[x]

leavetakingi.
the world is brighter where
dregs of strangers' revels remain --
i keep this half-light for my own.

ii.
i'll stay until the wind sighs a scotch-and-smoke
cliché, til the Muscadet's slipped from the lip
of my wayward
hello.(i know you're there before you do.)
iii.
your night is told in
patchouli-pulse wanders; mine,
in whorls of liqueur-breath. come
close and i'll find the warp
through the weft, the trails telling tales
in synaesthesia --
Platinum Blonde's been 'round and gone.

iv.
(-- closer, find syllables strewn
in an exhale's wake; stolen from my throat-
ful of careless farewells, spin and sway

The Death of VenusIf there lived in the world a man
as rugged and as strong as I,
who could forbear with me yet go against,
who took to the black woods and the silver hills
mostly unafraid--
who savored salt and the lay of fur
with fingertips of dirt and weather,
whose lips rolled words like smoke, like fog-
I would creep into his arms in the prologue of the night,
air sweet with the scent of new-cut hay,
alive with the nightjar's call.

in praise of scavengersOh, those crows,
perceptive and wise and with a sense of time and season.
They know how emotional humans get
when Christmas comes.
What suckers they are for feeding the birds,
an act of love when they can give no love to others
The crows settle in apartment block parking lots
the way seagulls gather in shopping strips
next to fast food joints
or hover and flap in masses
on the scrapheaps of garbage scows
sent from the city
with the dregs of living

Of Half-Filled WordsShe is not a flutterbird.
Her fingers are skittish,
her smile is not.
Do not fear that you will
drive it away.

Sadness is her fumbling limb.
It is unwanted, yet
necessary.

When it is January
she will tell you,
"I am still struggling.
And I am becoming so many people
all at once.

A conglomeration of beauty that
I have managed to mangle.
Please, do not be sad for me."

Sometimes her sorrow is
meant for you. But mostly her.

Those specks and spots
of ocean storm lulls
reveal her truths:
ones she does not want
to extract from herself.

Her heart is not a rabbit.

When it beats
faster, faster, faster,
you need not
run harder

Crows"Crows," I whisper and she flies,
brown arrow shot
from the bowstring of a word.

immolatethe first step
to sadness is to
have.

[3]

poseidon
punctuates the bruised
shorelines with broken hearts and
shattered abelone
shell fragments.
sometimes the
shore creeps up, kisses
my feet. sometimes he rips through
the distance between
us, taking
what's his.

[5]

the air here
vibrates to a fire,
sparrow's heart humming in c
major. it does scare
me sometimes,
how i might love you
more than ibuprofen, or
the way the light might
oscillate
through an ether storm.

the person i am now is
not compatible
with who i
was before you. but
how do i scrape myself out
from under my own
fingernails?

[7]

we caught the
moon

petrichorNiobe weeps.

gold scattered rough across
cracked earth and the last
remains of summer - they fell
like leaves in the arms of the wind.

some scents cannot be captured.
the gods bleed onto rock,
and the stone sends her prayers
in return: petrichor.

listen - the heavy thud of
rain on parched ground;
the monsoon sealing life back in;
the sky bows and kisses earth.

Niobe weeps.

city drowned cleanbirds fly bluer before a hurricane,
wings sharper, the bricks neater.
one train is always longer than the
other. i cried about it. the saturated
city, droplets of colour caught on
tape & rewinding, cups me in its
palms, i am a bug on its window,
imagining all of it underwater &
people clapping in a silent film,
the last dying bubbles curtsying
on their lips, for their marble town
the white skied & terrible atlantis.

for a friendThe sky is captured in his eyes, clear and blue.
The weather etched smile is honest.
The slender face says sixty; it lies.
It is that and half again.

Knobby hands sun baked and brown
peek out from ragged gloves.
They seem part of the old split locust post
where they are resting;
one of the row of soldiers
that keep watch on their field and its occupants.

The smile broadens as I approach.
I help stretch the wire.
His archaic dialect fills the road
with cows and snow and the yankees
that his grandparents saw marching.
The hours pass pulled by the mule
he plowed with as a boy.

He mentions his wife
they'd been marri

The Thin HoursI.

Those of us here in this skeleton time,
this time of the year when the nights are thin
and dark, and dark with anxiety, peeling
as layers of an oyster shell, brittle and effaced
and somehow iridescent.
When the bell tolls out the time the sound is thin
and reaches into fractured air and softly
seeks the spaces between the atoms and
misses the vital Os and CO2s in a lasting,
failed pinball. The bell sound dies in
some space between midnight and thereafter,
and each tock tock of slipping cogs is
a repeat and not a moving on.
The air is filled with each dull sound,
each tock a repeat and a repeat again. And the
slip betwee

Metastasis98.00

Autumn is the season when everything dies.

