katbert22 @ 3:10am: I Had a Dream About You by Siken


All the cows were falling out of the sky and landing in the mud.

You were drinking sangria and I was throwing oranges at you,

but it didn't matter.

I said my arms are very long and your head's on fire.

I said kiss me here and here and here

And you did.

Then you wanted pasta,

so we trampled out into the tomatoes and rolled around to make the sauce.

You were very beautiful.


We were in the Safeway parking lot. I couldn't find my cigarettes.

You said Hurry up! but I was worried there would be a holdup

And we would be stuck in a hostage situation, hiding behind

the frozen meats, with nothing to smoke for hours.

You said Don't be silly,

so I followed you into the store.

We were thumping the melons when I heard somebody say Nobody move!

I leaned over and whispered in your ear I told you so.


There was a show on the television about buried treasure.

You were trying to convince me that we should buy shovels

and go out into the yard

and I was trying to convince you that I was a vampire.

On the way to the hardware store I kept biting your arm

and you said if I really was a vampire I would be biting your neck,

so I started biting your neck

and you said Cut it out!

and you bought me an ice cream, and then we saw the UFO.


These are the dreams we should be having. I shouldn't have to

clean them up like this.

You were lying in the middle of the empty highway.

The sky was red and the sand was red and you were wearing a brown coat.

There were flecks of foam in the corners of your mouth.

The birds were watching you.

Your eyes were closed and you were listening to the road and I could

hear your breathing, I could hear your heart beating.

I carried you to the car and drove you home but you

weren't making any sense.

I took a shower and tried to catch my breath.

You were lying on top of the bedspread

in boxer shorts, watching cartoons and laughing but not making any sound.

Your skin looked blue in the television light.

Your teeth looked yellow.

Still wet, I lay down next to you. Your arms, your legs, your naked chest,

your ribs delineated like a junkyard dogs.

There's nowhere to go, I thought. There's nowhere to go.


You were sitting in a bathtub at the hospital and you were crying.

You said it hurt.

I mean the buildings that were not the hospital.

I shouldn't have mentioned the hospital.

I don't think I can take this much longer.


In the dream I don't tell anyone, you put your head in my lap.

Let's say you're driving down the road with your eyes closed

but my eyes are also closed.

You're by the side of the road.

You're by the side of the road and you're doing all the talking

while I stare at my shoes.

They're nice shoes, brown and comfortable, and I like your voice.

In the dream I don't tell anyone, I'm afraid to wake you up.


In these dreams it's always you:

The boy in the sweatshirt,

The boy on the bridge, the boy who always keeps me

from jumping off the bridge.

Oh, the things we invent when we are scared

and want to be rescued.

Your jeep. Your teeth. The coffee that you bought me.

The sandwich cut in half on the plate.

I woke up and ate ice cream in the dark,

hunched over on the wooden chair in the kitchen,

listening to the rain.

I borrowed your shoes and didn't put them away.


You were crying and eating rice.

The surface of the water was still and bright.

Your feet were burning so I put my hands on them, but my hands

were burning too.

You had a bottle of pills but I wouldn't let you swallow them.

You said Will you love me even more when Im dead?

And I said No, and I threw the pills on the sand.

Look at them, you said. They look like emeralds.


I put you in a cage with the ocelots. I was trying to fatten you up

with sausages and bacon.

Somehow you escaped and climbed up the branches of a pear tree.

I chopped it down but there was nobody in it.

I went to the riverbed to wait for you to show up.

You didn't show up.

I kept waiting.

tatianalarina @ 3:38pm: Aubade
Aubade
Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

murdermystery @ 10:58pm: FATED
by Ariana Reines


I am the bride of my baby, I am the bride of this ok day. The sun is a
peeled yolk. I broke.

