30 Poems in 30 Days

[StepStransky]

1-25

Sleepiness comes with
anxiety's departure.
Our love now deepens.

 

[4degrees]

20-28

an angry open wound
bleeds tears
pleads for the salt
of your painful years
to pour over
neutralize a frantic
fanatic of the extreme
until he only feels one
single thing

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-22 Full of Birds

After, I realize that it is true--
that I have become the birds
that filled the skies of your youth

trembling clouds of birds
turning in whorls of wind.
I am these birds but more intimate--
sheathed in skin
and shuddering frame
turning in the spaces you've made for me
in the nest of your body.

 

[StepStransky]

1-26 final day

From the office, I heard outside the
cheerful banter, the greeting for the girl
who had come to school for her final day.

The happy sort of joking that grown-ups do in
front of children; the little show put on for courage.
My, what a fashionable coat you have! And so on.

Her voice was tiny, lost; I didn't hear a single
one of her replies. The entourage passed the office door.
I saw cameras held tightly. They took her to class.

After it was over, the teacher swept past, pursued.
I heard the embrace, the firm instruction away from
eyes of watching children; the door to the next room closed.

From the office, through the wall, I heard
muffled grief, tears for the girl
who had come to school for her final day.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-23 Point of View of Panties.

It is time
to file your nails.
The mark you left
when you
pushed me down,
wet, to your knees!
Isn't it bad enough
that I am in the middle,
sanded thin by his beard?
Maybe you'll notice,
soaping me in the wash,
and buy him a razor.

 

[4degrees]

20-29

creamy nutmeg candles and
flowery lotions; books of
girl-things and buddahs
now find their places in this
recently all-olive green
man cave
bringing a balance along
with fresh appreciation-
for you, my yin
my tiger twin
here to tame this
dragon heart and
bring the softness in

 

[StepStransky]

1-27

It is
dreamlike
in its oddness.
Sometimes we float
together on the same
raft; we hold on to
each other tightly
and reassure
each other
rescue
is
on
its
way. But
sometimes we
are on seperate
rafts, dipping out
of each other's view
and sometimes the
wave rises and
I am alone
on the
sea.

 

[interesting12]

A challenge indeed. Sharpen your pencils. Get the lead out. Poetry may suffer like a puppy run over by the school bus. But the rewards shall fall like raindrops on a bald man.

I'm waxing my moustache to impress the judges.
My words are jumping through hoops to please them.
It's a lot like tag. The metaphor is it.
The words are frequently blindfolded and must find the fire.

 

[4degrees]

20-30

so many things discribed
in these thirty days
that hold such loose meaning
a poetic journal recording
lack or full-up-ness
of the life of a man
imagined or otherwise
this poem disguises
distinguishes a number
from all the others
persistance is always key
its my turn to turn it
and one day i'll burn
another smokey path of poems
through this small town
in literotic city
whether you want to,
you receive me.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-24

But there is plenty of time to talk,
isn't there? against
the freezing silences (in our respective armchairs)
some ridge appears and we climb
anonymously, white noise falling to our lips,
until at the crease we find someone's
last whispered word, unfurling from an open pouch
half-buried in the snow.
Peering in, we see it.

"Yes."

 

[StepStransky]

1-28

In a darkened room, thin light bleeds
through the slats; it casts your horizontal
shadow against the wall in strips
of watery orange. I watch your green
eyes watch me. As I tie the final corner, you
blink.

I forbid you to speak; I will know you only
through your eyes and your movement tonight.
You are mine, and you are safe. I watch you rise
and fall, and quicken. I come to your side and whisper
in your ear. Nothing will ever be unspoken.
I begin.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-25 Micro Fishing

Even when it is bright out, the pipes
mutter and bite. They accompany our
conversation, punctuating the lists
we make in this mutual proclamation
of personalities. The coiling columns

spiral thinner and thinner
sharpening us to microfilm
so we can slip into each other's
blood streams. Throughout, the pipes
plead, screwed to the corner,
to be twined inside our helix
to be permitted closer, but informed
consent is printed only in binary
this time, and signed in dna

partnerships. We are knotted but even though
we thin ourselves to silver strings,
to our base codes, we can't ever
combine, we can only splice and glue
the slim dimensions of our present tense
end to end or split in the middle
leaving two crotch ends whole,
never to be quartered.

 

[StepStransky]

1-29

How many times now have
we planned for x, only for y
in the end to happen? It is
ok, of course it is; that's how
things work with pegs and holes
and timezones, etc. But how
the body feels, logic cannot
regulate. I am the spinning
penny coming to the end of its
pirouette. What was once
something smooth and full and
graceful, is now just a flat thing
wobbling all over the place. I
don't want you to see my grubby
copper colours. I don't
especially want to see them
myself.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-26

Clearly I don't know how to keep
in the lines of a scheduler or how to stop
crying when the facts pile up too high
to see over. I crack columns and splinter
cornices. I am the fault
that shakes foundations, the clog
in the chimney that poisons the whole
chalk-lined family. Touch me
and you will be made of ink

leaking a trail of evidence. I wish
I could be something else instead:
the clean lined stenographer who never
smudges the rows together but here
we are and I cannot beg enough
stay baby please don't go even though
I know you've seen all the warnings
about how I am poison. I wish I could
trade the grains of it for dust--
a harmless mote gliding and sinking--
returning to the home of the skin
that made me.

