures of grief and hysteria whilst their queen kneels prostate on the ground, her head to the earth, her ladies ***** behind her. Above them all stands the forever-green tree whose origin no one knows.

Greta has entered the studio in her practiced, silent way carrying coffee and rolls from the kitchen. She has seen Midvinterblot many times, but I sense her gaze of fascination, yet again, at the figure of the naked king. She remembers the model, the sailor who came to stay at Kartbacken three summers ago. He was like the harpooner Queequeg in Moby ****. A tattooed man who was to be seen swimming in Toftan Lake and walking bare-chested in our woods. A tall, well-muscled, almost silent man, whom I patiently courted to be my model for King Dolmade. I have a book of sketches of him striding purposefully through the trees, the tattooed lines on his shoulders and chest like deep cuts into his body. This striding figure I hid from the children for some time, but from Greta that was impossible. She whispered to me once that when she could not have my substantial chest against her she would imagine the sailor’s, imagine touching and following his tattooed lines. This way, she said, helped her have respite from those stirrings she would so often feel for me. My painting, she knew, had stirred her fellow maids Clara and Solveig. Surely you know this, she had said, in her resolute and direct city manner. I have to remember she is the age of my eldest, who too must hold such thoughts and feelings. Karin dislikes my sailor king and wishes I would not hide the face of his distraught queen.

Today the sunrise is at 9.0, just a half hour away, and it will set before 3.0pm. So, after this coffee I will put on my boots and fur coat, be well scarfed and hatted (as my son Pontus would say) and walk out onto my estate. I will walk east across the fields towards Spardasvvägen. The sky is already waiting for the sun, but waits without colour, hardly even a tinge of red one might expect.

I have given Greta her orders to collect every easel she can find so we can take Midvinterblot off the floor and see it in all its vivid colour and form. In February I shall begin again to persuade the Nationalmuseum to accept this work. We have a moratorium just now. I will not accept their reasoning that there is no historical premise for such a subject, that such a scene has no place in a public gallery. A suggestion has been made that the Historiska museet might house it. But I shall not think of this today.

Karin is here, her face at the studio window beckons entry. My Darling, yes, it is midwinter’s day and I am dressing to greet the solstice. I will dress, she says, to see Edgar who will be here in half an hour to discuss my designs for this new furniture. We will be lunching at noon. Know you are welcome. Suzanne is talking constantly of England, England, and of course Oxford, this place of dreaming spires and good looking boys. We touch hands and kiss. I sense the perfume of sleep, of her bed.

Outside I must walk quickly to be quite alone, quite apart from the house, in the fields, alone. It is on its way: this light that will bathe the snowed-over land and will be my promise of the year’s turn towards new life.

As I walk the drama of Midvinterblot unfolds in a confusion of noise, the weeping of women, the physical exertions of the temple slaves, the priests’ incantations, the riot of horns, and then suddenly, as I stand in this frozen field, there is silence. The sun rises. It stagge
To see images of the world of Sundborn and Carl Larrson (including Mitvinterblot) see http://www.clg.se/encarl.aspx
zebra Apr 2017
"Claim me,"
she whispers in a plea
"claim my soul as I wilt"
Crimson lips parted,
head thrown back
in ecstatic ache
jugular bared
she needs to feel
that sharp -edged love,
skin and barriers broken
as she melts into
the underworld
of a new grace
a magenta cry into
the inky sky
sacred silence penetrated
as only gasps are heard
milky ******* decorated
with red liquid ribbon,
his nourishment,
her demise
******* pierced with
beads of her sunset life flow
as he ***** and bites...
and howling
into heaven's delicious gate,
she writhes
Her soul dissolving
into his night
and as his spirit
absorbs her vermilion soul
their power rises,
black as coal
…………….
your lips
stick black  
sanguine smile
tremulous murmurs
oh happy blood blossom of deaths surrender
sacrificial lamb
cats sparrow entranced
thighs on fire
sobbing from a thousand needled kisses
******* tearing blood
each wound a weeping mouth licking
milky white alter of cold stone
saturated alizarin rust
legs wide
feet and ******* trussed
in chains and drenched rags
for cruelties arrow
o crimson queen,
pomegranate half eaten
mouth smudge black
agape
snake tongue dancing
through cherry lips twisted
darkened eyes of fire and blood
a wash in devils incense
beloved veiled
in evils cradle
bind not the demons kiss
then face down my love upon the crypt of mist
black heavens gate
pupa
vampires bate
a blood moon shaking
a scourge you are now
goddess of pleasures wretched
in the Tuileries of the abyss
consort
your every piercing fang
duck tail ****
a boiling cauldron
desire
spills out

dark cupid witch
legs tied to throat
devil ***** twitch
******* in a mote
ive got the itch
feet scorched in rope
hot ******* *****
hells dark pope

vampiress *****
dark girl feeding
the sun is no more
loves the bleeding
****** horror
Sarah Spang Jun 2014
You wanted only rain today
And clouds from far anon.
I watched their fingers smudge the sky
And cast away the sun