I = Miss Havisham. Combustion heaven. To be changed, to go up up
up, to be translated. HOW DO THE BEASTS GROAN! THE HERDS OF
CATTLE ARE PERPLEXED, BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO PASTURE
YEA, THE FLOCKS OF SHEEP ARE MADE DESOLATE

I hate you and therefore we will be together forever, slice me open if I
ever smooth this over, slice me open if I ever soften, if I ever moisten, if I
ever fall for you again.

murdermystery @ 2:54am:

Keston Sutherland

Ten Past Nine

In my speech shines a radiant energy,

I can destroy hype, the wind flashes with its end,


fury and barriers become smashed

                   out, the music chars hype

broke out from me.  I sing and the serrated horizon

tilts, dirt splashes become zero each. We are

okay.  I am not even a fucking person any more.

         Without the bloom

of flowers set to crash, and without day after day,


antique throats would char.  I am not even

despite fire victimized but am okay.  The



grainy void over my speech flares and yellows,

day after day remains, ashen, vital.  The things I

do say distort hype, which may become over,

                    destroyed that

is to say our worst speech.  A face at  


my window faces that.  Without extrapolation

on me what could become smashed,

         you cut

deep into her tongue with broken glass,

with your fist you strike out.  I am ready

today, I can reduce the significance of love.

ismaelson @ 2:29pm: Makeup by Dora Malech
Makeup
by Dora Malech


My mother does not trust
women without it.
What are they not hiding?
Renders the dead living

and the living more alive.
Everything I say sets
the clouds off blubbering
like they knew the pretty dead.

True, no mascara, no evidence.
Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,
a faithful liar, false bottom.
Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.

The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.
At the carnival, each child's cheek becomes
a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.
Each breath, a game called Live Forever.

I am small. Don't ask me to reconcile
one shadow with another. I admit—
paint the dead pink, it does not make
them sunrise. Paint the living blue,

it does not make them sky, or sea,
a berry, clapboard house, or dead.
God, leave us our costumes,
don't blow in our noses,

strip us to the underside of skin.
Even the earth claims color
once a year, dressed in red leaves
as the trees play Grieving.



[from Poetry (May 2007), http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0507/poem_179577.html]

ismaelson @ 2:14pm: The Invited by Lucy Ives

The Invited

by Lucy Ives

1

 

she plays the aluminum side

 

of the refrigerator with one of their drumsticks

 

the boy with a mohawk says her name

 

a recollection of his one pair of sneakers

          logos bouncing like dimes where he

jacks his knees crossing the street

 

and took his small muscles off

 

saying, as they exchanged places on the

greenwood porch, starrily

 

consumed by beer

“this is something you can never

understand”

 

singing to himself, placing James Dean

over his face

 

bearing the girl he loves off through

    the heat to the cinder block where

    they are teaching themselves to speak

2

 

daylight; the dented red car like a skull

 

I’ll remember the refuse in here forever,

    soda bottles the color of flowers, souvenirs,

    clothing, the gold egyptian head

 

D. dresses in a pink shirt the color of

red

 

running once through the airport to no purpose

 

her speaking to me as she drives, saying

    “he said”

3

 

and in the kitchen with his own shirt

    around his head he says

    “stay out of my kitchen”

 

           making a meatless soup

           of yellow fruit one afternoon

 

I praise him afterward for this, and

       how well he plays pool

4

 

   in their wind-up bedroom

walls of navy, windows which shake with

every footfall, the filmmaker lights

   up a cigarette, and comparing his

   eyebrows to each other in secret

 

   begins smoothing his video

   making sounds and

the mouths move, in sync

 

precious

 

his bed which he claims a ghost

shakes nightly

 

precious his head

 

when will he remember? I ask myself

 

as in its dark bluejeans, the specter

      makes itself a sandwich behind my

      back whenever I sleep

5

 

the greenwood porch taken up entire by nesting lions

 

he came to the door the hungry kind

 

breathing so I heard, heart of some smaller animal

 

points of four teeth salted round the heart

 

he waited on all-fours

 

pathetic at the perfect center of the door

 

     working with a new sadness, their

     doorframes, their

     many-colored home

 

     taut skin along the ribs and the red

     insides of his hands

 

     there, I say, must be where

     you keep your blood

 

     he says everyone says that

6

 

there was a lot of pale boys going on

about being uneducated that night

 

one of them, you know, the one with the

nipples?