 

[StepStransky]

1-30

I can sit still here. I can think.
The peace and the patter absorb me.
I come here and sit beside you. We lean
against each other and watch waves
and stuff.

Oh, I have known you here for far longer
than I have actually known you. Ever since I
found this place, in fact. It never even
ocurred to me to think that we would
really meet.

Today, I have the conviction that, one
day, we will sit here together, and not just
in my mind. Do you like to watch waves?
Will you come with me to the beach
at Bossiney Haven?

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-27

I hope the sand is wet that day--
that castles accumulate on our soles
like time lapse photography run backwards.
We will scallop the hem of the ocean with our steps
scissoring in and out of time, in and out
of record. The waves will whisper as they sweep
behind us, but the only ones there
to notice will be awash in light.



I wrote this and posted it last night but it did not complete posting for some reason and, having started the 30/30 all over again recently for just such an error, I think this time I will either complete the last 3 poems or stop at 27.

 

[StepStransky]

2-1 eSenryu

Silently, we talk.
Our words fall upon plastic
intermittently.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Nan09-1

I have booted doubt
down the stairs, fenced him off
with wet umbrellas.

 

[StepStransky]

2-2

silent buzz in my
pocket you are
with me from
across that pond
and my skin
reacts no
different from
the touch of
actual fingers

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Nan09-2

Ten year old tries it on; he presses
the new kid against the wall
and says gonna knife you, nigger
miming the stab to the gut in partial view of the teacher,
the corners of his mouth smiling.
Teacher ushers the boys apart, repeats
the Code of Conduct. CoC Three:

Hate language. Imagine words as hooks
flung into your eyes. We don't do that here.
We are a learning community
and we need our eyes.

Next, the reminder of the consequence, the call home,
the record of inciting behavior, the coiled list
falling to the floor.

Next to the stack of incident reports
is the notebook of the boy's narrative,
his gun poem, his first
one thousand words.

Staircases travel
in two directions.

 

[StepStransky]

2-3

Already, I resent the coming
days of separation. No amount
of sand and stuff will make
up for the new distance

(which is,
oddly, lesser).

Already, I regret the time
we didn't spend doing
that we said we valued. I
miss your syllables dead centre

(more quiet is
somehow louder).

Already, I realise the walks
I take without you will be
different, for you will be there
all the same

(in your absence,
you will surround me).

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Nap09-3

First it was a layover in some town
you haven't graced since childhood,
then, quite naturally,
it became a finger stroking
the inside of your crook,
sparking the blood in your veins
to jump, to dance and cartwheel,
then the taste of the mouth
of your new lover.

 

[StepStransky]

2-4

My, haven't you done
well. First the barn
conversion, then the
extension, then the
veranda; then the
pine all got upgraded
to oak, the fabric to
leather and the CRT
is now an LCD, and
no room is without a
television. You have
such a beautiful place
up here, looking over
the sea.

And yet,
you don't know what
time the tide comes in?

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Nap09-4

At Stanton Drew we pay the pound
and cross the Honesty Gate
into the territory of grazing sheep.
Now its teeth are shorn and bent;
the circle greens beneath our feet.
This was the great hall of my nominal
ancestor. I imagine us here a long
ago century, our winter boots
scuffing the wooden floor. Here
I would have danced with you,
perhaps with the stems of buttercups
tucked into my thick braid. Again
we hold hands in Orion's portrait.

 

[StepStransky]

2-5

Twelve whole hours of sleep and,
damn, the world looks fine. Even
the noise of four sets of feet and
sliding carpets does little to dampen
*this* mood. Even their mother, hollering
at them about the carpet. Even
their father, he calls one shithead
for leaving a door open. Well, he might
only have a vocabulary of twenty words
or so, but at least he knows
how to make good toast. I was there
when he made it for her. She'd asked
and there weren't no womenfolk about, so
he did all the mandatory complaining, but then
he hauled his 250 pounds out of his seat, tore
his gaze from the Malaysian Grand Prix, and
opened that cupboard thing and actually got
the bread out. "I suppose you don't want
no crusts left on neither?" he asked, making
out she had yet the capacity to irritate. But
at least he asked. Well, he still calls himself
a friend of the guy who adopted her.

The guy who asked them to take her off his hands. She
gets in the way, he said. Now that his wife is dead, he'd
like to travel, apparently. What do we tell the
children who think they're done being rescued?
I suppose you just keep making them toast,
when they ask. They did say yes, after all.