30 Poems in 30 Days

[Eluard]

1-17

. . .

 

[wildsweetone]

22.


Winter Dawn

Each morning I search,
condensation wiped on my sleeve
nose pressed to the pane,
to see if gems have grown
in my garden.

The maple stands tall,
bare limbs stretched across blue,
hugs offered to angels.

Heraldry lines its bark.
In every vein and valley
a crest, history etched
and on the tips of each twig
dangles a diamond.

 

[Sara Crewe]

7-18

She thinks she’s lost her rings
but we’ve put them in storage
with the rest of the artefacts
that prove her life was more
than existence. I wonder
if we are wrong. Greedy to guard
the mosaic of her life by ripping
it apart tile by tile before she has gone.
Has she not earned the right
to lose her diamonds but keep her dignity?
She is the person I would ask
but she has no answers for me anymore.

The pieces of her life are sealed
in plastic boxes and she is left
with one suitcase and a room
with a poster that explains who she is
when she wakes in the dark.
She asks me, “Celia, where are my pearls?”
Silence is sometimes the best answer.
Her brain hears in a language
that defies translation and births
confusion on the road to death.
Celia is not my name. I have become
her long dead sister. My part
of her life became unglued months ago
and has fallen into her untended garden
of memories. I have stopped calling
her Mom. The word and all it holds
causes more pain for us than its absence.

 

[manipulatrix]

5

.....

 

[Eluard]

1-18

. . .

 

[vampiredust]

15

The Purpose of Rain

My sister told me I was incapable
of showing emotion that day
our Grandfather died.
She did not seem to notice
that I was sitting on the steps
waiting for the rain to fall.

And I never noticed
that its swollen body
was already holding meetings
inside my feeble ten year old
frame, waiting for some higher
power to click its fingers

and yell action!
Sometimes we need
to distance ourselves
from the most uncomfortable
experiences; just put our hands

inside our pockets and feel
the rain cooling our skin
burnt from all those times
before.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

1-13

Spell for Silence

Into a large jar, place these things,
dropping them carefully, listening to them when they land:

A cat's whisker
A handful of earth
A handful of salt
Static from a small transistor radio
Bark from a fallen tree
A page from a book
Ice

Fill the jar well with cotton.
Paint it matte black, three coats.
Set it out under the dark moon overnight.
Take it to a place of owls. Leave it uncovered
until you hear an owl hoot.
Then close the jar.

Whisper:
No motion or sound
within this ground.
Vibration is stilled,
with silence filled.
Like owl's flight
and velvet night,
all sound asleep
all vision deep.
As darkened moon
or August noon,
It's frozen time
that ends this Rhyme
so by my Will
let all be still.

Take it to a place
where there needs to be peace
and bury it there
saying nothing.

 

[Tzara]

18

Solitary

Her words lie
behind a window, in a bright room
barred to me.

I can only read these words, not
smudge my fingers with their carbon,
stain my fingers with their ink.

Such discourse is too dry
for heat. Its tinder will ignite
but only a mild flame,

although a steady one.
Still, I sift and scrape these words
across the parchment of my cheek.

 

[wildsweetone]

23.


The Weight of Winter

The edge of the sky
carries the weight of rain,
great black bruises
that welt the heavens
weighing down the words
I wait for,
words that will tumble
and pelt the sidewalk,
play on the mind
and guide the body
along paths
most often walked.

 

[manipulatrix]

6

.....

 

[Sara Crewe]

7-19

I told you I liked to decorate my neck
and I hate to seem fickle
but the generous gift of your opinion
has become heavy and uncomfortable.
Maybe I was too small to handle what you offered
or maybe what you offered made me feel small.
They do say scale is everything
but under your weght I have lost my bearing.
Left myself without any idea of where I want to go
waiting for a train at the bus station, watching
other half-ghosts lie down in the road.

It would be rude to ask you to take it all back
so I’ll just leave it by the door on my way out.

 

[vampiredust]

16

Castle

Mother once built
a paper castle
to protect her
origami heart.

But Father,
being the knight
he was, attacked
its walls,

eager to sip
on the tar
ready to forced
down his throat.

 

[Eluard]

1-19

. . .

 

[Tzara]

19

On My Specific Dysphasia

It is a kind of impotence, how I can write
blunt Anglo-Saxon words—write cock, write cunt—
but when I speak, the words go soft. Let's fuck
rounds to make love. Why should this be?

My ardor is the same or more. It's not that I'm ashamed,
or I don't think I am. It's as if the words get left
in a lower part of me and can't make it to my mouth.
My loins play rock and roll, my voice, Chopin.

So when with you I sound polite, I'll translate it to Ameslan.
With hands and fingers tell my thoughts
how my body wants to. Must. Forget my mild voice
and let my lust speak to you aphasic. The only way it can.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

1-14

Dance of the Seven Veils

One name for Her is Innanna.
She danced with her seven veils.
Watch as they fall at her feet,
The myriad names she has.

She danced with her seven veils
Before royals of generations,
The myriad names she has
Invoked by a hundred nations.

Before royals of generations
Called out her sacred names,
Invoked by a hundred nations,
She rose, from the women's flames.

Called out her sacred names,
Did those early lovers;
She rose from the women's flames
Wrapped them in roses all.

Did those early lovers
Cry out in ecstasy?
Wrapped them in roses all,
The body of Sacred She.

Cry out in ecstasy:
the Veil is dropped again.
The body of Sacred She,
The Gate of the Moon is open.

