May 2013
23 posts
6 tags
Harmonics
Notes (strung like white and black beads together) to self: pedals, dogwood trees with pink and white petals bass fishing and tre(m)ble (at the slimy, slippery catch) clef and cliffs, oh the bluffs of a man in love! Three-quarter time, quarter to next week not again. Don’t repeat Washington, D.C. is all codes and intrigue, al coda, etc. as we diminish, and diminuendo to nylon cords and...
4 tags
Cause and Effect
Lifeboats and iceberg lettuce or let us rejoice and make a joyful noise all that goddamn noise lawnmowers eat grass like fish drink water which is a point of reference books in your Hallmark card catalog models get thinner if you tilt a whirl, a world in motion.
6 tags
Call for Submissions
lanuitvenait:
I’m feeling the will and want to read and promote like an impressionist— meaning I’ll take a line and wrap it around my shoulders or a phrase and braid it into my hair… (meaning if I like it enough, I might tumblr-share) So send me poems, darlings… if you dare? ;)
A new blog project! Since I prefer to use “Cyntax” for my own personal work…and since there are...
5 tags
Sudden Luck, Son
Curious is not my cup of tea and Alice can keep the Cheshire cat grins to herself or save them for the teetotaling hatter— it doesn’t matter. I’ve got a deck full of cards and they’re all coming up aces.
4 tags
Such As It Is
Days will pass and nights will follow, morning will spill over the breakwater like beads of orange juice dripping off the rind and evening will curl up comfy and fall asleep where floating weeds and sea grass grow together and I will see visions and hear songs, taste sweet and bitter days both, feel warmth and cold encompass my soul.
We will grow old! Years will come and go and we will grow...
4 tags
Rule Books
Those rule books of yours are such a ponderous weight link by link makes chain by chain and you can try to explain an extraordinary value with charts and graphs and color-coded packets that insist that social benefits take precedence over the truly enigmatic but I’m not buying it too much my fickle father’s daughter and not nearly ambitious enough to bother conforming— I prefer...
6 tags
Mime Away
Mimicry cries foul over foul
deeds like beach houses
built with sticks and twine
and penthouse bird cages, gaudy and golden,
locked and tethered,
tarred and feathered—
there’s only one story to tell:
the sun also sets,
the sun also rises.
5 tags
Up and Down the Stairs
Gliding high in the white rafters with the winged creatures, dragons and griffons, osprey and purple finches, mother said, come down now, before you drift the outer atmosphere and lift the rings from Saturn’s fingers as if you deserved them— and you know you’ll pawn them when you return to solid ground, reducing the mystique of a millenia to a consumer transaction.
5 tags
Morbidity and Mortality
Vanity, thy name is— Narcissa! Oh, there she is, cheeks flushed and rouged unnaturally red, like one painted lotus flower in a sea of thick, black mud. Or a central line that must be given up. Either way, there’s something out of place, with stakes as high as likely they will be. And yet, the sky turns over with a sigh, restless in its witching hour sleep with dreams that creep and...
“Ask her what she craved, and she’d get a little frantic about things like books,...”
– Nightwoods - Charles Frazier (via llendaria)
5 tags
Two Steps Backward
Machiavellian martyrs— well we’ve veered off course this time and the atlas is crammed under the back seat with your crumpled boutonnierre and my last ditch attempt (five volumes, no less!) at selling out. Drive on, darling. Nothing left to say as the engine hums and I wonder this out, ticking off the minutes with the skittishness of a spider in a windstorm.
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day...”
– Mark Twain (via miel-doux)
5 tags
Bed of Weeds
Fire catching caught a cold and cancer is the worst sentence— structure has to give a little if the breaks and bends will ever build and bury weeds and wash the sheets and give up pride, the lion’s share is cast in goldenrod and mustard seed. .
5 tags
A hurricane of emotion
A break in the clouds— a mere crack in the lead-gray walls that shudder in a thunderous clap— reveals a silver thread tied off by the storm makers at pensive unrest in their cradle-rocked beds.
4 tags
Pretty Little Things
Broken bits of sand dollars wrapped over macramé—mention this to your mother, why don’t you?
Not everything that glitters is gold. Not everything that rusts is silver. And not everyone wants, either.
4 tags
Chatterboxes
With a high-spirited lilt in her otherwise, unaffected, Midwestern voice she refused to answer his question, cast it off with philosophical mutterings of Sudanese orphans and free speech, laced in overused irony, empathy chocked like wild aster in a bed of nettles and weeds.
And a young man with political aspirations chimed in, expressed, in a speech bereft of well-placed pauses or present tense,...
