Restless Milieu

I went to bed with a bad memory
All night it kept kicking me in the heart

In the morning
when we woke
neither of us felt
we got any rest

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Posted in character sketch, Short Stuff, vignette | 1 Comment

The Unveiled Word. I…

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Author’s Comment:
the unveiled word. I … was written for the Joe Cole challenge in another poetry forum.  Yes.  it is empty stanzas.
I read.  I listened.  I composed what might resemble a word.  And then realized, that the innermost attribute of a word is wordless wrapped in word-ness.  All I could think to say, is all I could feel in silence.  I. I. I.

“Listen” to John Cage’s 4’33” – in the silence of that “musical” composition, the sounds are vivid as pure “possibility” and not manifested in notes or piano key percussion, but rather what we hear in the mind. Written and spoken word exit and enter (writer and reader) through many different portals. To the point where, the words or arrangements given, are but distant cousins of what is actually received. Imagine music before voice and instrument, imagine the frustration of the first “being” who had a beautiful idea in the presence of another, but had absolutely NO words to convey it. Surely beauty existed before we could think or express it… after all, gravity existed before Isaac Newton discovered it!!

one man issues an “empty” poem and dozens fill it in with content. Such is the world. Great idea, this “words” thing.

The only thing that exists is not WHAT we believe, but THAT we believe… and THAT we believe, is art.

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Lovely Dreaming Foxes (extended version)

LDF first appeared on http://www.rebellesociety.com/2012/11/04/lovely-dreaming-foxes/

See Rebel Society for more great poetry

I grab the key, attached by a lace of leather to a foot long piece of restoration wood.  I look up at the wall behind the counter. It’s 1955.

There she is. Lover has been wearing the same sneer since the dawn she was drawn from the womb; only today, I notice it has softened, faded. It is even more perfect.

She had the cerise lips of Calliope, pensive and piquant. I never saw them pursed or closed. Instead, the corners of her mouth curled into parenthesis around some sardonic remark about to be made – yet all this time, I had never heard her speak a word.

Exposed below the weight of the cosmos, I imagine curled-up dreaming foxes in their dens and I close my eyes and she fades into existence. Clarity in crisp blue jeans, poised with hips sweeping up sensual imaginings from a corpus of creative possibilities.

My lover is standing on a cold brick sidewalk of a city affixed firmly to the soles of her black suede boots — as if the earth would fall out from beneath us if I were to lift her up. The profile of her face is obscured by strokes of deep mahogany tresses, woven with striations of brushed brass. I study her smooth and flush skin, the curve of high cheekbones, and the gentle bend of a gloved wrist as she tightens her black scarf.

Her eyes encase the hematite pupils of an Asian leopard looking out from the low-shadow foliage at the edge of a verdant jungle. She surveys the cityscape, neither waiting nor wanting, with an unfathomable gaze; one I’d always hoped would look at me.

But this visage is not of a wild cat or vixen – it is Venus herself, with an attitude; the North Star of any struggling author.

With a proverbial pout and the prancing tailbone of a pinup girl, she threw off an essence like a tart would throw off her bathrobe.

Her chimerical image had always existed in my darkest fantasies and this fantasy was set on a frigid January morning in Great Neck, New York.  The exposed skin of my face became so viscous in the cold that I could not get a sense if there was any air around me to breath.

Entranced, I could only speak to her as I inhaled — from a distance too far to be heard, “where does our love go today my dear?”

She just stands there in the frozen air while vapors of breath slowly sinuate around her lips. I can almost taste the spires of frost that linger for a moment on her tongue before they melt in the warmth of her mouth.

I love her – so much that my imagination cries for a higher voice; one that beats the chest of eternity for just a shaved second of time before it disappears into the clouds of passion. I hunger to just walk up and share the mist she exhales on the crest of her words—words embedded in sigh after sigh, page after page.

As I follow the contours of her hips she spins around toward me, and the camera flashes to capture a spirit fleeing into darkness. Our eyes lock and the transcendence of destiny resumes, ripping open the promise of time; expelling zephyrs into the stillness and light, sending off little parachutes of hope, like soft threads from dying dandelion blooms.

Bone gripping, I shake with awareness. Love’s presence is lulled from the shadows, sucking the dampness from our skin, leaving us brittle and shivering.

Our bodies fall into the sheets, compelled by austere climates only made for lovers and writers; torsos pressed and hewn into statuary, resisting the rime of the season… in this time of reason.

