I ride the bus
and notice the electric lines
     made of streetlights
     - pale reflections
in the gutter.   over time
     there is a collapse
inward, like footsteps on the
beach, sand crumbling
beneath
     your toes – you watch
the corner of the moon dangle its
     crooked smile
over the ocean. Right there we collapsed
on our backs
laughing against the
annihilation we
     knew
waited for us
     at the end of everything.

The song you sang reminded
me of a girl I loved once (and how she spoke)
except, you are not pretty - like she was -
so no one will hear how the wind bends
around the distance of         syllables    spread     out
from your
lips, while
drowning in the desert, you sing
of
    a beautiful
thirst.

god smiles and children die

she appreciates their laughter so much more than us

         I like to lick ice cream from
your breasts when our
house is so hot
     your legs melt
around my face     
     dripping
wet      lips          of               
turning          into
     drool
I hang
below like Kundalini, all coiled up
and present in the moment
and stuff, yeah.  

I don’t think you heard me laughing.

How I sang in the solitude
where my voice stretches the bounds
of where I’ve been,  
exploring new angles of memory
and how experience has shaped me.

The only thing you have control over is what you think.

Love has a beginning, middle, and an end.
Whether death or time or conflict takes your lover away, do not lament the natural order.
I would not rejoice either since nature is a cruel mother, creating food from infants for vultures.

If we live successive incarnations but do not remember our prior lives, and our ego is subject to disintegration each time we die – then all the nihilists are right, regardless of the soul.
Experience shapes the fundamental aspects of who we are, and without the recollection of what has happened to us we cannot participate in our development as human beings or souls of the universe.

I

We arrive late, sleepy eyed and watching
ourselves in the
reflection of our parents eyes. As
the intangible
we desired form, an expression
of self.

Without fail, we want skin
to register
the brush of lips and
lungs to tell sighs
to each other
on sleepless nights.

There is no desire
without a heart for sorrow,
no lust without
an object
of affection.  

No dying until
we’re born,
and no leaving
till we stayed
long enough
to know we
will miss
what we never had.

II


Ella
imagined it. Her kid with withered fingers
scratching at the door, scraggly sticks for digits,
his flimsy paper skin a mottled parchment membrane.
“It was not like this when I could have been a mother,
or younger,” she said.
During daylight hours, every other’s living is a killing
she won’t ever comprehend.

“What I mean,” she said,
and drew a breath, “ our ghosts are never given rest.”
“We were careless as kids,” I said.

Yesterday snuck up on Ella again, left
the edges of memory a little softer, hazy
impressions of photographs, the outlines
of faces faded
into a child she could not carry
and become company
when age has turned
to silence –
- when laughter doesn’t happen
in her life
without knowing someone
who did not have it.

In the space between my soul
                  I
write these poems that rise like smoke.

Edward Estlin tread the poem that is a tribute here

Serry liked the points of
         r     
      a
           i
                n
that
fell
              between
             the seven
wheres and whens if forever
D   N      E    
    A    C      D
like liquid on her LIPS.

she spoke the rays of sun
                    singing between the slips
and gives that have not made
forever
sames
the
single
feat,

Whoever longed the freedom and miss stood under
                                                        Earth and birds and sands of clay,
time pressed
        flowers on the face of glass
some           reality           peered           across
and went the end where toenails
dug
a gravestone for the birth of days.

All the oceans drank by lakes,
girls s p r e a d bare her palsied face.

If Serry wanted likes to look and smell
breaths
below her WindoWsill
she told no’s ever whisper-ever take
Regret would end a harshest faiTh.

I watched her smile
trace tiny fractures beneath
her eyes, little slivers of
consternation the sea wrapped
itself in.

I wanted her to kiss
beneath my chin
smile up at me
say something
about how wonderful
life is when lived. . .

Later I came outside
to smoke and remember,
reflect a little bit on how her
fingertips left my leg trembling -
and saw a bird with
its neck broken,
fractured against
a glass building
nestled like sleep, a rock bed beneath.

Her lips moved without her voice.
"I dance between the rain."

But I did not hear her.
Instead, I heard the dead bird not singing.

Midnight drips liquid stars to
the sound of my s h i t t y radio.
Snow billows down to cover
the wrinkles in the song,
a throng of voices shake
the atmosphere into itself
and embrace the illusion
of water boiling onto the stove
     while I sit
here and      float. . .

