Long overdue and horrendously supplied. Possibly a rough draft if it is hated.
For Rex.
---
When first you part those hued
lips, and slit your unknown eyes,
know that the penumbral day will
shift.
Soon, rockets will suspend before
you and glimmers shall dazzle
and sweet sounds will work their way
down your wind pipe.
The trees beyond the window
will bloom for you
today, tomorrow, every day,
for you make them your own
as soon as those tiny, windowed disks
blink and focus.
We are all caked in our bodies
-saturated-
but you, small one,
you will grow and stretch
and slowly find your fingers
and toes, and that,
in some ways, is the true
awakening: the discovery of syllables
and an enticement onto wobbly legs.
Dear, understand that
livers sometimes grow forth
from bodies,
and days pass like flippant memories,
and wars, they break out
like a plague across the country,
but it's all matter-of-fact.
Someday soon, it will all wash away
and dawn-circles will once again find your windowpane.
Somniloquies, dearest.
Warmth and surrender.
Let the ocean take your breath.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
What the World Will Look Like When All the Mirrors Leave Us
This feels a little like an ode to orwell, but that comes later.
Thoughts? I feel like this needs to be read out loud, or screamed.
Not sure about the last little stanza; it's not complete, and I just scribbled it out in a fit. This isn't completed, I just need...opinions?
Not sure about the title either; it feels like cheating. I know what I want to say, I just can't.
---
Perhaps we will run our hands over our bare naked bodies to feel the bruises, take swaddling-cloth into our spines, and attempt to cloak the hatred sprouting leaves from our ventricles - oh, the hatred that makes us want to discard all our boots; the boots lashed up to our knees in the thickest leather, unbending. It is a decision we know ourselves isn’t right, but unsettling things make most of us queasy and short-of-breath and just a little road-sick, craving gravel. Some may ask what it is to feel hollow. It is this.
Perhaps we will acid-wash away with all the denim in our genes, white-washed and strung up like fence posts, or hung by the ankles so all the blood rushes to our skulls and we forget that we aren’t fish and can easily swim. Perhaps our bodies will be left only in shadows seen scurrying from board to bed, dresser to table, begging for vitamin C, clinging waxen and achy to picture frames and those last long-forgotten faces. The message machine will ask us, “are your memories unsettling or are you already dead?” And they won’t see, but the faces - oh the acrylic and plaster and over-coats we don so luxuriously - will be peeling themselves away in sickness. The bodies will be filing into the blockade, lacing their masks tighter, taking a staple gun and bullet-proofing their jaws against words. Already, we will have lost so much and not realized.
Imagine, the extraordinary words will go first. Echolalia and soft mouths and bleeding, guttural, MIMSIES IN THE TRASH! Stuffed down the garbage disposal with desolation and flaccid handfuls of boyish hair and anamnesis, clogging - clogging up everything, every little morsel of good and doublegood and doubleplusgood and anything anyone ever thought or wondered or dropped into a street grate and fought to find. The intercom, the people will scream. The intercom. And oceans will eat the city because they are tired of living famished lives lapping up sand and carrion, and they have children to feed as well, and we never leave. Outside is another one of those words that will bleach-spot and mustard-stain itself to inscrutability and leave us wondering where we used to go and why. Sunlight means next-to-nothing if darkness is just the lights turned off or eyes closed. What is left to see beneath the curtain-folds?
We will conceal ourselves perfectly, encased in alabaster cells and wallpaper, never again to use these machines called bodies, perhaps out of vengeance or mirth or simply the human condition.
Thoughts? I feel like this needs to be read out loud, or screamed.
Not sure about the last little stanza; it's not complete, and I just scribbled it out in a fit. This isn't completed, I just need...opinions?
Not sure about the title either; it feels like cheating. I know what I want to say, I just can't.
---
Perhaps we will run our hands over our bare naked bodies to feel the bruises, take swaddling-cloth into our spines, and attempt to cloak the hatred sprouting leaves from our ventricles - oh, the hatred that makes us want to discard all our boots; the boots lashed up to our knees in the thickest leather, unbending. It is a decision we know ourselves isn’t right, but unsettling things make most of us queasy and short-of-breath and just a little road-sick, craving gravel. Some may ask what it is to feel hollow. It is this.
Perhaps we will acid-wash away with all the denim in our genes, white-washed and strung up like fence posts, or hung by the ankles so all the blood rushes to our skulls and we forget that we aren’t fish and can easily swim. Perhaps our bodies will be left only in shadows seen scurrying from board to bed, dresser to table, begging for vitamin C, clinging waxen and achy to picture frames and those last long-forgotten faces. The message machine will ask us, “are your memories unsettling or are you already dead?” And they won’t see, but the faces - oh the acrylic and plaster and over-coats we don so luxuriously - will be peeling themselves away in sickness. The bodies will be filing into the blockade, lacing their masks tighter, taking a staple gun and bullet-proofing their jaws against words. Already, we will have lost so much and not realized.
