The Three Way 365 1/2 Poem Thread

[ReccyV]

It's not just limited to Tunny, Alycia and I, anyone can join.
Post one poem a day everyday of the year. Start Date: May 2nd.

[Tunstall]

There was a thief among us
and I guess he was the moon.

Baking under the summer sun, the same that fired Navajo pots
we clapped the red dust off our hands like erasers
and when we spoke it was like eating chalk. I
got a jar of water and some paint brushes
and we drew the Southwest in my driveway,
me pulling on the border and you
dotting the major highways.

My skin singed (I always was too
pale for summer, like a winter bird)
while you got tan and sweaty.

We’ll get a car, I promised,
one that runs on sweat
or tree house dreams
instead of gas –
maybe we’ll actually afford it –

and I’ll take you to the desert in springtime
when it rains, and the dust turns to watercolour chalk.
We’ll caulk our faces and bake into artefacts. You’ll never
forget me.

but the sun lost her intensity, her interest
in us, and winked behind the maples.
We waved goodbye while evening
chewed at the edges of our day.

The moon, a crescent,
a smirk,
took her throne
and our mothers called us in to supper.
We split, like Arizona’s flowers in the heat.

[Raconteur]

1.

An earthworm tunneled
your smile and gave you fat lips.
Crushed together,
they might have been caterpillars
or fuzzy moth-babies
who clung to the anatomy
of my backyard

and we had our first drink here
where I slurred words,
snail-paced but earnest:
"I'll kiss you when it rains."
Paper-leaf lovenotes drew ink
from puddles that day;
we both brought umbrellas.

Wet grass stuck to our
hearts, a million strands
like nameless millipedes
all crawling.
They have so many legs,
and we have so much skin.
I wonder if one will outgrow
the other (sometimes the sky
runs out of rain)

but it's okay
because tonight I like the feeling.

[ReccyV]

1. The road beneath us
quivers with worm holes
and mole huts,
a speckled landscape
painted by a brush
too strong for either of us to use.

So we gave it to the moon,
and let her draw a snake in the sky;
two green eyes to watch
and a million scales
to wink and to bind
atmosphere to our chests;
each bright as the lamp-post
reflections on the sweating
concrete.

In the pools I point
out a dotted ladle,
and when you pull it from the bottom,
and scoop the earth into my face,
I can feel the warm clay
baking softly in my heart.

And the gap between your lips
opens wide as
summer sky
for my Hopi torn tongue;

while the stars below
lament in tribal song.

[Arty]

Hi. Can I join? My poetry is extremely mediocre, and I have some time to waste, so may as well take a shot at improving it.

1.

The morning after, jeans
sleep heaped on freckled floorboards.

A teenage life of passive verses sways
like toppled leaves forgetting
trees, a testimony to
your sour breath. Poetry

but who's the poet? leaks
through ceiling cracks, tangos
between our awkward,
tremored legs. Poetry

but what? but what was ever learnt
from epic advice, teased
from selfless literary gods? And
Romeo And
Juliet Are
always in our hearts,
I'm sure, though out
of steaming mind.

There are too many, now, too few
mistakes to make, and people
to mislead. There is a poet
buried in our mattress and the concluding line must hit the reader hard:

I want you out of my house.

[Tunstall]

[welcome to the party, Arty!]


our sea crest breath fogs up the air
and your words coagulate into something like moths.
They hang in the morning mist,
waiting for the sun to rise
like a giant lantern over the water.

I hold on to every one,
by spider silks or by dandelion parachutes
-- its hard to tell in morning twilight --
but either way I'll be dragged along
by the bugs that serve as sound.

[ReccyV]

2. In my school,
in the bathrooms
there are all of these
poems scribbled
in dark sharpie scrawl.

And they say things like:

"breaking shits
with a two ringed
fist."

and

"The love beneath our
urinals
grew yellow with decay."

And then there are the ones
that ring strong with poetic
Ideology.

"The blank faces
in this gutter swallow
my heart daily,

I beat back the torpid
rain slugs
and try to find home

beneath their quiet
shells."

And to me, I read them
softly as a spell
between lover lips;
the depth
of each word
tugging at my heart like an anchor.

I think that,
if I say them loud enough
the world will realize

Everyone is Art.

[Raconteur]

2.

I waited for autumn at a bus stop
with a vest sewn from
leaves cracked so dry
they might have been skin
or those wrinkles drawn across
our mouths. Remember --

close your eyes:
memories hide in retinas
or between the wide-ringed ripples
around your pupil --

the sunlight was bright in summer
especially on Mondays
and below it, our ginger faces
wriggled with smiles
wishing autumn never came.

[Arty]

2.

A hair sits perched upon my pen,
clutching at the space between my mind
between my hand. Medusa's head of snakes --
I never wanted this
I never asked your agony
to cross me off in bloody, broody ink,
to cage me
for your blocking writer's thrill.

Stabbed
by webbed and wedded,
growing old, as such
are failing in their humour. There is an emptiness
you see: gargoyles captured
turn to stone, and vomit brains,
and shiver blackened bones
through mangled carcass
underworlds. There is an emptiness
indeed: a meaning
void of words, a vast charade,
poised with dispassion at
my aching mind. I brush it off,
procrastinate for one
more
day.

[Raconteur]

3.

We count eras as pages
through our biology books,
studying evolution in our mouths
and smiling with paper-sliced
lips, blood-red
or maybe just plumped scarlet
to be romanced.

It would be easy to play godess
and cultivate our own species,
thinly fingered and born from your womb
-- or those deadened ovaries hung
on Daphne plants, waiting for slitted life
while perched on my lungs
and too close to my heart.

The cigarette smoke
I inhaled from your lips might
have killed Her. When we reach
the end, fingers yellowed as pages
and scissor-winged finches fluttering in our chests,
I think her roots are being snipped
or she's already dead.

[ReccyV]

3.
I know a girl
whose sadness
pushed it's way from her heart--
a sickly tree thing,
and tried to sew
buttons on her eyes.

She spoke of a goddess
whose hands were white
and blanched like the arms of a sycamore,
and whose grassy feet
were woven in this most
complex pattern.

She explained it to me once:
Overhand, under, right, braid 1,
under left, braid 2, Over, knot;
until all blades became fibers
and all fibers became atom

and the pink glass pieces
make up a tetrahedral heart;
cells after cells of
nuclear strength.

And She told me that
when the goddess came for you,
her beauty was so profound;
that you needed to blind yourself.

I asked her
"Why buttons?"
and she just smiled,
stuck a pin through
her eye-lid
and asked

"Why not?"

[Tunstall]

I set sail for tomorrow night yesterday morning.
The prow of my ship I aimed at the moon,
a pearly shore on the edge of an ocean
filled with pin prick jellyfish and squid.

They sucker on my boat now.
Somewhere over my head spin star-burst birds
turning like a mobile.

Early this afternoon
the silence turned to the sound
of piano keys. Or maybe
I’m just lonely, and the piano
is just white and black, like these strange fish.

But I untangle the lullaby legs anyway.
I take up the right-hand’s melody
glassy and cold like the surface of the water.

I throw my charter overboard (let
the bottom feeders have it) and
belt that song into the sails.

[blueboy]

1.

Doe-eyed, teary eyed, don't wet
the orphaned carpet mother so
carefully laid her grey skin on when
that bastard manchild wrung her
arm dry whilst the monsoon wind
picked at her bruises with mild
fingers, and cowered. Please, my
unknotted knees plead you to
keep your forlorn tongue and not
chatter - your teeth is too cold
and I'm afraid.

[Raconteur]

4.

I tight-rope walked across
the organs of your body, skittered
feet worked like stitches over
a calloused heart, almost dead
and I wondered about those eyelids
closing, being knee-deep/steep
in your body. I was digging for gold
and unable to find any

and I think I might cry
for those cancer-bones and
kidney failures, those yellow
innocent eyes, as your transplanted
self invades their dreamswisheshopes
with a masked virus because you died
lips still smiling, a malignant curve replicating
on their faces.

[Hypocrit]

(Catching up. I'm out of shape.)

1.

Every cursed little thing
splintered like ash across this man-made monster;
the hood of hell, motor-fanged and hungry
combusting his clothing, glueing his heart
to a denim fiend.

I, walking
stutter-sunk and soaking
wet with gasoline
watch this sunset
and the ground glow dark.

His fevered head as split
trunk tongue sucking the sound of war-drums
from the canaries who flew too low; I made
a head-dress out their blackenned feathers
and set the stars aglow.

Last I heard, his roots had tangled
their way round some monument
he clings; "To life!" a toast,
the blooded throat
closing in spring.

Oh, but the ground is still black
and my skin is hot
and this tar burns.

I paved these roads he wanders tired
just to sleep in an urn.

2.

Rosary red

what if I slip
and kiss those
lip-bead-sweat strewn
hips?

what if it hurts,
what if her hearth
doesn't have girdle enough
to hold my worth?

What if it rains blood?
What if those cloud fetuses crumble
and touch earth?

What then?

"Don't cry
I'll have your hand
till the end."

[blueboy]

2.

Squeeze me, woman and please don't
hurt. I never did have a bosom to
lay my pacing temples on. I'd be you
if I could, perhaps if I tried, hard
enough, and have another's breasts
to wipe my dirty fingers on, but
love's feline teeth had trapped you
and you; I just want my name to
be on tongues and make thighs shake.
Starved too many times of oxygen:
swollen lungs are no company; I can’t
by myself, be Kerouac.

[Arty]

Damn, a day behind ... Also, this is my 100th post! Excitement all around, fersure (:

3.

Pink ribbon, strung
across the silken rooftops gloss
the cover of your permanent
vacuum. Wound
around the sequin tiles
cascading trees, there is
a weaving beauty to
be had: a fragile magic,
worming in its warming through
the spoden city of a
teacup home.

[Hypocrit]

3.

Tell-tale signs of an old house;
a cat perched on the stoop, feral
fur in clumps around it; a
window broke like a face, nosey
shard highbrowing the street;
paint chips strewn like flowers
round a rusty bicycle, wedded to
the mudhole lawn.

4.

A divinity less pretty

What God is this?
Whose dirty fingernails claw in the
deadspace, fucking animals of thought
in the soccer field between
the neutralized soul
and the electric storm above;

This mess of mud, oh God I
clawed my way out, oh God I
confused my skin with its, oh God
what dirty divinity is this?
In the space
between the covers
and the bed
I claw
at reason
and paw
it's flower
to crush it in my hand.

We stood there, God in my
palm and in my heart and
all the blood and thunder in the world
echoing through my ears
and out my brain flew Athena
and wisdom lit the streets
and words bled out the gutter
and the winos mumbled poems
and the grave sang of untold
fortunes.

"I love you."
The space between the words,
the emptiness around those forms,
defining their function, are we empty?
are we alone? a lone
something
wanders
somewhere
and trips on words
and tries to eat it's shit
and finds divinity
doesn't always come with icing.

If there were a word or philosophy
to wrap round me like a cucoon I'd
have found it surely by now, hell
is not other people, hell is not
a place below, hell is here alive
and now and in my skin and
it doesn't burn, but it does grow
dull.

H
e
l
l

Oh my God in my palm
Oh my God in the stars
Oh my God is an invisible monster
still threatening my tender feet
as I pad a midnight room.
Oh my God is madness and empty
and vacant and unlit by stars
because there are some places

even they can't touch.

And here I sink, to the bottom of the world,
but Oh my God there is no bottom
and are those teeth? Rows of
them. A gumline of rot and
teeth thick as stalks, they
nibble the corners of my map
till tunnel vision executes
the light

[Arty]

4.

We live like this --

Behind the neon glow of pounding iPod screens,
our generation technology, prophetic analogy screams --

We live fast,
We botox young,
We --

Spit our toothpaste into sterile sinks,
rinse a little water round the rosy imperfections, then --

We stare our starving schizophrenic in the
Eye! and then
We break the contact lens into our hollowed lives.
We --

Shun the morning flower shops between
our flushed crush and the bus stops, and --

One
by
one
Her kisses slip our mind, our steady heart,
beating round the keyboard buzz
of our small office existence

-- We live like this.

