[x]

SolsticeOnce upon a time, when you were still sunlighthouses and shimmering existence wherever you were needed most, you found him. He was November, shaky on his first last legs, and you saw through the mind-twistings he feigned to the mind-twistings that were really there, knotted up in his dreams.

You were still birdsong then, and thunderstorms, and your bodyheat melted the frost claws that held him tight. You held onto him as his November deepened. When he howled, you howled with him, and the wind played with your voices and pressed the softness of your lungs against your cageribs—and then against each other's.

November became solstice, and

petrichorNiobe weeps.

gold scattered rough across
cracked earth and the last
remains of summer - they fell
like leaves in the arms of the wind.

some scents cannot be captured.
the gods bleed onto rock,
and the stone sends her prayers
in return: petrichor.

listen - the heavy thud of
rain on parched ground;
the monsoon sealing life back in;
the sky bows and kisses earth.

Niobe weeps.

la musica dulceheartbeats are psycho-
-somatic, dear;
the ocean has swallowed
me whole.

hay una guitarra bajo
mi almohada, y
sueño de música cuando
estoy solo.

you came here with
city smoke in your lungs,
and i
forgot to breathe.

MeanderingHardly a mountain, though on lowering days its head sits wreathed
By the mists of a passing front, aged and befogged as bygone elders
Doddering about – before there were names for the malaise
That hazed their thinking
And from this modest crown there slouched and sloped
A long shoulder, meandering down to meadows below
Pausing now and again to coddle a pleasant hollow
Casting a sloping pitch – enough to rush a torrent
After a sudden shower
Seldom pooling
Its glint and glimmer burble among the stones
To join a rill and plash and swirl and putter about a root
It's there I'm apt to wander

Not much of a path, hard passed a

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and WaitI don't know when we first went underground. I don't even know if it was one mass exodus, a swarm of mankind trickling through the earth's crust so vehement we carved our own caverns by the force of trampling feet, or whether it was a gradual process, perhaps even a repetitive one, a family here, a neighborhood there. For all I know, the echo of the damp subterranean machine has always reverberated off the cave walls, created long past by the Angels, who think of our well-being even while they shake their heads helplessly at our flaws.

They say that those who remained on the surface were raptured away in a great flash of light, like a millio

WhitmanI am all that grows from me
and all that grows from me is sacred—
              my hair, dirty roots reaching towards sky,
fed by sky, shifted by its undulating currents
              my fingers, spiders, crescents, twigs,
gaunt, blunt, probing, inquisitive...prurient
              my ears, awkward conch shells jammed on as if by mistake,
rigid and ridged, elven,
innocent like unexplored caves for children to bound gaily into
resounding with echoed cheers of courage wanting
as if a dozen more children waited within, fearless guides;
              my nose, obdurate.
The reach of my eyes knows no bounds;
what walls are there to throw my body against?

Survival of the IllestAre those hints of lemon I detect?
Look, I'm just here to get wasted, don't try
to make it more than that.

I'd drink motor oil if I thought
it could get me high; chase it with a shot
of antifreeze
so
you can keep your survival instincts,
locked up
in that pretty velvet box (along with all
those other things
you thought you could convince yourself
you lived for). Instincts are the bare
bones of the impossibilities we wanted
to believe in,
remember,
those times you tried to tell me that
adrenaline was God's way
of saying
that
we were His chosen ones, we were
special, we were free.
I tried to tell you that instincts an

starspunobserving the romanticism
of hooded cemetery kids,
smoking cigarettes pretending
they are not dead.

you were always so sure
about my uncertainty,
you watched
all my pick up lines
drop things.

we built the heat
of the evening from the solidity
of starlight,

pretended
that two teens at the park
at midnight
is the stuff of teen novels
(cliches dim on
our leaf-gold horizon)

your eyes darted
from the gray expanse
of the churchyard & wandered
in thoughtful
paths.

i wanted to ask you
if i could follow. shove
the words aside &
remember that i came here alone.

i remember our innocence
in the static b e t w e e n
stars

AirYou do not have to be empty.
Go, now, to the high places, the thin spires
of mountains and skyscrapers
the roof of your house, tipped with snow,
and fill yourself up with the air.
Drink it in, taste it, roll it around
on your tongue, feel it settle
in the caverns of your lungs. Feel the dust
and the ice crystals and the scraps of newspaper
brush your lips, and fill yourself with them, too.
Fill yourself up with the moonlight, the frost,
the dusky rose of the rising sun,
the night, the morning, the calls of birds,
the sillhouettes of telephone poles,
the shadows of people and clouds and alley cats
that dance across the pave

