a collection of general poems on the motif of a space, a void, a zone
My other collection is called Odes. There are also quite a lot of my poems not online. Held in reserve I suppose, should I ever attempt getting published in print.
This trapezoid we lay under,
A ceiling to shut us off from the sky.
Have we been dreaming it all our lives?
And can we escape it?
And do you see beyond?
I don't know sometimes what's real.
And my only anchor,
And my only cage,
Becomes this prism-prison
In which our faintest whispers have flown for years
In search of eternity
And each other.
The bed is much too large for the room it's in.
It stretches from the white, paint-dribbled wall
To that slight window that's always been cramped in an inconvenient corner.
The desk and chair back directly into its side.
A very slim walkway passes in front,
Squeezing a person in.
The sheets are white and tangled, making a crinkling sound when one
steps into it.
The pillows are lumpy,
A squelching rather than a sigh when one's head is in it.
The heat in it is uneven, cold in places and stifling warm in others.
The blankets are never large enough for it,
Messily draped in different directions
And muddled in a pile by the wall while one lays in bed,
Staring up.
One gazes forward too,
Finding one's bearings and sense of proportion oddly distorted.
One turns over, pressing face and body into fabric.
The bed smells of skin, breath, tears, and remnant sweat from fevers.
The sheets are changed, but there are memories in the bed still,
Perhaps pressed into the mattress beneath everything.
It tastes like dust and stale morning breaths.
When the lights are off, the darkness is thick
And makes the room's every feature chameleon with the bed.
All things the same deep grey when one blinks and stares around.
One lays with the blankets stretched over one's body,
Sometimes finding the sensation pleasant.
One has memories of other beds, other dreams, in comparison to this one.
One never sleeps at first, waiting in the dark for hours
For what should be tranquil rest.
One watches the red neon clock.
One's mind is busy.
One remains tucked into a narrow patch of mattress,
Huddled tight as though this bed were half its size.
One closes one's eyes every now and then.
One experiments about sleeping sideways, then diagonally.
One shifts, and shifts, and shifts.
One tears at one's hair.
One sleeps.
Our helianthin* years
Began in that stage where we divided our souls
Among the aspects that we had ability for in coping and in knowing.
We were resolved at last
For an identity of fidelity and everlasting shelter
To pull us through the webs of time,
The threads of night,
Filled with stars enough to draw a new pattern on our skin,
To change the path of our lives.
But--
For now
I am alone here, in these wilds.
This world removed.
helianthin refers to the Latin name for the sunflower--Helianthus
Lovers should share all they have to give.
This is where they meet, here in the darkness,
As they seek that which they would say with meaning,
Those unique words of adoration
That will fit no other,
That will show their brightest honesty.
There must be a way that this love will write,
Will compose song
To sustain the harmony between these two hearts.
He opened her eyes, and she only saw the sun behind him,
A silhouette carved out of the sky,
Needing to be filled.
This
Thin,
Taut
Wire
We
Pace
Step
By
Step,
Going
Who
Knows
Where?
I'd
Risk
Any
Place
For
You
No
Matter
How
Great
The
Fall.
I have still found no explanation for this heart.
For this sinking inside,
Or for the rare event of fullness.
What instinct sends binary pulses down to a shallow void?
Flicks the switch for this web of chemistry?
We are nearing the sun, my love.
Approaching infinity.
Collapsing night.
I want to be with you for all the time I have,
All the sands that will run through my grasp.
Riverfall,
New-moon,
Dream liquor.
--Tell me it's what you want.
If we fall out of the sky,
Tell them they were imagining it all.
These poems are written on the wind
That somehow you might hear them,
Feel them brush you in the chill wisps
That most haunt you
When I can't touch you.
These poems are my lifeline to reach you, our small way of magic
To survive each day until someday,
On the speech carried by the clouds.
These poems I whisper into the gray ether
For that is all that is fit to be our courser,
All that is pure enough to intervene for the sake of our love.
The sheer adultery of how I need you!
Body and soul.
I love you still in whispers, in our closed hush
That has been our language since first
Last you touched me.
That ancient witch-night hour of our history.
These poems are for the memory of you.
We must raze the oceans,
Stop up the earth,
Boil the sun in vacuum of the soul,
Slice the world open,
And undo the abyss of me.