[Raconteur]

5.

desire, you crawl up my gut
like lukewarm maggots tasting
intestines in tapeworm glory.
later hung there, as if wrung dry,
your shriveled form gnaws fried nerves
until wire is exposed. my shocked system
pools into your mouth, suckled into
black holes, black teeth, black corners
and together we decay.
if you should crawl again,
you may choose my spine, each knob
a set of teeth in our mouths
hiding venomous tongues.

[Tunstall]

4.

Water lilies flare,
twenty thousand setting suns
bursting –

They look oil-painted against the reeds
and I grab a cattail and spread the ink
across your face.

Summer clouds erupt along your nose
and reach peachy fingers to your eyes,
a beautiful bruise.
I think I’ll name you Raphael,
dump you in the water
and call you a masterpiece


5.

she carved faces out of oranges
and arranged the shavings into curls
around velvet-black plumbs
that stared at her
like white-less eyes, open wide
and dreaming of an orchard.

[ReccyV]

4.
The flowers on my headboard
stare down at me;
still wet and
I can feel their
budded eyes tightening my skin.

And in the drenching sheets;
strange fish swim through themselves
while
I cocoon myself away
and bloom beneath
the dark.

Glo worm Glo Worm,
meet me between
the pages of our hearts.

5.
Today a soap doll asked me
to carve a heart
into her chest;
and
I remember telling her
"you're a doll,
what do you need a heart for?"
and
I remember she said
"You're a man,
what do you need one for?"

[Hypocrit]

5. (woot, caught up, feels good to be writing not rap again)

Blistered
he walks like Icarus into the sun


there was a man, at least I think
(never did see more than his hair)
who drooled poetry into a brown bag
on the corner of the street where I used to live.
It was the strangest thing, pity
would collect in that bag,
and change it would shine by his dirty shineless shoes
and sometimes strange cars would pass
and the rich children who lived some ways out would come
to remind him that class pays well.



mottled feathers, a bow maybe
the strings bent to catch the passing muses
of sirens; technicolor parade and a
black black goo
covered arms.
Molten there sat
lava
and ash
and the stuff of angels
little bones, feather fingers
searching for a lighter
little sparks
gasoline dribble
from a drunk god


and he'd say "all the angels are blazing in the cemetery
and on the playgrounds, firefucked with passion oh
they're marvelous, you can see their wings glow with
their shrapnel in the cracks of the side-walk,
bits of glass teeth reminding you
of the tobacco shops that used to carry
a good bong." and he'd smile while he said this

and it wasn't a weak smile, it wasn't a feeble attempt
at empathy like those who threw change at his shoes,
and it wasn't a fake smile, the televisionaries
promising guidance and the divine through
some new snake oil sooth that will nurse the wound it gave

it was a broad
broad beam,
like the smile of a child
on a tilt-a-whirl,
falling to the earth
in livenned madness
crying, joyously
"Oh, my pregnant
pregnant
head."

6.

(I wanted to watch her)

a silent leaf in a parking lot
plays tricks on the children
spinning ghosts out their limbs
to handshake the sun.

a lively pulse swims
atempest round the button-nose
where sit ants atop a hill
watching the cyclone
devour, and like the sun

the leaf is red.

The earth is blushing
a little afraid
to embrace the cold
dark winter ahead.

Here the sun bends
to kiss the neck
of it's tired daughter
and I watch;

cars ache towards
glowing blisters of light
showing on
the child's face

blue-green and waving
envious sad
daughter earth
making ghosts
for her dandriff to chase

in circles.

(The sun
goes to bed
alone
and masturbates
to images of his child
in peril.)


"Mother are you there?"

"Mother can you hear?"

deaf-blind,wretched network
of flexing gasworks
oh your skin is light
oh your skin is seamless
oh your skin is string
and at night
when the world freezes
I can see
your bone

black as mine.

__solipsism__-+
sitsin(*8isi
watch

his name?(sin sits smiling ate my watch)
I didn't catch that.(sin watched smiling, isi 8)
his name?(years of age, the frog you)
I didn't catch that.(killed it to test your skin
his name?(oh god he was smooth, oh god he was

so smooth in death.)
I didn't catch that.
his name?

onequickbreath
pulse finds leyline to mind
to find pupil to measure pulse
to watch blood to make infinity
to stretch the sun from
a lonely son
to a grown man.

[blueboy]

3.

I'd like to think I am
small, a flutter and
just a frolicking girl,
nibbling at a disconsolate
requiem. We licked
the years away and
I am left an untrimmed
persona drunk on what
ifs and wrinkled by
tobacco strumming on
calloused fingertips.

[blueboy]

4.

Lately there is an
Irish spring in your
step and you lost
your staccato kiss.
Chessboy's tongue
still reminds me of
your low moaning
cello words, your
Nazi eyebrows and
your murmur's so
sweet that it makes
me a baby. I'm left
soaking wet in your
sink, sorrowed by
your lipstain and
loved only by one
sip. It's been too
long, boy, so let
leah cry acid love
letters again.

[Arty]

5.

What a glorious day
to fall in love! To fall

where the ice creams
shiver on vanilla tongues

and the grass runs green
in the wind of your feet

and the flitting wings whisper
like train tracks, through time

and the park gates need oil
but the tyrants don't care

and the question is posed
as a cyclic nirvana

and the answer is simple
as Summer Chart Hits

and the question is not
a Why is? but What now?

and you see it, too
through an incredulous, curious

eye, I

think.

[ReccyV]

6. I can't speak now,
not with the
cotton souls
pressed to my cheeks--
the tetrahedral
blue pills
and the
little hearts inside
still warm on my tongue;

I can not taste the blood.

[Raconteur]

6.

Bees look so sweet in
dusk folds, against the sunlight
courting skies. And pollen-
yellow turns fuchsia
in fever or

maybe they're blushing,
sticky with love, drizzling
still, in eight counts
like combed honey.

[Tunstall]

I met an a bird – an owl –
With kerfuffle feathers,
Fighting right and left like pikes.

I strung him up as a dream catcher
Dangling from the rafters
Of this barn-place.

The flight feathers I clipped
And rolled up my sleeves.

[ReccyV]

7. I think I've become
sick with fish imagery;
and so
angered at my previous obsession,
that I've chipped the little scales
from each of my poems,
and left them--skinny white things.

And I don't feel sorry,
really,
as I pry them from my own arms--
slick as an abalone;
with a marquee of skin gut
stringing it down.

But now that I walk around--
naked and not nude,
I find the sun
too warm,
too sharp
and the air
too thin
too dry.

So I worm my way
into the lakes left behind
by the summer storm
and realize,
here,
the water isn't so bad.

[Arty]

6.

gypsy day

and a horse stands still
on the motorway, caught
between urban sky-scraping
and yellowing meadows.

Daffodils line the roadsides,
bathtubs lie abandoned in fields, but
everywhere
nettles scream wild
and there
is rust, dry and swelling
past the boundaries, fast
like ivy, poisoning the chain-link border
fencing his decision.

There is a choice to make, a chance
to break his mundane daily life
where art stands tethered to a caravan,
its plastic windows gnarled,
TV antennae poised
to catch the traffic fumes. He

weezes - breath comes
Halt!
ingly these
days - and tries to fathom
why it struck him now to
seek rebellion, how
his hooves had stumbled blindly through
a sinking terror clinging to
the sweating disembodiment
of skin, leaping at the crack
in chance's bush. And now

there is a choice to make, a chance
to break his kingdom, break
his owner's alien heart, exist
without the throbbing ache
of trivial human loss ... Or else
another settlement awaits -
a school, or nursing home, perhaps -
play annex for another month, until
it's time to make a change
again.

They will come
for him.

Panic spreads its chips
across the table of the neighbouring
roundabout. He's been
here
before. He's sure
of
he's-
black eyes drown in artificial
whirlpools, mothered through the family
cars surrounding him as close as sin,
closing in to whip his dampened
mane. He has to
Go!- to jump the gap
between asthmatic ignorance
and countryside intelligence. There is
oppression stifling the spits
of salty teardrops, hanging
in the tempest of his vast and
fierce decision.

Pensive breaths, he takes:
one look at the bridge
to slavery,
two at the farther bank
to fields. Smells
like rotting petrol tanks. And as
his heartbeat slows, he turns back
(as he has turned a thousand
dawns before)
to brave the traffic, back
to plastic window views, back
to art suppressed in stirrups, back
to face the morning of his

[blueboy]

6. (for my goddamn ego)

I say girl, the sun rises
for you and the moon
severes itself for you
and they dance oh so
gingerly for you. But
you whore, you patent
slut, what nibbled you
so clean and left you
blue? Don't weep, no!
I told you not to sob,
you heathen broad; I
will take your face and
grind it if you do. Catch
the bone and no, you
don't run fast enough-
your limbs are inept
and you deserve the
whip. Please don't, I
beg. Please stop. Stop.

[Tunstall]

There is a city behind my house.

I go down in the morning, to the spruce buildings
that look down at me. They died; their charred skin
cuts a scar through the rest of the woods.
They tell me off for disrupting traffic,
waggling stubby branches like fingers,
or broken fire escapes.

Edit: it's actually number seven but apparently I passed first grade without being able to count.

[Raconteur]

7.

your touch, little fingers
print the moon as a sad child
and the sky a blue womb
birthing stars --
weighed in
our palms, so small and
we can almost cradle them,
wish on them, their genie
fingers snapping

and we can hear their wails
like a dreaming boat paddling
through our sleep
eternally or just until
sunrise.

[ReccyV]

8.

When I met you,
outside the Blue Moon
Jazz cafe--
the one with that pregnant
cow stuck in the space
above that coffee pot(?)--

I remember how
wide your mouth opened
and how I wanted to
press my fingers against
your teeth
and play the same
beautiful music
that you play
daily on my heart-strings.

And these piano key
eyes smile
bright in the light
of Midmorning Ohio
where the leaves
pour like wine into the streets
and the winter hares
shed their
cotton fur
for the sleek black
look of french table-wood--

the same kind that
sometimes
blocks the halls
of back-ally jazz concerts
where we hipsters
snap our fingers like
wishbones
and dream on
the skeletons of eachother
But--

when I met you,
outside of that cafe
where the starshine
lit the concrete between us,
I wished my lips
were coffee stained and
sweet
so you wouldn't ever leave them.

[ReccyV]

9.
"I need a bath"
said the leather-man
to his vats of
oil--bubbles
echoing the names of
past lovers and love-ins.

Past actors with their
ribs gulping air
as cannibal plants--
a cherry stamen pulsing like a tongue;
will it eat him?
will it kiss him?

Past schoolboys
who drank in him for
ten more years than I'll ever have;
who stretched the folds of his heart
and beat their rhythms into it
until it was loose as my sole.

And as I situate myself
on his knees stretched open,
I think of how their milky arms
played games on his skin;

I am determined to
wash them all away.

[Raconteur]

8.

I am an orphaned heart
tucked in your breast
or draped across it, and
your lips move against
promises, and
cotton pockets catch the air
that I'm holding -- this
hot blooded image, this woman
and I'm cold,

but desired, and my cheeks
if they could blush would
be red and painted like a poker
face caught bluffing or
a portrait of skies gone blank
(a canvas unpainted)
behind the red sun
who sinks, inches, down the
penned horizon -- we can
kick our mouths, our jaws
shut and they would bleed
red suns too

but I'm here, left raw and
once desired, without a
home.

[Raconteur]

9.

I'm holding this man,
small man with ten digits like
yours but his heart is so
different and I unlink our hands,

but his fingers are mine,
my own and his smile is mine
too, and now I never smile,

and this boy, this man,
he's a woman, a mirror and
my reflection if visible would
be so ugly, a raptor
a sky with teeth, and jagged --
maybe lightning

and these words mean
nothing, because they are me.

