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Loving AustraliaYears like bilbies--
days like kangaroos.

Want lives in a pocket womb
(salt suckle; scrape
of your grey-brown curls.)

Heart-split
by hemispheres
(birdsong way
you shape your words.)

Sleep
dredged in red dust,
sprawled across half a world,
night-lit
by wrong stars.

pentadactylism

you realize
and in so doing
something breaks.
every minute
you deign to make
some unknighted landfall
in a mime
of an irreversible
act;
all this time
wasted
going someplace.
when we’ve gathered up the last
of roadworthy flowers,
touched our final
sundance
in the skull
then
we’ll settle
on leaving . . .

or,
you’ll say
we’re still together
hungering in underboards
dog-fed on blood slivers, whiplash and improvidence.
why
do we pick at moments
to unlock their gnashing
guerrilla war?
i have no reason for what i want
just . . . be my collaborateur
my psalmist
my letterhead
be everything that is outlying and forbidden
the cavus which cannot bear the weight of waterweeds
and i promise to keep you
burning, weeping
or whatever
it is
you’ve
been needing
ever since our funeral

in that godless hollow
of a mind

what she came forThe quadratic stains
have lodged like diplomats
on our whispering wind.

They burn through immunity
with logic; there is
no piper to lead us to reason

and it makes me wonder

TrespassingI will stay awake all night now,
where there is no definition,
for the stillness of your regard
or the way your breath
tickles my frame.

Lovely stranger, I would ask
to remember you this way:
only as the moment in a day,
rain-and-pasture scented,
bottled up in flesh. I don't want to recall
the low clouds or your arms, only how your eyes tilted
full of a moment's light.

That humid air, it settled between us
with more accuracy than the sun could have
held in his intention. Humbled by the sweat
upon your brow, the rains came
drenching us, and forcing our escape
to this place unlike home, but safe
and quiet.

We are nameless, he

I hurtle through scattershot stars
secret unseen in a liquid night
silent and eternal cold
across seven centuries
my heart resounds in yours
silver-tipped fingers
like ten blind eyes
splay and seek
that core of warm
never found
past Mercury, past Mars
my orbit echoes yours
We never meet
but I return
again and again

nowadays,
Autumn mornings can be like this: near to nothing.
they do not sing
exactly
or hold to land
but mangle in the chimes
as gaslights huddle for permanency

and so, failing.

where have we left our-
selves?

i feign allegiance to it: eyes and dreams
and life, as dyes turn glass to hollowware
and wax to fruit,
as brindle on these bones
makes me your passersby.

but somehow, i still believe in you
like fragments of a mythos
which have calcified to faith.
you’re lingering in setscrews that i cannot touch,
waiting in the code of loins and blood-belief.

and as sudden as October sun,
you will rebloom from every pore
and bleed from

Act of the GodlessThere used to be the comfort of the words-
bereft, bereft, a woman drips her opalescent tears,
where thin-lipped men look on, away.
As common as cats, lives are.

Revolt against reasonA house of barley rice
was the only shelter I knew
in autumn,

calculus and Rousseau,
'My Last Duchess',
emptied onto
tables of paper wood;

smoke from the heart
of a sad, blue-eyed drummer.

I slept well at night.

HonorariumShame hands out its casual lies --
the ones you find cruising the neighborhood
or smoking on the pleated outskirts
of the inadvisable --
with Orphean precision and
a cautious inattention to detail.

This had been a long time coming, she said,
as she shucked it of miserly virtue,
revved up the blame machines
then pistol-whipped it with its own gun.

They found it later, stuffed in a dumpster,
still no foreign countries visible
but haute-righteous protocol eye-up
in a pool of glaring consistency.

Personification of the specious, yes,
but myth said that hardly mattered now.

GoldenI am;
I glisten and gleam,
Sparkle-flakes fly
With the wind.

I am golden;
Tall,
Strong,
Dreaming.

Birds hush when I sing
The world stops

When I dream

I am golden.

