The depth of my longing for you
destroys me.
How do you kill so beautifully?
What madness
have you lit inside my veins, etching
my walls and stars with ruin?
I am become the ages
filled with echoes of unfulfilled
desire.
Tag: Free Verse
Prettier Than a Broken Heart
If I could write to you of sorrow, if I could explain this devastation,
I’d use words like utterly, and calamity, and grief.
But the words refuse my bidding, choosing to cloak themselves in darkness and half formed thoughts instead.
They shuffle off their course like drunken sailors, lose their way somewhere between half-hearted and dejected.
With quivering chins and sagging limbs, I’ve not the strength to make them dance
to fool a broken heart into being
prettier than it ever is.
“where are the angels?”
One of the most beautiful and relevant poems I have read.
.
.
.
For the woman gangraped by the tribe of Benjamin.
Silent you were. You were
silenced. Not a word given you
in the whole merciless narrative.
Not a movement credited you
except one: prelude to the tale,
you returned to your father’s house
for four months. And one more
movement: footnote at the end,
you reach forward a hand.
Between that you are moved
as a pawn by primary players.
Nameless you are. You were
unnamed, called “concubine” and
“slave-woman” . Your “master”
was honoured as a “son-in-law”
yet you were no wife.
The whole story you travel between and with
the men meant to protect you. Father. Master (husband). Host.
They brutally betray you.
Father and son-in-law dine nightly
feast again and again, the two of them
then he takes you and “his other servant”
departs. Arrive in Gibeah.
Dialogue between master and servant.
Dialogue between master…
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Leaving Eden
Silence descends heavily in the wake of
your retreating footsteps,
desolate,
cruel in its unrelenting neutrality.
My thoughts are a startled murmuration
of starlings
with desperately flapping wings
resounding mournfully into the middle distance.
They settle delicately on my shoulders,
unable to bear the weight of our
existence.
We were the beginnings
of a dream,
a building crescendo,
the first strokes of a masterpiece
that fate or folly deemed never know
the fulfillment of completion.
A bitter wind sends its piercing cry
through the spaces of my ribcage.
Cold as a January frost.
My Love Is Like The Fragrant Myrrh
My love appeared to me in the hour
before sunset,
in the dusky hour heavy with the
weight of unspilled secrets. Tell me,
my love,
where do you gaily frolic in the hours
you are apart from me? ‘I toil ‘neath
the scorching sun,
weaving love’s incessant yearning like
the beams of bridges to find my way
to you.’
My heart is made of sandalwood, I trail
myrrh and fragrant spices
with abandon.
You are a city I cannot breach
You are a city built of shadowed corners
and mysterious alleys
I long to explore them with my fingers and my tongue
Trace the fine veins in your marble walls and wrap myself in your tapestries
I look at you and I see a dark and sweltering night
pregnant with heat and a full moon
and all the little things I want to reveal
in hushed whispers and languid caresses
But you keep your secrets close
and your walls maintained
with the sharp arrows of your archers
that are careless sometimes
with where they choose their target
And I wonder
if you are even aware
Fiddling While Rome Burns
Scattered bites of joy in the face of abject suffering
Prying kindness off forked tongues
(Must I wrest my happy from the jaws of monsters?)
Satiating bloodlust of the drunken masses
(If I relish this small joy I found, will it land like salt on your unhealed wounds?)
Don’t look to me to ease your sorrow
If I cannot save the burning city, then I shall glory, unapologetically, in its dazzling demise
Morning Dove
If, when counting colossal breaths,
the symmetry proves
too much, call down to me the
ways you’d like to further vanish.
Take me as a place you’d
travel to, when the swallows
go. All I can know about
you surfaces briefly, as if caught
in some oblivion. Some mornings,
I wake to gentle breath, and think in
soft touches, wonder where your
mind goes each night.
I could keep reaching for certainty
in response to this
grow-old-with-me,
but why land there? Let’s
step out somewhere more
blue-evoking, or bend the
river north. It isn’t
too important to decide
where to build the farm,
or the house with exposed wood;
the ceiling fan turns slowly above me.
I picture linens rippling in gentle
heat. Somewhere far away, a morning
dove perched on the moss fence
sings his holy tune.
Love Me in a Different Language
If you’ve forgotten how to love me, mi amor, then please recall the words that once upon a time were softly sung to you,
that were crooned so sweetly at your mothers breast in the land that bore your father and his father before him.
Draw near to me, amor, and we’ll map our bodies with the sounds of passion,
where we’ll learn to love anew in your mother’s tongue, passed down from generation to generation.
Let us ink our hearts in nuances of sun-baked streets and moonlit trysts
in dialects that knew of love and loss long before our stars were lit,
that echo still of golden skin, and raven hair, and lips that taste of briny seas.
If you’ve forgotten how to love me, mi amor, let us learn to love again in languages unspeakable.
It is said that one changes personalities to subconsciously reflect the language that is being spoken.
Your Darkest Night
It was black and endless and lined with teeth all over.
Descending like a wet blanket,
every breath you drew was a shudder.
*On a separate note, I’d like to reiterate just how much I dislike textual misunderstandings. Yesterday was the first time I got true hate comments on my blog. What I thought was carefree banter somehow caused the other person to devolve into calling me something vulgar and tell me to burn in hell. The fact that I don’t entertain phone calls from married men may have factored into this whole debacle. Why are we always so apt to screw things up so royally? It’s one thing we can always depend on to do spectacularly.
Ebony and Crows 