 

that’s right

he shaved

 

his head on the sides

so you thought

 

of a spine, whenever

he leaned

 

over annoyed, or

took himself into

 

the next room to speak for

that particular smallness

 

one feels certain those

flat sneakers stand for

 

the what?

he cries out if I appear

7

 

there are vipers in green suits somewhere in

the early morning this morning

 

an owl hisses its way toward the center of town

 

who knows what anyone told me before

I didn’t believe them

outright then

 

so you thought yourself a believer

 

they were old-fashioned

they lived kind of like punks

 

still the serious song won’t go

it’s the only chance I’ve got

 

scent of the face coming off in the hands

 

and up above them lies another land

             each and every time

 

                    I cannot live it

again they say, looking up

[from The Bedazzler (Winter 2007)]

ismaelson @ 8:55pm: Study Nature by Gertrude Stein

Study Nature

whirligigmagees @ 3:38pm:

ismaelson @ 7:10pm: In Praise of Stones by Gabriela Mistral
Kneeling stones, stones falling in cavalcades, and those never wanting to fall, like a heart become too weary.

Stones resting on their shoulders like dead warriors -- their wounds are sealed with pure silence, not with bandages.

Stones hold scattered gestures like lost children: an eyebrow on the sierra, an ankle in a stone bench.

Stones remember a unified face and want to piece it back together, gesture by gesture, someday.

Stones heavy with sleep, rich with dreams, like a peppercorn guarding pure essence, languid and drowsy, like a tree of conjunctures, stone savagely clutches its treasure of absolute dreams.

Kneeling stones, commingled stones, stones falling in cavalcades, and those not wanting to fall, like a heart become too weary.

The headstone destined for Jacob's neck, the stone of mourning is like a number -- without a blush and without dew -- it is just like a number.

Round stone is simply a great eyelid, with eyelashes, like Methuselah's. The hooked summit of the mystical Andes, that flame that doesn't dance, halted abruptly like Lot's wife Sarah. It did not want to answer me when I was a child, and it still does not answer me.

Stones flashing with gold or silver, suddenly pierced by copper, are startled by the intrusion. Stones are irritated by metallic almonds, as though they were invisible darts.

Kneeling stones, commingled stones, stones running in phalanxes or throngs, without arriving anywhere.

Ancient river stones from slippery shores are like the drowned -- they hold the same withered vegetation that sticks fast to the hair of the drowned. But tender stones exist; they can touch someone who has been flayed and not hurt him. They pass over his body with a tongue like this own mother's, and they don't grow tired.

Young river stones are pebbles painted like fruit. Yes, they can sing! Once, when I was also five years old, I placed them under my pillow; they made a commotion like a mountain of tots being smothered, or perhaps they took turns singing a round at the nucleus of my dream. They were its masters: tender-aged pebbles came to my sheets and played with me.

Some stones do not want to become tombstones or fountains; they shun a foreign touch and refuse the intrusive inscription in order to make their own gestures, unique language, rise someday.

Mute stones, their hearts are bestowed with a passion that could be given away. In order not to disturb the slumber of their vertiginous almond -- only for that reason, they remain still.


[from Sentence: a journal of prose poetics (No. 2, 2004), translated by Maria Giachetti]

for_esme @ 10:50pm: Lorine Niedecker.
Dead
she now lay deaf to death

She could have grown a good rutabaga
in the burial ground
and how she'd have loved these woods

One of her pallbearers said I
like a dumfool followed a deer
wanted to see her jump a fence --
never'd seen a deer jump a fence

pretty thing
the way she runs

syllabelle @ 7:02pm: Am Moor by Lucie Brock-Broido
Am lean against.
Am the heavy hour

Hand at urge,
At the verge of one. Am the ice comb of the tonsured

Hair, am the second
Hand, halted, the velvet opera glove. Am slant. Am fen, the injure

