Welcome to the newest edition of "I Wish I Had Written That"; this one being Two, or should I say, "Too"?  I'm glad I could get this in during the month of April because so many crazy things keep happening.  A hospital stay the first week, and a Daily Deviation [link] the next week; neither of which I ever expected! (well who would?)  Meantime...

Like the first edition, the following are being featured (in no particular order) because I am breathless to read each one.  Either for the exquisitely raw, intense, or lyrical uniqueness of the entire work, or even for a line, a stanza, or the title – and in most cases, all of the above!  Please give the artists of these features your love: many know each other and I them, and some I've only recently discovered and/or learned about.  Please enjoy.

Bokeh.These days, Black Friday really lasts a week
but I haven't bothered to write out a list--
You cannot find the things I want in a store.
The sound of a rejected embrace
is the same as the shatter of a broken bulb
or a house burning down on Christmas morning.
There is a name for the way 
strings of holiday lights blur out of focus
when you watch someone you love walk away. Come Home: A PantoumYou'll always come back to me
when the lights in the far hills
are done searching. For, new beds

entice adventurers. Too,
when the lights in the far hills
come home, the homespun dream they

entice adventurers too,
but they can't. (Dream we're neither.
Come home.) The homespun dream they

turn pioneers to homebodies,
but they can't dream we're neither,
our wanderlust fit to turn

pioneers to homebodies.
We've always made love free, so
our wanderlust fit. To

turn ourselves towards our home
we've always made love. Free. So
when the last adventurers

turn themselves toward their homes
in faraway lands, I know,
when the last adv
georgiaWhen they hanged the black man from Roopville, my mama burned
all the white curtains in the house and buried the ashes under a rattleweed,
and said He will send the teeth of beasts upon them.

Then those Clifford boys strung their shoelaces
together and rolled their sister’s Kewpie in mud
and left her swinging from a yellow poplar;

     you wouldn’t think honey could roll so slowly in the middle of summer
     but then you remember that honey ain’t sweat, and it sure ain’t blood.  
     And you could hear the bees for days.

They hanged that man for resting his chin on fence of a woman
whose husband used to My Husband Tried To Make Love To Memy husband
tried to make love to me
.

he was topaz, he was
grim, he was the chalk
and smoky fire
of fear and gnawed-at
angels
-
he was the bright face of fruit.
he was horrible and strange. he stared,
licked and rolled me in his palms
like a cigarette, wordlessly

dragged me from my grassy bed
by the bones in my legs and
pinned me down in that darkly
smiling, jagged place where

he put his hands on me and dragged
the crushed moans from my chest
made me yell
like a dog

and oh how frightened
and trembling
and in awe i was of his caverns,
his black and rolling eyes

how his pomegranates bled
and stung

and trickled, bitt
on commuting with no hurrythere you go
lighting matches in the rain,
walking with two feet
that the gods gave you
because they cannot walk,

heading home as if with news
of some miraculous disaster,

counting the steps between yourself
and the clouds that disappeared
behind the grey veil of October.

thunder and lightning unfold
so close above

and you dream of a destination
somewhere in the south

where birds and stormy weather coexist.

behind you there is nothing,
running water will erase
every footprint you have left
on the dark sand of this metropolis.

before you there is distance,
enough to live your life
in a constant state of travel,

but not n LanguageWhisper them to me
Between bed sheets and late nights -
Your hipbone wishes
ShadowA single silver earring
on an overflowing table,

moonlight casting shadows
of women who have long
left the room The Satori of Easter WaspsHornets don't regret.
I can tell, the way they're trawling the egghunt like little Zen zygotes
looking for eves to cobble another nest of wombs
from the damp distillery.
They haven't cared for a million lives.

All finalities, both my thrifty dreams
and those lofty tea clouds, when black and white would never do,
when I had time to colour in their shells with crazy pinwheels
and hide them in ivy, they all parade through Grandma Becky's
backyard garden.

