ALL RESPONSES |
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Spelling Bob to the wind in my brother's keep,
pronouce b as in -deiss -come -bob -of late discombobulated song where-in death we are not going to be crazy
passing by this way for o' Bob deiss; His is the time t'rembler, sang into my sister's son;
who now does the house this road belong to, when asked to ponder
in my father's house, whose now? do I belong. |
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Our boy stands under light in
dark alley winter, surrounded
by snow. It's cold. He looks up
and sees more snow falling.
He knows his life is balanced
on the edge of a blade of space,
how it cuts the mind into slices
distinct of pie for him to eat.
The night sky tastes best with
milk whipped into thick cream;
these are ideas, the clouds are
fumes from atomic clocks waking
shaken by electric fingers, their
insulated arms reaching down
to feel heart beat with enough
power to spin our boy in place. |
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Imagine a farm yard
ringed with high snow banks.
The yard pole is a twenty foot candle,
a man-made North Star shining
over a man, one half of a couple.
He’s posing, while the other
says, “Cold? I’ll warm you up inside.”
This is a promise winter extracts
from a night hour, as inherent
in freezing weather as the lover’s
handful of summer flowers.
An arm held out to another,
an embrace of a body’s terrain
which excludes the whole world.
This is not unlike being snow bound
with all necessary supplies,
while the storm fills in the road
lengthening from the house, and light
marries snow and stores its happiness
in the apple tree’s morning hoar frost.
______
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The outer black reminds you how
the sun could come to your grave’s edge
as quickly as a season’s change
With a night sky and the listening that goes
on forever, you stand as close as a single light
allows, but you can tell from the silence
that it is only your footmarks in the snow
which proves you’ve even been here
How colors tire so easily over time,
everything black and white, stalling
for more time, listening to one foot
stopping beside the other
Both magical and sad, in the end
all of us are in on this ongoiing process
as old as humanity itself |
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| So truly a delirious time as this snow packed world should give; only utterances of shadows cast by trees, themselves cast in morning frost. The leaves now drowned in the still white sea that covers this empty bed. The beast, narrow and silent, shivers its way beneath your skin, becoming the blood that fills your tongue with harsh moans of pain, weakness, desire burning hot as the embers that are quickly becoming nothing more than smoke fleeing the fire. Your body is a greasy oil, cocooning the fragile calls for help, making razors of your teeth. There I stood in the cold light listening to your whimpers, turning away from your naked, dying body. |
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When you tire of looking
homeward, angel,
when you weary
of groping up through
all the layers
to some thing that may not be there,
look down.
Lower your lashes.
When snow's too deep,
close your eyes.
Know earth.
Its grit
is where you come from,
angel.
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Lonely Dancer
She moves to a rhythm
Foreign to my feet
She has an understated something
Yet somehow incomplete
Smiling through the music
She dances all alone
It's an old familiar feeling
Chilled through my bones
Like a personal badge of honour
Worn with little pride
Under the glare of the spotlight
There is no place to hide
Your head becomes a refuge
The music your best friend
In a thousand broken pieces
Lies the heart you cannot mend
As she dances to the rhythm
Past the dreams she used to know
My fantasies surround her
Yet I have to let them go
Beautiful lonely dancer
Don’t you see me in your eye’s
Behind the curtains mask
Where all passion dies
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I watch you watch me.
I see the smile peek from the corners of your mouth.
You recall the old days.
For a moment you see the young me and my enthusiasm for freshly fallen snow infects you.
Come outside and play with me! Let’s put on our snow shoes and walk around the Bluffs! We’ll bring the sled!
You are tempted. I can tell. But then I see your contemplative face. I watch the fallen rich girl grab hold.
Their garage is twice the size of mine, you think to yourself. Envy creeps down your spine and your lips curl.
Alyse, I promise you, happiness is a choice.
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Looking up, the stars are hid
Behind the flurries and the snow;
Both seem to be part of my days--
Here, near.