Wind at withins,
Stranger where the storm forms a face if the body stands enough

In a weather this
Cripple & this rough. Am shunt. Was moon-shaped helmet left

In bog, was condition
Of a spirit shorn, childlike & herd. Was Andalusion, ambsace,

Bird. Am kept.
Was keeper of the badly marred, was furious done god, was

Patient, was bad
Luck, was nurse. Ninety badly wounded men lay baying

In the reddened reedy
Hay of Saxony, was surgeon to their flinch & hoop, was hospice

To their torso hall,
Was numinous creature to their dying

Off. Am numb.
Was shoulder & queer luck. Am among.

Was gaunt.
Was––why––for the mutton & moss. Was the rented room.

Was chamber & ambage
& tender & burn. Am esurient, was the hungry form.

Am anatomy.
Was the bleating thing.



from The Master Letters

for_esme @ 8:57pm: effort at speech between two people by muriel rukeyser.
Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair:
a pink rabbit: it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid: and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you. I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

I am not happy. I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.
There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate
On what a tragedy his life was, really.

Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death:
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.
I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.
I will be open. I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth: I love you. Grow to know me.

What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a chinese puzzle… yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving… Take my hand. Speak to me.

ismaelson @ 10:42pm: Resurgam by Sherry Mangan
Grimness in silence, Thou, my God, salute,
hooded in purpose, motionless in growth,
broken like hostbread to Thy worship's oath,
intact in essence, one though convolute.

My edge was turned as though my steel were lead:
perceive the dusty mount that marks me; yet
the very self that sinned has no regret,
for I am most myself when I am dead.

Grant me my strength again with moving pain,
that after regrowth may mine edge be keen;
O, come Thou in Thy singleness to glean
my dust and find the missing vital grain.


(note: the god addressed is not Christ but Apollo)

[from No Apology for Poetrie,: and other poems written, 1922-1931]

myrtle_stars @ 7:28am: Cool Poetry Site for School Teachers.
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-list.html

ismaelson @ 11:17am: 4 sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love, though for this you riddle me with darts,
And drag me at your chariot till I die,--
Oh, heavy prince! Oh, panderer of hearts!--
Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie
Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair,
Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr,
Who still am free, unto no querulous care
A fool, and in no temple worshiper!
I, that have bared me to your quiver's fire,
Lifted my face into its puny rain,
Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire
As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain!
(Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave,
Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!)

**

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now:
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you not still my hunger's rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you--think not but I would!--
And seek another as I sought you first.
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconsistent is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.

**

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favourite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And oaths were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,--
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

**

Loving you less than life, a little less
Than bitter-sweet upon a broken wall
Or brush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess
I cannot swear I love you not at all.
For there is that about you in this light--
A yellow darkness, sinister of rain--
Which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight
To dwell on you, and dwell on you again.
And I am made aware of many a week
I shall consume, remembering in what way
Your brown hair grows about your brow and cheek,
And what divine absurdities you say:
Till all the world, and I, and surely you,
Will know I love you, whether or not I do.


[from Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay]

ismaelson @ 12:14am: Winter by John (Brooks) Wheelwright
Rocks cleft and turned to dust reveal
cleft shells to be as stone; and cricket skulls
in powdered light give your quick, analytic mandate:
Un-think these things. Gun-roused at dusk
a cock'll bugle "Kyrie." Get the geometry of event.
When your lungs failed at war
my mother pulse of dividends revived.
Other theorems of Truth; of Beauty, other corollary!

As over water when a mill-sluice shuts
film ice twitches between inverted
tendril and frond, frond and tendril;
your rushing brain lay still.
Our bold-voluted immortality, fallen
is only rock
--though proud in ruin, piteous in pride--
Ned. Ned.
Snow on a dome, blown by night wind.