Lying there naked and twisted in linen, chenille, and legs, we agreed later that January evening on this one thing.

We were silently pondering the darkness; soul kisses and caress cast sparks around us like embers flicked from the flames, softly floating down in the blackness, like crying stars – or what could be moonlight ricocheting in the eyes of lovely foxes falling asleep in shadowy depths of their dens.

She says what I am thinking, she always does this,

I love you isn’t enough of an expression, to convey what is going on inside me.”

We stood beneath tree limbs sewing dying leaves into the moonlight and casting a colorful sundry of seeds – strewn like bottle caps and old spark plugs in saw dust.

We spoke of conditions through silent and mutual understanding and carved our identities into a distressed wooden counter with a ceramic handled knife.

The agreement was to love beyond definitions and titles. We would simply be city creatures that today, and who knew what came next; tomorrow was the first day of February.

Immortal souls such as these chase each other through the trails of time – stirring the Milky Way into confections of white nights and deserts, love forlorn, and… pictures of calendar girls tacked to the wall of an old gas station… such as this.

It’s 1971, and a brand new red Chevelle Super Sport just pulled up to the pump – ain’t she a real beauty.

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Posted in vignette | 2 Comments

I Polish Mirrors (Poetry for the Joe Cole challenge)

listenI polish mirrors.

My story is the collision of what I say
with what you hear or
something careless
That I’m here for

just a sentence
Poorly wrapped
A bow untied
Unzipped
Unstacked

All fallen rose petals
Under-watered
wilted pages
Roots of wounded
Periphrasis

Antlers shed
Their velvet read
With some words flown
from lips and bone
much is left      unsaid

Forensics show my story
s-stumbled
Witnesses heard three shots fired
My story bleeds channels
Along sidewalk seams
It seems my time expired

That I was right handed
makes my writing
average
marginalized
a ricochet of plans gone awry
Life stays two paces
ahead of mine

Still this story missed it’s stop
Back to the pages of your story again
when do I drop my polishing cloth
where does this sentence end?

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Posted in character sketch, poetry | 4 Comments

Poets for God

Skin is shred by ricochet
Shattered marbles shot
by childish thoughts at play
from a circle etched by a blunted knife
into the hardened dirt
of a playground, paved for life

Threads of clarity
patch weary fabric
The cloth of poetry,
real people, real drama,
real tragic

But love holds the hand
that holds the pen
that writes
poignant poems
Where even the homeless
Find a home
wherever the writer can

Earth-candy piñata wrapped in parchment
scribbled with sonnets,
couplets, quatrains
for bat armed readers
and sweet-toothed beaters
swinging at iambic what-ever-meter

Poetry is the ancient press
for the records of humanity –
who drags its demons, ghosts and fairies
from open graves to cemetery

These, life’s dark tunnels through the heart,
Seekers of light endeavor to plod,
Relighting the torch as the flame gets colder
Carrying their stories on heavy shoulders
to deliver our bounty to God

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Posted in Poems Beyond Their Words, poetry | 1 Comment

Glowering Junkies

A glowering beat junkie
shuffles frayed hems over avenue
I, propped up preened,
through the door he trips,
to find a pew
All this, I watch with a dour view

Down in a beanery where souls are served
coffee with a shot consciousness,
who nibble on curated cakes of turd

Awaiting liberation from these surroundings
It’s a cacophony of diatribe, cackles,
Disenfranchised, dim-witted opining.
Counting,
quarter time of a song I’d sing to myself
if this woman before me would just
stop talking
over the music in my headphones;
she’s talking to me from a bag of bones

You resemble my brother at Microsoft.”
I asked, “well, is that good?”
And then she asks if I too work at Microsoft –
I detach one earplug, and spit at her feet,
“I can’t imagine why I would.”

Crazy. We, those, who dare to thrive
like dew clung to a thin thread of spider silk;
and how we slide
down, in a moment, a little more
when the breeze of our prey,
quivers the chord

My deeper thoughts ride out
on the tip of a swordfish
dipped in fine finned fears;
from the undercurrents of this vicious tide,
to throttle the banshee that screams with eyes
filled with crystal tears,
that fall into my coffee mug
and sweeten the slake
of our bitter drug.