[Arty]

This will be the only chance I get to update for the next few days, so here come 4 poems in quick succession ...

7.


I broke
you off your hinges, took
you with me through
the oily winter showers. Seasons

swapped; the postman
changed his anorak
for straps; the salesman,
leaking benefit smiles, was
trampled on the porch. You
showed your hard side to
another neighbour, one more
Witness and
a Christmasful of family cards.

Then to bills and
banks and
final warnings, then
to friendly faces preaching
loss of lease, or
loss of life, or
something of the fearsome
sort, so serious,
so dull. What use have we
for social adequacy? we'd
laugh - I'd laugh.

But now,
when I take the lead, and
crack you open gently with
a frightened finger, I know there's
more inside your moistened womb
than any terrible cathedral
and that your passage
holds more rites than any
marriage aisle.


8.


Grace, I found
your magazine. I stapled
it to a faded photo of you, pinned
you up alongside Betty
Boop, and finally
gave you the send-off
you'd have wanted.

Sara, I will never
be the Betty
Boop you said I would. Lust
killed me before the flame
of bitter fame could touch me. Know
that immortality can never
stop the suffering of the weak, and
burn this message when you
find it, as I burnt
the issues of the shelf life I left
just behind the cameras.


9.


Through the silver lining
lies eternities of space. No,
you didn't listen, didn't hear - I tell you:
the road to hell is paved with
concepts drawn from anti-theories, drawn
from desperation to discover what lies
underneath the lies
of anti-perceived reality. No,
you don't know, let me speak - I tell you:
there is nothing, no thing, and
no reason to exist, so
while I sit cross-legged on
the clean green, why
does summer bite me through the sky, and why
is there a pigeon on the
terracotta roof?


10.


An angel asked me
once if I
could love a broken toy.

Dressing to impress, I said,
"Perhaps, if it were fixable - and if
no human came
to take its place."

Silver bullets rained down, hard,
over a human face.

And there I stood, still
dripping with pretense, so pleased
to root my definition.

The tramp looked up at me, and said,
"They call us lonely
but
really, we're just alone."

And there I stood, now so aware
of my dishonesty, exposed
to harsher storms of criticism.

The man looked down on me, and turned,
accepting my conforming
- my profound apologies, but couldn't
come to terms with all the earnest
of his heart, and all the black
infesting mine.

[Tunstall]

I wish had a violin voice,
the kind that grips the vocal chords.
Like a reel I would belt out the lullaby
my mother taught me, the one about a cat
and a pea green boat.

But my voice cracks, beer bottles
that I break against a piano. Instead
I stumble, slicing my heels on a dirge
about a sailor in a grey coat.

[ReccyV]

10.

I wish the violins outside wouldn't cry so loud,
so I could concentrate on the loudness
of my room.

And I wish the mechanical crickets on my nightstand
would run out of oil or battery juice,
so I could disassemble their pieces
and wind my heart
till it beats again.

[Tunstall]

Paper bag creatures breathe,
and they’re taking all my oxygen.
My lungs, pastel coloured with sticky strings,
are pulled in and out as their lips flutter,
white and cracked.

[Hypocrit]

(fuck, got some catching up to do)

7. To poets everywhere,

Romance is bullshit.

Look, I'm sorry for stating the obvious and not prettying it up with flowering aphorisms for how love necessitates muse.
I'm sorry I don't play the games I used to, and I'm sorry I don't look away and blush when you smile or bite your lip at me.
I feel
bored.

(so the screen started smiling, and I occupied
a fantasy friend with a fantasy world and
tried to fill in the chalk outline with a full report.)

Name?

(The syllables enjambed, cut-throat
antics to cut conversation where it starts,
in the gut, bubbling up, in the ruts
getting stuck again, there's always something
in the way.)

How are we feeling today?
Blue.

(Tangent tongue goes "iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou"
until the words lose meaning and glossolalia glossary
lets you talk your way to God through a pop song.
"If I only could make a deal with" -)

place your heart and number at the dotted line
and sign.

x___________

Romance is bullshit.
Everything reminds me of her.
Everything is dusk.
Elliott Smith when will you learn to shut the fuck up and stop whining.
Elliott Smith when will you learn the truth doesn't get you laid.
Elliott Smith when will you learn a synonym for "sad".
America when will Ginsberg leave my head.
Ginsberg when will you leave America.

When God breaks the heart of it's darkest hour to the Beats
and the Beats bleed a sick slew stew just to feed out feet
will the footprints lead us back home? I trace the veins of this
currency and found a railway smile and a tired old giant
with coal for eyes, and glass for fingers, and crucifix
breath that bad.

I'm going to stretch my miseries like a throw-rug
and skin your memory and place it on my altar
and smile knowingly and tell all my friends
that I killed "it" myself, (while scooting
the Lands End catalog
with a smirk
off the edge of the world.)

8. Too small to matter

Beneath a mad sky blushing blue
redorangepurple,green with envy for
the grass, whose limbs know the feet
of the calf, and whose limbs will catch
it's body bent with grace

when it rests; limbs know the crux of man
better than man himself, bearing the drought's mouth,
bearing the accusing glare of the sun,
it's children perish to it's arms. The grass,

upon which a boy sits cross-legged
studying his breath from a manual he found
in a library that read "peace".

A girl in a coffee shop across the street
watching an investment slip out her lovers cheeks
with one thousand secrets turned weaponry

in anothers' mouth; the symbol she bears,
a broken crux, clocking her breath,
crushing her chest, clutching

moments too small to matter. Too
small to matter; the pennies slipped
to the tip jar, the ones the barrista uses
to visit her unborn nephew and labored sister.
Too small to matter, the moments she calculates
on the bus, articulating baby-showerbirthfuneral.
Too small to matter, the lullabies muttered
soulfully to noone by an old hermit
drunk in the park, bruised through
the dark.

Too small to matter, the salt bullets
crushing through the skull of a slug;
the child's head raised in triumph to the sun
learning for the first time that pain is real
and sitting in his hands, too small to matter.
Some day he will kiss that slug
and it's relatives will make a nest of his bones.
Too small, these little ironies, too small.

Too small to matter, that newborn, or
the boys breath, or the grass, or
the dead calf, or the world
of used seconds
whose faces slip through cracks unclocked,
whose rumours are carried through fields unwatched
in lonely bar-tunes, bard-swoons, or poems,
or the musings of drunk old widows
watching their funitures color fade with their skin
to the withering gaze of the sun.

9. Khali Cunt

The gunshot heelwork of a flamenco dancer
laying siege to the paepr-doll dusted township beneath
her feet; a world of a fire, one day flatland found a
burning bush in it's Icarus' hand
turned blue, and brought the horizon;

God she's an armament of rhythm, seated
atop a world of clicks and whirls, stamping
them out in a festive passion.

(they scream smoke and give)



...man, I should expand on that last one. The horizon for them is like the apocalypse. It needs more fourht dimensional metaphors to our own dilluded stasis.

[Raconteur]

10.

I had a pulse once
that day we sat in a field, pollen-stained
with wasps whispering stories
in our ears, and we exchanged hearts
hesitant as if afraid to be stung,

and I was a child on a chair, rocking
to the sound of your voice
wondering about innocence and where
yours had gone,

I searched for it once in an empty
flower pot, insects up
my fingers and earthworms scavenging;
that's where you found me,
cradling our hearts, dirty too.

[Wessen]

A spinster with a broken bottle
and glacé cherries between crowded teeth;
slumped flags without the wind.

Waving to the back of moving limousines
holds amusement for only
so long.

[Hypocrit]

10.

It was a cold lead heart
he dropped at the bank
that evening, his eyes
danced a slow dance
to the floor, dragging
an awful impression
of the light fixture
down with him.

It was heavy, the air
weighted his hair, and
his head sunk from
the stress.
His eyes burned
from tears
and middle class hell
and a bodies weight in marrow.

And I asked him "Sir, do you live?"
and he stopped, and his skin revolted
and his hair stood with his spine
like an anntena(or middle finger) to God
and he replied, slowly, "Yes."
and waited for another word.

I averted my eyes and felt him leave,
sagging under the old weight
of an old world.

[ReccyV]

11.

I wish
somebody would just
blow the lid off of this great
SECRET
swirling inside my gut like some
insufferable monsoon.

The vietnamese people inside of me
are burning effigies
and spitting on my shrines.
I try and tell them: IT'S THE WINGS OF A BUTTERFLY.
But they scream Dragon
and lose their faith
in Man.

[Wessen]

It started with a
broken arrow, splintered,
bleeding jester juice.

Paste, the taste of
her nightgown in the
morning.

Broken flowers, broken
jaws that
fossilised under the
moon.

[Raconteur]

11.

A sailing boat met death,
and I found a man's heart on shore.
It was heavy in my palms and felt like secrets
bottled, just for me.

He must have been a healthy man, besides the sand
and sadness. I held it to my ears and heard a
crab's scuttle, but I held it to my chest and felt a
woman's laughter

a baby's breath in the wind, I swallowed it and fed
my own body-drum. If I were his child, I think we would
watch starfish and where the television sits
would be an aquarium filled with dreams.

If we were friends facing the horizon,
his eyes would grow blank:

"She doesn't like the sea, the magenta sky at sunset
or the sand between her feet. And every day she writes
me letters, lonely and unloved."

And if I were his lover, with pregnant skin and
longing, I'd sit at the edge of the beach thinking about
his flushed, warm cheeks while holding his heart.

[Hypocrit]

11.

Alas, my head
sunk into my stomach
makes a jackolantern
out my intestines
and I glow all holy,
hungry minded,
and shit-thought.

[Raconteur]

12.

She wondered if drowning was
as fun as swimming; she
thought when dead,
her heart would plug itself
into fish, their innocent eyes wide
with new life.

Or her eyes would drop to their
eggs, watching over them like a
mother might.

She thought the beach might look
different from below the water, the sand
rippling on the shore.

But the sky would look the same,
always tinged blue.

[Raconteur]

13.

In awful September
weather
I am ugly and the leaves
are frog-eyed

everything falls
into autumn
everyone is heavy
with love
with loss
with fear
and the seasons

change, but they're
always the same.

I love your smile,
I love making you smile
in spring
but in October, we wear our masks
and your lips are hidden
like that bookmark
marking that page
in that novel I never finished
reading

the ink
still wet from rain
in May dampens our heads
our hoods and umbrellas
and our love too

(I tried to peel it open once,
to know the ending past stuck pages,
but I think the protagonist
was just like me,
unfinished)

The ladybugs crawl up
my arms now
the sun
blooms in the sky
and awful weather is a memory
like awful springs
and awful summers,
and cold cold winters
without you.

[ReccyV]

12.
I enjoyed meeting your
face this afternoon,
the twitching
awkward pouring from
a coffee smile.

And the Black Hawks above
looked down on us
when our faces were
reacquainted in evening--
I remember hearing
a faint
"hello" travel from my lips
onto yours.

You know, I've heard
caffeine is an aphrodisiac.

[Wessen]

Synaesthetic, a falling
domino slide embedded
with paper planes, paper
chains

that

bound your wrist to
mine, I sign a
heart at the end of my
letters

to let you know
that

you were better
than her.

And turning hips
don't matter, (such
a sweet rhythm)
when they're beneath mine
and I feel the slick,
the aptamer tick

that lets me know that I'm forgiven.

[Arty]

Henceforth, I shall be updating this every five days -- although I only have three with me at this moment in time.

11.

Starting fresh as daisies,
petal sculptures weep
to greet me. Silent
bees hang softly in
the tension; webs of threads are
slicing through the smog's
billowing pillows.

Running noodle tracks around the
gardens of my veins, a maze
I would have overgrown,
if only to erase its
thickets, green and
glowering. From deep within
the hedge, a monster smiles,
extends a gnarled digit of veins from far
beneath his earthen tomb, beckoning,
beckoning.