Imagine, the extraordinary words will go first. Echolalia and soft mouths and bleeding, guttural, MIMSIES IN THE TRASH! Stuffed down the garbage disposal with desolation and flaccid handfuls of boyish hair and anamnesis, clogging - clogging up everything, every little morsel of good and doublegood and doubleplusgood and anything anyone ever thought or wondered or dropped into a street grate and fought to find. The intercom, the people will scream. The intercom. And oceans will eat the city because they are tired of living famished lives lapping up sand and carrion, and they have children to feed as well, and we never leave. Outside is another one of those words that will bleach-spot and mustard-stain itself to inscrutability and leave us wondering where we used to go and why. Sunlight means next-to-nothing if darkness is just the lights turned off or eyes closed. What is left to see beneath the curtain-folds?
We will conceal ourselves perfectly, encased in alabaster cells and wallpaper, never again to use these machines called bodies, perhaps out of vengeance or mirth or simply the human condition.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Body-Snatched
Something I'm experimenting with, and may need some possible help with if any random french speaking person stumbles upon this. My grammar is not what it used to be (or ever was); most of this was written straight from my french-to-english dictionary. I just think it sounds prettier in french.
Corps-lié,
corps arraché,
corps.
Comme il vous plaira de l'appeler,
je ne peux pas disperser mes lèvres;
ne peut pas fermer mes yeux pour trouver ces lueurs
ils sont juste au bord de quelque chose d'autre.
Je veux les capturer il
- entre la tache de rousseur sur ma paupière
et le tourbillon de mon iris -
mais elles flottent, moins tangibles, de moi.
Je ne peux pas décaler ou reprendre
les mécaniciens;
ne peut pas soulever mes épaules
ou exposer mes jambes à au même oxygène
les arbres une fois inhalées
parce qu’il ya des vallées pleines de rivières pleines de poissons
pleins de cailloux dans ma façon,
inondations la mêlée de ma caisse nue
entre gauche et droite
et mes genoux quand je s'éloignais.
Je ressens le besoin de courir jusqu'à ce que les semelles de mes pieds sont endoloris
et ma gorge est congélateur brûlé;
de jeter derrière moi demain
à la recherche de quelque chose une fois, j'ai su faire,
mais je ne sais pas où pour exécuter
sauf jusqu'à.
Et je ne peux pas trouver les escaliers.
And...the english version, for all you native speakers.
Body-bound,
body-snatched,
body.
Whatever you want to call it,
I cannot disperse my lips;
cannot close my eyes to find those glimmers
they say are just on the brink of something else.
I want to capture them there
- between the freckle on my eyelid
and the swirl of my iris -
but they float, less than tangible, from me.
I cannot shift or resume
the mechanics;
cannot lift my shoulders
or expose my legs to the same oxygen
the trees once breathed
because there are valleys full of rivers full of fish
full of pebbles in my way,
flooding the ruckus of my bare body
between left and right
and my knees when I step away.
I feel the need to run until the soles of my feet are sore
and my throat is freezer-burned;
to cast tomorrow behind me
in search of something I once knew how to do,
but I don’t know where to run
except up.
And I can’t find the stairs.
Corps-lié,
corps arraché,
corps.
Comme il vous plaira de l'appeler,
je ne peux pas disperser mes lèvres;
ne peut pas fermer mes yeux pour trouver ces lueurs
ils sont juste au bord de quelque chose d'autre.
Je veux les capturer il
- entre la tache de rousseur sur ma paupière
et le tourbillon de mon iris -
mais elles flottent, moins tangibles, de moi.
Je ne peux pas décaler ou reprendre
les mécaniciens;
ne peut pas soulever mes épaules
ou exposer mes jambes à au même oxygène
les arbres une fois inhalées
parce qu’il ya des vallées pleines de rivières pleines de poissons
pleins de cailloux dans ma façon,
inondations la mêlée de ma caisse nue
entre gauche et droite
et mes genoux quand je s'éloignais.
Je ressens le besoin de courir jusqu'à ce que les semelles de mes pieds sont endoloris
et ma gorge est congélateur brûlé;
de jeter derrière moi demain
à la recherche de quelque chose une fois, j'ai su faire,
mais je ne sais pas où pour exécuter
sauf jusqu'à.
Et je ne peux pas trouver les escaliers.
And...the english version, for all you native speakers.
Body-bound,
body-snatched,
body.
Whatever you want to call it,
I cannot disperse my lips;
cannot close my eyes to find those glimmers
they say are just on the brink of something else.
I want to capture them there
- between the freckle on my eyelid
and the swirl of my iris -
but they float, less than tangible, from me.
I cannot shift or resume
the mechanics;
cannot lift my shoulders
or expose my legs to the same oxygen
the trees once breathed
because there are valleys full of rivers full of fish
full of pebbles in my way,
flooding the ruckus of my bare body
between left and right
and my knees when I step away.
I feel the need to run until the soles of my feet are sore
and my throat is freezer-burned;
to cast tomorrow behind me
in search of something I once knew how to do,
but I don’t know where to run
except up.
And I can’t find the stairs.
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