Drip drip drip

Caught on the Barbed Wire of Sensation

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Preservation



Faces fade while other details stay intact,
like an ancient ship perfectly preserved
deep within the sea,
there is the shape of a hand,
the scent of a neck
the gauge of the light catching on the edges
of eyelashes.

All romantics are born into the same misery,
the same unquellable tide bearing
unwanted pieces
of conversations
lips and mouths
and a heady erotica superimposed on the pedestrian.

Searching out the merciful oblivion
of wide open gazes forgotten
and visions and revisions never started
is like praying
to a desolated alter
and calling it king.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Poetry is Inappropriate



Inappropriate.

Poetry is inappropriate. It prescribes meaning without owning up to it. It spreads words, like tentacles, out among unacknowledged 'reality' (without going into a discussion of Kant, Baudrillard, etc. . . insert your own version of 'reality' here).

Poetry is an embarrassment, unless it is lofty or removed.

Poetry is . . . well parallel structure is embarrassing, and a cheap tool in the poetry writing arsenal.

I don't like the word. I don't like the connotations. Damned semantics always getting me down.

I place words next to each other, plain words, orbiting around the sphere of the unspoken.

I'd like to think there is more to us than what we say. I'd like to think that what others say is also what we say to ourselves. I'd like to think that semantics isn't as thorny as it is. I'd like to think I could quit using parallel structure here.

Resurrection



In the earth
there is a slithering pressure
where mud fills the empty spaces
and warmth is close, filling each pore,
blocking each breath.

It is a place of roots and
doesn't take easily
to giving in.

Between my toes
and in my nail beds gone gray
with time,
behind my ears and my glassy eyes,
beyond collapsed lungs
and still bones . . .

A pressure
to resurrect.
To take back.
To splinter up, pushing,
fingers tubers in spring soil
and a mouth emerging
gawping silently,
unable to speak a sound,
but with eyes that see
a blaring sun.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The Heart of Darkness



Longing can be manufactured into a gift,
one that sits eternally,
unopened,
with ribbon that doesn't fade:

Her face against yours,
a similar respite,
a slow, unmistakable sparkle around the edges,
a pulsing intensity like a lower jungle canopy,
green to green,
leaf to leaf,
and a whisper in the distance.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

The QUEEN



Erasure. The queen is coming.

Her eyes chip corners from your chin,
a smarting wound
and a slap dash gash.

Bend low now. The queen is coming.

She crushes stone fruits beneath her
steely feet,
cropping the edges from the moon.

Palms on the earth. The queen is coming.

She smells like gold
and looks as distant as a star.
Words pour out of her
with the weight of a pulsing river
that cuts continents in two.

Voyeur ou voyeuse?



My more macabre self was lurking today as I clicked on the "recent deaths" section of wikinews. It's wikideath. Cool.

I didn't recognize any of the names. These are people of international notoriety no doubt. To some. But to me they are people with strange names and noble births and/or worldly achievements.

What's especially cool about wikideath is that they list the cause of death alongside many of the deceased. So convenient. Don't you hate it when you hear or read that someone famous has died and they don't even tell you how? Something as mundane as "cause of death" (well, for most of us at least) lends a needed human element to a celebrity death.

The fact that I take pleasure in such dirty details exposes something about me. I just don't know what that is. I guess I'm one of those people that stares as she drives by an accident scene, involuntarily drawn to the possibility of seeing blood.

Of course it's true that curiosity can kill the cat and I often find that my interest becomes blanketed in disgust when I actually do get my grubby little paws on the sordid details. It must be voyeur's remorse, but only in a sense because a voyeur derives sexual pleasure from the object of her observation, and well, that would be disturbing, wouldn’t it? A cross between necrophilia and Schadenfreude. Yikes.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

A careful flux of fluids.



Let me explain. It's all about the in and out. That's fluids in, and fluids out.

Night: beers taking the expressway, and then water to replace what was robbed by the beer monsters.

Morning: water in continual replacement of what the alco-beer monsters stole, then coffee to taketh away.

Afternoon: MORE coffee to keep the eyes open in front of a nasty computer screen. And then MORE water.

Rinse and repeat.

But aside from fluids what is going on in life. Nothing. Blurring horrendous time entry into days. Sickness and catastrophe. Love and war (all is fair). Discipline and loneliness.

Thank you, thank you (curtains closing now).