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A Seed Found Furrow in My Brow (Seaberg/Phosphorimental)

Image Alchemy by Diana Matisz  Find her at :  http://about.me/diana_matisz

Image Alchemy by Diana Matisz
Find her at : http://about.me/diana_matisz

A seed found furrow in my brow
Awaiting harvest, hungers now

Through my fertile mind’s palimpsest
A vine breaks soil where memories nest

Pushing on with a writhing stem
From deep brown earth toward blue welkin

With nostalgic rays, a star unfolds
a leaf, a story, yet untold

Each bud a poem that’s yet to bloom
In flowered couplets for the moon

awaiting dawn, for petals pleat
to release a blossom’s fragrance sweet

And from one strand a spider weaves
a gossamer web on trembling leaves

to capture prey that seeks to read
Poetic verse among the weeds.

Plant and spider thus conspire
conscripting minds of like, inspired,

to sew words of thorns, that never wilt
till every bough, a bookshelf built

 

(a Collaboration by Maureen Seaberg and Phosphorimental)

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Oh Icarus, what have you done?

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO ORIGINAL COLLABORATION SITE:
Oh Icarus, what have you done?
Image alchemy by “Life Through Blue Eyes” (Diana Matisz)
Poet accompaniment by Phosphorimental

______

Up here, hollering winds unsettle dust
softening on Empyrean
rising thermals graze cloud meadows
Up here, those who dress in shadows
dare not enter dreams of men.

Upon my brow this nimbus glows
Bestowed on my ascent
I bow in flight, on wings wraithlike
eschew the day to chase the night,
in bolts across the firmament.

Surrender brings lightness to a leaf
Behold my feather, the freer’s blade
Time is but it’s morrows thief,
A bounty box of verdant leaves
Released before the ransom’s paid.

Oh Icarus, what have you done?
Our escape was not your calling
Through life we sleep and death we rise
Yet vanity undreamt your vaster skies
Into an ocean, woken, falling.

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Posted in photo, poetry | 1 Comment

Last Nights “Best Used By” Date

These days, the “sell by” date
dictates the menu for my morning meal.
The next torpedo through the torpor
will be the sound of last nights unfinished dinner
scraped into the centrifuge of my garbage disposal;
separating hardened gruel into densities of curiosity.

The absinthe must have done our cooking
as I’m not familiar with the remains
and I can’t even boil water.

Damning the torpedoes
I ponder my death
and my whirring mind,
as it spins apart the densities of a girl
still passed out in the crevices of my couch,
spun-out shards of cold, pungent, pulp.

I need something for the pain
… instructions on the label read,

“take two pills on an empty soul and
call your publisher in the morning.”

Writing on an empty stomach
only exacerbates this unfulfilled addiction.
My motivation is a hope that one day
I’ll overdose on literary completion
and die quietly in the dawn
beside my “best use by” date.

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Love Ballad of My Generation

bruce

Those days recall less colors
and even less sense
With longer hair like Jackson Browne,
Pensively reeling in half rhymed ballads
walkin’ like Dylan and shredding our voices
like Springsteen.
“walkin’ real loud…”

When poets sang and singers
Listened, from a freight car door
Waiting on an old white fence
Anything that made an album cover.

My crew was meticulously unkempt,
one day shy of a much needed shampoo
but okay –
we were just okay then.
…Surely for another day.

Our moms were old with
thick rimmed glasses and smoked
and our fathers,
they were smoking men too
wearing two shades of gray
tucked in all the way… around
And around, my dad and I went.

We spoke with twisted lips
Groomed our eyes and looked out
From behind narrow poles
and dirty brick walls
That gave, what we knew of our souls,
This, sorta clandestine refuge.

And our pockets
Were empty, our wallets –
were empty .
Except a beer cap and a phone number,
Scribbled and torn from the corner of
a Houghton Mifflin textbook.
“I’ll call her when I get home.”
Let’s go home.

Sitting on the hood of my Torino
I scanned the streets, smelled the tar
Of our last summers burning.

These girls hugged their diaries to their chest
and we’d gaze
we’d gaze through Sunlit dust and dandelion fairies
eager to unbutton their secret stories about us,
always about us,
and our eyes made such nimble fingers.

We were outward bound on inward glory…
always thinking about love
hoping on plans that’ll get us “laid” by
a girl who wears daisies in her hair.

Big sweet flowers for the butterflies
Stirring in our stomachs
Fluttering to land softly at the entrance
of her big – sweet – flower.
My generation loved love.

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Posted in character sketch, essay, love poems | 2 Comments