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PixieI never had enough faith in you,
my best postmodern pixie friend,
who presses herself against my shoulder
killing her fall with leaning.
You taught me something new
about anxiety today:

   how to wake
up when it's morning, how to miss
dactylic illness with the parched
indelicacy of a crinkled sun.
In the eternal rendition you say
your name is always in the vocative
   case, and only vocative:

says the girl
who taught a smaller girl to sing,
a girl of thirteen, with the same
nimble character we shared, the same
calderical eyes we shared.

   The girl's voice
tumb

a poem about driving in pennsylvaniaI'm driving west and at the state line all I can see
are canvases of steaming light waiting to be painted
in the brushstroke forest that lies like a crescendo
across the reservoir where the grass washes over our ankles
and my eyes will never open so wide again.
June 12th had all the markings of a fine poem:
thick music scattering lights to the night city
reflecting in the same warm cadence of breezes
and your head resting on my bony shoulder.
You asked me with such sweetness if you could read my poems,
but please don't leave me with my love, with the cats
spilling out of your arms into the contaminated water
of taking in the divin

ConduitsWould you like to see a sea
of edges with me? would you
like to see it crimsoned—

would you like to set my neglected appointments
with fear to stir midair
as lobotomies—

        Laborious we crept across the scoop,
genitival woods throttled with catches,
terrene skin blinked to its customary blankness.
Still it surprises me what man can't tell me:

        I look warm expecting me to make a home out of his elbow

        that maternity can't linger inside me

one with othersit's been a week
only since the grey & white bramble-
ing winter tree branches made us a temple
in a high-contrast morning, mechanical songbirds
such metronomical solidarity that it's incomprehensible,

if the men and women
who mean soul to me now could have known
or would know about this would it have changed
you love me because I'm always spinning,
the sunlight's in the pit of my stomach,
the ocean in the wisps of my hair you know that

if fate means it has been said—
that there can be such radiance within a bursting shell
I find it somewhat clarifying, reaffirming

Earl greyAll over campus they speak the squeamish poetry:
all is one, and she is my romantic friend.
She is the earth that spun
you into my inverted winter. It's unfamiliar.
There's nothing so sweet as centripetal motion,
I heard you say, and I have been missing you,
missing the lattes lined up with the hours,
missing the smiles, my only glimpses
into the rare universe behind your eyes.
the space between our tired hands
that grows smaller as the spring closes in.

When we're alone together all I want is to wrap my arms around your shoulders but you can never know that

and here we go, I'm returning to who I am,
quiet, self-destr

Compartmentalizing is how I get processed
out of her staticky poems

when she wakes in a tree-womb
of elastic things being digested,

a pulsating room of sparks
blown up for a meager flame

like her kinked stray hairs
backlit by the morning;

a methodical recollection,
a stirring together

of lime juice and basil seeds
into carbonated water.

SiderealI spend every day in this planetarium life watching false stars.

TechneIn language dry and emblematic I will follow you, my thought, to wherever you may take me, though the road be dusted with thorns, until the gentle, roseate gleam of the afternoon sunlight falls upon the wall of my conscience, giving it color. The idea of replenishment remains why I draw such delight out of measuring your light with these cautious formulas, these verbal hypotheses. I hope to someday say, "I have had plenty," but for now, there is no love that can distract me from the pressures induced by my false word, my runaway continence, the unseen blemishes that are self-inflicted. My thought reminds me: I will live by my measure alone, s

World of floods.

Driving on the curb cured of swamplands and horizontals
my atmosphere dear takes wholesome bites of water
outed are the undersides of bridge smudged chasms
birdy hellcalls and undone song
he knows only fire pursues the winged
torn letters three years gone of the antediluvian
disintegrated into charm and clarity and the promise
of a moment in time that springs everlastingly
will be flooded

and the pulmonary one ways dripping varied shades of moving cars
in fresh killed greys keeping time with the hacks of self against love
while our hands are crossed in universes pleading
with the dying that cannot slow down but winds and wi

To hell with good intentionsGod, I'd give it only
four out of five stars,
because.

.

More + more this life
depends on how to get away
with
lying

to dimension's snapping fingers,
to time's elegiac movement,

for when time moves at all,
she lies to us with grace.

(Once time was
quieted by his shoulders,
drugged out on the changes.)

.

Why can't I open
my eyes
wide enough
to drink
it all in?

Why

can't you keep their lilac hearts from bursting, my love?

The carbon cycleThere's nothing I can do to keep the stars we counted fusing forever.
I can't channel nature's charming elegance
into a single point, as the great poets do.
I can't live on burnished wheat alone.
So I built myself a house out of the remnants
of this bluish dreamscape that last spring's
nuclear explosion sullied but couldn't sear.
It took such a surreal asterism for me to see
that a window is just a stripped wire.
Through the slanted glass, I can watch
the sea fall into the declining horizon,
the church of destruction, and feel afraid.