Finishing to twilght skies, crisp
bonfire scents play round my eyes
like fireflies, and chill-
infested grass breathes sweetly as
I tumble into dreams in softened soil.
And when I smile, I think
the stars shine brighter.

12.

It will drop

off, I know, like bricks
of sludgy lard will topple
from the flesh, revealing
first a buried steeple, then
a crystallised cathedral.

It will dribble
like a landslide, then
will see the sea, as
painful as the future, and
be frightened by the
cravings of the crabs, perhaps the
rantings of the sharks.

But it will slip, and
chip away
the salt, the ebbing
current. I

will finally be left with the
bare bones, a sunk atlantis,
glistening in the
shimmering, thinning sun.

13.

What I'm thinking as
the clock clinks on
is why am I not here and
why am I not profiting
from this penny
on my own?

(For the record, I compiled all the poems I'd written since the new year the other day, read through them all, and could see a genuine progression. There's still a way to go, but I am living proof that this celebrity diet is not just another fad!!!)

[ReccyV]

13.

mosiacs
and
stained glass faces
stare up at me
as broken teeth and reflect the
bright white
of orgasm light
as it breathes through my lips
and puckers open
these closed lids.

[ReccyV]

14.

His mouth loves all of me
his fingers too
when we
fumble rudely
in the blue
light of our Mothers' face:
The moons shining
down on the
veins beneath her:
each jabbing into eachother and
My mouth loves him,
my fingers too--

[Wessen]

Ochre eyes squint, bleed
while deaf ears hear
screams in
these keys.

Broken words from lips
that froze - for God's
sake, it's not enough - it is
the making of an anarchy.

Black hands dipped in
marble, pressed to her cheek,

she says:

'My eyes aren't brown;
yours must be broken.'

[Raconteur]

14.

i.

If I reach into you,
will you let me
find your heart?
Or just veins,
crawling
over arms and legs,
carrying blood and
love away
from meI am a child,
crying against
your chest
into it,
clawing it.
I can make you ache,
place your heart
below my rib cage
with all the others,
and you could let me
(selfishly)
love you.

ii.

If you let me love you,
close your eyes
like Cupid's mistress.
Only I am no Goddess,
with love arrows
drumming against the small of my back.
I am ugly, and my masks
are uglier.
Your sleepy eyes tucked
deep into your skull
will sink further when they see me,
your heart will sink further
away.

But unseeing, you
might feel the lump in my throat,
the heat of my breast,
and we might be warm
for just a little longer than planned.

iii.

If we grow cold
our dead bodies could
decay together,
our cancerous smiles may die
with lips still linked
unwilling to frown.

We may try to fix ourselves
but broken eyes can't see a broken vision,
and a broken vision
with too many creases,
becomes a memory
behind folded eyelids;

Look: my pupils were dilated and my irises sunk into them. They were brown once, the earth and alive like soil. But so black now, worse than a night sky with stars on the brink of explosion.

(Old man, you sit on that bench
feeding seagulls and
you wonder why your wife
had to die
but her body,
her old old body
was ice cold long before it was buried.)

[Arty]

Must catch up. I'm getting shitter now, but am taking it optimistically -- sign of breaking down your style to its raw qualities, etcetera.

14.


Your mind is whirring faster
than mine, sprinting
past the funeral line and
landing in a pool of
desolate petroleum beneath
my blistered feet. Greenhouse gas

will dry you up and
slap you on a wooden
chopping board. It’ll
be out of the frying pan, into
the fryer for you, it hurts
to say. Your mind

is whirring faster than mine,
sprinting past the funeral line
and landing in a strangled heap
beneath my blind feet. They boast

no eyes to comprehend the
space in what is tangible, but they
can nimble over stones, full pelt
towards the open sea, see blue. Your

mind is whirring
faster than mine, sprinting past
the funeral line and landing in
a ward equipped to deal
with white-washed walls and
bible therapy you
were clouded worlds away

from vapour linings raining
down upon a pebbled shore, pattering
against my swollen feet. My toes
can taste the sea, your eyes
are scarred with oily
black.

15.


Here’s how it goes, it’s about
who you fuck – if you
got money you get in
for a penny, in (for a trip)
for a pound or a stone, it’s about
who you know, who you
think of when you
throw a rock at the inches
that cling to your hips, who you
wake in a ditch for with
salt on your lips, it’s about
who you fight alongside at
the scene of the crime,
when the city’s aflame with
a hangover’s war,
when the day screws the night
and the night snorts it
harder, your
designer friends burn alive
at the tips of your
thumbs, well-rehearsed, well-
enjambed, smoking
figures fall foul
of your lighter.

Here’s how it goes, it’s about
who you know to
fuck and fight, it’s about
you.

16.


I imagine a child
swallows words the way I
gulp you down.

Five piles, pills powdered
and guttered,
dissolved into you
into blue. I could
dress you up with a hat
for a cork,
or a beautiful lady
to match its package.

I could
call it absolute love, I could
throw a society’s crack
at redemption, wrapped safe
in an upmarket glass,
through the window of
perception.

Then I would drink alone
no more.

I find myself reading
Atonement, picking
the words from the meaning, and
now I am a politician and
I’m breathing and shitting big words with
the mirror my grinning fan, and

now I’m a man with
a blood stream of thought,
sucking on a pacifier
and feeling faintly nauseous.

[Raconteur]

15.

I felt madness
up my arms with hairs
stood on end and
I wondered why
my eyes were designed
to cry. Today, they are wide
with revelation,
and so very selfish--Mother,
I used to sit in your lap
and smile,
did you like my
toothless smile?--Mother,
why don't you exist for me?
And did you ever know
that my eyes are yours
too?

I'll look at him,
a sweet sad child
carrying the eyes of a dead man--Mother,
why did you never prepare me?
Now, unable to love,
I am alone with a child who
might be lost before he calls out
Mother.

[Tunstall]

I hold myself with flower arms,
two thick purple stems that I coil
around me like a spring.

This field of hands reaching to the sky
is my hibernaculum and we weave
in and out of daisy-chain sleep.

[Raconteur]

16.

(Untie this blindfold,
please I'm waiting here
my sight fresh and eyes
wanting to roam the vision
of your words, the texture
of your skin, or the redness
of your flush, whose heat
is so raw across your limbs
and face. You are the rows
of smiles I touch on childlike faces,
and I want to know the curve
of your lips like the lines
in my own palm.)

Don't look at me, because my eyes
are a little soulless and terrifying,
and I think I could resist the
nonsense noise in my ears, the thoughts
that might be my own, to keep
this blindfold on a while longer.

[Wessen]

Mutiny, your fallen
smile (it's the time
I clawed my eyelids
just to see if I existed.)

You break me down, you
are the year I died, shed
my (skin?)
shook, my body
shook.

God, don'tletmefall, please, God,
I want to love you, God, please,
I want to fly, God,
I think I want kill you.

[ReccyV]

15.
When I pray,
see,
I press both hands to my mouth
and let the words
drool down like
something tangible
because
I don't trust what I cannot see.

Which is why,
that time you said
"I love you."
I just laughed and
shook your hand and said
"Thanks for the offer, moon,
but my eye's on the sun
and he's burning
holes through
these eye-wide coals."

And so,
it wasn't anyone's surprise
when I pulled tight
on Apollo's heart strings
and dragged the sun to
it's resting place between my ribs,
with two pressed hands
sitting just above,
ready to seal the wound
with some mouth borne love.

[Wessen]

I once knew a brown boy
with brown eyes;

he died on my birthday.

I think he's Okay in
Heaven, I think
he's Okay
now.

[blueboy]

the mottled yellow makes
sad so defeated and so i
cried and cried and oh no
the marble rusts and brass
fan burns and it bathes me
in its tiredness and i think
my dimples are sorrowed
too much in their damned
piss i want the ballet dress
and the bridge that took
half an hour again and my
grandmother to have black
hair i don't want to grow
old like her but oh my you
see i am and please maybe
a pretend god to squat on
my youth's ego so i can
sleep tonight

[blueboy]

8.

red dress and there
were still flowers on
me, in me.


9.

my my my your
muse, my. i found
my minor key in
your throat; my,
could i have it
please, perhaps
you could leave
some teeth in
my palm and my,
i'd like to have
your shape on
me when i sell
my, self to some
lone stranger.
or we could

[Raconteur]

17.

We slid into our places
like my arms trapped in these
warm hot sleeves, frilly and
I don't think they're meant for
summer, or first dates.

but, I like how we match even
under the dim glow of these waning
bulbs, filaments buzzing as if
gossiping our secrets.

My clothes, just pink enough
to draw the flush from your skin
and thread it around my heart,
stop the blood from flowing
and I see spots; they look more
like splotches made by infant brushes
and amateur hands, yes now
I'm a little dizzy

and this thread, stained
with love and not thicker than my vessels
tugs on me like a leash.

[Raconteur]

18.

There's an old woman,
here,
and I'm scared,
because her eyes know so much
and interpret so little,
as if the wrinkled rings, ageless
carbon, around her skin
stopped her mind from
working,

and I'm staring in a mirror,
there's a young girl here
who looks so scared, but
her eyes are curiously round
despite those laugh lines
keeping them crinkled. and I
touch cracked glass
her rosy cheek, wondering
about that time the clocks
stopped inching and
time felt like forever.

Her reflection now,
so sound
asleep and if her eyes close
they may never see again.

[Wessen]

I kissed her at seventeen,
and let her got next month

please, God, this world's
not strong enough to hold me,

please, God, just let me sleep.

Maybe she'll hear my voice
at night

and maybe she'll hear her
bed creak.

[Raconteur]

19. (Prompted by SP)

this pitfall earth
or the end of it,
is another love-carcass spurned
by your coloured cough
wishes.

I
hate

you
spewing out those silk
stained rainbows,
the beach typhoons,
(your tongue)
like sweat from between your lips.
so warm are the lava
plates beneath

us
burning the world with fever.
my skin is hot,
the lust beneath it collects
like nebulae, dust
beneath our feet and

it's dark
now,
pitch-black, when starfish
suddenly glow on the
water's surface.

[Wessen]

...and I wonder when
my universe will cease

I'm turning your dresses
into time, and I'm
wasting them away.

Buttered suns are
melting, and so is your
skin

(I can't hold you for much longer)

You're a great new world, babe,
you're a great
new world.

[ReccyV]

16.
It was there,
(do you see it?
you might have to
squeeze your eyes real tight--
taught and blinded by those
supernova lights blinking
like
Hearts or) the
after image you left
in my head--
right back there.

Behind the rows of
Plath and
Neruda and Bukowski,
where the overhead
lights grow dim
with disuse
and the carpet sits a different
shade of green.
(. . .the sea or diatoms
dancing, these rows look like
weeds to me,
and I can see the fish swimming
in and out and
I wonder why the tank
on my head is empty?)
I remember how awkward
things were,
with your small feet,
my gilled neck.

I couldn't breathe!
and I remember thinking
how wet the teeth in your mouth looked.

They looked like oxygen rocks--
I asked "hey, can you place one of
those in here?"

[ReccyV]

17.

I want you to
feel the bruises on my skin
and,
with your tongue,
can you trace
the fingerprints?

Can you feel the
inflamed patches
where skin met skin
and where
I reacted so
violently
that muscle detatched
from bone?

And left me all disfigured and broken,
splintered,
but still
alight and
fierce.

Match-maker,
match-maker,
make me again.

[blueboy]

10.

i had such a good day today that i don't think i can write but oh well maybe delightfulness makes some art. rawr. here goes nothing

Scandinavia, fair-
haired pussies roar
pale love; light-
feet tiptoed that
singsongs time in
itself. And I, dame
of bathed mediocrity.
Oh no! I am defeated
defeating; the dried
and lonely will be me,
with sad lips that
cowers to my breasts:
I'm ugly, I'm average
with a face of.

