[x]

the machine unmaking melearn me this way: scour
my flesh from these iron
bones. the drums tense in me, stretched
and languid with unspeaking.

listen: it is the still
before grasping. it is hands on hammers:
this clamorous, unthinking birth.

(the architect sleeps
in me still, skin-daughter of raucous
stumbling, this span
of lung to life. my blood
runs heavy with noise.)

learn me this way: your jaw
opening my bones with the patience
of coffins. i have spent my growth,
this upward twisting of mind and sinew,

to meet you--to know my tongue flush
with the language of godhead,
your skull printing my skies,
a bloated marble sun.

prayers from the back pageslove,

you do not know
that you have built me
a gospel,

song bent from frantic
shale, beckoning.  love,
you do not know

what it is i have done
without you;

of the way i have paced
these white shores
to deafening; the way i

have slept, alone,
with sand grown into my
tongue.

you have seen me this:
a dislocated curling.  you
have watched me sweat fire

and spit ashes and cradle
myself to home, that cold mouth
as i wake, and i

have known myself only blessed
with sinking.

love, i have been reaching.  gone back,
back, until my flesh teemed
with primordial oceans, and now,

at last, i am more
than a beggar's promise.  i

a

distance songwalking is not walking any
longer. every footstep
like a fist pounding
on your door.

this winter expands
its lungs with faltering,
and over, and again, i pierce
your memory: this silence
that conquers. you, my unreachable
eloquence: i am here, painting
my remnants with blind swaths
of music.

(sing the mind found itself
anew, another. sing this sleep, your hands
imagining circles
over me.)

walking is not walking
any longer. it is waiting
for trains, those dark prophets,
to color us with passing. it is away
becoming toward: nearer,
nearer. it is sound moving against
the close.

undoing usgilded, i
am unravelling. you
are marking questions
on my spine
again, bright storms
that ripen my blood
with fever.

the body is a language
that learns
itself. i know its salt
tender with shape. your body,
these cords of breathing:
this tide to which i
am shore.

my skin, open,
the pale stroke
of your releasing,

oh, lover,

i am watching you
unmake yourself
inside
of me.

erasuredeath is in me now,
the machine's frostbitten
ache. please, believe this:
there is no sky melting
inside my mouth.

oh, bones, you soft wrecks
of starfire:
you too are nothing more
than the sweat on
a fitful god's brow,

straining like blackbirds
in sleepless flight.

i have been walking our oceans againhere, these nights bruise
dark with wondering, and i feel
you in beds you have never
known. here, there are places
in me taken with thirst, and i
have learned, by your music,
to forgive them.

i think you now: your spires
of absent motion, and, buried
in the folds of reaching, i name
myself home. i think my promise,
smouldering in the cathedral
of my bones; oh, love, bless me
with the ruin
of my senses--

let me light the candles
of your spine: your face, a quiet
turning; let me call for you
to break in me like tide;

let me write redemption
on the small of your back; sky
drenched open, ripe
in the orchards
of our risin

sing me obliviondon't laugh, i
am praying again. these
hands, cupped like rooftops, drumming
like rain.

i will speak myself into
your bed, where your space lies, drunken
bowl of stars. fingers opening
southward,

now closed again,
now beating. heart, hands; arrhythmia,
this brief red gasping, heavy
with tiny knots of ocean--

now over me. over me like god.

you heard me praying
once. that sifting song, back
and forth, and the unknowing shale of me,

falling through.

why i will not be silentthere is a hunger so deep it speaks,
so wide it trembles. i know only this: my body
was not given to me so that i might sink
into it like a coffin, let it wither,
uncarried. this machine did not press
its dark handprints upon me
so that i may cloak my skin
with doubting. my tongue is brittle,
my hands, foreign beasts,
and with this alone, i play
at reaching.

oh, my speechless ones, a sieve
of voices too precious to soothe. steep me
with heat, stopper me with dancing. sing me
the living i have yet
to believe.

ode to an imaginary friendyou came like an old friend,
watching,
waiting

thought i'd forgotten you, whirlwind black-eyed lonely child
tears in your eyes music in your soul space between your
ribs

warm in mornings, soft in nights
a feather bed for your troubles
plaid sleeping bags for the nights you can't bring yourself to lie down on the couch in the stuffed-up air between my arms

long live glory, long live night,
long live popcorn and hot chocolate and blankets and radiators
and a spot in front of the fireplace when the pilot light goes out

white-twig fingers child,
breath in winters
breath in chairs

breath in hallways, under stairs

and you in the we

water processspirit-sloth and overdone;
wonder-lost and undercome:
still.
you are trenchant, sweet love.

you planted early mornings-
I lay coffee-drunk and thin;
oh,
the stir of your brown hands.

