Across the Crackling Years (poym)
Current mood: finery in the winery
Category: finery in the winery Writing and Poetry

Across the Crackling Years

That kindred night before our souls met
Your two eyes acted so differently one
Seemed resigned and a flat lazy blue
But the other jumped into the water
And called after me to jump in too.

Right then I chased that playful eye
Under its belladonna bewitching fell
And always sought out its joyful view
But I should have been noting the other
How a clinical mind sized up my heart.

Now I hold your hand and out for a hope
Your smile flickers and dies, flickers,
Dies again, across the crackling years.
In one eye a child still wants to play
In another a heart of mine stayed true.

Currently listening : Almost Blue By Elvis Costello Release date: 2004-08-03

1:30 AM - 6 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

I Can’t Read Your Little Poems (littlepoem)
Current mood: sometimes like a chameleon
Category: sometimes like a chameleon Writing and Poetry

I Can't Read Your Little Poems

I cannot bake your pistol pies
Nor lace our love with cyanide
No razored kiss in death of night
Now I lay me down upon a bank
My soul my keep in devilish times
Walls relieved of all compassion.

I can't read your little poems
Nor visit in a formal sitting room
Their lack of words hurts my neck
A light between the empty blinds
Punning fabrics make itchy teeth
Freshened adjectives clog my sinus.

Instead I am a creature of unease
Who craves a shadow unexpected
A ripened rose in the savage luck
The stain above a mantle peeling
A clock whose face is staring open
The sky is soft and clumsy thumbs.

Currently listening : Hejira By Joni Mitchell Release date: 1990-10-25

1:55 AM - 11 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

A Reverie of Flowers (for Dylan T.)
Current mood: streetly
Category: streetly Writing and Poetry

A Reverie of Flowers

A reverie of flowers blooms
Then turning browns in a field
Standing deadheads in a field
Catches breath of passing ghosts.

This living eye rails in the wind
And hiding sleeps in wider rings
For no bed holds a wandered time
Avails our soul its wandered time.

I smoke a final peaceful cigarette
Then curl my toes on foamy beach
Burnt again by this forgetful moon
Who called my love run out to sea.

There's in each sadness a loss today
A gathering of broken sets the sun
Final peaceful cigarette sets the sun and
Hasp of morning breaks a new dream.

Currently listening : Flesh + Blood By Roxy Music Release date: 2000-03-14

8:28 PM - 10 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

We Were Children Then (poma)
Current mood: this one is for cath
Category: this one is for cath Writing and Poetry

We Were Children Then

We were children then
With tiny hearts and fists
Voices lost in mighty din
And we stood apart while
Fire defined our shadows.

Air never exhausted us in
Those bottomless nights
Stars came out just to play
And we stood together to
Corral their wild moment.

We were seekers after all
And a day unfractured lay
On heaps of boundless time
When cool night arrived it
Rode our skulls like leather.

We were children then the
World a garden of oysters
And each of us found a way
A star came down to tame
The fire the night the heart.

Currently listening : Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1927) By Blind Lemon Jefferson Release date: 1994-05-27

3:27 AM - 16 Comments - 28 Kudos - Add Comment

The Summer Abandoned (pomme)
Current mood: apologies to the Aussies
Category: apologies to the Aussies Writing and Poetry

The Summer Abandoned

The summer abandoned like mariachi love
Or wild accusations by a fleeing heat made
And again the cabinets stripped bare to
Pack up a trailer with meaningful things
That burst at the railing and topple and sway
They bounce in the sunset of further away.

The colors in trees have begun their rebellion
When air in a nighttime hangs smoky and free
And shadows in morning lie flat to the earth
But their sweep of greed captures no plunder
Fritters away in gambol of afternoon sun
Dying under the laughing trees of evening.

Begins a marauding autumn its mad parade
The skulls that clatter and fall from a sky
As deep as horizons that swallow the ocean
That bring to your memory a ripened taste
Cascading like familiar accents from home.
Everyone in September falls to sleep smiling.

Currently listening : Exile on Main St. By The Rolling Stones Release date: 1994-07-26

2:09 AM - 12 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment

Nothing With Words (poym)
Current mood: enslaved by freedom
Category: enslaved by freedom Writing and Poetry

Nothing With Words

Sing me a song she commanded
And how I believed her
But nothing with words
A tiny bird she was got me started
Hummed a tra-la-la
Added some tambourine
Down lonesome windy pines.

