Verses/Curses
animal ownership
i am in love
with a real animal
she feels strangely familiar
she feels strangely kind
i am drawn
by her steady warmth
by her interior calm
she seems to understand
i am tempted
to bring her home
i want her to be safe
i am afraid she is not safe
i am bound
by animal ownership
my dog is not my dog
she is her own beach dog
//
disproportionate luxury
my three cats are
as kept-healthy housecats
i daily reckon a deep
irresponsibility
//
dessert first (so low)
it’s the way of a house
to wait
the weight
of when whispers / trying
to squeeze the quiet
from the day
task bar doesn’t move
watching, unblinking,
as the blue
thunderstorm gets lost
among tossing limbs
wanting, not wanting
its magic entourage
to disappear
before the night / goes
permissive
lines in waiting
falling
s
e
e
d
s
bodies on the floor:
the / irrefutable
conclusion
i know now not
to try / to count
the grains
i know
by the way you hover
pale
and wonderful
and unexpected — so low
to the roof tops
//
selamat Idulfitri / ‘Eid mubarak 🌙
//
Hyperverse is made from hypertext fragments of other bloggers’ work; follow links to read complete pieces. Praise belongs to all messengers of the heart.
i love living where i live
never a dull moment
immersed in your genius
the gamelan starts at noon
holding my heartbeat
from the inside
//
🌑
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
freedom advice
to where im from
from where ive been
when you cant see the room
stop throwing stones
//
prayer for puasa
the hardest thing for my puasa
and i still struggle with it
is not the hunger — i have been made
perhaps too comfortable with hunger
but its the eating again
its my takjil classic impasse
its the opening of my daily fast
and it would break me every time
my very body would refuse
my hardened lips just wouldnt soften
my sharpened teeth just wouldnt chew
my strangled throat just wouldnt swallow
so sitting parched-mouth after sunset
before my three precious dates
how angrily would i demand the cause
my why and what am i myself against
my self surrendered in survival
my self surrendered in nourishment
my self surrendered to the sunless day
my self surrendered to the slow care of the moon
and surely there remain deeper hungers
and surely colder winters to come
but Lord — please let me not refuse
your mercy when the spring appears
//
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
//
date night and an opened fast
the bistro grows further away with every date
the one at the end of the island where we go
to visit our phantom habit for public hunger
your eyes say its not fair to look with my pit
but the opened fast maneuvers greed into survival
so we chew but cannot swallow what we see
is this then what judgment is my lips will ask
this polyester napkin and those contactless faces
our eyes held hands fed body before what future
you drive us home in the twisting dark as i nod off
the headlights reflected in dogs eyes like coins
as the unfed guard the way by broken asphalt
we arrive and flavor seems to have returned
we bite a grey macaron speckled with black sesame
seeds soft as the crack at the back of a cradled head
//
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
//
lipsblum and parfum ooze
the cherries fell and placed their fingerprints
between my feet like small mouths of a month
of its here its a bloody wee well of a red whale
her fluke-petals strewn long the grey and white tile
and smudge of a moth in the blossoms to clear
but im always her hem and im on the sore brink
of love with the let-jet and inky-bruise style of it
like my pussy would write her own un-willing book
would underwear-stain me an avant-garde blotch
of enfant terrible for primordial brood
elsewhere wind-egg dramatic and lithe acrobatic
some brown-wise residuum to raging en rouge
sex-flowing battle and kiss-knowing cramp
my blew-brewing worm of verbage vole-damp
a crescendo howled in my bowling-ball clamp
and how you offered to switch off the lamp
so i wouldnt need to move at all
so i lie lust-fallow-unfastened at last for now
and i shower near the violet melati that you grow
with slugs softly tucked in a wet toilet paper roll
//
🌖
//
after
the easy way out
saucy
like a bruise
cherry
&c
& the maskmaker
who called lip balm that
fast flight
in the smudged aftermath of a hijacked plane
a bird sits in wonder
at the swift
heart
after so fast years
her beat so hard believing in
so locked in by the loaded spring
like a poem punched out through the windowpane
//
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
//