The Price of Dying“I want to be interred after I die,” Mr. Peters said. He made that clear to his family while he was still lucid, before old age and illness rendered him unintelligible. Seventy wasn’t that old, but he recognized the symptoms that were creeping up on his ailing body – the aches, the fatigue, the feeling of helplessness and despair. Despite his daughter’s attempts to assuage his concerns, he sensed his own mortality.
The worst part about dying, Mr. Peters thought, was what happened afterwards. Even since he was a small boy, he had been afraid of fire. He could never forget the scorching heat of the orange flames searing his skin, the dark billowing smoke entering his nostrils. The time that his house burned down, the fire almost took him with it. How ironic then, to escape the fire only to be fed into it after death.
So one day, he sat his son and daughter down after dinner. “I want to be buried whole,” he said, emphasizing the

ich liebe dichdaylight wakes me up and i turn into the green moth on the windshield.
a few months ago i would have died to be someone with the same kind of pulse
as you. i wanted to know what it felt like to breathe your same
air and listen to the fabrication of your words, your lies like lists of things
you wanted me to hear, essays crafted to the palaces of my mind.
you knew what i wanted because you know the architecture of so many women—
not seeing my poisonous nature, the blisteringly sweet aftertaste that crumples
you into me again, again, again, each hit better than the last. together
we chase the dragon, needing more and more of each o

Nathan Turner Nathan Turner, aged thirty, was a modest earner, if nothing other. Son of no

father and a flighty mother, and raised in most part by troubled brothers, he was never

one to put his trust in those upon whom the dust of age had scarcely settled. For a time,

he had meddled, even peddled, looking for the light in his own eyes. But never enough was

it, just as well, in his own mind, for the brand of fire which he desired was the sort a

man might chase until he dies, and even at the gates of Hell, never find.

But one cool evening in July, he chanced to meet - just walking by - a woman with

an empty stroller. "Empty stroller?" he asked at on

despondenti.

"are you sleepy today?"
"yes."
"but you were sleepy yesterday."
"i know."

ii.

she stirs her pomegranate green-tea until it turns from clear to purple
setting it on her bedside table and climbing back into bed again.
her fingers follow the bluer-than-usual constellation veins on her wrists and down
to the freckle on her forearm and then the scar on the inside of her elbow
crossing the tendon as if it were crux.
and then she remembered that God hasn't been with her lately.

iii.

today is long and sunny but when she steps outside the humidity creaks her bones
and her skin starts to inflame.
she assumes that if getting the mail

The Best is Yet to Comeif we grow old
there will be a sigh
an attention to the change
as your muscles slacken underneath
your faded, favorite shirt
the one that's threadbare, "holy"
in a sense less than divine
I'll have washed it for
the thousandth time
our eyes will crinkle, wrinkle
in ways that start to match
and we'll hold hands and ask:
when did the nerves and veins
begin to let our hands get cold?
-if we grow old

earth circuitAnd when the sun sinks, the earth's skin crawls:

I.
I wonder if this awkward creature would notice me the way I notice him.
He's so tragic at his throne
I stare after him longingly.
And yet,
He never realizes that I'm the one
Who forever basks in his brilliant beams.
If only he knew how much brighter he could burn
[with me]
He'd light up the universe.

II.
I heard him speak of thirst, once.
The quenching lust of the stars had run dry.
So that night, I brought along a jar of acid.
(And how it gleamed in his glow).
I handed it to him, wrapped in taffeta ribbons,
screaming
I wish curdling joy
On my gurgling boy

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xoxoxoxoxoxo
Looks like blind men at their prayers
Their cathedral the atrium of the heart
Windows no less lovely
Than the stain and etching of the vascular pen and brush
Though still lacking in homage of love's complexities
Just as the kiss and embrace fail to express oneness.
Cloistered, urgent whispers for love between the beats
The secret sweetness of the song heard against the chest
When one wakes beside, betwixt, entangled in another
Chest knotted in four AM restlessness
Still, the somnambulist may find peace in the sacred
The mutterings of hopes gentle's choir
Only skin and bone away-
In those dove-gray moments
Not even so far

The Burden Begged of the WandererI thought it'd do my soul some good
To see the road again
And adopt a gypsy rover's boots
To walk the earth from end to end
To see great works of God
Stand beside great works of man
And wile away the night hours
Swapping tales with bearded men
I thought it'd do my heart some good
To spend some time at sea
And fish for silver strokes of light
And my own serenity
Play at pirates with a child's touch
Or practice being free
Fly a flag in a foreign tongue
Whose only scribe is me.
I thought it'd do my feet some good
To set them traveling home
To put them up by familiar fires
And rest among known bones
And found upon arriving bac

