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PallorI cried myself sane and then
moved on. How strange, that a man
can split open like a rotten peach and find,
at last, nothingness. How strange to realize:
only then can sunlight enter his veins.

Death dissolves us. Nothing has changed
but everything is different. I spend an hour
pressing my fingers against a wall, the skin
whitening as blood retreats.

There is no regret, no fear. Only a man
who whitens against his final four walls,
the empty chair, the selfish and wandering grief.
Only a man whose face slowly unravels and the way
I wash my face, make dinner, let myself forget.
AlterAllow me just this:
your hand
my hand
separate.

1.
I fell into a deep forest. My femur
put forth roots. I did not say: oh Lord,
take me from here
like Rebekah, this is another
barrenness.

My mouth remained resolutely
closed. The moss
grew over me,
in me.

Oh Lord, I am scared.

2.
Mother is reading, brows
at half mast. In the kitchen,
Father organizes sardines
on crackers. Home means
this soft quietude.

Five thousand six hundred
miles away, I am watching a donkey.
It stumbles on three legs; the fourth
is loosely curled, like a child's fist.

There are wild dogs in the fields beyond,
waiting. I am a dog, waiting.

3.
SoftThe rain comes in
from the mountainside

and the musculature
quietens. The birds, the beasts,
the slanting cliff,

the light, the restless
hollowed emptiness,

the bits of lava and bits
of heartbeat and bits of
racing animal mind.

It quietens.

The rain comes in like a slow blink.
StillHe was waking or he was falling asleep, neither, both at once. This was a dream. This was the only thing he had ever known. It made no difference, he trailed his own body like ripples after a rock, smoothing and breaking and smoothing again.

His feet moved tirelessly, without thought. No longer human, only the Walk was real. For minutes, or for months; time was fluid and distant. Walk.

He broke and a low mountain pulled him forward. Smoothed. Broke into flatlands, into shallow water. Into the evening, into the weak dawn.

Smoothed, back into the soft yellow lights behind his eyes. Walk.

****

He was not alone. This thought came from his bo
The Loss of PeaceSophia learned early on to spread her studies over different usernames, to use them a few times and then abandon them for weeks at a time, never researching long enough to send up red flags. At the beginning she’d only used her own login, looking up school subjects and then going deeper, doing searches for terms she didn’t know.

It was a cyclical endeavor. Every new document she read brought up more questions, more searches, more questions. In this way she transitioned from division, to the history of numbers, to Pythagoras, to Ancient Greece, to democracy, to war, and so on.

War was still one of the strangest concepts she had c
FeetCartographers, yes
and water

But above all
we have
hands,
hands that sometimes
do nothing at all

but gather
crazy cursive
explosions

This
takes away
our wings

gives us
a better kind
of freedom.
To-Do ListLove is lust's
anticlimax.

Tomorrow I will sneak out
like a child, abuse a
stranger, pretend to be
a whore on the sidewalk.

And I will say to teenagers:
bare your scythén-teeth
while you can, you poor
goddamn Cronuses.

I will swallow a stone
and throw it up again, cast it
behind me. It will be
nothing more and likely less
than a childhood.

I am the anticlimax
to myself.
Speaking of Sacrifice "You should have potatoes with your dinner tonight, Jill."

"Peter, I recommend these fruit snacks to keep your cholesterol low."

"Remember your husband will be at a business dinner. A single portion of salmon will do."
Tom stared bleakly at the tower of cauliflower, his shopping basket heavy in his hand. The supermarket echoed with tinny, synthesized voices. "I hate cauliflower."

The light weight around his neck shifted, the small slanted head coming into the edge of his vision. "Cauliflower is very good for you."

"I really, really hate it, Ticker."

"Yes, I am aware."

He lowered the basket and lifted his arm in front of him. His
PlateletI wanted to tell you: my spirit
guide is coagulation. Stars put
a stop to the dead black

bleed of sky. Let me be
this holding-back.

And I am sticking to
the sticking place. And I am
bloodied by war. And love, I have
found in you a hard edge.
Newspapering and Postcards1.

Yellowed autumns crinkled under thumb
as I picked away at language long lost
depicting us on a boat run.

I was stuck in an infinite regression-
memories twisted and turned and
denoted turbulence of last excursions.

The authorship is creased,
writing spirals into
regressive loops.

2.

I have come back from the end of the world,
accompanied by the sounds
of a soft murmur and the ever-pressed newspaper clippings
of an expeditions trek into an October breeze.

It was of a black winter morning I returned to the sights
of London north, the besmeared and hazed brickwork
embracing the steam coddled galley of our
sea-ferry.

