Love or Whatever(Audio Version Included)

Art by Jen Bartel, @heyjenbartel on Twitter. Give her a follow, she's an amazing artist.

Music in audio is created by me. Also sorry for the poor quality.

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Lazuli

Okay I have 6 minutes to write a poem

I’ve been drinking

and truth be told I’m not entirely done.

Unfortunately, 

your distance makes me feel warmer 

as if the way you reciprocate

every other moon

brings more brightness

to the skies claimed 

under your name.

The way you bury yourself

rather than leave me to appreciate

the nuance of air

renders all wandersome thoughts

shovels, built into my wrists

the pulse of me

calling to your subsurface 

frequency.

Erupt

that I might again

say, “hello,

how is your morning 

and, beyond carving

lapis out of clouds,

how might I better

the stride of your soaring?”

Sunberry Touch

Embers fall from your eyes

as you blink away the shy flames

of our centered gaze.

 

Base intentions rise

quelled only by inner fountains

set to sprinkle on Saturday–

noon time, splintered sun tans,

tentative rays.

 

Campfire veins fail to cool

even as summers come to close.

Ample airings of argent hues

clenched, bark worn toes.

 

Speak with lips softened

by separate encounters

each time,

a step closer

to our shared heat.

 

Dancing tongues only know

so many steps.

We grew feet for a reason.

 

Remember the first time

the sun claimed your flesh as its own?

I fear the same of our first touch.

 

Burn me, afternoon lover

with the sunberry juice

of your blue sky brush.

Rusted Ribcage

Etched into the palm of time is a personal clock

ticking off each second

as it happens to pass

with individual volition.

Each finger, screwed back on

leaves the fist as creaky

as the release.

They don’t write much anymore 

but what can be certain

is the night with no moon

is favorable for those

who deny any sort of wrong doing 

in the face of atonement.

Seeking forgiveness 

must be everything 

opposite to selfish.

I do not want to feel better.

I deserve to be

chest deep 

in the manicured muck

of my own making.

I should have a tattoo

composed of January tears

and spring weather.

It will read,

“Love never knows best.”

The heart can pound 

against the walls of my

shale cage,

but it can never break free.

As such,

the hands must act.

As the heart beats blood

into the remorseful limbs,

creaking fingers must grasp

the iron handle of due servitude 

easing, as able,

the weight within 

other cages–

loosen rusted locks,

burn regretful seconds

tock, through to tick

cold as snow, soft as tin.

A Fault, a Seed

The flaw runs along the length

of my pale, clay and shale torso.

A tectonic fault

brought about by wanton weather patterns

iridescent shifts

fffin the eyes

fffin the palms

forgotten hymns remixed within

embalmed Toonami psalms.

 

I learned how to plant trees as a child.

Often they grew, thanking me for the soil.

You’d think, after years of building life by

filling spaces for the betterment

of the (immediate) world

I would know how to re-purpose a shovel,

I would know that one needs to add each single, solid, soft layer

of earth, of mineral, of sand and solar love

one at a god damn time.

All the way from the bottom

up through the star

hidden in the bridge of my nose.

 

Instead, I took a 2 dimensional spoon from some cartoon on the tube
and slammed it against the surrounding edges of my canyon
smiling at the delirious, dehydrated state of the being I was, laughing at the deepening, increasingly busted state of the psyche I toiled to correct.

Shrugging sunburnt shoulders and exclaiming, with no certainty and no care for it aside, “hopefully the dust settles such that all is well and fine, the hole is filled and once again we can think about sunshine, or perhaps even a solitary emotion rooted in more than air and empty arcs.”

Would you like to know why, dear writer, you will never be worthy of the sun? Of that last cup of water, of a kiss beneath a crimson blanket as the song you hate most plays and you forget to care about the overly crusted chorus?

No matter how long you spend dreaming up a field of molten love and distant skies fit to brim with salubrious storms, no matter how many drinks you can fit behind your glazed eyes before the night is done, and no matter how few times you say “I truly despise your character”, the smoke will always fall off of that same balcony beneath the same moon and it’s neighborhood stars.

Friendly?

Ah, but no one said friendly.

It was always assumed.

Your heart is gold and your hands are cold, Halsey.

