Today
Do not make meagre
turning time
violent seizure
missing rhyme
Collect yourself
and steel your blood
Lay the sandbags
for the flood
Wait and whistle
songs forgot
The worst is over
or it's not.
Be the Change
I sang a song of springtime while old sermons fed me lines but god is dead and risen wheeling barrows in the mines and whistling for canaries as he ever deeply plods The weak still kneel at bedside thinking they commune with gods Now these long Canadian winters delay decay like a fridge but rot and time and flesh and wine is all the devil is and I’ve swallowed what he sold me and my cheeks are sunken thin dying makes it harder to wipe the vomit from your chin I‘m not chosen or annointed I’m not by the sages sent but these thoughts and prayers and orange hair all smell of excrement Now with good and evil nonsense Order/chaos rings more true Be the change you want to see or see the world in you
Crow
When all the lines have blurred And still resolute I stand Will you still be a woman for my I am still a man? I'll run a little warmer While my innocence is thinned Your summer dress still takes A thousand shapes within the wind And I'll sing to you by porch light And you can harmonize Both of us too smart to see that None of us are wise And we'll meet the world like fireworks And we'll burn out just the same A woman and her man because There's something in a name
When the willow broke through the soil that we bought from the convenience store I sat there and thought Yes, love, this will do When the willow broke through When the grass was stamped bare by constant playing feet I smiled and laid sod Rinse and repeat Let the world last forever, leave the lawn in my care When the grass was stamped bare When the rocking chairs creak on the hard silent porch and the night closes in Love, light us a torch A lot like infinity, nothing like weak I'll sing you a song as the rocking chairs creak
The present orates at our altars profane our absentee saviours our monsters mundane Altogether helpless and endless, and right a wonder such brilliance led us into night Now the wolves are all howling there's meat on our bones Throw fast the shutters and stifle your moans Pick at the rations as wind chips away on all that exists- not escapes decay But all that decays had a birth all the same Kneel by your bedside and whisper my name I'll sing to sleep all your worry and shame Kneel by your bedside and whisper my name
Are you great again now you bigots burning witches? Are you great again now with your lotto dreams of riches as you overturned the hope of all the millions begging nothing but a shot at being more than just a little less than something? Are you great again now with all the trappings off the table Are you great again now and is your simple world more stable that you can spit upon your equal cause of your pathetic fear? Are you great again now? Oh I suppose you wouldn't hear with all of your screaming and your simpleness your narrow minded brawl- an orgy without pleasure- all that pride before the fall. But you drank a bunch of snake oil and one day your dicks will grow. I could fill a fucking country with the things that you don't know
ghostsandonionskins reblogged
She May Go
Upon your trembling lips she bloomed a lily Upon her lily cheeks there bloomed a rose Within your risen heart there bloomed a headstone for every flower yet to come, her beauty closed
She showed you where you waited by the water on the globe beside the papers time destroyed by the time that took the winding yellow river That same decay that fading youth employed
And her body rolled like waves beneath your wooden disposition, long left floating in a storm Her nakedness in winter rose to meet you Her nakedness in winter kept you warm
And if you roll and reach into her absence don’t let that absence into last night grow I’m sure she whispered something to you sleeping I’m sure your dreams remembered to bow low
By the ancient gods that first told snakes of venom By the ancient hands that first discovered love There is nothing of a fang upon a robin There is nothing of the wind inside a glove
So whisper into coffee cups and tinder those simple prayers you spoke into her hem And smile upon the mug bottoms and cinder And in her absence learn to worship them
Something is Broken
Something is broken I suppose when the pinecone that looked like a lifeless upturned baby mouse still gets this eulogy
Tony and Kiyomi 2016
There is love in nervous poems in hardened hearts unfastening There is love in ancient words the chiming and the asking There is love with bated breath next to the loved and humble There is love I promise you or else the rest will crumble There is love to feel for you and there is love to witness And I am mute with emotion beside your perfect business There is love and union thanks to your pure optimism I smile beside the bridges built within your sanguine vision
