Cyntax

Cause and Effect

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:23:57 -0400

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.

Call for Submissions

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:34:00 -0400

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 so many wonderful poets on tumblr who have work that deserves to be shared and shared again…I’ve decided to start a new blog to highlight poems I find that are (at least to this one reader in particular) extraordinary.

Feel free to submit (lanuitvenait.tumblr.com). If I like a poem enough, I’ll feature it on “Bittersweets” with some commentary.

Happy writing :)

Photo

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:44:06 -0400

Sudden Luck, Son

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:52:16 -0400

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.

Such As It Is

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:05:37 -0400

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 old,
this youthful bloom will fade and wither
until an old woman’s face replaces my own
and an old man’s quiver claims your lips.
Yes, we will grow old—
you in one place,
and me in another.

likeafieldmouse: Tom Phillips - A Humument (1966-73) “In 1966...

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:27:02 -0400

likeafieldmouse:

Tom Phillips - A Humument (1966-73)

“In 1966 Phillips set himself a task: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page by painting, collage and cut-up techniques to create an entirely new version. He found his threepenny novel in a junkshop on Peckham Rye, South London. This was an 1892 Victorian obscurity titled A Human Document by W.H Mallock and he titled his altered book A Humument.

The first version of all 367 treated pages was published in 1973 since when there have been four revised editions. A Humument is now one of the best known and loved of all 20th Century artist’s books and is regarded as a seminal classic of postmodern art.”

Rule Books

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:23:01 -0400

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 novels without dust jackets,
not constricted or laced, whether straight
or as crooked as the subterfuge on your face.

Mime Away

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:36:29 -0400

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.

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:24:24 -0400

Up and Down the Stairs

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:44:06 -0400

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.

Morbidity and Mortality

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:16:00 -0400

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 crawl
on shallow breath
until things we see
become those things we saw
and death neglects to come that night at all.

Photo

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:50:57 -0400

"Ask her what she craved, and she’d get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music...."

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:36:07 -0400

“Ask her what she craved, and she’d get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom.”

- Nightwoods - Charles Frazier (via llendaria)

Two Steps Backward

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:11:22 -0400

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 you figure out why."

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:42:07 -0400

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you figure out why.”

- Mark Twain (via miel-doux)

Bed of Weeds

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:36:53 -0400

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.
.

A hurricane of emotion

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:47:33 -0400

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.

Photo

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:40:23 -0400

Pretty Little Things

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:53:20 -0400

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.

Chatterboxes

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:35:19 -0400

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,
that what the people want, the people get.

Now they all choose sides, one after another
except Maryanne, timid, her heart bleeds out
once an hour, for lost dogs and widowed
mothers. The brothers, a pair of priests
who deal in absolutes, decorate the room
with string after string of fresh-water
pearls, gleaned from the depths of their
most shallow state.

Hang them from the ceiling, these notions
of death and taxes, beggars and kings.
These less than serendipitous things.

Not a gardener in the house, to dig
in loose soil, in unsettled earth,
bury foreign seeds from Eastern gardens,
to grow trees with fruit of uncertain
color and bittersweet taste. Chaste,
and strange enough to end an idle racket.