The leaves shrivel up and your lungs go with them, tiny dejected organs drying out inside your sternum, crinkling under our footsteps. The doctors pronounce their diagnosis as the leaves fall, listing medical terms and percentages and something about medication options.

The disease is metastatic: it has bored its way out of your lungs and into your bones. Dissatisfied, it's going for your organs, your liver, your heart. The prognosis says Christmas is a pipe dream, likely as the sun ceasing to set.

You promise it anyway.

94.00

November comes and I am a fish, breathing through makeshift gi

StripUndressing
we are either
children or ancients:

shedding clothes we
become classical
gradually,

stark
white marble
archetypes

young again and
with a little
of that

old fire in us,
the hungry reverence
for smooth and impersonal

beauty
that has
launched ships and moved mountains,

some sort of
sacred geometry
in the bones.

Undressing
we become aware of what is huge and terrifying,
the blank expanse

of our own skins,
the flesh that belongs
to myth and to history

and not to us,
not to keep
as if upon dying

we slip into nothing,
the body
remains.

Undressing
we are suddenly
laid bare

suddenly
discovered
fragile a

Rooibos TeaBreathe deep the chai haze—

Picasso's djinn,
a muse of eggshells and grandma's lace tablecloths,
cradles the tea kettle to her chest
and abandons Latin words and names—
flotsam and jetsam dribbling
irrelevant among the little red tea leaves;
the driftwood of genus and species bumping
against the shores of the South African scrublands.

She hovers orange and indigo,
a quavering flame of dreams
and drained tea dregs—
divination with a soft-spiced voice
at the bottom of the mug,
never quite gone—

a flock of Van Gogh crows
frozen in their hayfields.

As yet, untitledI swept out the corners of my mind today
In short shallow strokes
Not knowing if the dust disturbed my life
Or if my life disturbed the dust.

for exit 165.in the outstretched wingspan of
tuesday night you'll find them:
the foothills slumbering jagged under
sixteen inches of loose sand and
the city hushed and glowing, lines
of porchlights strung together in suburban rows like
beads on a chain

your house was cavernous hollow like a lung
the colors were dim and
jaundiced, a quiet rush of tepid water
bent the silence while thirty years of
smoking hung ownerless
in the air like the cling of a dead moths to a wall

you tell me of a dream that's vague like
clouds in the sky like
clouds in the sink with
your body limp and damp like
hot tea bags and
your face like spilled milk
a

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borne

by *pagan-poetess, Jul 14, 2011, 12:36:42 AM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

tomorrow we'll set
paper airplanes adrift
over the muddy pacific,
the place where it starts
behind stanley park.

i know the ocean wasn't
really born there, i know it
comes from a bigger womb,
but it feels that way to me,
sometimes.

that edge there
where water and foam
smash hopelessly against sand,
that feels like creation.

borneby *pagan-poetess

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

july 14, 2011

Daily Deviation

Given 2011-12-25

As we draw the year to a close, it is good to remember were all things are born. borne by *lestatsgirl387 ( Featured by `Halatia )

~trynke Feb 11, 2012 Student General Artist

I like it

*pagan-poetess Feb 11, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

thanks very much

*KaitForest Feb 2, 2012 Writer

that edge there
where water and foam
smash hopelessly against sand,
that feels like creation.

ahhhh yesss

*pagan-poetess Feb 2, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

thank you so much for the favourites!! i'm glad you enjoyed the pieces

~Phu-Phu-Hugs-Me Dec 25, 2011 Hobbyist Writer

i know the ocean wasn't
really born there, i know it
comes from a bigger womb
Such lovely words.

What a particularly nice time of year to receive a daily deviation. Congratulations!

*pagan-poetess Dec 27, 2011 Hobbyist Writer

it really is a lovely time of year for it!!

means a lot to me!! thank you so much

i'm very glad you enjoyed the poem

~TheHornist Dec 25, 2011 Hobbyist General Artist

Congrats on the DD!! Beautiful Poetry, you're a very gifted writer

*pagan-poetess Dec 25, 2011 Hobbyist Writer

thank you so so much!! that is very kind of you to say

writing is one of my most favourite things in the entire world, and it's something that's extremely important to me

thanks so much for your sweet words

*i-am-a-bridgewalker Dec 25, 2011 Student Writer

there is enough rich detail here to make the snatches of mystery gripping and intriguing.

there is a gentle respect for innocence here even as the piece celebrates growth.

very nice work.

*pagan-poetess Dec 25, 2011 Hobbyist Writer

oh, goodness, thank you so much!! i'm very glad that you like it

your support means a lot to me

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