I brought upon the downpour
And trembled as it fell.
Chilling every molecule
And drenching every cell.

I could not wish this rain to cease;
It was necessity
To end the all-consuming flame
That blazed through you and me

Still I felt the damage
Of burns beneath the skin
The outside seemed undamaged
Though truth lie deep within.
Lorenzo Neltje Jul 2018
So, you ask,
How would I explain it?
Well certainly, as something
Not fun.
It's like...
It's like carrying a leach around with you.
When I walk, I can feel it,
It is a dead weight on my chest,
******* the life from my arms,
Making my hands and face slender,
What should be full and strong
It's like...
It's like when you're sick to your stomach.
That feeling of tar in your gut,
But instead of being isolated, it's everywhere
Throughout your body,
It makes you feel sick everywhere.

This is how I explain dysphoria:
Have you ever looked in the mirror,
And wanted to just rip all your hair out?
When a bad hair day gets out of hand,
Have you ever felt the need to just start over?
Even when you tear out a clump of hair
And your scalp looks raw and a little ******,
But you keep going anyway,
Just to get rid of that stupid haircut?
...no?
Alright, how about,
When you're watching the outtakes of a 3-D animated movie,
the scenes that have "gone wrong",
When the girl's eyes are far too big and pop out of her face,
Her arms are disconnected from her chest,
Her head moves but her teeth do not,
And you just want to scream "DELETE IT!"
Because it's obvious that someone has ******* up here,
And this nightmare, this fever dream
Is not what they intended their creation to look like.

Alright, well have you ever
Done a pencil drawing?
And you've put a lot of time and effort into it,
You're so proud,
This is one of your best works,
But something about it is just off?
You might not be able to tell what it is,
This will bother you for a long time,
You will spend hours on end thinking
About what exactly separates this piece of art from everything else,
What it is that keeps it from perfection...
Until suddenly one day, you realise,
You notice exactly what's wrong,
You grab an eraser to fix your mistake
But then, oh no
Your eraser was *****,
And when you tried to rub out that single wonky line,
You leave a huge black smudge across your paper
And now there's no way to get rid of it
All your work on this piece, ruined,
And you're really upset,
You were so proud of this drawing,
It was so close to being perfect,
It could have been so beautiful,
It was almost perfect, but now...

But now, it's wrong.
It just looks wrong
It just IS wrong,
It wasn't meant to look like this
I am trying to explain as simply as I can
That this body is wrong,
That it wasn't meant to look like this,
That it wasn't meant to BE like this!
Don't you understand?
This is how I explain dysphoria:
Have you ever looked in the mirror
And wanted to just rip your chest out?
Do you ever see your body, your parts seeming broken,
Your chest, legs, hear the sound of your voice
And just scream "DELETE IT!"
Because it's obvious that someone
Has ******* up
Someone was using a ***** eraser
When they created me, erased me,
And they've left smudges, mistakes, that I
Cannot get rid of,
And however hard I try to pretend
That I don't care,
I do,
And I still feel the need to erase them.
These leaches that I carry around,
They drain me,
And I was so proud of myself
I,
This body...

It could have been so beautiful
An attempt at a spoken-word poem. I wrote this a while ago but I came back and edited it, and figured I’d finally publish it. It's very different to the style I usually write in, I think at some point while writing it it just turned into venting. I figure if this speaks to one person, I've done well.
Timmy Shanti Feb 2015
We have the witness,
But not the victim.
We have the trial,
But not the case.

To blindly follow
Senseless duty -
Abandon sanity
Without a trace.

There is no freedom,
No commitment,
No gallantry -
Just lust and laze.

We are updating
The equipment,
Entangled
In our golden lace.

But in the end,
What will it matter?
Conclusion
Is the only judge.