[Wessen]

When minds are a collage of
fractured mosaics that went
out of style
three millennia ago

you wonder if, you
wonder if
she's you (not
a little.)

I like to think I
spit out seeds that
scorch, chip

their landing, I

am feeling ill.

I don't write in journals, any
more, I am not sad, moping,
weeping, wishful, I
never was (I
hoped...)

I just wanted to be a champion.

[Raconteur]

20.

translucent skinned; the sun
strokes watercolour pores,
your face diluted and
passion, I looked for you
in treehomes where those
wood creatures lived, and instead
I found some kind of
childhood memory.

we're lost now, halved,
and our faces were prettier
sunburnt.

[blueboy]

11.

umbrella-mouthed, he
pucked his lips and the
girls giggled in moans.
thin shortbread walls and
i think they heard about
the broad next door
with the same-pitched
caresses and loud
disappointment: that
blush that climbs when
lovejuice is left to
dry, only to be picked
at and spat upon.

[Arty]

Does anyone else find that the idea in their head never sounds as good when put to paper?

17.


Moustache and marijuana, raise
a toast to the master
chemist, discuss
the greater good within
your cult and sleep
below the starry roof
of cultured non-existence.
Love runs fleetingly;
you hit it hard
and fast, hard
and past your parents' muffled
mutterings.
Your hopes are pinned
on days to come, but theirs
died long ago.


18.


I learnt a word today, Mum:
existentialism. They said
it meant free will, they said
it meant responsibility. I think

it means escape, a means
to meet a peaceful end
at any dinner date
debate. I think
it means they all ran out
of ways to word their thoughts
(I think they all ran out
of any thoughts at all) I think

I'd like my tea now, mum, laid thick
with grated butterflies. I know
the effect makes sense, mum, that
I know.


19.


The day I went mad,
I grated a butterfly
over a grave. The wings
turned to scraps through a
shredder, a solemn
sermon to the office monster
I'd become, grown stiff
inside a plastic bin,
head emptied daily, void of more
than curling scraps (one inch by five). The body
turned black, not bread
and coughed a head of cobwebbed
cars, and cardboard love, and spluttered stuff
my itching eyes would flinch from under
Real Life conditions. And then
the scraps aligned, drew
gold and green and rainbow sighs
and beat out paper chains; the coughing
trickled pink euphoria, all
splattered on the glass, and then
the grave of Harry Rolls
exploded into tambourines.

The day I went mad,
everything was beautiful
and I was not surprised.


20.


Promises trickled from the
mountains of your breasts. I
licked them up, each one
and watched them melt
as snowflakes.

I'm sorry. Is this
awkward? Shall I
beautiful the rumbling
of your vast volcanic lie? It was
you that shocked our core
foundations, ruins
now and battered through
by stone.

I tried to be them once. I tried
to be your everything, I was
your tender summit, slope, cathedral
village, farmers, herds that fed
off ripened grass. (Goddamnit
I was your frightened grass, tracing
weeds along your youthful fields)

You lied, the empire fell,
the grass decayed. One year
since I last saw that
mountain.


21.


FirewoRKS
guns blaze colours
spell rapture in
sequined powder skies
yield bonfire must
-oh, what a smell!
-oh, what a summer!

[Wessen]

Without words, without
hair to twist around my finger
and
lie with.

Hi, I'm
angry, let me
kiss you and tell you
of the things I've done, I

spun on kissing-gates with
my almost lover and we
shared that biting grin and we
knew
we were lying.

It's bitter in my mouth, and
I want to take your tongue, stroke
it with mine and you can taste my
escape, you can
taste me.

Hi, I'm fiendish, I've
come for you, I'll tie
your wrists to the keys you've put
your eggs into and I'll love
you,
godpleasedonthurtme,
and I'll touch your eyes with a smile, and
that'll be the linking of our hands,
of the
godpleasgodedonttrustme.

[blueboy]

12.

look ma'am, see
how the mothermad
-ness bakes my
your sun dry and
can you see how
that maidenstar,
the nymphwhore
combs her hair?
old mother's skin
feels like the steam
on cement and she
looks like the sun's
bow from stage,
and some glance
at an angle.

[Wessen]

I killed my cousin
when I was nine

and I remember his eyeballs, weakly,
sponging juice, looking silently
at me

or the washer (I think perhaps
the washer.)

[Raconteur]

21.

she wants to make amends and punctures
her ticket stub with a timestamp as her testament
to living. they shot her in the head at 10:27PM
and the news journals called it half past a decade
of grease culture. but her sorry note, little diary
of apology, is tucked between MATH 4th edition
as if unknown to the world, or just subtracted.

[Wessen]

Ecstatic, a raining puddle, planted
(flowers can grow in concrete) in
mushroom feet.

Tip of your tongue, circumcised,
red water, red remains to your
mouth. Careful,
it's bitter.

Tired of watering plants,
mother. It's me that wants
to grow.

[Raconteur]

22.

Human nature, he calls it a feral
instinct and brings the wiggling worm
of his fingertips to his eyeball. He thinks
he can see everything this way, touching
it to his sclera, and his smile is archaic,
a modern misfit not because of his glasses.

At seven years old, he sat in the compost of
his mother's sweet-pea garden, smelled the raw
earth soiled by her kitchen's gasoline stove
and used nicotine sticks to light it. He lit it so well,
the little mushroom growth in his lungs almost
couldn't bear it. He coughed up mucous and
ash, all the same dull-grey colour
in the black&white Polaroids taken
of him "smiling".

The officers should have known, their shiny
badges catching his attention like it would
a bluejays, that only a tragic, troubled, boy
would comment at his father's grave
about his dead dog and its chewed up leash,
or about human nature and animal mentality.


23.

As young men, we drove on a nothing-earth road
prettied with monster frills and chalk drawings.
There were holes in our pockets that fed
coins to leather interior and air conditioning,
though us burning, still hot like torch flames,
used our bodies to build empires and cloned
men like Egyptian mummies. We looked them, too
last Halloween, drunk, and all of us somehow doctors.

The latticework of urban pipes puzzled
our toxin-skin, and we sniffed pollution like dogs,
driving past family values and trivial criminal minds.
And us, still boys in men's bodies, giggled at
the long road ahead.

At a pit-stop we bought diet cokes and choked
on pretty women--

Oh God! One seems to have
my child clawing under her sweated skin, and I
didn't bargain for more than mixed drinks.

[blueboy]

13.

Shitless and mouth
too dry to fuck some
unknown's tenderstick.



14.

God, (god) have
mercy and Yahweh,
(god) becomes broad
clad scantily in greyed
dress, it's sticky like his
lips: his tongue, lonely, oh
no! so he lullaby-kissed him
-self(torture) and becomes
old, old, not enough to be
a vintage lovedoves.

[blueboy]

15.

she, with her skirt
pulled to the floor, i think
her breasts catch light.

[Tunstall]

[too lazy to post the last ten.]



I met a person who looked like me:
same bones as me, same skin, same jellyfish
mind, flailing tendrils that catch and sting,
and the same red time bomb in our chests.

I saw him first on a stage, a pedestal,
time-ticker mouth kissing a microphone
two hands around her neck. I think
the microphone kissed him back
pressing against his chest.

The red strings that held us
(so thin and wavering)
beat a drum against me.
Skin taught, air thick with dead bodies
riding on the tide of the bass. I opened my mouth
and we gaped together, two dying goldfish
in a hot room.

I swam towards stage,
and watched as the three on his t-shirt
dropped down to two (too)

short
the number of breaths I took
before he was strangled by the phone
and before I went hypoxic
and turned belly-up.

[Wessen]

A peculiar smile, so
androgynous,

as it twitched,
died (frothing
has-been's.)

[Raconteur]

24.

A tiny world below birds'
oiled feathers is spun
by infant hands; child's play
with lego blocks built as
buildings where men jump
from windows. Young
God, he makes so many
mistakes.

[blueboy]

16.

flimsy morn and beaten
like a brothel's child but
not a beat (pavement son)

[blueboy]

17.

going to play with words and see if the intended meaning could be derived from it; you know the maternal paternal shizzle yo.

grandfather, sick sick
sickened dogmatism, arm
-chair funeral as she I
lifts his slouchskin and weep
like child, is child, (oh grand!)
child. Dustless face faceless
dust and he strokes a god
-less fear: oh my, my heart!
(arrest) is too fast, I'm tired
and let sleep find me (but please
not for too long.)

[Raconteur]

25.

a pretty toxin, this sun
and its cancer light
bathing me in blistered
skin, not my own, but a
Jew costume and chemo
head; we call summer
a gas chamber.

[ReccyV]

18.
Today I kissed a toy
boy doll,
and had to apologize
for the way my
rubber lips
just...
totally missed his.

Hey ,
again,
sorry for the way
things just didn't meet up.

The Test Prep books
behind you
were staring at me
with a big orange
FIVE across their faces,
I felt they were counting down
the time I had.

"four minutes"
and father walked in,
I could've sworn
never to see you again,
sworn off the physicality
of lips and tongues and teeth.

Besides,
I didn't know what to do with my eyes.
_________

19. I took a day to myself,
and set up canvas sheets
between alley streets decked
blue by the light of
lamps and blood
fights spilling their secret
words like lover-doves--
Cooroo,
goes the church bell,
and the midnight moon watches me working,
patiently eying the
small details--
a cat with teal eyes
and a fiddle playing clown
crying rivers of music
in oil paints.
________________

20.
Do not raise your
smile to me,
Cinderello you fool.
Superiority is found
between the creases of my
eyes-
dyed and flat
from not laughter
nor smoking.
_____________

21.
I strung my dreams between
the windowsills of a bedroom--
each fiber dipped and knotted
Fate's Loom
illuminated on my ceiling fan.

When I woke up this morning,
there were giant moths
of every hue,
each etched in the word:
You, you, you.
_____________

22.
So today I
took out my oil paints
and laid them down on the ground,
thinking
this isn't so hard.

See, art is a weapon,
like any other thing.

You can wield a
pthalo bayonet
or a rouge bomb
as strongly as
metal heaps and
artillery; twisted
into christmas
lights.

I laid my paints down in the street,
in front of the daisy picking
choir,
and then I laid my body down,
and told the black
ghosts behind me--
(their peppered spit,
their glassy face)

if I lay down my arms,
you can lay down yours.
_________________

23.

i found a song that you wrote for me,
pressed flat as a flower
between the pages of my journal.
the postmark
(six months ago)
sucked tears from my face
and
try as they might
the flower wouldn't bloom.

[blueboy]

18.

Andrew, you sly-
eyed boy, with tongue
that spits luvduvs, and
no place to rest. Eager
-mouthed and your ribs
are wide open. (Wo)man,
don't tilt your head too
much or the curb would
find you and your side-
burns would screech.

[ReccyV]

24.)

Blue boy,
blew your horn too loud
and the neighbors
are scraping their teeth
across the ground--
the same bloody
cochlea
of a snail creeping against
your fingerpaint
nails--
blue moon bless your
tilt eyed kindness,
and I'll see you
(feet taller
in bone mesh shoes)
between
Greenwich and
SoHo,
playing beat poetry
to the tune of a
fiddle.

[Wessen]

...and it was almost as if
there faces were melting,

and their mothers were finally
eating
their limbs. 'I like

the way her bones, scream
and hollowness in her
teeth

bled her tongue and
it slithered,

(a writhing ton)

out,
ha.'

[blueboy]

19.

I tell you, child, vivace
men are skinless pores
who gasp (gasp) whilst
dreaming, of a (you,
dear) perched upon my
breasts and my thighs!
shiverthighs. I luvduv
you for being ashamed
of a heart(ache, dull
ache), you mantle of
ugly, mad-clutching at
your ebb: I think this
glory spittle perks my
nipples(lips, for a peck.)