Your hand touches my shoulder:
One day the stardust inside of us
will rediscover its will to

TorchesI met my best friend in the hospital where

he told me that the most dangerous illusion is that freedom
can come back screaming once
it's lost & as we got older our Fugazi mornings became claustrophobic midnights willing each other manic under the pining
of the carbon monoxide detector, pretty lushly taking
the humanest cancers, the causal
parallaxes our identical allergens, his god being bigger than
my god since he could pay the beats off in this cosmic experiment, where Lazarus became the first
fascist for making death real on the corollary,
taking me for a spin in religion's Ferrari with the post-hardcore dawn

quadrantidsyou wake up early & the dawn tells
you what the neutrinos mean

and with a sickening crunch
your tarnished shade climbs to the underground,
the creationists' thinktank of pianosong & sorrow

where the lifeblood is a barricade
where the lethargy tastes fine & becomes addictive
where the children have cosmic dreams instead of memory
where you're with me like you were supposed to be

and all the collective setting suns
can't bring darkness upon the light you give me

ConfluenceAccording to the old religion, a scribe
must bathe in natural running water
before she draws what is dictated to her,
because writing's just like cleaning a mirror,
she says, it's like rearranging stains
left on wholesome rivers. For three nights,
I drew geometric shapes in the margins;

I had been instructed to take notes on
the underside of snow, and how it colonized
the lithosphere, musically and without hurt.
It felt like a call, but it wasn't a calling.
The paper was made in Himalayan foothills
by a woman who had cleansed knots from fibrous bark
and dipped her bleached hands into boiling water.
I mangled the page into a cottage, then

Here in springIf fatigue could grind down
cosmic energy in the center
of the universe
and in your center

like you are
grinding nutmeg and cinnamon
onto your cappuccino,

stirring
the little cup of storm
with your bent spoon

and eating raw walnuts
with the poet
tumbling

out of the person
in sportive vapors,

this is
what has mesmerized you
to me: being wrapped up

entirely
by the silhouette of your
coming and going,

nurturing the pearl
you have broken off of
a universal necklace,

your button picked off
of the universal sweater
draped around my shoulders

when we tour the little towns
that stand over the Hudson
like haloed hallucinations.

I would h

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The swerveI tore my flesh on the corner of the lake & bled in cubes

and my best friend knew the weight of my green eyes and tried to sell them
and the spring left me heavy in my skin and the air she breathed me
tasted of umami and B12 and water. I drank it all in just like water

and began the aviary process of collecting budding groves and early springs.
you came to me with eyes like empty jars begging for sparks

and the hundred scraps of paper of pretty lies in pretty cursives,
the firefly wings and peonies and ocean salts and river rocks
and you were the first one capable of rustling the dead leaves
at the creek floor, so those went in, too.

Of solace sleeping in today was the essence,
waking up the process of becoming singular

.

I want to end it
but I can't stop associating you with these images—
: a season being flung onto the ocean, making a mess of color

.

there's an insect caught in my poetry,
trying to mend its broken wing

.

Your reminder:
the exhaustion's relative & it never comes too late

.

: blinks of cartoon sunrises & twenty-pointed, starry eyelashes

.

m

HeartmindWe lost electricity on the night you left me
and I spent the night curled up against the rain,
drinking in the slack of damp green winds
in our treasured driftwood home of mist.
I had to come to think of time
as a medium and my thoughts as
imperfect and cursive. It was a wrinkled medium,
a mediocrity of sunken breath: words condensing
into droplets that so contorted my teary lenses
that I couldn't tell that you were turning towards me

with a sound, the sound a book makes
when its leaves are rustled against the grain.
Tonight my body lingers on the edge of the ocean
like a gasp; New Jersey's throaty highways
bear my rosefelt thou

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Recitation

by *archelyxs, Sep 4, 2012, 10:55:11 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

His blessing: may your affection waver limbically
above the quiet water to not become love. May your

loving voice be the death that begins to spill out
twenty years before it's completed in pebbles.

He lets them sprout before he gets attachy,
and from the inside of the soil the meek flicker

collects its heartpieces of seed, and shoots
into lascivious greens on the sill. A little

like the swarthy flowers that cover over the structure
of my fingers: mossy and flightless. Supraffective

sighing is the only song this lyric makes,
pining for the emery and empathy

of lighthouse scatter, a getting of lavender,
a gathering of metaphor, the amalgamation of

starting over by the river. The letter ks
finding hearthsound between a and the. For me

the standard's always losing, a giving
to the molar swish, the words contained

in word, a holy shelter: the regression
bending fractals ever for the ends

begin at within, not at the heroic withering
of love's voice down into pragmatic wind.

Much like tragic, inward affection,
this drawn-out chorus of being friends.

240

11 3 5

Recitationby *archelyxs

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Move-in week at college, lots of absence. First poem in a while, first rhyming poem in much longer.

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Submitted on: September 4, 2012
File Size: 1.3 KB

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`dreamsinstatic Sep 7, 2012 Professional Writer

Your fantastic work has been featured in Friday Night Features.

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*archelyxs Sep 7, 2012

Thank you!

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`dreamsinstatic Sep 15, 2012 Professional Writer

You're welcome.

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