My sister calls me from the East coast,
I can hear her loneliness bouncing
through the phone lines –
drug addicted husband, unstable brother,
crazy mother. . .
this is what we’ve inherited Mary,
the loneliness of words.  

I am the skeleton of a white lotus.
My blossom arms have dissolved to leave only the remnants of the
architecture that once supported them.

I sat inebriated by the blurring of boundaries – matter exists without time, but
time does not exist without the illusory motion of objects in space.

Enlightenment is not the enlargement of self nor the absence.
It is the unification of the substrata of our universe within ourselves.

The blossom wilts in time but remains a tangible universal memory recorded on the ether, unendingly giving forth redolent  dissemination of its Absolute idea.
     
As Ouspensky dreams of the differentiation between an idea and
the object it represents –
     a vast sea of people are perpetually frozen in an instant state of
infinite ending
and
beginning.

This is just the skeleton of an Absolute idea,
not the idea represented accurately,
but without perpetuation all concepts would
remain an osseous framework –
never ending
never beginning.

two

She goes home
with empty house and lonely bed.
She cries briefly wishing for warmth.

He goes home
with lonely heart and worried head.
He sighs deeply with wish for love.

On the street their eyes catch,
but they pass never knowing.

Fate plays games on those with heart.

I am now remembering a past life where
I walked into my son’s room
and he was sitting silently by the window.
He said he was looking for other children –
on other worlds who could understand
how it felt to fall in love at a young age.

I didn’t think much of it then but now
I’m called back to wonder
if that past life is still
happening in the timelessness of infinity?
And, if it is – could I reach out to him?
Let him know I’m looking out the window
and still thinking
about my child from another life?

Beneath my feet sand crumbled and filled the gaps
between my toes where the skin clings to bone.

I looked out over the beach and saw a drifting mist
and I wanted to go back in time and see if the creatures
that labored over the ground and scrounged from
the ocean all were made in the same glory, as say,
the light reflecting on a lake in summer.

Have you ever felt like there was some intricate
part of life you had never seen?
Ever, just once, felt like you could slip upwards
and end up in the vapor above the Earth
with clusters of sunlight on fire like synapses
and I know
There are some things the physical being
can only perceive like shadows in a dream.

So here we are.

Shake off your illusions,
press our warm bodies back to back,
scream at the silence of night –
that b i t c h won’t take us.

Run through the forest,
forage for dinner and
scrape the leaves dry
with your bare rotten teeth
end up on the ground laughing
at the ridiculousness of living.

I will wipe the blood stains from your face
while we feast on the entrails of a ripe carcass
and make you beautiful before morning.

I will whisper airy tangents into your brain
every night while you sleep and one morning
you will wake and taste the world, rub
your satiated belly, get to your feet,
and stand unstained by the passage of time.

Your hands and feet will revert to claws
and while you fly your song will echo into
space and every star will shake until the fabric
of time tears into tiny little pieces of paper
shaped like snowflakes.

Then, riding your chariot through the sky
you too will sing dreams into sleeping minds.

They will not know you were there, but
they will wake up dazzled, rub their work
tired eyes and repeat

“There will be time enough on other days, this
too can wait.”

Knowing the past and forgetting the future you too will wait.  

I feel like I've been brushing
my teeth with dynamite,
gargling with stomach acid
and swimming in oil spills.

"She's too pretty for you," he says
and pitches his cigarette
into the gutter where fish and
birds can choke on the toxic angels
and
garbage towers that rise to the sky.

If I was a god I would crush worlds
and snort their ashes.
I would be the only deity around
considered to be rabid, and dangerous.

There is a summer of memories locked beneath a thought of you.
Past the honeysuckle that clung to the fence in our yard –
beyond water and summer and winter and love.

I’ve written thousands of poems and used devices
to craft words into sounds from thoughts I could
not express because my belief was these were
things that could not be said.

My entire life I’ve felt like a shadow hovering
above my body – watching life go by,
which I could not feel because
I was not really alive.

I finally wrote about and relived the experience
of my father dying, and as I understood why I
could not say the things I tried to feel –
I slowly felt myself descend
ever so slowly,
piece by piece,
back into my body.
“How good it feels,” I said as I tried on my new skin,
“to have a body again.”