[blueboy]

20.

taken off for the while

[Raconteur]

26.

we, yew tree and I
on the Pacific, drugged
by the steam-shocked
sun. dark faces bitten
with Native desire, like
small mosquito itches,
leave our city behind.

here, we grow.

[Arty]

Catch-up time:

22.

[don't bother reading this one, it's a waste of time.]

push another doodle on the
desk, plastic tabletop
balancing the roughage of sanity. Tiny
hearts, so sweet, draw closer to
the edge, buzzing
with the stars, adrenaline
battle to brave the precipice and
soak into the classroom carpet. Marks
intricate themselves into the walls in
rows: flower, matchstick, word.
The makings of an artist - here's
a cage, a science lesson, here's
a noose to tighten the boredom, here's
a potential-fulfilling detergent. Please
be sure to wash your love a
way.

23.

Hello myopic love, my linen spread
who shimmies up the posters of my aching bed, perhaps
you'd like to lie among the
stallions of my mind, who rear
reject the hurdles in their daily path
and nimble blindly over their
corruptions - questions left
unanswered, though they searched
each suitable solution, failed
to find. I imagine you are

an orange gas, the kind they
drown in chemistry lab diffusion
tests in efforts for us
to mingle. I imagine you are
a sweet asphyxia, a heart
compressed by a beer can's wedlock to
a greasy man. Perhaps
you've come to weigh my soul
with scales of tangibility, to load
me down with granite, till
I crack.

I like to think
it can't be worse than all
the hoof-prints scattered through
my pounding head.

24.

You don't care if it ____
You want to have ____
You want a perfect ____
You want a perfect ____
You know the gaps, so
fill
them
in alongside
the vacuous hole in the
pit of your vomit,
writhing and rising against your teetering
frame.

25.

Toilet turnstiles accept 20p's
only. I have one 5p
and digging hard, I'm in
my fingernails backs of
my thighs. A space
opens next to a man opens wide,
fat spilling over the waiting
neighbouring seats. I lose

the opportunity and dance
on the spot, a waiter's dance.
I'm desperate in
my feet hopping, distracted
by the clock.
Digital terror soaks me. One
fifty-nine fifty-eight and squint
into the distance, silhouettes
waltzing with my toes draw
close, draw close, draw
ominous faces on the platform
glass. Steam up my fear
- throw me, fog-bitten, to
the dogs of the future to

the tracks of the oncoming
train. I am
a whistle away from the future,
straining and
scared.

26.

Either you
and your minimum wage
are the limit,
or we've
got a chemistry counter
to kiss under.

27.

I'm working on my
sanity; it's dropping
bombs on a cult
existence, philosopher's
heart-throb; needs
fine tuned bullets
inhaled through the window
of instrument's innocence
to function, needs
brackets to split between
logic and warfare, fight
nuclear bidmas and
flee for your life from
your mind your poor crane
pissing over your city
to smother everything.

[Wessen]

Bloated fish are crying
through lips

that inflate bodies of
steel.

[Wessen]

Yes, it is
a grey world

stop gloating
(I like your flowers)

[blueboy]

21.

loquat, shoulderless blue
man, waxlips shoe-shined
to anger the sun.

[ReccyV]

25.)

There are so many
barnacles here.

So many empty faces
looking up from their
strand(ed) places
and

the crow flying
on a shoreline
brings bad luck

says the white lipped
jew woman,
with crustacean legs
and a wet
body made of sand.

She requests our
nickel and dime
curio--
the
hemp bracelets
and bucket of
sand-dollars.

At night she'll gather
herself into a blue shawl--
cold and loose as the moon
itself,
and she'll carry the lazy
penny fish downstairs,
into the pool;

where german fish
in polak tongues say
"leave all possessions,

they will meet you at
Dachau."

and she will be found by
the roaming sea-gulls,
drenched black as a gore-crow
from the oily Atlantic;

the lookers on will press
hookered claw to beady mouth
each murmuring their
rumors
into a conchshell.

[Raconteur]

27.

gloom-child, my skin hurts
today; I scrubbed my face
raw and it glows Indian red.
at night I think of you with
the vain moon, and my
bleached bones lust for those
same colours. sad-child, will
you find depression in me?

[Raconteur]

28.

Under an October moon
we glow like cinders, negro-faced
with orphaned hearts that don’t fit in
these taxicab doors. This Mexico
street feels sticky hot and alcoholic;

but we find a renaissance man here,
exchanging pennies for paper lanterns.
I want to know him and mime the
alphabet from a safe distance with my
glow-flesh. Autumn red, and I wonder
why his musk scent makes me queasy.

[blueboy]

22.

So, luv, my hands flicker, skip (like little
girl madness) across your hunched back,
lowers, shys to my flesh and waves hi to
the dirt tiles and watermelon peels: I think
you are shedding skin, strange child (old

man). Now your belt tires from decades'
sun and falls upon itself, and you tell me
the aged yellow was milk (that time you
flew and I still get free train rides) -white,
pale like your cheeks watching the news
under pastel lights,

lilly-petaled colour,
colourless but you
are an exhausted
child, wearied brittle
-bones, something
foreign-tasting, scared
of death, it makes
you old and I'm two
again -- baby-cots

and I was so afraid.

[ReccyV]

26.)
the water here pours
smooth as
your fingers against my face

like the old tinker
who runs his hands
across glass clocks
and spins knots in
the hair of little dolls.

I think your fingers have been everywhere,
and I really just want
to press them into mine;
maybe you're from a
different antique collector--
one who preferred
Russian Kissing Dolls
to actual lovers.

And the water here is smooth,
broken only occasionally
by the sharp rap
of wooden hands
and wooden feet--
solider-boys marching
marching
marching
away.

27.)
I think I've traded
scales for splinters.

No not the musical kind,
I've never been one
to play,

No, I'm talking
about poetry.
my voice

has changed, I think.
No longer do I want
to talk about jellyfish

and their sick cousins,
the deep throaty things
beneath oil pitched skies.

Lately, it's been about toys,
boy toys,
play toys,

things one finds in
an antique shop.

Where the old man
and woman pair
sit holding hands

and signs like
"break it buy it"

and I just keep thinking
about my puppet finger
strings

and how easily
breakable the hands
of that skeletal pair

sit
perched one on another
like a prayer or something.

The other dolls all stare forward,
blank and lifeless
they tell me

"life outside is bad,
outside there are colors!"

and I tell them
that I wasn't built
to grow faded and gray.

28.)
Wood blocks
block the doorway
of my soul,
and inside pound the fists
of two thousand
paper dolls--

cranes whales
frogs that hop
and even a lotus
bent at the tips--
they all
cram their heads against
the hands bent over my chest.

The Craving of Freedom.

[Raconteur]

29.

I'm tired of this old-man
artist on my page and
his book-worm spine,
hunched, or rot like tree
trunk decay. Today I tried
to deny those sleepy pills,
but he and his whiskers
had no words to give.

[blueboy]

23.

Cheap puffs and I'm
shaking, lonely shoulder
is bare and needs a hand.

[ReccyV]

29.)From a Wooden Doll To His Maker

I wish you'd touch me more
says
the wooden doll to his maker,
I wish that,
when your hands groped in the dark,
seeking wood:
a cane or bookshelf
to steady your
arthritic feet--
I wish that they groped for me.
You haven't touched me
since constructing this--
you called it art
and
then left me on a shelf
with the other dolls
eyes closed and
lips pout.
I long for the
fingers who
dug me from a lump
and said
"Look,
here is art in
everything!"


30.)From a Craftsman to his wooden Doll

I cannot touch you
when you face the moon;
I can never convince myself
that
those wooden legs
have something between them--
I forget at times
that
the light behind your eyes
isn't just reflected starlight
or
moonbright wishes
but
some sense of humanity,
the pounding animal of
thrust.
It's my fault,
I know,
I'm sorry.

[Wessen]

A churlish winter, browned
for long, and it swept the feet from their grandfather’s,
grandmother’s wills.
Crawled, a-gently, two huskers in need of water, son
with child, son with arms.

[Wessen]

Wasn’t summer, but her hair curled
& the smile that wearied her sunken, abstract mouth
caved and battled with lack of water.
Mary, it struck her arm,
and the force that she’d used to stand
turned
and her scabbed lips quickened, rapid flies wings,
staring at a cardboard ocean.

[Raconteur]

30. Going to expand/revise this one later

Gasoline man, the world on
your oil-skin thigh grows
hot by the sun. Burning, us
two-legged couplets smoke
poetry from pulp mills; we
ignore the cool yearning
of our tree bark homes,
and this culture boy works
at funny rigs that lean like Pisa.

[Raconteur]

31.

Beggar on a begging street
walks paved roads, where road lines
meet
and intersect haggard Man from Man
from speed sign idiom.

[blueboy]

24.

Fair-haired boy paces
nude with his nimble
fingers and strokes
the half of his face
where it's pale, seethru
like the wetness of
lace-bridal-panties
and he lolls his tongue
over spittle teeth
that tells tobacco
tales of liquor-coloured
two ams, where he
is a boy with a cock.

-for boy

[blueboy]

25.

Her bellybutton and Freud's womb
sits at the table, dropping saliva
missiles on porcelain faced suns,
the colour of chinese boys who
sell bread on dirtroads; and she,
the morosed damnsel eats chalk
and becomes flo(w)ur, flowered
in her seagrass hair and peach
cheeks that sow poplar trees.

-for Wessen

[blueboy]

26.

Oh, look at me, ego all fed
and dry-skinned, with a face
dotted by godless boys who
grind their sleepless teeth,
some bittered clench on words,
to pity me and I am naught,
just an infant with tantrum
at hand, romanticising hermit
paper with tongueless men.

-for me

[Wessen]

For blueboy

Locks countless suns; palmed
her mother’s table and
she’s not seen Christmas but
father’s brought her lights—blooming
under eyelids.

Doesn’t stare into rivers, hasn’t
marvelled at a face:
tainted goods taste kind of nice
when God’s not there to see it.

[Raconteur]

32.

Biology boy (mad scientist),
I never agreed to this x-ray scan
or these dry-ice shivers.
Your skin is warm
but this dissection cold,
and I am not an organ donor.

When dead, I will be buried with all
the chewed up entrails I was born with,
and all these crosswire veins
are mine.
But hysterical man, you can have this heart;

I don't think it works anyway.

[Wessen]

-For John. (Head up, boy.)


Several faces made to chain china
to a wrist shackled with translucent fibres
& it’s emotion that sweats from his skin.

Alice in Wonderland, a capricious girlthing
with umbrella hair, and a mind trapped between
your status and your enigma.

Not that you died yesterday, just weren’t at home
to see the freesias left upon a broken tree table, and
a hair you’d once felt, you remembered.

Her birthday yesterday, entwined fingers above a cake
where spun a figurine of you and her,
not melting, but rather...frozen.

Oh look, it’s you upon the tree top, sagged suit
drowning in a world long sunk with malted hair and
lips drawing words in space,

‘…she used to call me sunshine.’

Upon a wintry silo finds a crusted man
injected eyes with chlorine, thinking
that maybe Heaven's dead.

[Wessen]

A harlot's mouth brushing over
a Guantanamera stand-off lullaby
creeping into her children's heads and
lulling their eyes, arms
closed.

Endeavours that rescued her heart
from fallacy. A warm smile at midnight
and she's gone for the day.

Taken her home, rims of her eyelids
attacked with blunt scissors, then
left on the floor. It's a casual reminder of who
she could be,
if only her foot passed the doorway.

[blueboy]

27.

When charlatan boy meets man,
he just warms his breasts
and reason himself a god-willing
boy, if he is zeus, and shook
the gaspump thrice.


28.

Sloppy-eyed girl with
some slanted dimples
on a noose's end.


ah fuck I'll continue laterz.

[ReccyV]

31.)

When asked by
his father,
the boy responded
"the red smiley's
on my jeans
came from
Rosa's
jeans too.