From bamboo rakes turning out the sky
to the little spring torii that opens back to Earth,
children run and rummage through a giant toybox in the shade.
This is it, all of it: the slender
respiration.i am shipwrecked fever;
kerosene sleep,
& she is denied oxygen.

i taste sirens on the shore
of her collarbones,
& salt-licked sea limbs.

but, it's the natural disaster
wrapped around her coral spine
that really has my lungs
                           s
                             p
                           i
                              n
                            n
                              i
                            n
                              g. Revolver in a Bag of PuppetsRevolver in a Bag of Puppets
For Christine Chubbuck

On a fiery July morning
your eyes opened with intention

to involve innocents
in a cold steel plot

detailed on pages
in the bowels of your briefcase

wishes birthed in solitude—
no light, no hope

Did your hands shake
as you buttoned your blouse?

Did your coffee
go cold in the cup?

Did your eggs
burn in the pan?

Did you think of the children
watching that day,

as the camera's eye
transmitted your pain live in color?

A thirty-eight caliber Smith and Wesson
drawn from a shopping bag full of puppets

One shot
fired behind the right ear

Your head
slammed against the desk

Dead
c
the eyepatch and the handcuffs     his hands have promised
     to wipe off every fingerprint
     your last lover left on you

     he has sworn he will
     wear gloves, when he needs to,
     and pay attention to the instructions on the boxes

     "this side up"
     and "fragile"

     and you have sworn
     you will try to let him

     i hear your bodies whispering these things to each ot EurydiceHis voice enveloped me, and I became
Myself again--I heard it in the song:
A mordent on a note he held too long;
A stutter in his voice. I heard my name
In these and felt a happiness the same
As when I saw him first. Oh, I had longed
To hear him sing again, but this last song--
It was so beautiful. And it remains
The best of human works, though none shall hear
Its sorrowed notes; the lyre's meand'ring tune
Through vast arpeggios and Death's expanse
Except the dead. It will not disappear
'Till all the world's destroyed, and hell's exhumed--
Such music must be worth a backwards glance.
bella's palsyWilhelmina looks sick in the light

Wilhelmina smokes cigarettes at a bus stop
between dope-dried ex-beauty queen in pajamas
and secret agent student of chemistry shifty behind his newspaper

Wilhelmina hides in Harlem, behind wet glass
watching red water suck down into sidewalk drains

She has these invisible heirloom knives
slippery when wet
that whisper right through all metal detectors
A sure winner with the jury

Wilhelmina clucks down the echoey hallway in hurried heels
late like white rabbit
like either one of the hepburns
clumsy in her grace

The door opens to racks and chains and crosses
to another he's no dracula but he'l sea featherin the breaking of the morning we tore apart our ivory shells
     our blood-red hearts are saturated in spume & sea spells
with the ache from the brine gathering around you
your ankles slippery, your mouth
moving liquid through
mine
   i had never seen a more beautiful shoreline

gunmetal breaths
on shivering, silver shores

you were ebbing to my flowing
you were coming; i was going

i wrote in the sand that i was yours

on the coast i could feel
salt on my tongue - dew from the
ocean in my lungs
& i was your pearl
latched from the inside to keep everyone out
speaking in rhymes, & cotton tides

         this is when you pull my body fro
pompeii's little deathspompeii’s little deaths

the things i could never say
after a blue sunday …

i am not bitter, but maybe
the beauty is in the leaving
the isle of antiquity,
once you have found it
into the sea below,
amaranth and mild as may:
a season’s change.

poets have the loneliest hearts
when a muse stands silent.

collage made by SophieCT, march 21st 2013 Stay With MeSuch as death scars the living, leaving wounds
that can not break the skin, I am left without a mark.
Only visions of what can not occur stay with me,
as you promised me you could not.

And the days seem longer, without the quiet
that I found in your company. Words, never necessary,
were generally found in the passing moments. I miss,
most of all, the way your smile sounded.

Your eyes, grey as the inbetween of everything
seemingly understood, took the weight of the day
from my shoulders, often. When they could not, I found
in them a graceful forgiveness for my defeat.