[from The Collected Poems of John Wheelwright; orginally published in Mirrors of Venus: A Novel in Sonnets]

syllabelle @ 11:56am: Settling Song by Heather McHugh
One who could fly
from the rose-closed deck
toward starfuls, farthest-flung, of pure

forgetful sky might take
the forks and tributaries in the night––
afar, aloft––only to find

herself mistaken: nothing upward
ever brings her nearer.
Land's alluring after all, from there,

its oil fields quietly constellatory,
suburbs subtled by abounding glow....
And so a soul might settle back

toward the old dim beck
of bedside, one shade shy
of wicked glimmers. There to

bide and be. In sight
of the flicker of living.
In spite of the quicker to die.

(from Eyeshot)

ismaelson @ 3:04pm: I'd Give Up My Soul Itself by Solomon Ibn Gabirol
I'd give up my soul itself for one
whose light is like the sun:
He softly entreated me, saying: "Drink,
and banish your grief and longing--"
the wine poured from the beaker's spout
a viper in the mouth of a griffon.

And I answered him: "Could one contain the sun
within a jar that's broken?"
But my heart didn't yet know of its power
to utterly crush its burden--
which was lying safe and secure inside it,
like the king on his bed in Bashan.


( notes )

[from Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, translated by Peter Cole]

for_esme @ 9:18pm: Once Ever After by Harryette Mullen
There was this princess who wet the bed through many mat-
tresses, she was so attuned. She neither conversed with magical
beasts nor watched her mother turn into a stairwell or a stoop.
Her lips were. Her hair was. Her complexion was. Her beauty
or just her appearance. What she wore. She was born on a
chessboard, with parents and siblings, all royal. Was there a
witch? Was she enchanted, or drugged? When did she decide to
sleep? Dreaming a knight in armor, she thought it meant joust-
ing. His kind attack with streamers. A frog would croak. A
heart would cough after only one bite. Something was red.
There was wet and there was weather. She couldn't make it gold
without his name. Her night shifts in the textile mill. She forgot
she was a changeling peasant girl. Spinning, she got pricked.
That's where roses fell and all but one fairy wept. It remains
that she be buried alive, knowing that a kiss is smaller than a
delayed hunger.

mehinda @ 4:39pm: Two Poems (Theognis and Praxilla respectively)
Best of All

Best of all is never to be born, never to see the blood-
     orange sun swelter the hills and high meadows.
But once you're born then best of all to hurry on through
     the gates of hell and, once inside, lie
down under a caprocked gash of moldering earth.

~Theognis



Adonis in the Underworld

Of all the pleasures in the upper world,
     what I miss most is sunlight,
after that the stars, a full moon, summer's
     late season harvest of fruits
cucumber, apple, pomegranate, pear.

~Praxilla


Translated by Sherod Santos

for_esme @ 5:49pm: Housewife - Anne Sexton
Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day,
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother.
That's the main thing.

ismaelson @ 3:42pm: Self-Portrait, Masturbating by Steve Gehrke
--- after Egon Schiele

Here he is again, distracted, lonely,
pulling at the doll-strings of desire,

fingering his sheet music of moans,
whispers, his holy name, the whole choir

trying to sing the body from its cave,
to ignite the risen body into flames,

though the self, to flee its own decay,
must be beaten, must bloody the reins,

which is why he collapses on the spill-
cloth when he's done, his body half-exhumed

from the mirror, the painting like a meal
half-eaten on the canvas, sloppy, ungroomed,

his eyes deadened, pupils like swatted flies,
and the opened robe swanning from his sides.


[originally published by on Slate on 22 November MMV; click here to hear Mr. Gehrke read his poem to you]

atruestory @ 4:57pm: All Hallows
Louise Gluck

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
Sleep in their blue yoke,
The fields having been
Picked clean, the sheaves
Bound evenly and piled at the roadside
Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
Of harvest or pestilence
And the wife leaning out the window
With her hand extended, as in payment,
And the seeds
Distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.


-----------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------

Incidentally, does anyone know where I can find a copy of "Hyacinth" (or even which book it's in)? I'm having a hellofa time finding it.