We were
sitting outside and,
sitting on top of
my world and my lap,
the radii of heat
extending up
and out like a flag
or
phallic symbol
(really it was just a
penis.)

And she kept
clutching her tummy,
I could hear
throaty monsters
buried deep;
grunting their awful
concerns.

And then I felt
her body melt on mine,
she--
this wax doll,
as if I were the sun--
I asked if she was hot
and she said no,
but that she needed to go.

I told her
that I loved her,
and that
she couldn't leave,
so she said
'i left a part of me
on you,
as a smiley face
of virginity.'"

32.) There's a leaf
stuck,
in the corner of my heart.
And,
at the leaf's base
are two twigs
bent across the flowing rivers
like
crossing lovers.
If you listen closely,
you can
hear the wind whistling
through their splints--
singing of
their death.

The first man,
he cut himself on a river's tooth--
this wet chunk of
molar jutting
into flesh
and bone
and
they never believed fags could bleed.
So,
when his lover
ran from Village II,
a skin of
water taped to his back--
the night air
crimping his nipples
into copper pieces,
he found
Man I
dead and
flung across the river bed,
broken bodied
and
heart--wrenched,
floating pink with
a dickhead spear in his back.

Man II
hung himself
from
the forest's
rafters,
let the cool rain
wash
away all months of
sweat
and
sex
and
semen
from his body--
the niggered moon eye
crying nightly for
her broken toys:
each hand bent across
the riverflow
seeking eachother.

So it's with great pain
that I beg of you
to rip the sticks from my heart
valves,

they've damed this red place up,
and I think
I'm ready to tread
the
rushing waters.

[Raconteur]

33.

Lovers decussate by the stars,
behind the mountain backdrop
and hundred-year deaf slumbers
of their hearts.

They dip their bone ribbed lips
in rivulets of bruised-apple skin;
a tender collar, hanger bent
and hungry.

Daybreak comes, brings with it
a sky streaked with aged wine
and pungent with the drunken
slew of tepid tides.

.......And they, couplet-legged
.......finally shake the dazedust
.......from their sleeplust eyes.

[ReccyV]

33.)

My night was made
by a boy whose
words dipped
further into my heart
than any hand has ever gone.

I kept expecting him
to stitch
or tug
or
glue something together,
I asked
if he was playing cat's cradle
and he just
smiled smiled smiled.

The contents of my soul
stirred hot
and wet as
alphabet soup poured
backwards,
and you can read the message
on my face:
uOy EVoL I,
and this brings back days
of
kindergarten.

When I still found girls pretty
as the glitzy bows
in their hairs.
Before there was the confusion
of
tits and lips
and going dutch on a date.

So I guess,
what I'm trying to say,
is that I've found a pair of hands
that
can hold me up
and hold my hands--

wet and soft with fingerpaints.

[blueboy]

29.

Woman knows no friends
when her furrow cheeks
sink into her dimple pits

and her thighs are too
soft with the stench of
cheap brothel perfume;
when she laughs, only
street mutts hear, her
breasts shake off the
wetness; perhaps, just

perhaps, the feverish
mounts on her ribs are
plaguetongues and she's
got the blues, too loud
for the bars' aged beers
and her palms are too
lonely on the scrapped

countertops, counting
cigarette butts the hue
of her dustlungs and smile.

[blueboy]

30.

removed for now

illiterate men

[ReccyV]

34.) Twice-Bit

Frost on the old woman's
fingertip bit
down hard and drew
dew dark as
the night Alaskan Sky.

And she'll die here,
in the woods of her
fathers and mothers
and of their bones
among the ground-dug
roots of a great
Pine Tree

who melts to tar
in the heat of night.

[Tunstall]

I am in a room full of books
whose pages lose dust like moth wings.
A young man in large glasses
kneels at an alter of photography
anthologies and short story collections.

The room smells like old newspaper
and cigarettes.
I think I recognise the music in the back,
but maybe I don’t.
It’s as nameless as the books.

[blueboy]

31.

removed for now

skyscrapers

[Raconteur]

34.

Between the boughs of hung honeybee
knelt a winding man by winding creek.
Humming song, carelessly,
while his breath caressed my hair and cheek

and It was morning,
where we bathed like pigeons
when my wormy heart began its own descent,
................and seized quietly.

[ReccyV]

35.)

We eskimo snow-bi
rds
are too much
for this heat,
this
pulsing sun
of veins and love
pressed tight between
our throbbing jeans.

We are creatures
of the north,
people of purity
as the white
you see on
knucklebones,
when you've peeled
back
the infections of
life and sin
and lust and
the din of this lovemaking
is too much for us;

we are quiet birds
caught in an updraft
of our own heated
mating.

[Arty]

Products of the last two days -- I'm churning out three a day in an effort to catch up.

42.

Let's go to church on Sundays,
arm in arm. Religion is faith,
and I have faith in you. Let's
pick apart the pine tree needles
sticking out your blistered shoulder
Together, let's ride on motorbikes
we stole during the breathlessness
of night, let's watch the air catch fire
between our dancing, darkened eyes.
Safety makes pupils dilate, and I feel safe
with you. Let's stab each other's
backs and wish our spinal cords would
snap, let's fight and spit out how
we really feel, let's take a break
- write songs about each other's absence -
crawl back into bed, and kiss through
our regrets. To say we never meant it
is a lie, but I would lie for you.

43.

Dressing silence with tasteful
bullshit, a man rapes her
social ineptitude. Red-faced, with
drunken eyebrows, he wants
to know her name and what
her boyfriend does. Layla,
haha,
no boyfriend. His tongue whips
psychopathic teeth; gold
fillings glint where molar
purity failed. He wants
to see her again, but wearing
unwashed eyes, he will
be blind to dress-up (word)
games when next he cries
alone.

44.

Summer is bleeding
ladybirds, crusting
beneath my rusty
windows. They came

to cool, and beg
with moths for space
to clamber up the sill
like blackened vines
and stab a dash of red
between my bloodshot eyes.

I let them bask within
the cardboard box,
the blip in time I like
to call my home. They
flit from fox blood through
to fox gloves, till
they find my annex
dress my window
ledge in dew-drop necklaces, waiting
for the heated crack
of morning.

45.

I'm learning to drive
in service station car parks,
protected under fluorescent lights,
corrupted by desertion. The night
is bright and beautiful
in loneliness, a vacant glow
from street lamps splattered
on my humming car, like rain
so vivid I could taste
its smoking neon streaks.
So vivid I could smell
the burning sulphur;

perhaps it's just the burning steak
wafting from Little Chef's sliding doors,
one door half broken
and dripping from its hinge.

46.

I smell like my mother
lately, clammy
and warm,
moist. Beads knot round
unshaven hair and
everywhere, every
where teeth-grinding grime
clogs oily pores, there lies
a space between hygienic
motivation and slow,
dogged action. Seconds
wasted, money
drained.

So this is what it means
to be a lawyer,
mum.

[Arty]

Nearly there ...

47.

I prayed for summer
but when it came, it left a
heart-shaped scar inside my
head, a bleeding remnant best
destroyed or drowned alive in
waterfalls, who hide sharp rocks
beneath a crystal stream
and deafening steam.

Likewise, the summer
stole my heart, replaced it with a
sunny day, a cloudless sky, twisting
wisteria branches to lay the blame
on me. I prayed
for summer, but when it came,
it left a plague: appearances
can be deceiving. I'm praying
for the winter now.

48.

(I likes this one)

My eyes are over-taped with shades
of grey; as such, I never
listen, merely nod
...................in your direction
where appropriate, where etiquette
shakes hands with common communism,
impulses weaving silver slithers
through electric minds. The space

between one earring and
the next is filled
with beaming smiles and glossy
lips; my cheekbones ache,
maintaining drawn-in stomach and
that twinkle in the eye. I learned

to nod, insert an anecdote, agree
whole-heartedly with all
the thoughts you thrust between
my teeth, yes smoking's bad, yes
global warming's getting old, yes let's
talk NHS and brain-dead negativity
and Tory-biased politics. Yes,
Hitler was a good man,

you're so right.
Amble off, think highly
of my jokey-eyed responses, blind
as I am deaf to brainwashing machinery
fused fast within my brain. Spending
pennies, I glance up to breathe awhile
at my reflection by the marble
sinks. And laughter lines
are fake from constant ache
of lies, and where I seek those dull,
robotic eyes, I see now only black.

49.

Harder than you'd think
to deceive one so much purer
than yourself, when bleeding
scum pours naturally from every
swollen pore. It's laziness
what killed the cat, while sound
asleep on some quaint fireside
mat and fighting silently for
smoky breath; the owners saddened
slightly by his death, though not
enough to motivate their stagnant
dreams placed high on shelves
in attics, fraying at the
cardboard seams. A lack
of care for actualities of
self, a damnable desire for
high esteem through fame and happy
wealth achieved, but could
be so much more. Replace

the cat with guinea pigs, and
feed their routine lifestyles twice
a day, convincing half the world
you are content on average
pay. The other half, the brutal
few, turn restles, see you
through but judge your weak-
willed whims you might have once
claimed your Ambition. Worming
as a butterfly through dagger-shaped
cocoons, they'll feed upon the bright
eyes you possessed, sit back, and think
through bitter tears of your
demise.

50.

We could start again.
I wear men's t-shirts, oversized
on weekends, leaving home
to meet up friends I don't
care shit about. Occasionally
I spit while speaking, mainly reaching
two to four yards from
humiliated teeth; occasionally
I bathe the town in coloured
gas, spontaneous attempts
to prove I'm not my mother. I argue
till I'm satisfied, and bitching
gives me meaning. I believe
in only extra ordinary worlds without
the time for hell's eternal pain. Sometimes
I am a nutshell, ever lonely, ever
seeking company in squirrels, power
hungry, think me
oh
so very hollow.
If you would sit a while, define yourself
in understanding me, I think that
We could start again.

51.

Picture a drip
or a splash of a gun
or a bomb
in the rippling shallows
where shadowy soho
cries murder at night, oh picture
a rooftop deprived
of a pigeon or bleeding
drop-bullets and pleading
through gutters, please picture
hearts cast in a hand
grenade grip stained
with street lights and iron
y skies, pathetic,
cathartically false. God's crying
today.

[Raconteur]

35.

I lay my head gentle
on the rolling hills, near the monotony
of seagull squawking. Resting cheek
on daffodils, I smell bumblebee
labour as the scent of honey,
....sticky as my skin in August, and wet
like the arms of young chickadees,
with their aortas dribbling in mid-flight.

[blueboy]

32.



Rhode Island lights send off
the bourgeois to ladyslumber;
a mute boy with mascara
and shy coal-lined eyelids
beckoning for a bottle of gin
to wash the chalky paleness
of his cheap caked forehead
with commas of sweat beads
by a furtive calloused touch
of the local preacher's wife
and he's kneading his fingers
into the same nervous shape
as the Wednesday before
and pushes his squatted back
into the greying cement slabs,
holds the translucent valleys,
soft above his angled knuckles,
towards another waning moon
and prays that he'll see god
today.

[ReccyV]

37.

and the
broken glass ships
are
spilling loose
their
anger upon
our distilled
love:
it's whiteness
speaking
"hey.
there.
you.
behind the
doorway."
And our eyes
are broken,
staring through
glass thorns
seeking
ointment
between the
skin
in our hands.
__________________________

38. (Next to Normal)

Bright blue
flashes the new
dawn in my head:
and I can taste
the burn
of synapse after
synapse.

"I'm no sociopath,
I'm no Sylvia Plath"
say we prisoners
to the sharp faced doctors,
the ones
who
are used to this
sort of thing,
the Dirty Ones
who feed
pills to
our many mouths.
the mouths of
the crazed,
the
traumatized
killers of society:
the footless
few who
limp their
broke bodies
across a stage of skulls;
an audition
for ever:
A comedie
in three parts.

