death and dying poetry

Look at me

#keepitalive #poetry

I’m in the stacks high as a half floor of the classics held between the pages and wands and cups. Looking deeper your eyes burn holes with the investment of tonight or a lifetime.

Emma or Juliet or Madam Bovary protect the faces prettier than hers in the quadrant always mowed in rows – cut grass rusted between the notes.

Spiraling and bound there’s no word for the sound a girl makes when all the nexts and fortunes and eventides behold a barely audible thing. Listen to it boil from my throat.

Women fainting in the humid doorless rooms inadequately chaired. Sit there behind Heathcliff and expose those white thighs to Flaubert and smell those Madeline-scented clavicles, songs wafted up from hot pipes. B sharp A minor chord comes to warn us all to keep our distance.

That very day I left the mold blooms and heard the copilots speech, balloons began rising ever so slowly. I learnt that heat rises and a cold sinks like a feeling of mediocrity.

Not the virgin she’s reborn a little girl. Not a diving bell. Not an oven door to a living hell. Not the clamber of a piano on the short seashore with the conch shells and their perverse Fibonacci shapes sequencing his final thought.

She’s guarding my life with the covers of a book forgotten, in return naughty but respectfully right, on the shelf – so you reach her cheek in your dreams.

Fingers part my lines, as the stuff of your words open my mouth like a cannon. A Captain, a whale, and the man whose name you’d never know sat between us.

You still call him Ishmael. We all find out what his name means as one of the dead. That very second we pull ourselves out of this fictional life.

I died to finally read the last sentence, the words no one knows.

Flattening the curve of the earth, weakened at the knees, her neck craned around to notice he’d gone.

Pleased to return Dentistry in Suburban Phuket, forevermore out of print, it once ran cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

Printed on my imagination the greatest achievement of self discovery.

I thought you’d finally agonize for me.

On Fire

Bury me amongst the trees

Where redwoods overlook the sea

From atop a crossed mountain

Where my body will quicken

From flesh into sand.

Underneath the needle-bed

Blanket, the fibers of my hair weave

A way through the wind-filled leaves.

Heat my voice with borrowed sun

Which once kissed my cheeks

Where freckles reached to meet.

You now hear my broken chords

Faintly in the the distance unmoored

Tasting the salted shore. Safely clean

I lay down on a million fine grains of sand

Not feeling myself again I repeat

To no one: I am an empty vessel.

I’ll still wake every morning

Habitually, my hands still sleep

Parting the fitted sheets aways,

Long gone I still reach after you.

I am the water, then the dew

Maturing into a pinguid mist.

The palms clap and sway to

Conduct the band at noon

To play a song of our bequest.

The hour’s imminent.

Time to ride a wicked dream on

A silk weaved carpet twisted

With last night’s ghostly breath.

Come take inventory of my remains

Should the tree mark me no more.

The lumber that’s become of me

Taken over by the shore. I am a house

Now – shelter for a family to whom you

Lost me once again. My soul holds up

The walls now, my legs hammered

Into floorboards, arms encircle

Each bedroom where the dormers rest.

My fingers lace together to build

A painted white front porch,

That’s my hips now a swing

Hung there, under the eaves.

Look up to see my head holds high

A roof; my back’s now the front door

My eyes frame All the windows, my heart beats

In the kitchen. My birds left the

Forest knowing where my mouth now sings

And the woodpecker that lived inside my trunk

Hollowed out my attic in the spring.

Let me stand strong and steady

For at least a hundred years.

By then, long gone, you built your own

And our lives live on, unworldly yet eternally.

Looking down at the rubble of what’s

Left of my body in the demolition heap.

What at all might grow from me who once

You buried underneath a tree?

Let me now burn someone’s hands

Someone lit afire from my plight.

It’s cold outside where I once stood

In the trees and dark of night

And I’ll burn vast and luminous

My spirit gives newborn light.

Babe, in the woods

Wandering inside a rocky labyrinth
Whispering and asking myself for a complete and grand theory
A big punctuated unanswerable kind of question.
I’m answered by a softer voice in my head
I unheard it for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it said.

The sounds of trees speaking to me
Voices melting together, humming a bee swarm choir.
All the creatures singing to my delicate sensibilities,
Breaking the crystal with those high pitched cries at
The octave of all deceptions.
Blindly sliding through an unshaped wood
Where all roads disappear
Maps drawn in night’s ink
On black cartography paper.
Long lines of highways and dashes of dirt roads,
Big blue bodies of water and brown paper mountains, all
Legendary and meaningless without any keys, locked
Inside the stomach of the night.

Between the packed rows of forestry teeth,
The pointed firs choked while biting me into pieces.
Swallowing me whole down
The throat of the past.
Disgusted by my taste
They spit me out, coughing from my flavor.
I fell outside the rows
Imagining a creation of myself from small
Fragments of past participles
Shards of who I once wanted to see
Sharply ahead of me.
In the onyx ink I know there’s a fire
Blazing outside the warm front door.
Red flares snap breaking sharp icicles
From yesterday’s storm, cold and incomplete.
Waiting for my mind to name it something simple, biblical perhaps
Like any new born.