And when you find
Your life in tatters,
Well... Rub it off -  
It's just a smudge.
Connor Reid Apr 2014
A duality of elan vital, two people
Spectres of emotion
Intertwined by a fuselage of bruised skin & tendon
Tissues become orbital, gushing towards grafts
Helixes of snot, **** and lymph
Boy & girl
As they embrace the animating principle and eachother, they fuse
A one piece tapestry adorned seamless with no hem, beginning or end
Always was, always is
Patiently turning to liquid as their being unzips
Lying figures of runny makeup and genetic *****
Quintessence, a texture of synaptic potential
Corpus Callosum
An entirety of self, lost in imbued disintegration
Theory of mind, looped & bound
I will water the thought
Roots envisaged in dystopian amygdala
Piercing data packets with a frost-like intensity
Forgetting our obsolescence moments ago
A neuron dipped in nylon
Theta waves and the non-euclidean crux of dissociation
Ghosts in the machine, your macro god
The sympathies of fractional distillation
Digitised/assimilated unto the nanosphere
Cold hands and brass backs galvanised in oscillated tears
Commodified, sold out and bought
Stretching, from purple, white and black
slowly losing its colour, amorphous in shape
brushed across a smudge, ambiguously chromatic
Monetised flesh god
An eternity bathed in starlight
Cutting an incision in the sky to allow entropy
Divided dimensions of energy
Fleeting and intangible
No longer a delirium of seperation
All semantics become light
As a rusted vehicle passes overhead
And all the worlds questions fade out of existence
Flutters of red tape and foregone growth of practice
Sinew flayed, integrated towards information
Our minds shared
In circuits and resistors
Photons and electrons
We radiate
Stranger Blue May 2016
My love was pure.
My lover was not.
Can my heart endure,
this painful little spot?
I think to myself.
Who am I to judge?
Take the stain remover
from the shelf,
it's just a little smudge.
Tashatha Oct 2014
I don't understand
Why we claim we're human
When we tear each other down
Hurt each others feelings
Because we're too small minded
To accept that we are different
Instead we become hateful
Acting stupid and illiterate
**** the minorities' spirits
Make them feel insignificant

We teach every generation
That being gay is a sin
Then turn around and say
We're all God's children
There are so many thoughts in my mind
I don't even know where to begin
So I'll begin with this thing
That they call sin

God makes us exactly
How we are
The differences we have
Are to set us apart
So we shine brighter than the stars

So I don't know why man
Would turn around
And say on judgement day
All gay men will repent and pray
Cause they won't be allowed
Into heaven
Simply because they loved men and not women

Say the "homos"
Are lost and will never be found
The hate towards gay men
Is a sound too loud
The other day
An innocent man who was gay
Was killed by a homophobic crowd
When I heard of this news
My heart dropped and frowned
I don't understand
How man can be so proud
So send an innocent soul
Six feet into the ground

So tell me
You so called Christians
With your egos so large
Who do you think you are?
God said we should not judge
You walk around like you're perfect
But I see a smudge
From the lack of innocence
You carry on your sleeve
With your head in the clouds
Saying God created
Adam and Eve
Not Adam and Steve

Thinking you see all things
Through God
But really
You're blinded by hate
And all I can do is wait
For the day we stand in heaven
And await our fate
And hear God say
To all the men that are straight
"There is nothing wrong
With being gay
Because in my kingdom
That's how these men were made"
Society belittles gay people and I believe we should accept them
Falling into the jangce jang
We sing with a clear
voice

Pass me the passport
Sail on the roads
Of perpetual
Drum

Dream of baobabs
Dream of saharas
Levitations

Crush as snake eggs
Thou lamentations

Make me a poet
Surpass me as teardrops
Mingle in every waterfall

Augure my autumn
Argonaut my silken
Wool crave me as a mad
Hatter

Call me a beauty
I'll be your beast
Raven Feels Apr 2021
DEAR PENPAL PEOPLE, plastering a smile is torturous sometimes:\


smudge the torture and stand with pride

plaster a smile and the tears of grief you hide

cope a force and shred the cages breaking frees

rise even when the mockery spreads and the clock spits threes

change last years cape and stiffen the knife

hang just for you to get out of your strive


                                                                                  ------ravenfeels
skyyy Mar 2015
My mothers perfume is sweet
but not like candy or fruit
my mothers perfume is champagne when she exhales
and wet concrete when she sobs in the dark
my mothers perfume is laughter written on
her face with $40 eyeliner
that does not smudge when she cries
my mothers perfume is her hair in my face
when i fall asleep next to her on the couch
my mothers perfume is not a smell
but a feeling in my chest when I hug her
Nat Lipstadt Mar 2015
oft on bus seated next,
every one of your senses
adjusting, modulating,
to her unpredictable
solar flaring

you don't ever risk
that first missing
           misstep,
your entirety is
sun bursted
        (un)/consumed
in unhappy joy of her
consuming presence