Burn the poor to heat the rich

Let's take lunch early
and
     eat time for fun.
Forget about forgetting
and
     watch the moon chase the sun.

Let's get dizzy spinning circles
to watch
      the world turn upside down.

Chew on Ritalin when we're thirsty,
and
     eat dog meat at the pound.

Let's beat the neighbor's kids with sticks
and
    burn the poor to heat the rich.

Burn the poor to heat the rich.

The meeting at midnight when the house is silent

The brush of hips

words whispered in shadows

Rhythm of skin to skin

a cadence nature created

Flesh wound to bones

bones to soul

gone

Long nights returning to an empty house

Years straining against an empty promise

Silence drawn into wood

like a breath held too deep too long

Can I ask what the concept is here on this thread.  These are obviously all your poems????  Are we to comment, add our own poems...what?  

MBCgirl

Since this is primarily a screenwriting site I didn't imagine anyone would have any interest in them. If you have some good poetry which you feel fits with this scheme then post it. If you have criticism, write it.
Granted, they are all mine, but all writers who publish their work are obviously looking for type of feedback, be it a reply of your own poetry or a critique of their work.

The snow settles on a field in front of my house
and as I watch it descend I imagine
bones in the sky, grinding against each other
and shaking ash over the earth.

I open my mouth and let the acrid ash  lace my tongue.
I do not speak, my lips have gone numb – the cadence corrupt.  

The universe stretches out, long eons of dark-matter lattices, plagues of hyper-civilizations escaping entropy – the disorder increasing in space.

I do not wonder about god, for if she exists, she is a f u c k i n g psychotic, a twisted and disfigured corpse who makes us eat the dead flesh of some thing, had we known, we might have loved.
Perhaps the pig, all ruint in s h i t, layed in an open field and dreamed of flowers opening to snow and loved, again, it is gone.

Every day is a blessing, I know, I know.
I had to kill again, not for pleasure, but for health.
And again, some thing had I known, I surely would have loved.

The snow settles on the field in front of my house,
and as I watch it descend I imagine
the swine I ingested turning in my gut,
taking nothing with it,
not even the flower opening to snow.

Quoted from electricsatori Since this is primarily a screenwriting site I didn't imagine anyone would have any interest in them. If you have some good poetry which you feel fits with this scheme then post it. If you have criticism, write it. Granted, they are all mine, but all writers who publish their work are obviously looking for type of feedback, be it a reply of your own poetry or a critique of their work.

If you look back into the poetry thread you'll notice Tommy started a 'poem a day' challenge which many of us contributed to: http://www.simplyscripts.net/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?b-poetry/m-1249901335/

Then the August OWC redirected our interest elsewhere for a bit.

You've got some nice poems here ES, no doubt of your talent in this direction but I feel staggering their release and/or adding to the existing thread above might have been a good idea.

Just to give readers time to absorb ... hey, just my opinion.

Libby

Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate you telling me I have talent. I would appreciate more, a critique of my work, or better, a reply with your own work.

somehow, the plague got through
the paper-thin veil
stitched together
of our prayers and
(lamentations)
burned a cigarette-sized hole, in
which the single eye of a curious
child would occasionally peer
(blue, brown or hazel) it
never mattered.  

And, in
a fit of sneezes -
stained cherry red
welts, like lesions, on her
pale cheek,
“a kiss before leaving,” she said.
and I knew what she meant.

She wanted to take
all of the snow
and drown the sun -
bury herself in immortality.
burn away 100 billion births
before hers
before any of us
had curious eyes
peering through paper-thin veils.

I remember Denver,
it was not all too long ago
I knelt in an alley,
vomiting
on my jeans.

I remember Virginia,
and meditating
on infinite planes
for endless hours,
- finding
a hole in the sky,
and
nothing else.

And Denver again,
a mouthful
of blood,
as I ram
my tooth
back in my gum
after
being slugged,
while drunk.

Then Virginia,
the bloated ocean
spilled over the shore
to impress
upon the world
the indelible
nature of the words
I wrote
on the sand.

