WritersCreed

The way he smiles at the end of a sentence

And the way she giggles quietly when she’s nervous

The way the moon reflects on her collarbone

And the way his eyes search for hers in the silence

I had been moving through this world so rapidly

And then there was you

The night is close

to the day. My head’s

thick with whiskey

and bitter ideas.

My hands ache. I find

it hard to speak

at length without

losing words, or how

to say them. So, I wait

and listen to the silence

for the words to stop

their emotional slither,

and allow me to go

home, alone again.

wicked willow trees

stupendous serpents

giggling gorillas

hypocritical herons

sadistic sunrays

climbing cancer rates

gore ridden governments

clueless confusion

my head is spinning

frightening future

a clash of morals

or doors wide opening

for new solutions?

who knows?

who 'll tell us?

please get me out of here

and kiss my innocence

Eyes Upon the World

we dream of

better things

better times

complicated endings

simple beginnings

the yin and yang

of the world

which surrounds us

sometimes we live

in the illusion that

we are on the

outside looking in

when in fact

we have always

You the sun and I Arcturus,

As you rise I fade away,

I, the night and you, the day,

So in darkness I must wonder,

How some claim this makes me fonder,

All it does is bring me pain,

You can see the deck your dad built, nesting,

From space

I walked past the classroom where you built birdhouses

And I bet they’re still wherever they’re perched, too

Love like that

Doesn’t leave this earth soon

It takes a lot of emotional erosion

More than weathering of plank board, acid rain,

Or even fire’s renovation

I kick myself

I should’ve jumped from the car

And pleaded the woman

We could’ve walked down the steps that he made

We could have earned

A splinter

Sure, something to fester

But even that gets pined for sometimes

In the missing of another

Some souvenir to prove he keeps

Needling into your life

Sliver decks share hive mind abilities

I project these things

I don’t understand fully

I only want traces in me, too

____________________________________

Our

bare-faced

wanting

turns

the world

In this instant our day’s to start.

The sun rises with imagination’s art.

Canvases unfurl forever changing.

Changes unfurl with minds raging.

Heads spin to lust and learn.

And the ageless age with every turn.

It’s time itself telling time.

By degree our world’s a chime.

A brushes stroke and all’s made right.

Then our sun will rise on another’s night.

~*~

this is where a poem would be. if I had one.

this empty space looks back at me- an eternity observing at a distance, waiting.

i've settled into this three-dimensional space, living out my linear existence- my sentience cast as sculpture, waiting in line.

the silence has acquired a shape. dust rehearses the outline of things i almost meant.

somewhere, language is still becoming itself. birdsong discovers the morning without first consulting a dictionary. the tide arrives having forgotten every name ever given it.

perhaps poems are not written.

perhaps they are excavated- a careful brushing-away of everything that believed it was stone.

if so, i've mistaken the waiting for the work.

i've been polishing the pedestal instead of listening for the first fracture.

this is where a poem would be.

now this return of a ghost from the shadows, moth-soft.

its breath visibly pleated inside a small unspeaking mouth.

its beaded eyes, condensed obsidian spheres, moonflower intense.

i befriend darkness by its wings that are half sheen half lace. and measure space by its wingspan to travel light years into the past. when you and I were aflutter against blinding love.

i tell you "i am lost without you."

"love doesn't need a memory" you whisper.

"i wish …" i begin to say

but every memory dissolves into diffused light.

i wouldn't trade caressing your limbic system for all the copper pipes buried peacefully in the walls of communal mobile homes

A hill,

A mountain top,

A journey that must one day stop,

So I hurry on with haste,

Keep a steady heady pace,

I see flowers,

Smell them sure,

But I hunger still for more,

Time runs out and I with it,

Life's so short,

Do not envy the dog

Their sense of sound so profound

As to hear the storm coming miles away,

Frightened is the whimper

And adrift is the tightened tale,

Do not envy the privilege of noise,

Do not strain to hear the sickening song…

The first time he hears the music of violence,

Like a sickening for mass movement of immorality

The families are rounded up one by one,

It is not the crying that bothers the inner ear

Not the crying for their fathers’ lives,

What frightens the boy staring at the television

Is the silence in his voice,

There are no words for when the gun shots go

Off and each body drops,

Families dead upon the doorstep

The song has already been written for him,

He has no words to give

There is no meaning for a child disposed upon 

Violent enterprise,

He is broken and all the fires of death sound off 

Within his ears,

This is just a movie,

This is just a scene

He is just to be a willing soldier of the song…

Nineteen is the age when the song 

Reveals his phobic nature,

He can hear the walls screaming,

Malcontents breaking gravity to see 

Their families float into the drywall,

Fire anticipates in his desperate eyes 

Lifting his fist higher and the sledgehammer falls,

Like the metal going into the train track

A child’s right temple goes into the carpet,

For a minute the melody is silenced

And yet this boy can only hear violence 

Stumbling through the air,

His breath is quietly bitter and yet he drinks all of it…

At thirty he listens closely to the song of the bruised maiden,

Her tears have mutated into all sense of tolerance

She is a broken kitten subjected to fealty,

His ears make out the sonorous cuts upon the shoulder

And anticipate twisted blood run over her mouth,

Her eyes sing a song of suicide

For with each breaking smack and sophomoric scream

Solidarity reveals a treasonous feeling within him,

An imitation of terror for his thoughts

And a smile of misfortune for at the end

The tragedy begins anew,

Sound of indignity ignited as the door opens

And the devil in the form of him struts through it,

Her fright is flaunted 

Flaunted deep across the boundary of his sanctuary

my mirror has learned

discernment

developed

the blurred mercy

of an Instagram filter

every angle

is suddenly flattering

I cannot distinguish

dysmorphia

from psychotic optimism

or perhaps

it is just

magnanimous glass

then again--

were aesthetics

ever more than

when we were girls we were taught that if you just loved the beast enough, looked past the dripping fangs, the claws curled around a heart you were certain was good beneath it all - if you held a little more faith, stayed soft enough, malleable enough, resilient enough - that the spell he was under would be broken and you would live long enough to see the beast become the man you were promised; your reward for loving so blindly and wildly - and so i drank my poison like a good little miss every last d r o p we're feigning fables now, but not really. it's a tale as old as time. so we sit in our gilded cages and carriages of copper and wait. wait while the beast clips our wings, and the bars that once kept us safe, the bars we mistook for devotion, now hold us captive. until the clock strikes midnight and the carriage remembers it was always a pumpkin, while you're standing in a pool of your own blood, cutting your feet on the same glass slippers you were once all too willing to wear.

and you cannot be surprised when the fairy tale buries you in a shallow grave.

because he showed you who he was from the beginning.

the teeth were not a curse.

the claws were not a hex.