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

you laugh
years later
re the topic of
your first shaky
foot in the mouth
a classic misstep
first bow shot,
opening one liner

and each storied retelling  
is nature!s
snow and rain
refilling
the love of your
groundwater table
welling up

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

you love her scent
the silly hats she wears,
her short skirts arouse,
that last open button
a misstep invitation,
angry it incenses,
her every solitary everything is
incense,
pervading a daily
co-riding
passenger's
oxygen? starved soul

~~~~~~~~~

her umbrella is a wet
selfie stick
accidentally opening and dousing
an un random next door
seatmate

just another unlucky misstep for
someone sitting next store,
oil on the fire of
happily ever after

two selfies are last seen as
one
un selfishly
toweling each other off and
on
with wet kisses

~~~~~~~~~~~

you eavesdrop on her
earbud music,
weep internally you do with
crazed jealously

The Temptations
are so unfairly
singing to her
"Ain't to Proud to Beg"
and neither are you

you heart is misstepping
to every beat,
your fingers
thrumming,
you idiot, not quietly enough
humming
in the next seat

the first,
will not be
the last

smile exchanged

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

poem writing on the tablet,
amidst the groaning awful
no moving
city traffic

overheated bus
combustible with
winter snow dampness,
wet dog sweat smelling people clothes

all you want to do is get home
shower off
the daily dirt

the poetry writing pastime
is the place
where you put yourself
to better to pass over
your sour surroundings

her finger rattlesnakes,
misstepping over,
noisily invading,
the invisible boundary
constructed to hold up the
eye-averting
Keep Out sign
to momentary,
too neighborly
strangers

her red painted
pointer finger
smudge prints on your tablet,
accompanied with
bespoke words
"try this"

that smudge suggestion
won't come off

insisting on crediting
a shared authorship,
you ask for her
email and cell,
so you can share
her
forever

co jointed tangled
bus and bed sheet first efforts
on writing, all about
what you play~argue
what should your entitled poem
be titled

you think

endless short love story bus poems

but she prefers,
with red fingers persuading

the first misstep is the best

both see the merit
in each other
I love this poem. I do.

Lyrics to "Ain't to Proud to Beg"

I know you wanna leave me,
but I refuse to let you go
If I have to beg and plead for your sympathy,
I don't mind coz' you mean that much to me

Ain't too proud to beg, sweet darlin
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go
Ain't to proud to plead, baby, baby
Please don't leave me, girl, don't you go

Now I heard a cryin' man,
is half a man with no sense of pride
But if I have to cry to keep you,
I don't mind weepin' if it'll keep you by my side

Ain't to proud to beg, sweet darlin
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go
Ain't to proud to plead, baby, baby
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go

If I have to sleep on your doorstep
all night and day just to keep you from walkin' away
let your friends laugh, even this I can stand
cause I want to keep you any way I can

Ain't too proud to beg, sweet darlin'
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go
Ain't to proud to plead, baby, baby
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go

Now I've gotta love so deep in the pit of my heart
And each day it grows more and more
I'm not ashamed to come and plead to you baby
If pleadin' keeps you from walkin' out that door

Ain't too proud to beg, you know it sweet darlin'
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go
Ain't to proud to plead, baby, baby
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go
Baby, baby, baby, baby (sweet darling)
Dustin Dean Jul 2016
My feelings run through her hair
An exquisite sensation in the daytime
Bonded by the wall of charm
We just can't get over ourselves
And that's the beauty of it all
So we carry on into the night
Looking for ways to refine
Which Sister Neptune takes care of
Glistening downtown's highs
Over the rustic romance
That shrouds Saturn's sighs
Sorry Jul 2013
You may say you don't
but you know me; of me
and my swelling quiet

and they may say
over and over
in a low rumble
not to write of love
I know, I know

I close my eyes
the sanguine lids
like a heart
throbbing  

In ink it spills
brims over like tears withheld
and stains the stark white page

your whiskers at dusk
the fine lines in your lips
Your eyes drip like jewels
heavy and sparkling  