Far off, too far, my fight
Bedded down
Below the fury of each front,
And need beside me in these drifts--
My head must rise, alive,
My own tow hands
Must take and make the lift. |
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remains
of bright spirits
aureoles where
heat still accrues
Mozart’s scratching
on Handel’s Messiah
Monet’s amber haystack
brilliant as houses of parliament
century leapers
those beings that are fire
light at both ends
windows holding
as much flame as possible
all crossing the smudged gaze
thumbprint of moon
recurring swirls
old gold blown light
you can’t help but be in
as it opens and falls
unfolds and unsays
when you shine through
roots of snow
the earth opens you
like an eye
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In the winter of this evening
a burning yellow-green hue
does not deny the cold crystals
but casts on them a sickly appearance
nauseous to a jaded brain
tricked through color-shifted eyes
by the flood of unappetizing light
and the snow has come too deep
to feel the warmth that was
the sunned side of the shed
in the melon patch of late summer
where the red I could plainly see
was simply delicious within its
oval frame of green and white
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Where is the star after Christmas? Do we still look,
or pack it away with Santa hats and ornaments?
Did we notice it at all or was that just neon in our eyes,
or headlights, or flat screens that kept our eyes lowered,
or maybe a low watt inner reflection passing?
It’s still there, behind a cloudy backdrop of snow or freezing rain,
beyond our local sky, beyond our personal edge of the heavens,
waiting above the same garages and down the same alleys,
always to be sought as our hearts will lead us, we just must
grow wiser, and move out from under the street light.
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East to west and west to east Christmas looks rather empty
schoolstudents presents could be twenty different
not connected to the Christmas.
nor pronounce what’s better
now as the many of you
our death shields untie well
For all the seed, spring will come, for them for some, a good field.
Quarry, Night, and me
Ouldn’t shakes as though I am holding onto
Thy possessions, as thru it is Something of fortune – so write friendly
20 bcm 11/ abode and the door
All others look to the road
Of kin, kept all his lovers inside
For kindling;
Accept theirs will be a welcome sign
Any Greenfield- snow covered is sound as mine.
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All around you and then black
sky, a feeling inside speaks loudly
of other paths you could have taken
And the way you’ve been feeling:
torn from the clouds and scattered
You are an ignorant prophet, leaving
decisions to fate; you gamble with each
gust of wind then watch dreams float away
You are a desperate gypsy, sent through
cracks of the past to paint a pleasant picture
over our decay
Your motivation lifts from logic and emotion;
what are the words the mind and the heart
scour each other with? |
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Sodium lights have always reminded me of dad’s greenhouse--
The shoots and roots and plants all lined in trays, on shelves,
In bags—the need for moisture always paramount,
But then the winter came and drowned each outdoor row,
And leaves were made into rough paper to blow across the acreage
Where kildeer once had swooned, where stalks now blackout.
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Stolen
(Steal the lights!)
I know it's not your point, but why street lights anyway?
Who walks the streets these days? Who even has sidewalks?
What light do you need at three in the morning?
All the street vehicles have their own lights. They don't need these things.
I'd prefer the stars, if you hadn't already guessed that.
I miss them.
And give the owls a break and the moths and
all the other darklings that are confused.
Give us back our nights!
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sitting with you now at the end of a line
your voice reminds me of a child
lost in the dark
not afraid, just lost
feeling with hands
the open emptiness
waiting to run into something divisible
I called
she misses the dog more than you
say without finishing
it off
yes I know
when you wrench against
the verbal threshing machine
why apologize to me
say you aren’t complaining?
she calls now
she came
2 out of 3
you rest against 7
in a silent bed
at the end of a quiet hall
waiting for the phone to ring
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The birth of butterflies
happens
downwards.
On
the
ground, little heroes, their wings
open up against the wind,
as if covered in cement.
The phosphorescence shifts green and blue and
flecks images on a murky canal.
The lights are renewed from above -
the iridescent indistinctness of their life is undecided.
I have spent most of my life facing down;
searching for distractions in the asphalt –
watching shoes scatter and scuttle;
in such a hurry looking up
so as not to miss their own lives.
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Found deep in cold lakes
only one tenth percent light.
Photosynthesis! |
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Her light will soon out
and take her shadows with her.
Perhaps we'll go first. |
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It's been like this for days,
it's been this way for nights;
all you dream about is this:
snow seaming the air about you
so that everywhere you go
there is space,
exactly you-sized.
The reams of snow you walk through
are ready to be written upon;
written upon by lights and wires,
written upon by sticks and plows,
written upon by sleds and children,
blank, but ready.
