dime bones

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These marks of longing. Skin less like cacao,

flesh washed to the root, succulent like crab.

 

Mother of sorrows, I collect them now.

The way others collect scars on skin, scabs.

 

The way others collect loss. This is how myth

is made. Not from scars but from what wont heal.

 

Not from a bag of dime bones and a fifth

but from this. Rankle. Putrefy. Rot squeal.

 

This and these. I collect. But I won’t show

you. Sleaze tease. I won’t show where I ooze,

 

levee-like, flood seeping around the seams.

Mine is all that the body spits out. Slow.

 

Steady. Hard. Myth of loss. Myth of the blues.

Fleshed ooze. Too dazed. To cut. To joy. Flesh screams.

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quote unquote

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Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long forgotten snow.

“Let It Be Forgotten,” Sara Teasdale

bacchanal

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Strange change, indeed. Who am I to question?

I’ve come late to the gate; dank with withered

 

grass and shade. Debauchery is foreign

here and deprave one more forgotten word.

 

A touch of burlesque. Silent movies thrill.

Theda Bara’s voracious eyes promised

 

teeth in your flesh, nails down your back, the chill

of sharp ice countered with hot wax. Encrust

 

me. Trust me. Be my scab. I’ve yet to be

stared at the way she stared. Shadow and bow.

 

Gloom puts the rage into umbrage, anal

into bacchanal. I’ve followed many

 

wheel ruts through blown stone not once asking how,

searching for your sun’s night, your sparkle’s skull.

come quick

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If you must disappear, love, trust the trees.

Take the mojuba bag I made for you.

 

Fill it with stretching salt, morning glories,

Lady Marinette’s Bwa Chech root. Make do

 

with trees that love you. Follow the skylark

to my land of witchcraft and sodomites.

 

If you are seen remember: be oak bark,

be leaf and vine. Be still. This hex, these rites,

 

you’ve done this before. Just get out. I’ll wait

for you. Signs will come my way. Always do.

 

I want you safe. I want you before fear

rises, rain hisses in the leaves and hate

 

knocks on your door — I have faith in you.

Travel light now, love. Come quick. Disappear.

from, “childe harold’s pilgrimage,” by lord byron

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  And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
  Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
  Borne like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
  I wantoned with thy breakers — they to me
  Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
  Made them a terror — ’twas a pleasing fear,
  For I was as it were a child of thee,
  And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane — as I do here.

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“fish food,” by john wheelwright

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As you drank deep as Thor, did you think of milk or wine?
Did you drink blood, while you drank the salt deep?
Or see through the film of light, that sharpened your rage with its stare,
a shark, dolphin, turtle ? Did you not see the Cat
who, when Thor lifted her, unbased the cubic ground?
You would drain fathomless flagons to be slaked with vacuum
The sea’s teats have suckled you, and you are sunk far
in bubble-dreams, under swaying translucent vines
of thundering interior wonder. Eagles can never now
carry parts of your body, over cupped mountains
as emblems of their anger, embers to fire self-hate
to other wonders, unfolding white flaming vistas.
Fishes now look upon you, with eyes which do not gossip.
Fishes are never shocked. Fishes will kiss you, each
fish tweak you; every kiss takes bits of you away,
till your bones alone will roll, with the Gulf Stream’s swell.
So has it been already, so have the carpers and puffers
nibbled your carcass of fame, each to his liking. Now
in tides of noon, the bones of your thought-suspended structures
gleam as you intended. Noon pulled your eyes with small
magnetic headaches; the will seeped from your blood. Seeds
of meaning popped from the pods of thought. And you fall. And the unseen
churn of Time changes the pearl-hued ocean;
like a pearl-shaped drop, in a huge water-clock
falling; from came to go, from come to went. And you fell.
Waters received you. Waters of our Birth in Death dissolve you.
Now you have willed it, may the Great Wash take you.
As the Mother-Lover takes your woe away, and cleansing
grief and you away, you sleep, you do not snore.
Lie still. Your rage is gone on a bright flood
away; as, when a bad friend held out his hand
you said, ‘Do not talk any more. I know you meant no harm.’
What was the soil whence your anger sprang, who are deaf
as the stones to the whispering flight of the Mississippi’s rivers?
What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?
Did it make you drunken with hearing?
I will not ask any more. You saw or heard no evil.

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“they say the sea is loveless,” by d.h. lawrence

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They say the sea is loveless, that in the sea

love cannot live, but only bare, salt splinters

of loveless life.

But from the sea

the dolphins leap round Dionysos’s ship

whose mast have purple vines,

and up they come with the purple dark of rainbows

and flip! they go! with the nose-dive of sheer delight:

and the sea is making love to Dionysos

in the bouncing of these small and happy whales.