The Blink and the After-partyThere's something about morning eyes
When the Egyptian queen's lines of kohl
Have smudged like the banks of the Nile in monsoon
And the cotton-sides of well-watered pillow cases
Wear the glitter sand smoke of the late night
In eyelash furrows.
Underneath uncertain fluorescence
They are proud eyes
Brought low by morning
And burning up their retinas to consume the Empty.
Proud eyes
Shamed, but not enough to go home
Not enough to learn
Mama's photographs are of a clean-faced child
"She's so bright-eyed"
"They're her father's," Smiling Voice replies
Mama's memories are the same.
The ink and blur of bruise wants to k

Bowed Heads with the Wordless MouthScreaming is screaming
Because the words stopped
Somewhere between now and that shelf
Where decency
and logic
and hope
sit high court across the collarbones.
They were caught up in the wood and wires
and pulled free of their gentility,
left high
left hoarse
left cruel
left coarse
Words, off with their pretty plastic coatings
Pills arranged as jewelry
In grandmother's glass box
The one with peacocks along the side-
Even now, they seem not so proud.

House of MapsMaps are good for walls
In homes held by the restless
White plaster plastered with curling brown edges
And a smell like chai spilled out on wooden tabletops.
Old maps first,
With the wingspans of cranes.
Portraits of the way things were
In Paris and Rome before fire
In Spain before Guernika
In London when Plague walked on padded feet
And the hearths where it plundered for tears
In New York when buildings were yet to be taller than imagination.
And older even-
Topographies splayed out beneath the windowsill
The world before man.
The untampered calligraphy of sierras and their sister valleys
Of rivers without dams
The earth bet

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Submitted: June 11, 2011
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[x]

What I Know of Madrid

by ~handswouldweave, Jun 11, 2011, 6:00:45 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

I dream of Madrid
Because I know nearly nothing about it

Except that the heat is tangible
And sits in a layer beneath the skin
And the sweat of the heat is silk
I imagine it tastes of honey and wine

Except that the churches are tall
And God still has a fist of gold
Just as he has a palm of silver
Shaded in the vaulted arches of another age
The cheekbones of giants holding up the world
There the air smells of musk and incense
That has long since been swept away
By the wings of the doves that dance where the choirs sang.

Except that the nights are long
And the golden lights filter across the water
Like a sunset sleeps on the silted floor
And the music is a tango is a rhumba is a flamenco
The soundtrack of love and of lust
And the pulse of the city is up
To catch souls in a rhythm that can't be matched

Except that the language is beautiful
As coarse as the women at the well once were and always are
As liquid as the honey-drip in the amber fire water
As rapid as kites caught in a storm
As languid as a wooing, for my heart is lost to it
And the tongues weave through the day
As ignorant of their power as they are careless of their words
It's a low-heel stomping on a black wood floor
Palms attacking the time above the head
And the mandolin that ends the war of sound
That is the language.

Except that it is free
And that my dreams have belonged to many places
And they have been shared in whispers
Caught and held in the spaces between held hands
And this city that I know nothing of is all of me and all of mine
Though the sea and understanding part us.

Except that the sea is merely miles and distance can be crossed
And time is only an education in want.

What I Know of Madridby ~handswouldweave

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

6.11.11

Daily Deviation

Given 2013-01-05

What I Know of Madrid by ~handswouldweave ( Suggested by `LiliWrites and Featured by ^NicSwaner )

love 4 4

~~joy 0 0~~

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~winterkate Jan 26, 2013 Student Writer

And time is only an education in want. Amazing.

*BlakeCurran Jan 14, 2013 Student Writer

AAAAAMAZING. I'm waiting to travel, also

`vespera Jan 14, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

wonderful

=CrematedMan Jan 6, 2013 Student Writer

The last sentence is pure brilliance. Magnificent.

~shadowzabimaru Jan 5, 2013 Student General Artist

Very well written- it took me back to Madrid and my home country, Spain.
The only thing is there aren't many tangos there haha.

~GlamPhan Jan 5, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Ohhh... wow....
This is wonderful.

*Asfodelo Jan 5, 2013 Student General Artist

Beautiful words, very mudane yet so dreamy

~54Claymore Jan 5, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

This was really good! Definitely going to have to check out more of your work. Amazing how a place and bring such words and feelings into our thoughts

~Lantis-Erin Jan 5, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Beautiful.

~gummyrabbit Jan 5, 2013 Student Writer

This is like the kind of poem I try to write, only better. I'm jealous. It's gorgeous.

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