The veil is dropped again:
lose count of their number.
The gate of the Moon is open;
Her own she draws into her.

Lose count of their number:
The worshipers at her mound.
Her own she draws into her,
They bend to her dance and descent.

The worshipers at her mound
Go down into ecstasy;
They bend to her dance and descent,
Downward she moves, beautifully.

Go down into ecstasy,
At every gate a surrender.
Downward she moves, beautifully,
Her dance will pull you under.

At every gate a surrender,
the veils of woman's flesh.
Her dance will pull you under;
Go with her, wherever she goes.

The veils of woman's flesh,
Watch as they fall at her feet.
Go with her wherever she goes.
One name for her is Innanna.

 

[manipulatrix]

7

.....

 

[Sara Crewe]

7-20

I have waited in winter light for death to come.
Listened for his random footsteps to match
my father’s uneven breathing but when he arrived
the scene was anticlimactic. I flipped back, thinking
I skipped a page but everywhere I looked
words drained through my hands and back into the earth.
Death redefines the language of your life
and then sneaks out the side door without warning
that the world will be completely different
the next time you walk out the front. It’s the same room
but the furniture is rearranged and where there was once space
to move now you crash into mirrors or fall into chairs.

While you stumble into tomorrow you realize
the reaper never confessed to being both a thief
and a vandal. The latter marks you with cancerous
graffiti for grieving fingers to worry and pick
long after it’s a scab or even when it’s a scar.
It’s a bitter reminder that death’s gifts
are the antithesis of miracles and that I felt safer
when blind. Now I see him everywhere.

I know it’s not the wind on the swing, watching
the baby play with a syringe in the sand.
I know it’s not a shadow that walks the white line
with the other carrion-eaters. They smell tragedy
when a man turn away from his wife for a second
while he changes a tire on the shoulder.
I want to scream through my window
safety is an illusion but then I remember
without loss he does not speak my language yet.
When the husband turns back she’s gone.
A truck has scattered his life across the highway
and now we both can see things
that make us want to close our eyes.

 

[wildsweetone]

24.


Treasures

I once searched for rings on the tide line
where seaweed and seashells
shared a dip in the sand.

I found gems,
delicate shells for necklaces
and ornaments that sit on the sideboard,
reminders of wading days
and Summer ice creams,
sunshine and sunburn.

I still search today; among the debris,
worn green glass, a shoe
and a shell
to slip on a waiting finger.

 

[Eluard]

1-20

. . .

 

[vampiredust]

17

Invisible

None of us quite here, alone.
Asleep, we pat skin to make
sure our flesh hugs the bone.
Rain is produced inside grey
wombs of cloud, but no-one
knows its father. Trees
reproduce silently, in unseen
shadows. I let my hand run
across your thigh, but only
your hairs feel it.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

1-15

Nympho

"in at least two cases, women whose children had died were reported to have become nymphomaniacs."
- Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices

Was it life we wanted?
Was it the urge
for the replacement, the howl of every cell
to fill the space in our arms
the absence of the proper living weight
which should have rested there? Did
we wish to bring
by any means back the body
that had so wrongly lifted itself away
to press flesh against flesh
to offer the breast, the belly
Mad to break that cold
to solve the absence, to lay something heavy
on the hip, wrap legs around us
as it should be, must be, cannot
any longer be? If I slam
with such force any living flesh
against, into my own, can I bring life
into my dead body, missing its soul
empty of that animating spirit?

Or is it death we celebrate now
Is it lifeless, this embrace
punishing our own corpses
for birthing the wrong thing
for their dark mistakes
the terrible error of the womb
Do we wish
to beat it out of ourselves, deny that we
still live, couldn't trade
what we'd have given gladly
if we'd had the choice. Even now
we bargain: kill me, and bring her back
give her my own body to walk in
as she did once. If that which
lived in me is dead
how can I be alive
and what good then these hips
this belly, but as a cold toy
for unwitting lovers of the dead
who are deceived into thinking us alive
because we move, or speak. No,
no longer alive, this body, no longer
moving as you do, a simple puppet
of appetites, too stupid to fall
too stubborn to rot.

 

[wildsweetone]

25.

...

After the ice has thawed,
after the winter water
has run down the gutters
and the sun penetrates space,
the skinks come out
to bask in mid-afternoon heat,
to laze in the light
to eye with delight the ants
moving house,
in a race as silent as shade.

 

[Tzara]

20

Lost

I strike a metaphor
to be my match in this dark room.
It flares briefly

with a sulphurous smell, but
too dim for me to see the walls
of a poem. I walk about

looking for them until
I am burned. The trope goes out,
and I am still in dark, alone.

 

[Sara Crewe]

7-21

A city inside a war unfolds like a play within a play.
Sun and moon become the same circle
of survival while the days and nights are beaten
to a grey existence where everyone’s a player
and the stage is in the streets. A soldier slips
past enemy snipers who sit in the skeletal eyes
of bombed out buildings. Bullets will find him
like a bat on a moth if he stays with his back
to the porous wall pierced with light. Movement
means life in this boiled down world. Down the street
a mother grocery shops between rounds
of gunfire to stop hunger from eating
her children. She, the soldier and the strangers
in between stand eye to eye. There is no good
or evil only necessity in suffering through
this inoperable tumour that has wound
around their internal organs in a tangle of humanity.

 

[manipulatrix]

8

.....