This smudge of words
I would die in
if I could not write  
what I cannot speak
Francie Lynch Apr 2015
I've been at hundreds of funerals
Standing beside Fathers
Soon to be posted to Peru
Or to missions for black African babies.
They'd sprinkle caskets like Spring rains,
Burn incense to smudge the dead
With rising smoke signals.
Sounding the advance.
I witnessed pain in the front pews,
The kneelers with thin cushioning.
I prayed fervently for a whosh of wind
To sweep behind me,
Billow my soutane,
  And lift the lid;
Prayed for the candle flame to flare,
For the body to rise
As Rathgar did.
He was a faker.
Not like what I saw.
Up close.
On Friday mornings.
Rathgar Lothbrok: See final episode of this season's "Vikings."
Sofia Von Oct 2013
Strangers are my best friends
Even feelings are for even people... Know anyone who matches that description?
I'd like to cuddle away the problems
**** someone while crying
No
I don't think so
I want to be felt and loved. And craved like fluent chocolate gushing
Down the corners of my mouth
Lapped up by your tongue
I wish

Scratched letters over a blank canvas
Make for messages of clarity.
Nails on a chalk board every time you etch, but its the promise of the next word that makes it tolerable.
These pick-up-stick letters are angry and depressed but fit together like bread on butter. creamy song lyrics you scribble but there’s no tune.
An obstacle foreseen and ignored.
The rhythm of voice catches, flame to syncopation, and feebly you grow with your words to become the song

Sung now, in churches
Do they realize from whence their hymns originated? Deep down, long ago, in the valley of hidden emotional pangs
Your envy was too rich for your body
Yet big enough for this... congregational ritual.
Heart tears are beautiful for creation
To existence
They're treacherous

I smile and admire my work
Blow a smoke ring over the wet words not quite solidified on the page
Smudge
Better with a flaw
I don't smoke
Im a social stress smoker
Self diagnosed
Self medicated
So you see I'm an aspiring artist
Although most of my works are ****, I don't really give up.
Its just this part of me I can’t always explain
That happens
They’re my impulse of choice
A painting, a drawing, a poem, a song, dance, all music (save country).
Even little quick thoughts or plans I have are peaceful to record.
It's times like this night where I should really be fast in my REM cycle, dreaming of crazy scenarios to **** up and uncover a truth upon my waking.
But I'm on my notes
Typing away the babble of nonsense thats streaming on demand
Tonight
I'll exit with a line
Or so, I'm not sure
Breathe in the plant, puff out love hits and over expose the motion picture. Each passing present memory is precious to the cycle I don't really want to define.
But I'm in love with its inhabitants I can't get over them
And each day is another episode
But... Is this a sitcom, or a documentary?
These words, are time filled

Cold feet shouldn't be a thing.
Sara Apr 2018
Cover up the mirrors and I'll find somewhere to look,
rip me into pieces like the pages of an old notebook,
smudge me into ink stains, stick a needle in my eye,
scribble over my mistakes and cross me out with lines.

Turn me inside out to wash and
hang me out to dry,
drown me in a dried up lake
and cool me down by fire,

spit me out like sour grapes,
then leave me like an ageing wine,
just now, I've quite the bitter taste
but I still need a little time.
Catharsis in a poem- felt very grounded after spitting this out
samasati Sep 2013
I must be incredibly wary
and alert
and I gotta follow my gut because there’s a reason to why
it aches
or jumps with excitement;
it knows
much more than my head does;
and I must hold myself firmly like a proud statue, but I can’t just stay in one place
I need to tiptoe on a tightrope
I mustn’t fall, but if I do, I mustn’t fuss
just get back up again,
just get on with it

I went to an art gallery this afternoon
and the theme of one small contemporary art room
was,
“just get on with it”,
(I decided that myself anyway);
there was a painting of an airplane, resting on snow,
that one was obvious
I said, “just get on with it, then, fly”
there was a painting of a snowy road,
that one was obvious too
there was a painting of a sad girl
again, obvious
but then there was a painting of a person
with a large smudge of green on his face, he barely had a face
and a large smudge of white on his waist, he barely had a waist;
I concluded,
“sometimes you don’t have a face and you just need to get on with it”
because my mood was easy breezy silly this afternoon;
but now I’m thinking
sometimes you lose your identity
and you just need to get on with it

I can barely take anyone serious when they ask the question,
“who am I?”
the answer is obvious if you allow simplicity into your heart,
“you’re what you are experiencing and feeling and being right now, and it’ll change all the time in every moment”
so,
I feel kind of commiserable
and much of a parody
for sitting in a busy mall foodcourt, with a cup of coffee I didn’t even buy at that foodcourt,
remixing an old song on garageband,
then looking up and realizing I’m surrounded by all of these kiwi strangers
and finally asking the question
“who am I”
oh I’m a lunatic, aren’t I?

