Element
beauty of change
i fall to fragments in the pulling of your chain
my ageing eye-bones ugly by the sea
as always drags for stunner-fish from me
speaks death my fathers pockets into poverty
futility behind me fire-dives like stars
for childrens sea-bed faces i will never see
the grieving know by undertowing force
necessity your surface that i choose to be
by breaths am i permitted in this dream
your daily judgment sheer futurity
my watch the world unmade as history
your swallowing my coin remainderless
your lie in the veil between me like a mist
your move and i miss you infinitely
//
eta - note: i came across this and wanted to clarify, in case my poem may have been part of what prompted it.
this piece was written as an attempt to work through feelings of futility, distance, and a failure of vision and expression. it was not intended as a “heroic” or “no problem” poem, or as support for war, genocide, or the justification of violence.
it is fairly common for me to discover unintended interpretations in my poems after posting. sometimes that is part of what i value about writing this way. but i also recognize that it can lead to readings i did not anticipate, especially when the subject matter brushes up against real suffering.
to be clear: i do not support genocide or war. i do not blame or hold animosity toward victims of violence. i have made personal choices in my life to distance myself from institutions and systems that do support those things.
im sorry for any harm or distress this poem may have caused. that was not my intention.
-e
matter
the season leaves
the city leaves
the bitter ending leaves
i stay
i stay so hard
i drop my taproot
i plunge into the sphere
there was a sentence here
there was no choice in the matter
i am a matter of survival
(fasting)
//
fasted desire (lay me)
her demiurge reviews the urge
from which amaze tactfully de-mazed
earth-maker of my demi-glazed
eye
for sighing to be held — ready
your valley to be seen — surfaced
used witless by the restless sea
(lay me
in memory)
//
for not a place
et al.
proper fast (& thanks)
dont give your body up for nought
so reads the rhetors scroll on love
now i forgot just who it was
that stole my breath in body bound
yet i recall the lovers nought
who let me give my breath away
//
fast by you
body of grass
black earth body
body of an ask
three billion years
four billion blades
body yet new
when i lie still
fast by you
you find me
//
immaculate ooze
until discomforts of
deep oceanic trigger
a sighing spring
when the abyssal ooze
in-twined fecundity conceived
our dark-bodying infant
(of constant cry)
//
🌗
recollection of an ask
on that fateful summer day
when we escaped the tiring city
by silly-door in set-down wall
my love — were we un-born
//
in just the time
i sleep in a living bed
its not clean but keeps me fed
its a cradle for my head
while i wait the one i wed
i sleep in a shady tree
i love rumors of the sea
i refuse the military
i know you will come for me
i sleep in the bed you made
im headstrong but im afraid
a face could change or be remade
in just the time i was asleep
i sleep under miles of ice
drill the oil melt the dice
i sleep in a grain of rice
for my heart you paid a price
//
golden ooze
i did not know until i tasted your honey
it made me ache to feel everything you did
it made me stutter to say nothing but grace
when the belief took me for one moment
that your spun-gold had been made for me
it made me forget myself inside myself
was i the honey in your cell
your glass jar of honey or a thought
in the stomach of a honeybee
the sweet up-welling had dripped everywhere
i wept to taste it over everything until
the sky set me down in tethers and drizzles
//
miel japonais
i cannot lie the bit plum
is perhaps uncomfortable
yet her blossoms are close-pure
sour soft easy undressing-me cool
her love-notes strewn across the floor
like slipped-off shoulders of honed wood
light anarchy my never lonely reason
to lend her tart my sweet-tipsy vibe
(i inhale)
these golden hints of spring
seems so promising
//
hungry
4
a japanese jazz record
original ooze
this nights business
sheer sky-falls of memory
your willful ooze is
teasing my soles your
frothy ooze my
salt-bedded indiscretion
//
purple fast
you caught me on your pleasureline yesterday
a warning on the sounding sea-bruise of night
at the global brink of your vaporous flight
into the tiniest vessel of my flecked resistance
and what would my hydrogen-burning father think
when my limbs shudder to lie next to yours
when i slide my fingers across the plum-skin sky
my rose-thread-hooked by your star ungoverning me
who steals the scene from the full face of the moon
who steals my dream to die until another spring
i am awoke at noon by iambs falling like the rain
like pain or like war until the poem is written about it
until the martyr says i was just a child in love
and now you will repeat my morning for me
//
🌕
mere eidolon
at sundown when you disappear
like death is an unbroken sound
my dark thought into your empty pockets
an oyster swallowed
//
katabasis on an intact plum
as the violence of my storm
on the exquisite valley like a stem-snapped blade
draws her meandering twin
along the vein of your virginity
by whose volcanic seam the black
and greening scar is welded between
rivers
until the bottom of her exhalation
where dreams our deepest lake
(orchards of wantlessness)
//
Phaedrus: (as Lysias, cont.)
which none would attempt (epi-cheirein)
even being experienced (empeiros)
to turn away (apotrepein)
// 231δ
ἣν οὐδ᾽ ἂν ἐπιχειρήσειεν οὐδεὶς ἔμπειρος ὢν ἀποτρέπειν
//
previously i wrote a poem called “Δ” that performed my severance with social media; it was also a faceoff between monsters (?); i wont link it because i havent read it in a while but the search button usually works
the inward prospect of a delta
once upon the oceans day an open secret rode forth
enrobed in sheer sunsets and sunrises to say
it is always and regardless of the weather okay
to not be okay on a winged word
she said in my opinion like roses aflame
poetry is never okay
poetry is the doing deed
poetry is a metaphor for the mishap
and it might have worked but that beachgoers assumed
she plied postcards for the impossible
well she spoke quietly to her own heart
ive seen worse ways to circumnavigate this black earth
//
🌔
//
Halcyon cyanoventris
seems nesting nearby
very loud
and yet so blue
omg the genealogy of OK
cries out
via improbable speech
babel bobber bauble bubble
//
ahistorical fast
you come to me with your fishing game
your hunger for hunger
i might bite
to stir the turmoil of that famous ocean
the subtle friction between his loves
our pretty little law
your holding vibrates like a plucked string
all beauties of the past
swallowed
//
whos a good
i heard a rumor about myself
from you or my long-lost
referential tendency
the scent just strange
like a far-flung purpose
with charred edges
remarkable love
mighty hobbler
good nature
//
ache
daikon & rice vinegar
& kopi & key lime pie
& something i don’t recognize
and everything else
ive eaten at iftar
and everybody laughing
at my stomach-ache
because they know
//
might //
Phaedrus: (as Lysias, cont.)
that they claim
they most love (philein)
those whom they love (eran)
// 231ξ
ὅτι τούτους μάλιστά φασιν φιλεῖν ὧν ἂν ἐρῶσιν
//
philos and eros
cacao and sea salt
or the dog
//
of the lovely maker and the might of Achilles
i think often of Achilles triple-shot
how he returned to the war before his armor was made
by Hephaestus of the golden-dragging foot
to his naked rage and slaughtered twelve with just his voice
then we are gifted some pretty face of a shield
and as all the seas daughters in threnody behind him
his myriad aunts and his mother verging on hysterical
its light-footed Vulcan tuning weather that i remember
and as amber waves of hair around her loomed fluvial
like civilization swashing blind into the bloodstorm
although material and form were mountainwork and metal
a cetacean iris was blooming around her tectonic teapot
//
rereading book 18 of Homer’s Iliad