And as infants
the filaments inside
were sharp
and bent all proper:
complete chemistry
that ran
ten thousand notions
only to say at the end
of the day:
Aha!

Yet now do the filaments
crumble
and piece apart
inside their heads,
rattling about
as beans in a child
toy.

So do the babbling
children return,
predictable
as wetness in the
crotch of
an adolescent
who pushes fistfulls
of pills
through the throats
of the damned.
__________________________

39.)

When I was a boy
the women of my neighborhood
would meet
as chickens in a coop
or
poppies in a field;
each
bleeding artificial smells
and sounds from
their puckered mouths
as they would press
them ear to ear
just quiet enough
for the neighbors to hear.

__________________________

40.)

there was a boy
who fed his body to the corn
and in this
last act of fornicating,
he thought
"these were the only
ears left open;
i must fill
them with something."

41.) ReccyV 2.0

So I'm back,
says the lover of the moon,
to his goddess
as she bows her head
to the earth.
her willow arms
aren't sad anymore,
the hurricanes
in her hair
have curled
and uncurled as
snakes caught
beneath the folds of a dress.
Her lips
are bare white,
blue and she
breathes little eddies of
snow across his cheek.

There is a quiet here,
it is tight,
it is compact,
you can hear the
thumping of his
sea-bound heart,
you can hear the
skeletal
silence of her own.

And he presses a flower to her chest,
letting the veins pour through
blue and red,
blue and
reeds are forming in her chest,
as her ribs open and close,
swallowing the stars
as a flytrap in the sun;
but there is no light here,
only the blank stretch of night
left by a dying goddess,

as the lover creaks his ship
around her broken heart,
and steps into the
arms
of his husband Dark
who gently folds
the night around
their naked bodies
and tucks away
the remains of stars.
__________________________

42.)

The darkness here is so
at peace,
so still within itself,
I feel tucked away
as a child in his mother,
and there is a
loneliness here,
unlike that I have experienced,
a throbbing gasp
so profound,
I cannot speak.

there are others here,
gray,
their faces wet and
smudged as ash in water.
I think they are nothing more
than ghosts,
I think they are nothing more
than dreams I have envisioned,
little puppets to keep me busy,
to block away all thoughts of something else.

yet, as they pass me,
their bodies ripple and
quiver through mine,
and I am forced to believe
they are not my own
ponderings,
these are not my children,
these are not my creations,

they are chalk prints
smeared wet by the
hands of a faceless god,
who mirrors himself
into the lives of the odd.

and there is
a secret here,
buried beneath the walls of
a confessional,
pounding its fist
and demanding a voice.
__________________________

[ReccyV]

43.)

The walls of this funhouse
are wet with the sweat of
lovers and mothers
as their legs
crunch together,
and inside
curls the
long tongue of
animal,
poking it's head
through the
heatbaked
cracks
in our morningsides.

[Raconteur]

36.

A native man sleeps in honeysuckle dew,
and his red cheeks stampede the grasslands
like the thundering ribcage of buffalo
.......................down a cliffside.

[ReccyV]

44.) Maligna


From a throne of seeds
bleached red by the life
of virgin sons,
grows Zeus in his naked form,
the feathers of Leda
peeling off as semen in water
and the clouds beneath are his too:
spirits of wandering children
swimming above the fertile earth.

The atmosphere is thick with them,
they have blotted out the sun
and created a night without
moons; no light,
and the people have grown white
as starshine,
their wet bodies wiggling about
as snakes in heat,
a ball of sex

waiting for the final
puncture,
the eventual poke and stir
of a fork or two,
something to shake up
the stickiness of animal earth.
They wait for Zeus to pierce
the eye-white sky
before this waning crotch will die.

[ReccyV]

45.)

You had no right,
you know,
to break through the
mirror hall
the well crafted
web of ice
I have constructed around me.

It was so cold here
for so long
I had begun to think
the sun had died away,
and as Anansi
I folded my self
into a dream cone,
with kaleidoscope eyes all
S(p)ee[k]ing
you
you
you.

A thousand fragments
beating and beating--
fists against my heart
and inside
I am just a boy
caught between
the death lips
of mothers and
sisters,
knitting complex
poems
to snare my lovers.

[ReccyV]

46.)

I have this breath,
lover,
caught beneath my veins,
as fish beneath the
Oily Atlantic
and in vanity I
wouldn't let it speak.

And then you kissed me
beneath the dying stars
and I felt them
throb
and I felt them
orgasm
within themselves
and they tore from my
throat
a waning gasp
that spoke
the irrevocable
I Love Yo
u.

[ReccyV]

47.)

The starlights of manhattan
bounce off your face
as the streetlights of
fort myers
where we bathed in
fruit
beneath the eyes of
ospreys and hawks,
and our bodies
were stripped of
sandandwater
as Pisces in the moon
we would
dance with just our hands,
fiddling eachother
as fingers to a buoy
creaking against shores
And, Lover?

Before I knew you,
I had oceans of
poetry
and
waves of strangefish--
their fetid bodies
piling around me,
I thought I was a fish
too strange for
mating
and so

Lover?
When our bodies
thrashed in the waters
off Boca Raton
I spoke
no words
and felt nothing
but the dull throb
as gills ballooned to lungs
and the sting of salt
rubbed too hard
my crooked eyes.

[blueboy]

33.

A nimble-mouth once told me
that if man found man
sacred, we'll die of apathy
and god's cosmic loneliness.


34.

I think it was the damned lady time
who makes me some lonely child
without moorings or a name. I think
I'm a whimsy in madmen's monopoly
and they can't roll their tongue right
or have rosary cheeks to count

the fireworks that charred their eyes
and their mamas' knelt pleas.


35.

Silvered,
with frantic eyes
telling of sparkler tales
on fifth November
and barefooted skips
in circles,
a woman by
the sidewalk with her legs
apart and shaking,
rolling tobacco
and giving her childhood love
to flimsy paper --

her spiteful child, the sun
lighted the stick
and she's losing her flesh
to desolation.


36.

I told mama that I should have been born
in 1929. I tell her: You, woman,
should have squeezed me out of the wedlock
with me, tugging at your womb.
I'll go to New York, mama, by the SoHo
and stroll up and down until
my soles are worn and the hookers'
tell me I'm no woman. Or I'll
take a bus to the midwest, to be drunk
and write poetry.

37.

Jack, put out the cigarette.
Your art is starved and you are too,
hurt and scared and don't
belittle mankind because you're mad.
Your sickness is conditional
and there's no need to scream at
America to braid its hair
put on sandals and long bohemian skirts
so you could laugh and call it
poetry. Society bore you and don't be
a sad replica of the ten-year-drunk,
you're no Bukowski and you weakling,
you imbecile who can only whine
and smoke your art away. Okay.
Quit. Mad. Stop. is degrading
for the learned men before you.

(I guess I decided to go on a writing rampage today. And I guess I'm mad at Kerouac. Because I am hurt, I am scared, I want to live, I want to die, I don't know, Where to turn, In the Void, And when, To cut, Out is despicable.)


Well, it's a new day, July 6th, equally melancholic.



38.

I watched Forrest Gump with
mama and she sat behind me
on the couch, with giggles
and coughs; and at the end,
when little Forrest says his name,
her nose reddened and she cried.
I laughed at her and asked her
why she's weeping: it's a screen,
I said. But mama wiped between
her wrinkles with her sleeves
and I lit another cigarette.

39.

I wrapped myself in blankets
in my room, and the taste
of smoke and pink freesias
told me to pray. So I did.
And for the first time,
I arched my neck towards
god and clasped my fingers
into a knot; I whispered
into the cold of the night:
god, my mum would be
sad, and my grandma too
so please, come down
and let me have my words.
I lied: all I wanted
was to be adored.


40.

He told me to clap hands
and sang about the soil I'm on,
told me he's no devil,
just a god drunk on bourbon
with sand in his throat.
Then the four watches he wore
cursed newfounddump
and its tawdry Ureah shoulders
slumped on a wall,
heels on a dead man's chest,

and said: oh no,
not another fool moon.



41.

My father was a little bottle of whiskey
and my mother was a white pine.

When she put on her russian overtures
and pushed the flimsy second-hand stroller
by herself in the evenings of 1993,
I tossed in my womb-coma, drugged by
the rain. I tried to make a leaf print
out of my lips on her walls and petted
her softness, whispering perhaps
it's better lacquered, like the slums

of places she only talked about in sleep.
'Cause the inner-city looks nothing
like candlelight and the sound of records
telling her dirty stories, washed out
her sonatas with cold dinners and cold
limbs. The mornings would usher her
to the windows but there wouldn't be a hint
of her backwoods skies, just cement
on cement, until she sat in bed one day
and watched the fan turn till noon.

And when daddy brought home
a girl with a laugh, my mama learned
how to lock the door. The sun will set
and as the fish on the table grew stale,
she'd sing old tunes with a hand
on her belly and a hand on the phone.
Then the nights fast-forwarded
like a playback tape and she'd wake
at six, then five and she lost her mind
before seeing a bloodied me.

She never ran and she'd tell me:
I won't stop and I'd be on my way back
here, and my mama and papa
would get a letter asking them to pay
for a tombstone saying I told you
I was sick. Sometimes she'd still pray
and gasp into the night, but
tomorrow I will tell her: I'm sorry,
mama, god's gone away
and a drunkard never comes back.


42.

Hello, is this Jeremy? I'm calling
long distance and I hope this doesn't cost you.
I found a yellow pages today,
by my feet on the porch, when I was watering
peonies and thinking of you.
I knelt down in my dress and the water ran
into my lap, I flipped to Nashtown,
and cried just a little.

Hello, I know you're there,
Jeremy, do you remember somnolent evenings
of singing sad nightingales
and the spinning mad-mouthed fan in my ears?
I wouldn't sleep 'till it was morn;
I'd rather lie trembling close to your name.

Now you're two years older
and I've spent all my money on cigarettes.

[Raconteur]

A lot of unfinished ideas and flash poetry will end up here. Heh.

37.

Birds hummed strangely from my pocket breast
where a man's hand wrestled my heart,
and I looked down at my wrangled chest,
unable to ever expect
such bloody spillage.

[ReccyV]

48.)

In 1963
the skip ropes stopped
thwapping against our street
and the sky rose dark with
the fumes of an open oven
but inside was your face,
not a pie or a loaf
or a roast
but two eyes
and one mouth spread
open as the cracks
in our road.

And from that hole
crawled a mummy woman,
the scrolls of her toga
wet with the oil of
palms and hands.

[ReccyV]

49)
"The moon is used to this sort of
thing"
say the mouths of a gravestone
stuck in the crook
of a cemetery
where the only light
you see
and the only light
you hear
is the artificial hum
of two thousand lotus
petals,
dipped in the honey of
six million bees.

[ReccyV]

50.)
and she says
freedom is for the honeybees
for the gold dipped
arrows
who,
(pluck!)
vault above the
hives.

And these hives
tear up the countryside
as little cells
as little bits of bone
all white
and stuck in their place.

And love is for the honeybees
who find freedom
in numbers and
geometry,
while we gypsy few
write songs for the deaths
of six by six fireflies
who flare to crisp
above our burning
books.

[ReccyV]

51.)
In 1963
a woman drew
her skirts above the
eyes of watchful ants
and yanked from her
uterus
man and all his ant
ics.

[Raconteur]

38.

This boat ride may end in peril,
wrecked by tide after tide
and rocky mounts lapping water's edge
like those ripples rung 'round
my paddling oars.

And I never learned to swim,
only to know the hush white-light,
the little death,
and the euphoric edge of a waterfall.

[Avery_Rayne]

1.

"Freed of a Disparate Palm"

Trees - I view them everywhere,
sprouting even from the lush of poems.
They are not poetry, given roots,
nude in June; they are not poetry.

I walk a walk and see one there.
My point is moot, to be sure. Believe
only trees in sway, only a breeze
that rattles the onlooker,

some lavishing January -
the names ringing everywhere.