I must be open, but not too open
and easy to get along with, but not too easy to get along with
I must catch a wave on the first try,
but if I wipe out, I mustn’t turn red;

I need to watch what I say
before I say it
but also find the courage to speak
when I’m shy
and I must be considerate
but not let people walk all over me

I can’t be a pushover, and I can’t be too much of a leader
because I don’t know what I’m doing
here;
I can love but I shouldn’t fall in love
at least for awhile
because I’m still high from the transition and I’m dubious of how
authentic and sincere
my falling in love
would be

worrying is the most unnecessary thing
money isn’t an issue
(right now)
and loneliness is a blessing
but it’s also a sickness
and I must remind myself that I’m worth not being lonely
and instead being free
and above all,
I am capable of anything I set my mind to,
even if I forget
“who I am”
or “what I wanna be”
above all,
I must always be me.
Alfred Vassallo Apr 2013
Where goes the time when it flies?
Simplified by expression, and stained by clarity.
Smudge by lucidity
smeared by simplicity
tainted by intelligibility.
Tempus fugit as in time flies.
Sharply distressing with painful feelings
to the point of mental instability
morning or night
we become possessed with its mystic dealings.

Where goes the time when it runs?
Not a solitary explanation is found.
It happens and it won’t stop
until life terminates as well
without cause.
Derived of rationalisation
lacking understanding
short of justification
bursting with vindication
persistently and with conviction.

Where goes the time when it sails?
From the second that we’re born.
Where were we existing?
We cannot be so sure
Cannot recollect the past
Not for the first five of our years
Memory so blur, so shadowy
Hazy with distortions
obscure and confusing
Unit our mind starts slowly to recollect.

Where goes the time when it escapes?
The chronology of life so mysterious.
Nothing can solve its ambiguity
for time is a complex case
with an infinity of secrets.
What’s the obsession when we have so many setbacks
drawbacks and obstacles
obstructions and conundrums
to take care of before time perishes away
and leaves us stranded in oblivion.

Oh time, you magnificent of all mysteries,
the high and mighty of ambiguities.
Show us mercy and explain
we are not detectives of secrecies
your spell with us reflects on the whodunits.
Oh time of things past and yet to come
give us a clue as to what is to derive!
“Remember”
it softly replies “Make most of your lives”
“Once I fly away no one can have a replay”.
Nigel Morgan Sep 2012
I

Before the sea the sound of sea, before the wind a mask of wind placed on the face, before the rain the touch of rain on the cheek. The lee shore of this finger of land is a gathered turbulence of tea-coloured, leaf-curling wave upon wave, wholly irregular, turning, folding, falling. No steady crash and withdrawal hiss, but a chaos of breaking and turning over, no rhyme or reason, and far, far up the beached misted shore. There, do you see? - suddenly appearing in the waves’ turmoil a raft of concrete, metalled, appearing to disappear, the foreshore’s strategic sixty year old litter shifting and decaying slowly under the toss of water and wind.
 
II
 
From the lighthouse steps to the sea fifty yards no more: the path, a brief facing of the wind and spit of rain, then turning the back to it see the complexity of low vegetation holding its own on the shallow earth-invading sand and rolled leaves of marram grass. Sea Buckthorn is the dominant plant, not yet berried with its clustered inedible oil-rich orange fruits. The leaves, slight, barely 5cm long, but in profusion, clustering upward, splaying out and upward on thin branches, hiding the wind in its density, never more than chest high, so the eye looks down, sees the plane of the leaves, long, thin, suddenly tapered, dense, stiff, thorny.
 
III
 
You said, ‘look the door is curved.’ And it was. In the late afternoon light filtering through the oblong window 150’ into the grey sky the panelled wood was honeyed. Covered with a well-varnished frottage of swirled marks, some of the wood itself, some of gathering age and infestation, the single window’s light blazed a small white rectangle on the larger rectangle of the door. The passage outside the door too narrow for the eye to take in the whole door straight on, one has to move past and catch its form obliquely.
 