Balance me inside you.
Sleep alongside my dreams
And voice your wizardry inside my tongue.
Fill
Oh fill everything.
Spell my name in the orbits of my fingers.
I have been needing you too long to remember.
Tell me I am, some portion of me, your heaven.
If I bruise me in loving you,
What is it but the heart flowing too fast,
The body not knowing how to keep up with the soul?
When I want anything,
When I have time enough to want anything desperately,
I want you.
I want to write infinite words
For your pleasure,
For your smile.
I want to write of this heaven you hold in your eyes.
I want to write of infinite time,
Infinite space,
Infinite energy
Flowing in this zone your heart builds for me.
This zone where I live,
Separated, distanced, silenced, thinking
As the world goes on, ticking its life away.
When I want anything,
I want to see spring unfold in your eyes
And be a small, smooth atom
Woven into your skin.
How is it that you fit just here,
At the crook of my elbow?
At the bone of my cheek
And under the palm of my hand?
Round the mound of my belly
And down the scales of my leg?
You wondrous, wonderful thing.
You precious piece of the sky in my arms.
They say that comedians are tortured souls.
They must be, for it is easier to laugh off a heartache
Than to cry tears enough to drown it out.
Parts that are lost are less missed,
Not seen going.
So have I blinded me and laid brick after brick
To wall me from the sight of pain,
But never learned the lesson of release.
So they feign,
So I feign,
So sadness bears her chosen costume.
I fear much of my tenderness was lost.
I fear I am not amusing.
Why should loving me be a resolution for sadness?
Say you will have none of it now nor ever,
Only cherising being cherished.
I will kiss you and you will smile.
If that is the only I can give you,
It's enough.
I would let you unravel me like the sun,
Filling,
Rising,
Sliding out, away,
Shedding layer and layer
In its nova.
Casting off shells,
Losing all portions
To its lover, the vast, dark night of space.
Giving all up into such arms,
Its essence rendered helpless,
Open,
To give its unbounded kiss,
Going lost into the night.
Belly
And the button you often touch,
But yet don't touch often enough.
My belly
Is a round, soft thing,
And I don't give a damn about the waist that's supposed to be finely turned.
I'm healthy this way.
It's my place, this place of love,
Of center.
Center of mass,
Center of me.
Your welcome caress
I would wish to linger
Here,
At my back,
And every curve and space of me
Down to the buttons.
O speak my name and show me you know the sound of me
More truly than any false heart whose fork struck tinly in my ears all these ages.
Tell me my music is not too low for you to hear,
Too feeble to move your heart.
I am still yet yours
Though my devotion be hidden
In the gliding my steps do within these shadows.
She's not afraid of spider veins
Or crow's feet
Or turkey neck
Or any yawning, witch-hazel terror
That may well threaten her body in times to come.
It matters not
And gives her no stir of anxiety
Or starting out of place.
She will let them conquer her willingly
For they are harmless to her soul,
They are all quaint, forgivable ravages of the shell she temporarily resides in.
She keeps her heart's hopes fixed somewhere else,
Somewhere further away than any landmark on her body's geography.
Aging may afflict her,
But cannot change her.
Her eyes are wanton and damp when she looks at her lover with desire.
If that is always so,
It is enough.
Sweet rim,
Half-dusty glow in darkness.
The soft glare of the screen
And the background hum of hardware.
Ever challenging us to be faster than it,
Itself faster than life,
Machine holds in its curved shell
This window to someplace else,
Some order else.
Made itself this captured frame of pixels,
Spellbinding and numbing.
Red is the color of the sea when I hold you.
Green is the color of skin.
Blue is the color of my blood pounding.
Pounding down and bursting
The hot, white dam of my heart
That blinds my witch eyes and your gypsy mouth to blackness,
Mingling in the shadows of the moon.
This cavern between my ears
Is only an echo of things that have passed through it,
Of much greater lights filtered.
But it is slowly being filled.
Good morning, heavens,
And cast your light still down
To follow us until our cosmic death.
We are mere words
Found scratched in dust
In a place we've chosen with our breath.
What little light we have we spend on our dreaming,
Lost 10,000 miles from a civilized shore.
A sweet nonsensical path we two weave
Out of the atoms of our skin,
And something more of the ages.
