Wednesday, March 23, 2011

spring

call to me as the moon
a tidal pull, a rising of the blood.
lure me into you.

speak to me as a sigh of flowers,
a gentle breeze to cool my fever
a fragrant song to lull my mind.

teach my hands how to hold you,
with the silence of fingertips
draw words only skin may feel.

together we create the pages
to fill with the promises of spring.

mirage

the promise of water
is only a lie rising
from the road.
the memory of your skin,
a dream that fades
with the dawn.

as the mirage
will not quench my thirst
neither will the dream
let me feel the
pearlescent flame of your flesh
or taste the wine of your lips
the miles never bring the past closer

hours of darkness

when the night hangs heavy around your neck
the blackness coiling, an easy tightening of panic.
when sleep has fled and the last drops of peace
have long since evaporated.

each breath an ocean pulled across buried continents and
every memory a past that might have been.

do not lose your prayers to oblivion
give them to one you might touch
only flesh can save you

persistence

the spline of my fingers find
the hollows, a persistent torsion
against loss,
subtle gears winding a delicate intrusion,
a flower's primness out of season.
Small paper dreams
crumple and die in spring's convection.

the empty bones of loneliness
have pinioned my hearts
small bird,
wingtips trapped in the
soft crevices of a life's
shifting tectonics. An aborted
migration, innocent of flight.

host

I will shroud myself in your skin,
recite the blasphemies there
with a zealots mouth,
slipping in a few of my own.
my tongue an impenitent flail
on the livid bud of your flesh,
the softest lash to bind you to pleasure.
I will drink the wine of you, and feast on a banquet of desire,
your body the food my fingers feed upon.
you are parasitic, an inescapable hunger.
together there is oblivion, a carnal singularity,
an abandonment of loss.

emptiness

no atmosphere to house or
gravity to confine,
a freedom never known.

the stars have their own
way, but my breath
isn't slow enough to
know that solitude

careful of the warp and weft
I harvest sorrow in
the time growing in between.
contrails crossing my heart
as they disappear
over the horizon
weary of all the leaving.

holding out

I can hold beauty as I would light
my mouth over flowing with nothing.
a current of photons.
an electrical storm of regret
grounded in the past.
and still I shelter in your limbs,
a decrepit church of desire
that only leaves me
clothed in lightning rods
and emptier than a tomb

remorseless

because I have sinned
enough
there is no soft comfort
only the razor blades slow kiss
and the whispered truth of the leather
on skin that prays with
the devotion of a penitent.
the night comes hard
but contrition is only
a dream
in the naked mirror of loneliness.
safety comes with knowing
I have paid for
the seduction of hope

























Jel Ena

fools gold

tears decorate your face,
glitter and sequins
I would lick,
pull off the silver drops
with 100 proof kisses.
a showgirls smile
shines with the sparkle
of a fractured mirror.
I must of broke them all
to be stuck where
neon bleeds
in an incandescent night.


I hate myself enough to
accept your flesh.
A communion of sins and
warmth the desert won't give.
Let the lie be simple,
a story told in animal silence.

chemistry lost

bullets have been scraped
from our hearts,
the paper cuts of poems
have healed.
your skin no longer ignites
with the grinder sparks
my fingers throw,
ozone and heavy water
all we can do is drown.
a love cauterized by
silver nitrate
days

recessive

centrifugal movement is always away from the center,
physics demands leaving.

sundown, the pastel sadness
of a horizon failing.

night.

the moon shows,
a half round
glint in the slick
curvature.
the dream of countless stars reflected.
all pass, anchored elsewhere
arching into memory.

the crows,
small flecks of night,
call a slow atonement for the dreams.
the sun a bruise yellowing to another day,
already my eyes are blue

lost

1
discord held
in feathered fingers,
surface irregularities
lost,
an updraft of tension
embezzles dreams
from sleeps poverty


2
unaccustomed eyes
squint through arrogant light,
glimpses of intersections
lost through faithless
distance


3
loose change lips
mannered words,
purse strings
easily lost
in the couch with
any real change

afternoon

blue thread
tangles of cigarettes,
a scrim of smoke,
the incense of loss.
Hymns written on 80 proof
labels become emptier
as time refuses to pass.