And as I stand, wounded in ways that never heal,
I ask you to s
LandingIf a dragonfly
pauses on your freckled nose
so might the summer. Part-Time HookerI inhale smoke and dirty thoughts

(sleeping with a waste-of-calories
with no sex appeal. her heart
doesn't beat
 the volume of
smell increases as it's
getting hotter than a
 fever heat
 I don't mind her
cold hands around my --
 burned out lights form a
silhouette; film this on
screen like a dream
you can watch or hear.
but she doesn't scream;  
her bones suffocate me
as she's wrapped around
my body -
she's stiff, cold, dry.
sleeping with a waste-of-calories
with no sex appeal. her heart
doesn't beat. )

Until I can't breathe.
rock bottom, ocean floorhalf-past a different kind of broken
on sadness, she wrote:

           
           blind fool in the umbra    
           bury yourself in me
           on the other side of lonely
           and by god, i love you
                (maybe i will be a landfill)
           

everyone i meet looks for a place to stay;
out of the woods, on wet roads
under wind, under rain
  -i'm so far away

no wonder it took him 1455 pages
waiting for her to come this way

tramps like us-
               in lieu of emptiness
               in absence of a poem
               wander, wander
                    (pour a little salt, we were never here) If you drink enough vodka it tastes like loveHe’d whisper sweet nothings to trees
Hoping the roots would remember his name
I watched him drop pieces of himself like bread crumbs
His lantern limbs quivering

I don’t think he ever really knew how lovely he was
And on a sunny day when the pavement was sweating
Out onto the roadside
Everyone else found out too

I don’t think I’ll ever forget him because he was like a dream catcher
So quiet and magical in the way his eyes turned green in the dark
And blue in the winter
Like he stored the world’s secrets behind his cuckoo spit heart
The Angels said jumpShe's gasping for daylight and her skin smells like copper. She can't remember getting off the Ferry. She's trapped. Her hands are covering her ears and the walls are weeping with her own blood. She punches 4/4 beats on the door until her knuckles shatter.  
She grabs her head presses her thumbs in her eyes and tries not to scream.

It's been two days.
The door opened twenty minutes ago and she told Him she'd swallow sunlight and nothing else. The slamming door nearly broke her nose. She's dancing in the darkness to stay sane.
She's remembering home.

It's been four days
She's wondering if she could hang herself with her own h You don't seem to notice (my scars)-i-
Years Ago
He and I were eleven when we met, the first day of the sixth grade. No particular moment served as the spark to ignite our friendship.  As children do, we started talking as if we were already good friends, and were inseparable from the start.

There were rumours, but we didn't understand half of the words the other kids had picked up from R-rated movies, and neither did they. We were called King and Queen by a crowd of boisterous first-graders who followed us around at recess.  He joined the choir and the school play just because I did. It didn't take long before we weren't allowed to sit near each other on the school bus becau
why stars don't sleep& stars they never sleep
cradled in the gentle limbs of the moon
the sky in ocean's blood
how they love their dawn
never wake to twilight nights
breathe life into mountains
caress sky's limit
& painting life in yellow dots
falling out soundlessly. The Book of Longing and ForgivenessI.

I welcome
the grief of elephants
and the shards of slowness
in time.

The last breathing tombs
in this earth are eternal
constructs

they
manifest the degree
of my sorrow and forgetfulness.

I embrace the natural laws
of regret.

but of love,

I'm sorry.

I avoid the sound of leaving.

II.

The oceans heave.

The sky, breath heavy
for a single drop--

two bodies of water
colliding.

The earth thirsts.

You don't know,
the half-life of all
my longing leads to you.

I wait for the sound
of forgiveness everyday

a knock on the door, a phone call,
your voice shifting the air
under this vast sky

my heart wanders to this
perfect shade of blue
Sanguine in name onlyangre de cristo
bruises things I touch
purples them in spring
when my fire sounds
lilac in fury

enough

it is enough
to push the angry
past tomorrow

the fire poppies
channel blue
into a future sea dawnin a quiet tangle
of young bamboo
bound
with a silken web,
dawn shimmers
in a dew drop—
and the spider hurries
to capture the sun
.T.we speak through the sky
and I know you
the way trees know the wind. Banquises - Ice fieldsFraîcheur de la neige fracturée de ciel
que ferai-je au soir
de ta mort

Freshness of the snow broken by the sky
What shall I do when
your death comes

Frantz, novembre 2012.


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