(The world is exactly shaped to snow,
and you are easily covered,
should you feel the need for simple silence
all the way to the earth.)
Soon, again, the plows will rumble,
you believe you hear a summer storm,
or elephants talking in the northern streets,
the size of you will only vary by boots
and a winter coat,
but you will know you are nothing
compared to this momentary monstrosity
having histories written upon it,
only to forget every one of them in days.
By March everyone will think you're mad,
seamed in by the absence of snow,
hallucinating empty pages all about yourself. |
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where is the someone
that stands on the corner, of me
influencing the planets with her sign
did she take leave for the holiday
says to me,
take care of the sweethearts - deliver them
here, the hurt and every vain holy name plenty - planted the sign
incanting and hoping in
the ground to rise again.
her quotes were soon delivered on trains
owned over by the pullmans, that only We are
or might be watching
her tragedy is over, is a divine comedy.
some noons in time peirced her pictures
wheels white and soundless
stills to show in goldleaf millixour.
i overthink on me, now, and know little else, friendless; even simply existing -
as for the heavens, I am not to care for,
they regard me the same, my libel
never read on his word, just asked in my bible.
i'm someone lesser, now, up in the firmamanet
wandering begger and blind pulling off
all that I've gathered
inside the skin, my fox,
so long she traveled so far from Baltimore, she carried Gabriela's caligraphy
her darned socks
were aboard the Northern, imagined gifts, quilting and she hushed
the long tracks these last few years
dividing our justice from seeds; eternaly.
her beautiful lids to my nostrils
pulsing streams pillows gather
up on the down thrusts some old pipers notes or accordion tunes |
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All I have of you is words we've exchanged
and a few photos on a bright, flat screen.
I've never heard your voice, touched your
hands, looked into your eyes, or kissed you.
Should I think about who you really are,
or who the woman is I want you to be?
This thought begins its life above the gut
and reaches through the heart into the spine,
makes the heart beat faster, harder, louder.
An echo in the regions of the chemical mind,
drives the will to create ingenious words,
gives gifts to those who might feel the same.
Life is a golden dawn, followed by copper sunset.
It doesn't matter what light unveils your eyes,
how they absorb the life of everything around,
like a hungry black hole in the center of a mind,
from which the captured escape in imagination,
and return to build this bright, round world. |
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From little bird's brain
spring song in early winter.
Chickadee's solstice.
Daylight receptors engage
impatience for the mating. |
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The Roman Candle of a yard light
caramelizes the color of old snow.
The glow trespasses the dark hold
of December, dimming the view
of the night sky with its winter
triangle a boy strains to see
through the haze, as he lets his jacket
hang open, unzipped to the cold.
He knows to return through
the black cleft between buildings,
below electric wires that seem
to carry a little train of snow
on their slim rails, where he throws
the switch that shuts off the bulb
on its pole, that opens the dome
to a blast of stars in outer space,
to the redbud of Jupiter and its rings,
to the constellation of Orion hunting
the Great Bear that the boy follows
to find a smudge of gray––he can gaze
through that peep hole to another
galaxy also spangled with stars’
radiance that traveled two
and a half million light years
before it appears as a signal
in the rod cells of his eyes that passes
impulses through neurons and nerves
to his brain that turns them into images.
He is a marvel looking at a marvel.
He draws a sharp breath of air,
his throat and chest humming
like a high voltage power box. |
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A man stands
in front
of a snow bank
Echoes
surround
him like
like a flock
of black birds
The light
above him
swells
into a universe |
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With growth untethered
believing there was no end
each rose and prospered
laboring under bright lamps
that burned 'til the fuel ran out.
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After the long nights
more light in January
offsets depression.
Even lovers see the signs
and distance from each other. |
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shed light
he said
and I thought he meant the light over the shed
but then you are the subject
by the shed
so maybe that is what he meant
why are you by the shed?
and why are you under that light
just standing there
dumbstruck?
let me guess:
you are in one of those
how long can you stand there motionless at 10 below?
high school buddies' challenges
so the six-pack qualification you must have met makes sense
and the second six-pack reward to the winner
will make a lot more sense when you chill each bottle
with your frozen fingers
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