IV
 
The curve, the long four-mile curve of the finger into the afternoon mist and sea cloud. From the road: only seen the smooth ebbing tide waters retreating from the archipelagos of mud and sand and slight vegetation of rusted grass.  From the road: only heard over the marramed banks the sea’s sound of waves’ confusion and winds’ turmoil. Follow the fade of the curve’s progress in the echo of distance. It paints itself from the brush of the eye, the sea a grey resist. This spreading away is a long breath taken . . . then expelled from the lungs of looking. You can’t quite hold it all in one view so you’ll build the image in sections, assembling and projecting across two adjoining landscape sheets as if the spiral binding isn’t there. The resulting image when digitally joined will describe the negative space of sea of sky, silent and uncluttered by marks. Only the curve of the land will collect the drawn, a vertical stroke here for a lighthouse, a slight smudge for the lifeboat station.
 
V
 
From the road looking south to an invisible North Shore, the mist hiding the true horizon, there is layer upon layer of horizontal bands: of grass, of mud, of nested water around mud, wet sand, layered water, mud-black, water-grey, a dull sky-reflected white of a sheltered sea, and patterning everywhere, dots of birds near and distant. Then, in the very centre, a curlew in profile, its long downward curving bill dipping for worms into the wet sand and mud. Breeding on summer moorland, wading winter estuaries, this somewhat larger than other waders here, so distinctive with its heavy, calm stance.
Here are five 'drawings' made in an extraordinary place: the Spurn Peninsula in North Humberside. This four-mile finger of land juts out into the North Sea. At this time of year it is one of the UK's foremost places to sight flocks of migrating birds as they travel south for the winter.
Jared Eli Dec 2013
There once was a boy who was but a slender
Line in a portrait or a smudge on a fender
Nothing more than would be passed by your eye
Was the boy so young who did nothing but cry

The world was a cruel one, but he wasn't so tainted
His picture more perfect than of David's statue painted
But the world would soon tear this boy apart
It would end in the mind what began in the heart

You see, innocence thrives where ignorance rules
For blissfulness is the kindest of the ignorant's tools
But this boy would be taught to feel and to hurt
His tears turned to ash as they fall from lips to dirt

He was now cold and ****** and swore
His opinions had changed when his brother died in the war
There was no point to heaven and less point to hell
When they called out your name, you either stood up or fell

Chipped bricks covered in posters past
Graffiti from people of phrases that last
Like one-liners, humourless, gaining a laugh
And the three-word with the sketch of a heart cut in half

The best philosophes of this past generation
Write thoughts on the wall from their closed imagination
And the boy with his eyes red grew darker
As he reached in his pocket and pulled out a marker

With a couple quick slashes a ballot was drawn
And he labeled the man in the voting booth "pawn"
Underneath it he wrote what might be a phrase
That just didn't catch on in those olden days:

It said, "A stone cast down as in defeat
Will hit thine foot before the street
For he who gives up his voting right
Will have no say in where we fight."

The boy capped the pen and he walked away
He had written down all that he wanted to say
His hands now were smudged from the marks on the wall
And he thought to himself, "In short time, it'll fall"

Right around the corner he was halted by the law
"You thought no one was watching, but guess what, kid? I saw.
The truth is, you're right, we vote for our wars
But the man up on top of the nation? He's yours."

The boy smiled slightly, for this cop was wrong
And he reached deep past the tears in himself to be strong
"That man isn't mine; he approved of this war
And congress has made my brother break the oath that he swore"

The cop looked at boy and the boy at the cop
They weren't talking graffiti, but the man up on top
Two strangers, two people, agreeing the fact
That the choice on the ballot was a serious act

"Most kids don't realize just what a vote can mean
They don't attribute the choice to the step in between
Old ideas corrupted or improved upon
All they know is their voice can make the other guy gone"

The boy nodded and looked the cop right in the eye
Saying, "This president let my brother ship out to die
If you try to make us think that his empathy wasn't fake
Contradiction in contrite diction will no conviction make

"You can't justify death because the harder you try
The more your arguments fade like the clouds in the sky
But before they dissolve and assimilate with the air
They leave behind pain to show that they were there"

The cop nodded, waved, and went back to the beat
More hoodlums and lost souls to help off the street
He passed a dark alley and his instincts erupted
His mind yelling to him, "Check for something corrupted!"