Make me a poem she summoned
So I fell to my task
Without using words
A moonlight kissed me tenderly
Rhymed my soul and
Tossed in a star's eclat
That rustled in my paper wings.

Now do my heart justice she said
And I died in my doubts
Without a lucid word
The hills leaned toward their troubles
I dreamt a home and
Chopped up some wood
Built her an imaginary fire instead.

Currently listening : In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain By The Carter Family Release date: 2000-07-17

2:49 AM - 11 Comments - 20 Kudos - Add Comment

The World Can Change (a distraction of a poem)
Current mood: i’m looking through!!
Category: i’m looking through!! Writing and Poetry

A World Can Change

A world can change in a day you hit something
When you return to the old familiar those rooms
(Just the way you left them waiting jape-jawed)
But this new and guiltless light reflects hollow
And dust gathers in corners in heaps of taunting:
You cannot outlast the silence.  Night knows it.

And an aching in your bones says it's closing time
The best one can do falls like scales from the eyes
And wrinkles in the waves crooked as moonlight
There's nothing magic that daylight will not fade
(The soft gray of autumn air hanging like death)
A kiss pulls apart.  We keep each other standing.

Now all the days string together as if by cat-gut
The face of your smiles dries stretches and sags
But peace arrives alongside the things you forget
(A sort of sadness sings a cappella to your dreams)
And in your ears you carry the laughter of echoes:
A world bears its own.  The curtain of sleep falls.

Currently listening : Wonderwall Music By George Harrison Release date: 2006-06-29

2:57 AM - 13 Comments - 23 Kudos - Add Comment

Long Toothed and Grizzled Rain (poem)
Current mood: all that you dream
Category: all that you dream Writing and Poetry

Long Toothed and Grizzled Rain

This long toothed and grizzled rain this dog-faced day
I scratch for friendship a damp aroma behind its ears
From panted steam of fog and mist and whistling weed
This rain is upon me without falling the way life does.

Surfacing like the weary rage in all men's hands a green
Loamy earth spelunks a faulty memory in moldy ardor
A younger skin a sweeter day to wrap ourselves in love
This time is where I swam and then off to the giant sea.

Today is eroding down rain gutters and drain sewers in
Lymphatic design.  Leaves shiver in no westerly wind.
The funereal silence broken by gunshots of hunters and
Slap of tires in wet streets drivers shaky from their fumes.

I recall grown men arguing with my father on such a day
And took that ride to peer out behind windshield wipers
My heart in this rain is a manhole cover flat under itself
A conduit world carrying to sea a fallen leaf a dream.

Currently listening : Thanks I'll Eat It Here By Lowell George

6:48 AM - 8 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

A Chatter of Scaups (poma)
Current mood: very somewhat
Category: very somewhat Writing and Poetry

A Chatter of Scaups

A chatter of scaups off the granite caroms
And singing marimba the water in wind
My riverbed heart has come to its delta
Its patterns of grief in their fingers of sand.

The weather will turn like the joy of old women
To lash us our youth and to teach us to mind
A wisdom in stout things a judgment in silence
Like trees in the earth who are standing aground.

The pelicans stutter the jays are a-twitter
And I have lost track of the sun once again
The clouds are avenging a bloodthirsty slight
By smothering hope under cover of change.

The chatter of scaups from the granite returns
Its melody backward in minor-key gloom
My waterfall heart has leapt the horizon
It throws off a rainbow a forested prayer.

Currently listening : Kid Blue / Louise Goffin

3:41 AM - 7 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

A Toledo Matador (poema)
Current mood: angsty
Category: Writing and Poetry

A Toledo Matador

Late afternoon sunshine dissipates
Breaking like a Toledo matador
Frozen in the orange dust of clay
Heavy of heart and guilty-haired
And points a futile finger at the sky
That silent graveyard of our hopes
Full of rue to sketch by charcoal
To catch a breath in carbon record.

Raw-fanged bones do not leap today
Tart of tongue and thickly coated
With the metal taste of living done
But the sighing air of first evening
Slowly her debutante entrée makes
In a summerdown thistle hardening
And casts a hush over gravestones
A whispering inside ignoble armor.

Three hours' darkness swallowed in
Whole pints of sweat and smoky rage
We stagger home and mourn the sun
To take the hands of leading ghosts
Hearts no longer lonely and faint but
Fortified by ancient patterns in a sky
That silent graveyard of our hopes
Again like a welcoming pool the bed.

Currently listening : Metal Circus By Hüsker Dü Release date: 1990-10-25

3:02 AM - 13 Comments - 16 Kudos - Add Comment