Poetry

Sorry missed this Yesterday. Day Nineteen. Held in the hands of yesteryear we never would have cradled ourselves in our cold contentment if we knew, but the heart of our minds can never recover the moments wasted with empty promises of sunsets to come. Instead today we pick up the mantle of love and learn to live again in a world where Lady Apathy no longer lingers in our doorway on the worst and best days. Shut from the home of our hearts she will dwindle and die. Pick up the mantle of progress not of hindering spite; there is a whisper in the wind carrying the time of change do not let it pass you by.

Day Twenty. This frame you left to me is so hollow it hurts. Its wire is bending under the pressure and puncturing skin like the indentation left when a needle is pressed against a balloon. The burrow of contact in the fraction of a moment before the collapse and the implosion of being that once belonged to this barren body. The flesh no longer covers bone, the words cannot blot out the worst in me, and the way your eyes on me sear the curled edges of my being burns more than the hell fire of this purgatory.

Day Eighteen. Devastated by this disaster The chaos of cataclysmic clatter wedged between our hearts this vacuum between you and I looms. The day when Separated by a moment turned into lost for all time.

Day Seventeen. The woman holds out leaves of paper That fall from her hands like autumn But crash to the floor like a hurricane Without words he pulls her to him Encompassing her in his long arms she doesn’t even try to stretch her wings just crumbles like the ruins of a decaying façade letting herself be consumed by something larger than her He holds her like the binding of book Trying to hold onto the loose pages of life.

Day Sixteen. I am stuck with my face in my hands and the words everywhere but the page

Day Fifteen. Vendetta is a word wrapped in silk It encoils its bearer with the sweetest feeling It slides from the tongue in an ever-pleasing hiss The self sufficient lover of the tortured The ever hungry beast from the heart That dwells in the darkest of places Just dying to get out Vendetta is a feeling burning in your eyes Seething with hatred and a promise yet surmised It whispers tender evils into the innocent ear And corrupts the benevolence within your heart Here it is the power to take back what was rightfully yours To steal away what was stolen from Dignity, honor, and your name ...

Day Thirteen. Heavy petals feel of heaven’s feathers Like an angel’s wings Plucked from the fresh body of innocence Shorn of shame leaving you bare and naked Before the eyes of the sun and the melody of reason Screeches like a snapped violin string Even your upturned palms Cannot bear this burden Of eyes unseeing peering down upon you This gaze will crush you and your will Leaving you the shattered broken form A wingless angel stripped of all that didn’t make you human This is the disease ridden world Where the grass against your cheek Feels like shattered glass ripping into skin That has never before felt the graze of reality The voice which is pulled from you is alien Horrified by the essence of self pouring from you There are horrors in these hands.

Day Twelve When the fire came it burned a hole in the porch, like a portal being opened to the far below. Sissy used to tell me that if you dropped something in it you could hear it fall all the way through to the end of the earth. So one day I took my collection of eucalyptus buttons and threw them in the blackened pit below; the jigsaw teeth of the burned out boards like ivory appendages ripped from bodies of great beasts. I didn’t hear the sound of falling like Sissy said I would, So I just stood there with my empty jar, bereft of years of good keeping my collection was swallowed up by that black earth leaving me with the wasted anticipation and the heavy empty jar. It seemed so much lighter when it was full even though it weighed down my arms. So I walked away from the yawning abyss that swallowed my eucalyptus buttons whole, with a heavy heart of disappointment. When we moved away a short time later I left the jar with its emptiness beside the pit the inferno had left behind; standing upright on its own, the jar was the only thing left in our gutted out home. But when I grew up and years had whittled my cheeks with age twenty maybe even thirty years later I went back to the place where the fire started late that night, hoping to look that darkness right in the eye and ask the questions that haunted me for so many years. But when I pushed my way through the gutted cobwebbed remains of a place I once called home and made my way to the back porch the darkness was gone, replaced by the outstretched trunks of eucalyptus trees. The trees rose up in the middle of our porch the new trunks breaking through the old planks of wood pushing upward and upward as if to show that they could. I walked across the deck with slow awestruck steps my eyes turned upward in reverence of the great canopy. Drawn back to the earth from the skyward reach I heard the crunch below my feet. Lifting my foot I held below, the ground was littered with buttons like a fresh blanket of winter snow. I knelt by the edges of what once was an abyss and touched the base of new life that grew in the face of darkness and refused the decree: do not be. To my amazement, as I knelt there, I found it beside me Unchanged except on thing, this time when I picked up the old glass jar it was far from empty. Filled to the brim with fallen eucalyptus buttons the trees had replaced the source that had unknowingly given them life.

Day Eleven. Sifting coffe beans through withered fingers like they were smooth rocks found on a beach without pebbles. Feeling each delicately, as if they would crack crumble and fall away like the shell of a robin’s egg. Sorting each bean on the counter top of a diner lost in an age of countless coffee stains and waitresses with smokey voices caught in the cloud of cigarette ash. The old man waits at the counter with an empty bar stool still left spinning from the years of memories weighed down upon it but vacant for these remaining days. He waits, not wondering for a time to see her again.

Day Ten. I can smell the mandrake in your veins Thick as molasses and light as a sea breeze; It runs from your cracked edifice like a deluge Of cold glances cast down lonely roads Caught only by the spider’s web Left to the whimsy of the wind; But theses white walls Will not be washed clean of me. No bleach nor paint will draw me from the cracks That keep this house whole Because the fibers of the brick thatched roof Has been slowly woven into me This macabre patchwork of my being Has been interlocked like the roots Of a mandrake that stretches out Like a child’s hands Reaching out for the nightshade Not knowing what this shadow will bring. Mandrake melody sing not too loud As the fire consumes you Some sacrifices were necessary, my darling And the dark was closing in before the day was done What was I supposed to do?