So he turned down in darkness to check out the spot
It looked like a place where blackmarket is hot
The fungus and mold that once grew peeled off
Leaving yellowish stains and the urge to cough

A voice near the brickwork called out saying, "Hey,"
"If it's not to much trouble, mister, couldja stay?
See honest to goodness, mister, I tried to stay clean
But when you take your own product, separation is mean"

"I don't know exactly who is to blame"
Said cop to the girl he could see but not name
"There's no one to blame," said the girl to the man
"There's things that will happen, and with time they all can

"For a creature that thrives on flesh alone
Will bite through the skin to steal the bone
And he must be careful, lest he find
That he's been feasting upon his own behind"

"Yes, sometimes it's true: Desire drives us too fast
Sometimes to places where sanity's long since passed
But sanity's fleeting and must be sought after
Come; let me find you some lodgings and laughter"

"No, mister! I'm a lost cause, my fate's without hope!
Permit me now to symbolize: I'm at the end of my rope!"
"Now miss don't you think like that, No one's soldered to their fate
Such thinking will confine you like a cage with bitter bait!"

This world's harsh and confusing and you've had the short stick
But don't let hopelessness be the only thing that's gonna make you tick
Like treading water in the ocean, panic makes you die
Find beauty out of terror, spread your arms and fly!"

The girl sat there blinking. She'd never heard such talk
She'd never been another thought on anybody's walk
"Now let me tell you, I'm not short on self doubt
But I've got to say: that's not what it's all about

See I met this boy earlier, who told me his story
About how the status of the world often makes him worry
This boy's actin' out, but he'll turn out just fine
But if you're giving up hope, then you're crossing the line

Because we've never needed Merry Men and Robin Hood
To stand up at bugle-call to turn the world good
We just need to remember: We're in it forever!
Fight the urge to look upward and shout angrily, 'Never!'

The world, good and bad, is mixed unto itself
And you can't take you your recipe book from the shelf
And add pinches of falsehoods like seasonings for a mask
You must fix it internally, for that is your task

See, though you've given up, that's something I just won't allow
You're gonna go out and fix it, let somebody show you how
Because there's more than one way to a proper conclusion
Some ways are hard and still others illusion

But become obsessed with the truth, with doin' things right
Become a shining green beacon to lead others at night
Promise me, here and now, in this alley proclaim!
That you will set forth and make good of your name."

The girl gently nodded and as time's hands were wound
She grew like a flower from that dank piece of ground
It's the tiny conversations that can so alter life
And cut the crust of complication like a peace-bringing knife

The boy with his brother who'd gone up in the fight
Was just like the cop said: he turned out alright
He put his mind to better things, gave up the childish art
And in the realm of history, his bio did its part

Because he realized how tangible the change he wanted was
He set aside resentments as the true reformer does
He spoke of love, acceptance. . . And then switched to compromise
Because when you're just a visionary, the vision always dies

He used the good and bad to weld a better, stronger, net
To catch the lost and lonely, his was the best support to get
He filled the heads of others with the change that he once viewed
And little inch by little inch corruption and violence met with feud

A verbal dispute filled with picketing people
Who shouted, "Change!" from their electronic steeple
And the media members had themselves a field day
As they caught on the camera what the boy had to say:

"Too often we forget, that apathy isn't peace
But we allow ourselves to be served it by the leaders filled with grease
And we skip along, ignoring things that should rightly upset us
Bombs abroad are wholly fine but not the one that's gonna get us

We've got to think of the whole picture, got to figure out the puzzle
Though you think the lion's fierce, it always has time to nuzzle
So let's switch the view and take on that trait
And put aside the thought that nuzzling can wait."

The cop saw the boy who was on T.V.
And said to himself, "that kid talked to me!
He smiled a bit, "his speech is pleasing as a wren
And in the case of my boasting, I'll say I knew him when!"

The girl wasn't taped, but she was out changing lives
By having conversations that we've likened to knives
And so it was when time was up on the impending revolution
Armed with words she voyaged forth to fufill her resolution

The boy and she stood side by side and led the people on
And using power words of choice, the old regime was gone
What started out as compromise, effloresced to peace and love
And the cop the two had talked to nodded at boy and girl above

A change in heart, a change in mind, can spark a worldly change
Though originality is difficult, ideas can rearrange
To fit the modern times, and indeed to mold it best
And the answer's sometimes difficult, but as we all know: life's a test

This boy and girl were lost, then found, and so was their whole world
And their string of conversations were around their finger curled
Reminding them that there was out there a better way to live
And revolution was the message that the cop had had to give

— The End —