Off
SometimesDigital stars make neon scars in the night,
and we are imagining the feeling of sometimes being alive,
and sometimes being in love.

Magazine dreams rip at the seams in the light,
and we are imagining the feeling of sometimes being in love,
and sometimes being alive

Bright coloured cars start highway wars in plain sight,
and we are imagining the feeling of sometimes being alive,
and sometimes being in love.

Tasting the sounds as the ocean pounds against moonlight,
and we are imagining the feeling of sometimes being in love,
and sometimes being alive.
Only as Old"Frail bones predict what fragile minds can't detect,"
He trailed off slowly, "And my bones are achin'."
The air around me hung low and depressed,
Sticking to the back of my throat like a stormy syrup
I'd tried to swallow down.

I peered out the kitchen window
And caught an inklet of patched-over-grey sky;
I wondered what was in store for the day.

Impartial to the gloom outside, we stepped out onto the back porch;
Grandpa wobbled out with his cane in hand and we waited.
In the hushed stillness the trees traded birds—
Robins, swallows, whippoorwills, and cardinals.
If you squinted hard enough at the sullen shrubbery,
You could
starcrossedand we sailed

in sinking ships

on borrowed tides

'neath starless skies

[i wonder, love,
why we never made it home.]
lakelightsi.
tonight
the lake drank what was daylight,

      what's now just boats whirring
      and going blind

and pale sand        trying to close its eyes.

the waves come in
like dogs,
falling as they run,

almost howling,
upset
as if the earth were spinning too fast

and creating them
only by leaving them behind.

ii.
tonight
i am east of the entire world.

unsmiling, unaware,
everything makes me.

it's okay,
watching how the boats
are only ever halfway in the water.

iii.
the lake trembles,
learns to open,
to remain skinless
NaPoWriMo 5--9April 5th, 2012

It was the unearthing of everything.
The wind was bestial
and hungry,  
it stripped away.

I left the window open.

It meant nothing.
It meant nothing at all.

April 6th, 2012

There is nothing left
to be said so we
say it.

Outside,
the birds and beetles
eat each other.

April 7th, 2012

When outgrowing yourself,
as hermit crabs do,
go down to the waterfront.
Find your new place, call it
precious, make it true
by speaking.

So it is with all things. I love,
I hate, there is an un-tame boar
in my head. I have flown widely
and seen the world to be kind.

Make it true. Construct
your new place, say
you fou
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More from ~saartha

Lecture Poems: Set 11.
Growing thin and ill,
it stutters and moans bluely
that distant, lost sky.

2.
Creation becomes a thing of
microbes and acid, primordial
asteroid enzymes. This is
our new beginning: Earth
pulling herself together like a woman
puts up her hair.

3.
I am not in love, but the wind
deepened around him. Leaning smoothly
at the waist, he passed beneath
the nut-heavy tree. I am only
taken by the fluidity of him
how his yellow Berber shoes scuffed
unhurriedly into the distance.

4.
The monster
broke it down for us:

"Rejected, I reject. The labyrinth
is my own twisting heart. It keeps
me from them. It keeps
them from me.

And
DisownAnd it broke my heart but I
killed every trembling thing. The yearning
spaces subsided, they were reddened, they
were convinced to stillness.

And it broke my heart but God
became God-in-exile, became
yearning spaces. I buried my demons
with a knife, and left them to it. Exile
was the new love, it was a barren land,
it took no prisoners.

And it broke my heart but the pieces
hardened, they were as clockworks,
they counted down the hours. I was
waiting, my body was a sharp angle,
a border, I was waiting, everything

had already happened, I had killed it,
it drifted through the motionless diaspora,
the hours turned on me and they
NaPoWriMo EndApril 26, 2011

He is in love with me,
this young man. I think him
into a low beast, his voice
nothing but animal chuffs.

He becomes as I
have always been.

April 29, 2011

The follicles of water
spring up
from the fountain.

I can only remember
remembering it, Rome
growing like a weed
in its own ruins. The molted husk
of the Coliseum, the pope's
off-key sermon. The pope's
gaudy tomb.

The roiling millions.

Leaving, it all falls away. Just
this remains:
the baby-faced policeman,
arm out, eyes skyward,
obviously wishing
to be anywhere else.

April 30, 2011

The caves hold everything,
there in the heart.
Leaning back, fat
NaPoWriMo 18-23April 18, 2011

All about, the murmurous
world. A man can rise
like the dawn, beleaguered
but inured. He breaks open
and the sun splits and the
metaphors unravel.

A man is just a man—
vestigial, lost only
because he believes
there is a path.