Breakfast At Connie'sSmall birdbones, brittle
Large eggs over easy
Tiny dogs yip and nip at the feet
Under the table

A lock of hair in ashes
A crow cawing from the bookcase
Breakfast at Connie's is always
So damned surreal

Last chance for a smoke before the show begins
Light 'em if you got 'em, or just light a candle
Italian Catholic grey-eyed girls
Love ceremony

A pumping heart dessert
Hidden in plain sight
Ignored by all as proper etiquette demands
They leave softly

Marching in softshoe-step rhythm
Crunching small bones beneath their feet
Wondering why it's still dark and why the
Show still goes on

On The PodiumThe art of conductivity
as the maestro explained,
is that the man with the baton

serves as a lightning rod,
earthing intuitions from god.

StiraboutThe ghosts of a thousand Celts
haunt where you lie, heavy as time,
dream-quiet in ochre and grey.
Warm as an October moon,
soft in a pink-cheeked dawn,
you wake to honey and cream
under my hand, butter melting
into a strawberry kiss,
just so.

Certain LightParcels on the doorstep
are smaller now,
blurred paths between the lines,
impossible to follow.

Again, misrouted telegrams.
This is the problem with
opening someone else's mail.
Raw history explodes;
yellowed paper ribbons
spill over crime blotters;
the desks have no names.

The words of this house
are spoken in stage whispers,
and every future is ironic
in a certain light.

virginity is like an envelopemy mother said her mother knew.
i wonder if she stumbled home like i did,
fifteen and beer-loose
tied to the door like a thunderstorm with black lips
and i wrote a story about disaster,
a quiet two sleds long.
a box full of beads, i swallowed
fifteen needles, mommy. don’t
tell me i’m not sorry.
don’t call me a whore you bag of bones
you lock-loose suitcase do you even
recognize me look at my face my toothache skin
i am not the one with the knife.

my mother never slept with a boy
who didn’t love her never let a boy
sleep on her while she lay awake beneath
the shroud of his skin breathing only
when her voice-box gathere

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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

Certain LightParcels on the doorstep
are smaller now,
blurred paths between the lines,
impossible to follow.

Again, misrouted telegrams.
This is the problem with
opening someone else's mail.
Raw history explodes;
yellowed paper ribbons
spill over crime blotters;
the desks have no names.

The words of this house
are spoken in stage whispers,
and every future is ironic
in a certain light.

Deja vuIf I slipped into unfamiliar shoes
that you had worn your whole life
I would remember neroli-scented air
and the smoke of incense
and the taste of tea, gathered wild
from a mountain I had never climbed.

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A Noise At The Bathroom Window

by ~EmmaSloane, Aug 29, 2012, 6:48:25 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Is frantic, wild. It jars me from sleep -
from a night of half-dreams - a bird,
trapped this side of the window.

She throws herself against the light,
blood on the glass, her heart, an arrow.

I think I will never catch such a fighter,
but she is tired. My hand closes over her.

The window gives way with a push;
then she surprises, launching herself
from my open palm.

A Noise At The Bathroom Windowby ~EmmaSloane

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

©2012-2013 ~EmmaSloane

after Isaac

~~joy 0 0~~

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

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~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

Mood: Love

~Babou-Shka May 17, 2013 New member Hobbyist General Artist

Beautiful.

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~EmmaSloane 5 days ago Writer

Thank you!

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~Babou-Shka 2 days ago New member Hobbyist General Artist

You're welcome

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*AlecBell Mar 22, 2013

There were tiny creatures, loose in a land of giants ...

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*Swep-Lovitt Nov 12, 2012

cut "Stillness-an instant-" which dulls the spare, clean "Then, she surprises,"

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~natasamakri Sep 16, 2012 Professional General Artist

This is lovely

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~EmmaSloane Oct 2, 2012 Writer

Thank you

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~natasamakri Oct 4, 2012 Professional General Artist

It's my pleasure

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~natasamakri Oct 4, 2012 Professional General Artist

It's my pleasure

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*archelyxs Sep 11, 2012

Gorgeous. I can hear the scratching.

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