But my heart is a weak and fearful sponge, and my hands are too recklessly uncreative to find a way to say anything better about that which pumps them full of purpose, second in and second out.

I know what you’re asking, dear writer. It’s what you always ask on nights like this. Nights where, you feel you’ve finally beat enough dust into the air to hide the fact that there even is a canyon anymore. A gap of any sort. One can hardly find an uneven surface, so long as they refrain from wincing.

“What do I do? How do I finally do it? Why am I still like this, even though I am no longer like that?”

I will never have an answer better than this. This. What you are doing. Actually thinking about helping and doing your best to go and go and go until there is some sort of brighter future on the horizon, for you, or for anyone really, to chase.

Keep going. Create the horizon. You know you want to because you keep looking at it, asking, pleading, knowing it will not answer. So make it answer. Create the horizon, and dye the storms with your eyes.

I cannot help with the canyon, however. I’m a poem, not a therapist. Get a therapist, and make sure they have the right kind of shovel–the short handle one with the nice plastic grip surrounding decent iron, the one you used to plant 100 trees in a single day. Let them toil away at you, as you toil at the world. Everyone needs help. Get help.

Get help so that you yourself can help. So that you yourself can finally, maybe, perhaps at last, sing the song buried at the bottom of your canyon, the one that needs good top soil reaching all the way to the surface. The one that yes, will then need water every single day after the hole is filled and yes, the one that will need sunlight from each separate dawn until the dawn’s respective end and yes, mulch that will not simply be tossed away by the next alcoholic breeze.

You want to finally sprout? You’d like a tree that means something? A day where you finally feel worthy of a kiss, of sweet songs written with the quills of the moon?

Soil. Water. Sun. Mulch. Love.

Love throughout.

Love instead.

Love even so.

Love, in rest.

Now play me out with the droopy notes threatening to end the concert of your eyelids earlier than expected. There are jobs to do that tired folk should not be doing.

photo credit to lunacameo

Crush

Riddle me with your incomplete sentences.

Crease the last letter
you thought to leave beneath
the mattress
a secret admirer
only found between
changed sheets and
fingers tipped with
daydreams
afternoon interlude,
faded release.

Face me like a heart.
Open and close at the rate
of bus fare handed
to the driver who
sees you run
and stops to
tie your shoes into
a fatherly knot.

Give me the soul of your last sleepless night.
Pour it slowly into my cup
such that I can smell each yawn and
caress every droplet of the words you

only sell to yourself.

I know.
It is worrisome
to let it drum
bit by bit at the bottom of the glass
moments stretched, bare,

uncut grass.

How are you to know
I’m not just another mower
hired to snip at your growth, or
step carelessly on
your most closely held
solar?

I am the breeze.
I want to feel each feather of you
bent, perfect, blessed or pressed thin, overgrown, under rested. Tied and left in backroad gardens, exposed and erased, rewritten in jargon.

The way you fly…
I sing it.

I could write to you
every summer melody and
pardon my reality
the simple rain and drought of green
It will never render me

water,
but dive in–
dream.

Summit Rose(a Rewrite)

Bring me back
to your blue sheets.
Teach me red.

Your collarbone is a roadmap
upon which my fingers could
scout out every landmark
sending the coordinates
to my mouth.

Create a single night
with me.
Let us both collide
maybe
the stillness of your feet
will fall away
at the whispers underneath
your neck.

I
can sing to you
with nothing but my tongue
inciting
harmony
deep within
your stomach
notes strolling casually
up through the throat
greeting your hot breath
as you decide
to allow the refrain
a taste of its own
chorus.

First of course
those legs of yours.
One hand remains free and
bought tickets
to your knee.
Those fingers have been dying to hike
the snow covered summits
leading below
the single rose
where symphonies are strung along
by tongue as well as tone.

Your hips are
begging to be
jailed by palms and tips
as crescent locks and keys.
Suddenly there
isn’t air
it’s pressed from you
the petalcrest blooms
filled
with a new warmth
refreshing like sunlight
rigid as river stone.

Dear,

walk me to your window.
The breeze will cool
the sunset pools
fit to simmer
beneath the tresses
of heavy lashes
as starlit sighs grow dimmer.

Ember eyes,
burn me away
so I might live again
to douse you
with the songs
of “stay”.