In Vegas,
I let
the desert heat
soak
into my bones,
and
slept
like a child,
a spoiled
and
dirty child.

the rest of the town watches a witch burn and don’t know
how bad it is to die by being burned alive and
all the while being innocent the young girl, no older than fifteen,
wonders what it would have been like
to have kissed a boy or loved a man, or maybe a woman
but she’s burning and she can smell the clothes
her mom stitched together for her on her last birthday
when she learned how to ride a horse
and she imagines herself and the horse riding on top of the clouds
and she dissolves in the sun
and she dissolves in the fire
and all the while the pain is unbearable for a grown man, let alone a young girl
and it was all of us who built the pyre
and let the fire lick the side of her face
and burn her nipples
and she watches a storm on the horizon
and prays for rain
but cannot remember
what it is like to feel the drops on her skin, or the cold wind.

It was raining, pieces

of            s  

     k    

       y(descendi

ing) dangling

                from the tips

of trees

we(we)re

teenagersrunningtogether

kissing

in the rain, warm breath

lips to lips

you (we)re,

alive then.

It was just a photograph of you,

in our front yard

that I remember,

but I have never kept another

photograph since.



Your age was clear in the kodak,

a spotted bald head,

(you were)

standing erect against

your curved spine.



The tattered shirt was stained

and you looked normal,

old,

as you always did.

I have never kept another photograph since.

Matsura Emoto’s Collection of Rice

On Thursday, I boiled a pot of rice,
placed it neatly into three
separate air-tight containers,
and pasted words on the front
like
“I love you,”
and
“You’re a demon,”

and everyday,
I spoke those words
to the rice
as if
speaking them
to a friend, or enemy.  

By Saturday, I had boiled
two hundred more pots,
and the counters
of my home
were filled with
containers
which said words like
“My Angel,”
and
“Betrayal,”
and
“Destruction.”

And I was amazed at the results,
thousands of jars,
each spoiling at the same rate.

I wondered
why I could not save
even a single grain of rice.

Because she does not love death, as I do,
I read to her only poems
which did not mention the words
years or silently or ghosts.


My sleeping dogs lay around me
on the bed, the twisted covers
surround us,
bound around our forms
like years and memories,
but not ghosts.

I.

I awoke     with you(r)
voice)      lingering     in     the air,
remnants of dream    clinging,
scattered pieces of       planets falling
over      down      around.


II.

Every night a little death,
                                                              a prodding
of formless intangibility,
                                                              for example –
last night
                                                              gravity held us in orbit
above a planet

I became a block of black granite

and explained  

                                                             communication

occurs
                                                             instantaneously
across
                                                            great distances
universes
                                                            or lifetimes away.


III.

I poured some coffee,
thought about
        your plain smile,
          how smugly you said my name,
                                      (as if you owned me)
and
I realize
          I never lost you,
because
       my dead father would have said,

“You can’t lose something you never had.”


IV.

Every morning I wake, surprised
     at life.
                    being alive.


V.

Whatever Secrets the Dead Know They Keep to Themselves

Here we go round the thin shade of ‘morn,
a soft side of dawn. . .

A great hawk, six feet wide,
circled once and dove into an open field.
and rose, like a breath of smoke on fire,
his wings plowed draughts of wind
in invisible eddies –
a silhouette on starched earth.

Here we go round the razor of dawn,
a shade of a form. . .

And the field mouse, stuck in his talons –
fur torn open –
heart beat bled empty,
ascended also,
watched her home below,
become as she would soon be to…

(And a 1 and a 2 and 3 and a)
a never a nonono. . .

You shoulda seen the black crows
circling below,
eating her entrails,
while pebble black eyes (infinite alone)
remembered the field
(and a)

See we spin down the dark of the blood,
a sun a sun of smoke. . .

she might’ve dreamed
(of a 1 and a 2 and a)
of being back home,
a hole in the ground
(3 and 4 and)
too far too far too far

Patta-patta patta the blood on the lawn,
a home a stone a birth. . .

(7 6 5, a life is alive)
a sad man
(4 3 2, what to do what to do)
in a s h i t brown field
(and a 1 and a done)
died her death that day too.

Silence Came In, Filling Hollow Spaces


"I chose you because you looked easy to hurt," she said, and meant it.

"My lady," I quoted, "what a ragged meadow you have made of me."

"I cannot fall asleep next to you," her breath heavy with my sweat, "it's too intimate."

"I know what happens next, my life continues without you in it." I never said, but should have.