we met you said you hated every soul on the planet took their shining grace and damned it only you undesecrated i took you in my jaws to show you how to drip for sinners deconsecrate the gradeschool winners mistaking morals for laws so now you're acting like you think I owe you something for all those headboards thumping as if you owned the night if there was a funeral for every single life I've invaded the funeral march paraded stopping traffic like an act of war every life is a vessel, inspiration filled every life is a kernel, threshed, dried, and milled every life is hammer to pound true any steel every life lives somewhere other than the one you know is real
I don't write haikus to profane the complex Another five-seven-five in one tired dialect I can write about hair and not mention the breeze and the letters are still inked on my l-o-v-e keys Sometimes the shallow conceals no great depth Sometimes the simple is not a concept And sometimes construction is paying your dues till your ache poetries so I don't write haikus
Given no recourse no bent spines with paper ribs inked with long-longing-loves and magic so simple that You must be true I would be Jesus for the sinners fraternize with virgins kill the living turn wine into piss and for my final trick drown slowly on dry land Never to mar again the tranquil greenbrownblue with my infinitely beautiful nothing for the future but a few poems that gnawed my living bones awhile but let my dead ones sleep
ghostsandonionskins reblogged
I started writing poetry because I fell in love I stopped when I remembered it I offer no objective rules but a poem should be written on the scorched skin of your eyelids after diving into the sun or should be whispered accidentally through the leaves of a poplar by kite-flecked wind
I started smoking because of a girl who was so smart that I thought maybe that smoke went in and set fire to all the bullshit we’ve all been eating but her breath always smelled like spearmint
Somebody should tell the teenagers that a poem is a death and nobody can die here in public every day fresh
I think haikus are for the daily and smoke is for the haikus and sooner or later something more stable something harder broken must take its place
Tomorrow I’m going to stop smoking and I’m not going to write not until I’ve died some secret death that harder days hammer into the words of a poet without lung cancer
When I don't want to die I don't eat hot dogs smoke run carelessly on icy April sidewalks or kill myself When I'm happy these rules subside and yet I live Here is an example of heavy words you're forced to take seriously that don't mean a fuckin thing Trigger warning: we're in this together Spoiler alert: none of us make it There are issues that (if you've been blessed with the brain to understand gravity) kill you already If not, you are either despicable or incapable The End If your anger though denies love I promise you, you are just as deplorable or stupid This is not a poem this is my "sign my petition" for the we-are-not-assholes of the hipster world For those beard sporting sundress wearing theoretic simpletons who might just want to not have to worry about the insipid latent muderousness of every single one of us wearing a baseball cap Turn the lights out and hear the madness scream And yet I live
He never had breakfast it made him slow and serious 8 cups of cold coffee and his spirit would alight He sang to the stockpiled dishes his hands pruning in opposition all those beautiful meals cooked to make hard brown stains on china He lied his way into mundane work as every sort of professional so-and-so imagining resumes to understand what made the rest of them tick He wanted to have sex with every single woman who ever smiled at him if she wanted Oh god, please one day And lonely through and through he saw the world too often through the desperate half sad lens of pre-orgasm reserved for the purely masturbatory A few weeping souls just fell in love with him but he is from my mind and fits neatly on a page Those wandering wretched who have ever left three tears unwiped before putting on their socks to begin a day will spit your pity right back in your face Meet humanity the terrifying or go buy a fucking goldfish These are your options
Words to Live By
Look out for murderers Don't stand on explosives Drink not the poison Bathe not in corrosives Punch not the lion Don't tickle who's driving Hold not the departing above the arriving
I call now the memories found in a snowglobe of wet leaves never blowing -just haphazard gravity irresponsibly shifted- rearming tree limbs into damp infinity We forgot the unlearned weight of age and climbed the witchfinger branches of the everything park at the end of the whole entire street where we sat, ate and entwined our fingers too tightly Awkwardness foreshadowing loneliness clawing at the dark peripherals of my closing eyes dreaming wondering where we were right now the last time it happened