Poetry

Our Birdcage

I’ve whispered through the grass the tale of our claret soldiery. 

Reduced to a wrestle on the ground where we shed champagne selves you fled

And I sat, as I sit now, on the shock, sword at feet

Because even when you’re beat there’s further to fall.

My uniform’s torn from all the battles that I’ve bled

From the cavalries I’ve never led because I don’t want to be the one who said

The truth.

Every time you trespass through my mind I find

That the only reason I bound myself to you was so that

You could let me free.

Set me away.

When I said goodbye to the cartoon of Yesterday I meant it.

But it keeps creeping through my skin

Like it’s hell bent on sending me off the edge.

Because every war we wage is another minute that I’m not pretending to make peace

With the life I ought to lead.

And even if I bleed I’m willing to accept the scars because the battlefield is far away.

Our comrades hide their landmines beneath our fingernails

So that every time we clench our fists our lemming dives become their

Barricade on the front line.

And I’m tired of lying.

I’m tired of lying face down while they write boot prints on our backs

And I’m tried of lying to cover our tears

But I love when we lie long enough to cover our tracks.

When we slip off the tightrope of our carnival games

I hope that the slow tumble leads me

To your footprints in the snow.

  We Love Making the Silent Nightlife

When I laughed and said “Don’t worry” it slipped off my tongue less like a pebble and more like a bolder and I wish that one day when we’re older you’d turn to me and say “but I did.”

Because I don’t just want to be held by you, to know you for a night, a week a year, I want to pick out baby names with you. 

I want to watch the crows feet form around your eyes, wait for the laugh lines to solidify and have those awkward chats about remember when?

‘Cause forever was never an option for us.
We never carved our names in trunks of dying trees or spent our lives trying to be anything more than what we already were.

Two people just trying to figure it out.

And regardless of what the romance books tell us we were never meant

To be the kind of story you could document

And we never created poetry, never shook the earth, never set the world on fire.

We never found a place in all the cliché’s because we were busy just surviving day to day

As two people who were never meant to find each other.

If you question what I would do to get over and be with you, lift you up over everything…

And I remember the time you told me to be silent

And while my violent tendencies rose I was quiet.

Because a thousand useless words could never express what it meant to lay in your arms.

And I remember the scene at the airport gate but we were too busy being late for somewhere else to say goodbye.

If we were a book any high school class would know at first look that that was our denouement.  

That was the scene where we stopped going on.

I fought for you like you fought for me but sometimes defeat is the hardest word to say.

We’re like two blind divers who forgot to check their oxygen tank and just discovered why sometimes “breathless” and “drowning” are synonymous.

You asked me if we could just ignore so I said yes and so as though we each had a tape recorder mind we hit erase.

And the space

Between us gradually grew until I knew that there was nothing more that I could do to salvage what little bit of “what if?” that still hung stale in the air.

And I was forced to stare at the freckle on your back, some proof that

In fact you’re not perfect. 

It made me think of the way you’d laughed and called yourself my mistake.

And I wanted to reach out and touch it,

I wanted to own it under my skin but you rolled over and what I saw wasn’t the face I knew but a face of someone passing through.

I put my hands around your neck and you wrap your arms around me. Put my hands around your neck and you wrap your arms around me.

And just like that we forgot

We were a children’s fight on a playground,

We never found a reason to hate but we still held it

Tight within our firsts.

And beat each other with it on Friday nights.

And I can assure you that if Cinderella ever met Sangria she would have said, “Fuck the deadline”

Because when midnight rolls around we stop waiting for the rules to apply.

Any semblance that I might have held in your eyes of a fairytale princess

Melted the first time I admitted that sometimes I’m lonely.

Cause I stayed at the ball but it was the prince who ran when I became nothing more than a beggar with nice shoes.

I concede that you were right about this place. I can make a perfect likeness of your body if I trace. I can hold you until we turn out the light and I can’t see.

Because honesty wasn’t a promise we wanted upheld.

You pretended I was just a nameless face and I pretended that I wasn’t disgraced by the title ‘crazy.’

All it took was grey t-shirt on my floor for me to see that I don’t need you.

And when I heard the words “are you alright?” I realized that we’ve never looked beyond ourselves.

So this is my renegade over overplayed songs,

My poetry of lines admitting I’ve been wrong

And if I’m not getting over I’m at least moving on

So little by little I let you vanish

Until you’re nothing more than a song

A button,

And a dislike of hard candies.