April 19, 2011

Moving forward, Zeno
knew himself as a cat
in a box. The fractions
chased their own tails. Unobserved,
he existed in every space
at once, as an asymptote
reaching zero.

April 20, 2011

Oh, my body realizes, this
is rage. The electric heat of chemicals
destroys and remakes,
tiny focusing pinpricks. His hand
on me, everything falls
into place. I finally know
what
NaPoWriMo 15--17April 15, 2011

Liminal, a god
washes up on the rocks
of everything. Its lightlessness
howls I AM ALL, WHOLE, A PERFECT
ATOM OF CREATION.

It looks about, absently
shuffles the stars, knowing
that it knows that it
knows that it
knows that
it

cannot create relevance.

April 16, 2011

Geodes know
the secret to happiness.

Keep part of yourself
empty. Full,

you cease to be.

April 17, 2011

Holub, eye bleeding absently,
was not surprised
to see an angel
rise from the depths
of his poetry.

Its face was lightening. He measured
the voltage, mapped the looping
currents, observed the terribly
neutral polarity. He diagrammed the
NaPoWriMo 10--14April 10, 2011

Writing about herself, a girl
is always on a cliff edge, or the center
of a night moor. The unblinking
moon regards her, she is many
falling stars.

Waking to herself, a girl
closes her moleskin. The ceiling
regards her, she does nothing
she has nothing
she is nothing
worth speaking of.

April 11, 2011

They're not enough, the night sky's
silver tacks. It still curls up,
writhes about, blindly searches out
its own borders. It discovers hands,
digging weakly into the ground,
one million fingers in every
sleeping crevice.

April 12, 2011

Left foot becomes the night,
right foot becomes the sun.
Running in circle

Featured in Groups:

:iconthewrittenrevolution: #theWrittenRevolution
The words are the spark.

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August 30, 2010
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Blessing

:iconsaartha:

My father strangled a bird
quietly, calm as gravity,
there in the garden. He bent
as if praying to the torqued wing
reddening his hand.

The night hunkered down on the screaming
wildness, on the kicking legs, the abrupt
and awe-filled silence. I watched him
watch the beak open, close,
like rippling lake water.

I loved him, the mercy
of his heavy knuckles, the kindly
indifferent expression.

He closed the beak like a priest
closes the eyes.
:iconsaartha:
Heart of Jesus, once in agony,
have mercy on the dying.
-Catholic Prayer for the dying

:iconthewrittenrevolution: Are the religious references of this too heavy-handed? Is the simile in the second stanza suitable, or does it seem out of place?
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:iconsammur-amat:
=Sammur-amat Jan 13, 2013   General Artist
Wow, this piece packs quite a punch :heart:
Congratulations on the well deserved DLD, dolly :clap:
Reply
:iconpinballwitch:
~pinballwitch Jan 5, 2013
Congrats on DLD :) it was nice to see your piece again (found it first in group gallery a while back)
Reply
:iconsaartha:
~saartha Jan 5, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
Thank you! Never did figure out what to do with the word 'rippling'. This is an old piece by now, I suppose. More than two years, anyway. I had almost forgotten about it when `Kneeling-Glory DLD'd it.
Reply
:iconjamberry-song:
*jamberry-song Jan 4, 2013  Professional General Artist
Powerful piece; I love what you've done with language here.
Reply
:iconsaartha:
~saartha Jan 5, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
Thank you kindly.
Reply
:iconxlntwtch:
*xlntwtch Jan 4, 2013   Writer
This puts me in mind of the first time I killed a chicken. I didn't know where to look, whether at the body or at the head. I decided to look at the head and ignore the sounds from the body. Then the chickekn's head opened its eye. Yes, that comment is on a tangent, but your poem made me think of many other things much closer to me, too. When writing does that, it's successful. Thank you. :+fav:
Reply
:iconsaartha:
~saartha Jan 5, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
Urrghhh, I get the creeps just thinking about it.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed :)
Reply
:iconxlntwtch:
*xlntwtch Jan 5, 2013   Writer
Yeah, the first part was creepy little comment.
But I meant the rest and of course, you're very welcome. :)
Reply
:icondailylitdeviations:
=DailyLitDeviations Jan 4, 2013
Your wonderful literary work has been chosen to be featured by =DailyLitDeviations in a news article that can be found here: [link]
Be sure to check out the other artists featured and show your support by :+fav:ing the News Article. Keep writing and keep creating.


(Really, this time. ^^;)
Reply
:iconsaartha:
~saartha Jan 5, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
Haha, thank you!
Reply
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