6 tags
TOO Historical Fiction 86 Meg Harper | Tales of... →
By Gretchen Tessmer Read by Jane Osborn Caleb and I played jacks on the sun-drenched planks of Deck A for more than three hours this morning. We’ve changed…
April 2013
22 posts
5 tags
Family Affairs
Come to me now! Brothers in arms, sisters at rest. I drink a bitter cup this evening tea leaves spoiled hemlock forthcoming— it’s not news to me that the old man’s raging but in his reckless abandon he might knock the sky from the heavens and I’m not going to clean that mess up again… it’s sinful to be so hateful and patience stretches only so thin.
4 tags
Written on the Courthouse Steps
In this murder of crows, I will lose my soul. Here, said the woebegone sparrow, trembling in sinew and quaking in marrow, this is the gilded cage that will bleed my hopes dry. Yes, here. This is where those sharp-tongued crows, in black-sheened clothes will pick at my bones and peck out my eyes.
4 tags
Battle-Maiden
An intercepted message brought me much madness and a fit of righteous anger, both red and fiery. But time was short and distractions would have to wait. I didn’t sleep the night before I was supposed to slay the dragon. A woman in distress doesn’t get the press it used to so I wore the leather and lace costume of a battle-maiden, shield and sword at the ready. The sweeter enchantments of the...
4 tags
A Raging Epidemic
Shake it off, the world-weary plague, ruined roots a blight of soul and tacks and tares a field of weeds the golden vetch fabric rent and curtains blowing in hot glare off a sullen, vindictive sun and stars conspire together in facing the enemy you have my word and my absolute devotion every second Sunday from now until the end of all things take it and play it off easy— as sparrows of the...
5 tags
pride and vanity
little late for saying grace, don’t you think? when the dishes are done and the dog is asleep and the man upstairs puts a lime in your drink.
4 tags
Roots and Bones
Spring in the shadowed valley glen spell works, rainy glade and mossy fen those earthy smells come up from shallow graves with deep truths all set at seven years that run blood- red as trilliums now plight this troth he said served April-chilled and oh so cold.
4 tags
Helter Skelter
Lady Liberty, pseudo-ed up to me and I thought what’s the old witch cooking up now? My God, we all succumb to a wasting disease leprosy without a word of protest. The stage has been commandeered for cheap acts and those booked on credit— let me tell you about credit— it’s a house trap with pretty doormats and an overfed bureaucrat’s slippery, slimy, greasy fingers...
“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most...”
– Henry James, born April 15th, 1843 (via thepenguinpress)
5 tags
Sweet Things
The white-breasted nut hatch— glimpsed him in the sky writing his name across the morning spray of peaches and oranges gathered in a wicker basket by dryads with brown eyes and garbed in green dresses, imported and sent as a gift from the summer havens. The mud-splattered violet— saw her laid out in creek beds sleeping, flutter-eyed waking, rising, rubbing her eyes.
4 tags
Oblivious
Oh! but let invidiousness
vanish
in our unceasing sufferance.
4 tags
Antigone Reprised
My father, the mad one,
the bringer of death—
in his zeal to outrun old age,
he tramples youth like
mud-splattered daisies
beneath his feet.
4 tags
Clutter
All those lyrics and all those lines taste of pomegranate sound of groaning pipes flash of color, blush musky scent of a sadly crushed ladybug ouch talc powder smooth white gloves water, grime touch of his hands in mine daydreams night thoughts wicked and washed up love, laughter, tears and absence beginnings and endings forgotten forgiven for nothing forever.
4 tags
Curses
Shadows, spite and wolf spiders crawling o’er your face at night.
4 tags
Plainly, you and I have some things to discuss
Old flames revived a wildfire burned, then erased the last two years of every life is displaced in ill-fitting gypsy clothes patchwork of leather lace and feathers make a garish costume maids and matrons alike speaking gibberish bent and picked out pearls in the heavy black mire scattered and abandoned by the foolhardy hands of their predecessors.
March 2013
28 posts
2 tags
4 tags
I'm Just Saying...
Troubles, darling? Stress is a killer with a red vendetta and a pitchfork, it’s a little devil in disguise don’t fool yourself otherwise. Lock your doors, pay your bills, stand up straight— don’t give that boy an excuse to concentrate his special effects on you.
5 tags
Consumer Economics in Short
They hiss and spark like an electric current screaming across a power line— fed and re-fed stocked and re-stocked. A language made up of zeros and ones is metrically sound and lyrically bankrupt. A worse one yet ends with 99 cents, advertisements spoken at a break-neck pace that soften the harsher verbs and unkind adjectives underbreath. Take it away and you’ve got supply and demand...
4 tags
Be Soft, Be Tender
Sullen silence festers smartly and fighting the current is a lesson in futility you’ve got to f a l l with the weary waste of it all lay your head on down feather pillows and sleep the sadder thoughts off.