I concede that you were right about this place

I can make a perfect likeness of your body if I trace.

I can hold you until we turn out the light,

And I can’t see.

I put my hands around your neck and you wrap your arms around me. Put my hands around your neck, and you wrap your arms around me

(Sun)day Nights [AKA Don't Judge Me =(]

We watched from our porch as the sun collapsed before our blind eyes.

The darnkess wore me on its naked skin,

And I heard it sing, low and rhythmic as it soaked into the earth...

Parched throats and loss of touch gave rise to

Strangled whispers and empty tears.

We felt the velvet trace of silence

Like cookie crumbs long eaten

And it left memories of scars along our flesh.

Our nights are filled with but One

And we chase it, palms outstretched

But it slips past our fingertips like sea in a net.

How the shadow betray is side.

We remember because the child inside

Refuses to deny

The tragedies of an unkept yesterday

And with every word we write in memorandum of a better tomorrow

We hold the frozen knowledge of today.

And it's Sun

Crap
 
>>> <b>Warning!</b> This was written in under 5 minutes while passing (Sun)day Nights back and Forth during writing. Judge it as such. <<<

Brand ourselves with the letters of a generation or wo,
Store our dreams in Vending Machines
Until the answer to life's questions are a few quarters and a button's push away.

Write titles into the tags of ragged clothes
And call ourselves designers because we can create.
We sew our names to the backs of babes.

Emboss our crest to the breast of your last car,
Race us as though our status determines our outcome
And play our lines before you watch your life unfold in fiction.

We bet on who comes first and who comes last,
As if reality equals predictability
And a known name determines our right
To survive.


We Love Making The Silent Nightlife

We love making the silent nightlife,

The velvet sky looks out across the underground destinations

And from our beds we see that

We love making the silent nightlife,

Breath’s cashmere hum,

And the pale hue of skin as it slips past

And hides silent under frills.

We love making the silent nightlife,

Our fists lying flat against the honesty of icy touch.

Just set us up on a one stop train

And palm-to-palm we’ll trace our veins

Until they disappear into the angora black.

We love making the silent nightlife,

Counting the travel of stars with our fingertips

The atlas whisper of muted voices

And they swim across our collars.

We love making the silent nightlife

Wishing Good Morning to the falling tears

Of a cheviot sun.

 


Pantoum

These days, the earth stops spinning.

Words come slower, far less now,

And as I sit I wait for answers.

Something, someone, tell me how.

But words come slower, far less now,

And thoughts are lost, just empty space.

Something, someone, tell me nothing,

Let me wait, this calm embrace,

For thoughts are lost, just empty space here.

Silence warns of dire fates.

So I must wait, this calm confounds me –

Sounds of quiet elevate.

Silence warns of dire endings.

These days, the earth is done.

Sounds of quiet scream around me.

I wait for answers that never come.

 


On Blindness

Clambering hands trace the cool form of your twisting limbs.

Through the blackness I can’t see you but

I reach for you.  Your hair knots tight

And holds my fingers to your scalp. 

I can feel the warmth of tricks and fear as they rise

From the canopy of your mind.

I can feel every breath. 

Your cheeks burn.  The soft skin slips under my touch

Like sand from somewhere I can’t be.

The bridge of your nose –

I feel it cross from oasis of glass to oasis of glass.

I can feel the way you smile,

Features folding beneath my fingertips.

I know the way your neck rises when I read you,

Each cranny welcoming touch as I learn my way

Around your throat to land

At the neckline that I’ve never seen.

You tense when trembling fingers read

The waves, like oceans on your colorless shape.

Every imperfection noted,

But I don’t care.

In my downward sweep I find

The secret tower of bones that curl from back to front,

Too evident too ignore.

And you shiver in the cold as you stand

Naked in front of me.

But we both know that I can’t tell

Just what it means to you.

Your satin seat is carved like oak and I can feel the veins,

Like bark where time and stress have dug deeps marks

Into your skin.

And when I run like water to the trunks of your tree,
I feel you sag in this darkness.

Your fingers wrap mine around your toes.

Though I know every curve, every breath, every sigh,

I know every bend of your subtle spine,

I know ever dimple in the fabric of your being,

I can never know your smile, but for its feel.

I can never know your lashes but for their touch.

I can never know the fear you feel just to be

Naked.