lost amongst the stained
glass I would pray
if I had the money

crumbs

1
the blood flows
threads pulled from a heart
tangling into oblivion

like bird songs in a forest
not a path to remember
but crumbs of a wave
lost on the shore



2
the empty branches
an unsteady metronome
as the wind shakes
a few crumbs of snow
from the blanket of clouds

pastoral

my words are the hands
of empty arroyos,
fingers where
kindness slipped through,
not even the dampness
of a kiss to remember

my words know the
washboard stutter of a dirt road
getting closer to nowhere
but the thinness of the horizon

my words are the nail that strings the wire
between cedar posts, the wire
that cuts out the past, the wire that sections the future

my words carry
purple aster, fleas bane,
lambs tail, and tumble weed
the soft and the sharp
a crazy dust devil ripping
up sand, spreading seeds

my words whiten
in the silent glare of the sun
becoming less
but more obviously so

again

I would eat the last of the bread
to taste your fingertips again
to remember when you placed
their petals on my eyes
gentle as prayers
silent as the sun
I can't say anything
with a mouth full of crumbs
as your ghost keeps
walking out the door

your lips are remembered
in red smudges on crushed
cigarettes
a plastic reliquary
full of ash.
with a flare of recollection
I try to bring life back with your paper kiss
and feel you in my lungs
wrapped around my heart
poisoning my blood again

a language of prayers

golden pages scattered from a choir of trees
the whispered ghosts of a January morning
bright ribbons of promise on a recently green day
an answer of rain after the skies unyielding blue

fire of autumn

1

a home burns memories like calories
avaricious flames dance
timber bones become a charcoal skeleton
smoke rises like grief



2

a dopamine blaze rages
chemically consuming lives
while ash piles up behind eyes
and love fights for life
with smoke filled lungs



3

leaves smolder in yards
a smudge to fight off summer
and a prayer for winter to bring
his blanket and smother
the fires that consume us

put your hand on my neck

put your hand on my neck
feel the seismology
of muscle and tendon
the fragile tectonics
of whispers
and the metronomic
flow of blood

the coolness of your fingers
temper the inherent desert heat
as they record the tremors
of hidden prayers,
an archaelogy of desire.

I offer up my hands

If I offer up my hands
will you return them to me empty,
will you give me the smallest pebble of hope
so that when I curl my fingers
they close on more than emptiness?
will you give me a feather
or an empty robins egg,
dreams of sky to fill my hands?
if my hands tremble
will you still them with a song
sung into my palms
so that I might hear
through the movement of your lips?
will you give me driftwood
when my hands overflow with need,
a new tide to carry away
discarded desire?
if I offer up my hands
will you accept them?

the pious shuffle

the pious shuffle
through doors that offer
no access to sanctuary or
righteousness
whispered prayers and
mumbled hymns
hang in the air
the dieing breath of hope.
as a bribe for forgiveness
they take the coins from their eyes
and drop them in the basket
for the priest's wine
and bread

forest

sliding into the deep end of the forest
the air sighs like a lover
and parts to accepts me.
life barley blinks,
silence threatens
but the explosion doesn't fall.

they do not know it, but
the birds are the choir
to my baptism
with the dew gathered
from amorous clouds
kissing the trees

I am dappled and spectacular
a silver fish slipping
through the staccato sunlight
of a blue sky morning

time is the dance of shadows
around trees until the darkness
of starlight heralds
the nocturnal guard

wearing a robe of spider silk
and moss my footsteps learn
to whisper the prayers
hidden under the breath
of the forest.
And my heart an
ancient rhythm

desire

whispers of footsteps
and posionous preoccupations
tremble through bones
becoming more limestone
than living.
A growing desperation
sulks in the dark.
desire for destruction
takes root, thriving in the
abbreviation of time
in the blankness of empty bottles.

hands of the ocean

I want to wake up in the hands of the ocean
a child of a new medium,
salty kisses to wash away the sand
that has settled into my windward corners.
the sharpness of cactus
and tumbleweeds
replaced with the slippery green
of seaweed

let me feel the pull and release of the moon
as she plays with the water.