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.

over-extensionhere i am cultivating my little garden of lonelies
a sponge, a chair, a shoulder

here i am with a wad of cotton batting, filling up my cadre of empties
line you all up on the shelf in the back of my head
pull you off and hey, lovely, how are you today?

how was the test the date the hospital the visit to the morgue
did you panic did you leave him did you hurt yourself
are you all right?

here i am lab doctor of chemistry far away, drugging up my
one-and-onlies

abscesstruth is,
i am afraid to lose him
like the tide does the moon

1939my skin is colored
like the crescent
moon.

sometimes i wonder
if maybe my bones
were rolled in ashes
i would be
a more fitting
shade

my hands have
never mimicked the sun
in elliptical shadows, my
chest is not
the dark reminder
of my soul

my skin is silk
and honey, milky lines
crossing the floor

mocking
the midnight hands as they drape
my body
over this bed.

twelvehe has a rabbit's heart;
a hemic race
with one touch

his
heels are thumping
like the ventricles
in his chest &

his mouth moves

in rough whimpers, but

all this boy wants
is somebody to
love.

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what it would say, a map from here to enough.you step into the dark with as much
as you can carry. climb heavy
into the smoggy stroke of night. pack up
the city tongues, half-spoken garden
of promises, pleading. hope baptized
in a suitcase of northern air.

and now. after everything. you exhale
on the backs of your hands, warm yourself
into leaving again. exhale, out
into the cold: breath stopped, reaching, hanging
everywhere. too much, the ice growth
between arrival and abandoned. too much,
the work of returning. pitted fact of it. a brutal strain.

pack up the city tongues. those lights
in the breath, heat-spangled echo of night.
move from yourself into yourself. wash
yo

syrinxstep now into the vanishing pool. turn up alive and writhing under some other stone, some other riverbank flush with reeds. bone-lyre tuning itself in the ripening swell of moonlight; i am picking my strings in time with its breathing, that week-long lunar inhale, then out again, a single smallening lung.

remembering prayer, that salty thing on my lips as i bent to kiss the sea. make me different; if i am to survive this, make me different. i will leave my skin to curl on this shore before i will learn to call it by any other name. and the tide bent its heavy legs over mine and whispered lover, i will carry you, carry you just far enough. i

november, you are gone. what i am becoming withoutlumbering agent of displacement. forgotten radio
transmissions tuned out, turned
under. disuse in my pores and a oily noise
on everything i touch. trace time
in circles around your palms. irrational otherness
of my limbs in the dark, my shape in the cold.
fire on, light out. sunset slides fingers
down my back, laughs, refuses
to be poetic. sleep, and you move
your empty mouth
against my dreams. ambient
nonsense. accident of unemerging
beauty. silence has turned me inside
out.

renaming the garden(what they should have told me
when i found myself born
into the curved lungs of woman—) your breath
will be taught its names ripe
with sin. choked out of eden
a blue circling cartography
of veins, scorched earth, salt-pitted fields.

you will bloom yourself
a kettle steeped in fire, and inside, the water
churning. a reflection of a reflection; kneel
inside your mirror-house
of limbs, brimming herb-bitter, asking—

my body knows itself a retreat,
a resurrection. takes you in: pores
and ripened dusk, blue
cartography of wrists in shadow.
a nothing of pieces, a piece
of nothing. and here, i beg you:
learn its secret names,
and my

what you write when your fire spills its darkbundle it up, lift it,
this sticky sweetness
of being; lift, grapple,
sway; these
are your arms, something
they are worth; now spilling,
now song, an infinity
of notes, of sweating marble bones--

listen. i am calling up names
to the witness stand of my disassembly.
speak now. gather up these fistfuls
of sonorous unease, this tipped vase
of unbecoming: exhale. cradle
your mouth until it blooms.

