NOV PAD 2010 - Day 5

I was born bare-boned, a skeleton. Threw on a bodysuit
of muscles, a coat of skin. I have been becoming,
not yet settled on been; growing into being.
I have swallowed a muscle built like concrete
and let it sink, weighing me as less than worthy.

NOV PAD 2010 - Day 4

Because veins are not highways
I cannot travel the tips of your outstretched fingers
the inside curve of your elbow
sloping under your breasts to your heart.

NOV PAD 2010 - day 3

It's easier to get warmer than cooler
add another blanket
or two. Cuddle with a pillow
or five and burrow into the mattress. Hibernate.
When you awake the sun will be half passed midday
the season will be in full swing.

NOV PAD 2010 - day 2

I can tell you about concrete. Tell you
about barb wire, about burnt bridges and bruised bones.
Love, is not something that can be deciphered
or explained; it has a language
my heart is just now learning...at least it thinks.

I can tell you about murmurs. Tell you
about holes, monitors and clogged arteries.
I can illuminate the tangible, the constant. I cannot tear
these foundations asunder and rebuild.

NovPAD 2010- Day 1

Taking cues from the Poetic Asides Blog I'm going to try to post a poem a day for the entire month of November...it may get a bit dicey at the end though because I'm moving the week after Thanksgiving. Anyways, here we go:


Stand still, stand perfectly still. When you look back there will be no footprints--
the trail you blazed will have been swept away.
Toss away your book of matches and curl into yourself.
She was always miles ahead of you, I was ever the omnipotent narrator.
I'm unable to write happy endings, so you can just stand still,
stand perfectly still
wait for her to run back while you watch her run away.

Red Bull

I crave wings
call me Daedalus, Icarus
Earthbound Seraphim. I will flex my naked shoulders, subconsciously
and dive for the sun.


*this came about from being very very very tired one day and being stuck alone to fight sleepiness alone...*

How to Be a Vampire....

(This poem is really one of my favs right now...cuz of the snark and fun of it...)





No matter what be brooding
even if you’re usually carefree and spry;
be brooding. Be dark, mysterious, and cryptic.
Speak needlessly in painstaking riddles,
don’t speak at all. Avoid humans.
Live among them, but separate; blend
into them seamlessly
a cousin, an uncle,
a long dead mother. Expose your bloodlust.

Sue Whedon for defamation of character.
Start an evolutionary phase of mankind: Vote ‘Yes’ on Vampire Proposition 9.
Stay hidden. Scoff at the caricatures of yourself and other monsters.

Believe you are demons
believe you are cursed
or normal
or Gods.

At all costs avoid the sun! You will crisp
like a Peking duck
or instantaneously cremate
or implode
or explode
or at high moon you’ll weaken like a coward avoiding a gunfight
or it will have no effect on you at all,
and you’ll wonder how Hollywood comes up with these things
or you’ll do something ridiculous like sparkle.

Please whatever you do don’t fucking sparkle.

And drink blood
while you’re searching centuries for your mate
or before you escape the sunlight in your coffin;
while you fight hunters or slayers of werewolves
or each other. Anita Blake
or Blade of the Vampaneze.
Drink blood.
Take lives of take only what you need.
Take animals or humans, but take.
And when you’re done taking remember to brood.

Submerged

The decisiveness I lack I make up in dreaming
the ability of my off-sync heart to unscrew your hinges.
I see you better than you see yourself
and I always see me the same: a little abstract
like a pointillist painting from a distance;
the colors are all bleeding together,
into something that could be beautiful if it tried.
I’ve never been known to try
too hard.

I can’t tell you where I’ll be in five years
or five months or five minutes, but I know my heart is nothing
if not potential
like I am waiting to be sprung kinetic
like I am waiting for you to realize I am 75% water; you can drown in me.

Blitz Poem

Got this Idea from Robert Brewer's Poetry Asides and tweaked it a bit to work for me...

It's sketchy at best...I mean I finished it earlier today on my last break...so, let me know:



It Opposite Death



For the ladies,
for the hell of it!
“It just happens sometimes…”
“It just went that way…”
Way we might have gone;
way of our fists.
Fisting my way through life,
fists clenched.
Clenching muscles, cramped.
Clenching, grinding teeth.
Teeth, forced smile.
Teeth chemically altered white.
White masked malignant,
white walls.
Walls, in an ever shrinking box;
walls padded and restraining.
Restraining order;
restraining our hands.
Hands: scarred and peeling.
Hands: out, open, upturned…
Upturned life,
upturned and carefully chaotic.
Chaos in the middle of order.
Chaotic designed survival.
Outsurviving the fittest,
Survival against the odds.
Odd, that we have turned to this…
Odd, that I am me not we…
We are, that, which we are not…
We diverge on forked paths;
paths cemented in bones,
paths of which only our strides are aware;
aware that we are moving,
aware that any moment we could stop:
Stop pretending.
Stop breathing.
Breathing in slow and deliberate.
Breathing out shaky and shallow.
Shallow thoughts lead to empty plans.
Shallow dreams lead to empty hearts.
Heart un-begrudging its beating.
Heart fortified for fighting.
Fighting: because we were born brandishing tiny fists.
Fighting: because we don’t know a better way to survive.
Survive another sunset.
Survive because the only other option is death…
Death, because you stood too still;
death because you were too scare to move.
Moving
Still…

Another Wayward Love Letter to Atlanta

I’m still wondering if you can be homeless and homebound at the same time? Concurrently adrift and set to some unknown path. A lighted beacon, a glowing hearth…
I know without realizing I don’t belong or realize without speaking the words.
I know you write love letters to Chicago, Providence, New York; I leave post-its for Atlanta on my fridge. We only speak in snippets; terse conversation of an impeding divorce. She wishes I’d sign the papers already and leave. And I wonder if we were ever in love or in love with the idea of being so.
I wonder if this was a marriage of convenience. She kept me afloat for a while…
And perhaps, I owe her something for this, roses on the eve of tomorrows that might never come. She always tried harder than I to make this work.
I’m still wandering towards something that instinctually feels like home. Both well aware she can’t be it for me, no lighted beacon, no glowing hearth; but she leaves the lamp on in case—still lost—I find myself stumbling back.