If we pass the chemistry and reasons that would formulate us,
Perhaps our crystalline constructions
Would melt a trail of sense upon our pages
That are faintly more than whispers
Cast in the crumbling stone of our hearts.
When will we make song, you and I?
When will the lullabyes solidify?
This blanket-capsule we hide in,
Love in,
In the sweet night
Is the hearth of our home,
The shelter of our love.
I roam these wandering paths, without purpose,
Just daily eking out my life.
I'd always wish us solid if I ever had a chance.
There are feeble attempts I can make,
Some small steps of release to accomplish even part of what I wish to.
Yes, I wish to love you well.
I believe and find you in every voice and vision.
Will you stay?
I must cope with the emptiness alone, in this silence.
Pipe dreams.
False starts.
We are drawing the map anew.
We will right the errors of old geography
And fill in the centric unknowns.
These blanks you can name.
These rivers you can trace.
Discover the sources, the depths, the speeds, with me.
Every contour to measure.
Every peak to note.
We'll affix our boundaries,
Set compass,
And ratio scales.
"I want you to do what you want with me,
If it doesn't disgust you,"
Said the spider woman to her long wished-for mate,
Finally washed up upon her shore.
And even she got her
Last,
Long
Kiss.
A breath into the vacancy.
Blackness.
I remember the rain coming down
And watching the lightning flash
While we stared out the window
And I held you near,
Wishing for the sky,
For the rain dappling down our skin.
Wishing to be free of the caging indoors,
To be more than mere shadows in the window with you,
Watching the orange night.
If we must be creatures, my love,
Let us have fun with it.
Why should we wear always the masks they gave us to begin?
The lowness of a beast is a thing,
Like beauty,
That will be judged according to conceit.
Filth is not ours unless we choose it.
Be my phoenix,
My dragon,
My basilisk.
I'll be a wraith, a banshee you shelter in your embrace.
We'll retreat in each other
And hide from the light of day
In fire.
Some breaths will recall the memory.
Some places in my body preserve the sensation of fever,
The electric sting crackling in my skin.
You are somehow at the back of my eyes,
In the hollow that throbs under my dark circles.
Too much of me is weary, is perpetually spent.
My voice is softer now.
It shrinks and tries hard to pace,
To dull the high-pitched flights.
Self taught?
Self taught?
What do I mean by this?
What are these vague excursions of my self?
I am babbling,
Pouring rain.
Dreaming
Samothrace wings
Singing voiceless things.
I am seeking eyes enough to fill the sky,
Fires enough to drown the oceans,
Words enough to net time.
Draw me nearer, my walled off lover.
Shatter me inside out.
You used to kiss me
Like maybe I was going mad to believe it was true.
Dead or dying I have always been
Immortal sir.
Don't speak to me as if I have drunk your same ambrosia, blind.
Ah, but you little see the sage-fool,
sovereign-wretch,
mortal-god,
child-witch,
warrior-angel,
and fountain-mudhole creature I am.
In the dark night,
Will I ever learn to see this love that sits so near my heartbeat,
Yet is smothered in the crush at the back of my eyes?
Words of worship, of loves, should be particular and very chosen,
Not borrowed from conceit.
How funny is the night
And the vision of a near-sighted lover.
I can feel quite clearly
My nose pressed to your skin,
Not a gap between bridge and flesh,
But all I can see is 180 degrees of you.
How the nose becomes invisible,
Not even a shadow,
At close quarters.
Like a magnet,
Suddenly reversing polarity,
The water runs from hot to cold.
She was the Bright and Dark side of the Moon,
Attendant on new-born life,
And swift harbinger of an untimely end.
She was a lover of shepherds and a killer of huntsmen,
A goddess and a
witch.
She smiled and danced after days of slaughter.
She was Lilith, she was Eve.
Loved few, killed many.
You are so gentle with me,
Moving slow, soft,
As if I were delicate and breakable.
A structure that cannot be allowed to fall.
You cushion my bursting heart,
Pounding too loud in both our ears,
And echoing in your skin.
Sweet kisses
On lips that are useless everywhere else.
You touch and keep every part of me
As your own treasure,
Though I've always thought it trash.
My lover, my sun, my knight, my zone....
There's an empty space in my bed beside me.
You should be in it.