(we are here at the back of the raft
and kicking. bruises floating
off our feet like god.)

sex poemgive me inward by any other name. (apologies again. my tongue is a broken hinge, loud closing and opening with these over-again footsteps, their nightly moving-through.)

give me your body wrung between breath and stone. frictional heat of opposition; leap the synapse from grace to need. (you will apologize again, brutal decadence of forgetting heavy in your tide, but no, but no. your bone-shapes rising in the dark are my only believing.)

these drowned hands. folding war dances from ghost to ghost.

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to love me

by *i-am-a-bridgewalker, Jan 4, 2012, 12:26:26 AM
Literature / Poetry / Romantic / General / Free Verse

to love me, here is what
you must do.

let me make of myself a mask
with three faces.  let me speak
to you this way, a careful
toe-over-toe turning, but do not listen.
gentle me slowly, slowly, until at last
i unzipper this piston pageantry
and step outside: my body
a tender blue frothing of breathspun
metal.  let me fly to you, unborn,
unbecome, unopened. believe me only
when i am not worthy of believing.

claim me.  wrap me into your fires before
i sleep again. violence me
softly, softly: cleave my spine
under the clamoring of your need.
wear me beaten.  wear me holy.  stare
into the machine that lingers
at my throat, that heavy
precious theiving, and refuse
to deliver me into its mouth.

.

to love me, here is what
you must do.

you must look upon me at last--look
and do not turn--as i peel every
stammer of heat from my flesh, peel
away every quietness you have given me, every
mouthed secret, every croon of belonging--

watch me disrobe myself of humanity, slow
and even as hydraulic lungs,

and love me, barren, still.

to love meby *i-am-a-bridgewalker

Literature / Poetry / Romantic / General / Free Verse

if this doesn't convince you guys that I have no idea what I'm doing, I don't know what will.

~~love 0 0~~

joy 2 2

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

*staphysagria Feb 26, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

Oh, dear, how beautiful this is.

*i-am-a-bridgewalker Apr 18, 2012 Student Writer

<33 thank you!

~IceMoon-Wraith Jan 6, 2012 Student Writer

"and love me, barren, still."

Oh, my. I can't even say how much this line affected me.

And about not knowing what you're doing? None of us ever do. It's not about knowing, and following the path laid by others before. It's about the feeling, and showing your audience the twist behind your sternum.

*i-am-a-bridgewalker Jan 6, 2012 Student Writer

= ) glad to hear it!

(and you're probably right. I secretly suspect that most artists are fumbling around in the dark and trying to music their way out by texture alone.)

~IceMoon-Wraith Jan 31, 2012 Student Writer

Oh, I haven't had internet lately, and I read the original comment and that line, and it STILL AFFECTS ME D: even without the whole poem behind it. Off to read that poem again.

I know that feeling your way is better than knowing your way. Knowledge is fantastic in many ways, but it's the emotions and the feeling that brings passion and wonder into art. When you ask artists how they wrote something, or painted something, or whatever, the answer's usually exactly the same: "It just came to me." Beethoven didn't sit down and work out Clare de la Lune, he just sat down, felt it, and wrote it. If we can master the ability to tap into our subconscious, the emotion behind what we write, and learn to let that flow through us, I think that there would be many more pieces out there that their authors aren't second-guessing the structure, or the rhythym, or whatever else. They would look, and read, and feel.

`thetaoofchaos Jan 5, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

you are absolutely convincing ... but it is not that you have no idea what you're doing.

*i-am-a-bridgewalker Jan 5, 2012 Student Writer

I really really really don't. (every once in a while I do and then I forget all over again.)

~ClioStorm Jan 5, 2012 Student Writer

this is quite extraordinary

*i-am-a-bridgewalker Jan 5, 2012 Student Writer

goodness, thank you. = )

~chadwood Jan 5, 2012 Writer

wow - very powerful work.

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