instead of the dirt devils driving
me to shelter with their shrieking
curses through windows and bones
give me the siren's song and its reasons
to seek a new destruction

death in translation

my voice is the knife that cuts
nights viscous surface
a brightness that reveberates
in the red shift of stars
and slides along the livid belly of the moon.

a breath of syllables.
whispers in the hallway of
dreams waiting
from the White Sea, a dead
language to haunt you

a subsonic heartbeat
of someone too far
away

the death of silence

the friction of dreams
treacherous touch paints
a slow dark fire along neurons
overgrown pathways
initiating the itch of desire

peeled lips plead for the
wine of a single kiss,
intoxication,
dialating the lust
in a million capillaries.

the death of silence is
palpable and slickly luscious
when hunger is echoed
in the flesh of another
ocean of want

lull

I'll pray the somnabulist's prayer
through green clay
fingers melting into a dream
that refuses release.
I seek the confinement of sleep,
the flattening of spectrums
with too many paths
decadent with promise
rusting on the vine
and the whitewash of hope
peeling to truth.

If you could offer
a small comfort
steal the stories from my eyes
with a quiet shh
of a kiss.
And sing me the song of your breath.

autonomic

at the slightest touch
I will flay the skin from my chest
and split open like some morbid flower
my fetid heart laid bare.
what kind of evolutionary response is this?

Oh, and here's a stick to poke at it

electron drift

words fall like tempered glass,
a busted chandelier insinuating
the refraction of gravity
as two masses combine

the strerility
of loneliness is rent,
a collision of desire,
flesh seeking flesh

silver nitrate kisses on skins
emulsion evokes a distended physics
of proximity and fire

passion zooms in on
a pin hole view of infinity,
a singularity

eventually entropy evolves
again

let go

pull all the paths
until attachments break
a thousand tiny spiders
flowing away
on the faintest prayers
of love and laughter,
a million raindrops
rising to the clouds,
an ocean of hope
evaporating into song,
a mustard seed
in the sun

























Jel Ena

salt

how could I have not sown salt
with my slow tides and
saline promises.
grace gave way to a curse
and the garden withered.

give me a small piece of shade
and I will wash the road
from your feet
my kindness might sting,
there are no saccharine kisses for
your weariness
but there is a boyancy
in the ocean of my blood

If you can protect me from the sun
I can offer coolness
a brief respite from the
currents of life

together we might make it
to another night to
shelter in the embrace of the moon

bones



give me your bones,
I will hollow them and
stuff them with clouds
heavy with implications of light
and colors of a sunrise.
I will redeem
the weight of dreams
that the night imposses,
and the humanness of always
wanting more
with the sparseness of the
winds whisper.
give me your bones,
and I will give you a feather
to fly

the desert is no place to forget

1

the desert is no place to forget,
memories bleach in the sun
and the jet blue sky only laughs.
A fervored wind
born of rocks
bears dirt devils.
Thunderheads rise up like gods
but they are only empty promises
to even emptier arroyos.


2

alcohol keeps the past lubricated
so it slides off my back,
a past lost among photographs of clouds
a past locked into boxes
but never put away
a past trapped on barbed wire
like so many tumble weeds


3

memories are dead bones bleaching
ever more brilliantly
under a relentless sky.
nothing ever goes away

can you

can you put your hand
the true one,
the one without the knife,
on my violet heart?
will you feel the sea
remember the storms
the bodies tossed
the souls lost?
green waves are
only sighs now
and a slow fog obscures
sea birds who morn the wind.
the tide doesn't care
since the moon lost her way.
what's left is a past
and a make believe future.

can you carve
a whisper of life into me?
you have the knife.
but is it subtle
enough to give something back
and keen enough to to take the blue?

I carry my prayers with me

I carry my prayers with me,
keep them under my tongue
in case I come across some god
that might listen.
I'm not looking for a hand out
but I am hungry for the fat
of my years to be gone,
for a sparseness where the
sun is no harpy.
A promise of snow that
is more than a lie the wind tells.
I need to be closer
to anyplace
a little further along this highway.





















Lara Dann - A Promise of Snow