[x]

Morning - for Carl SandburgThe morning erupts
on little cat feet
A flick of the tail
a breath exhaled
too fast at the end of a leap
and then

A paw,
placed on lid's soft fan of lash
breath whirring, throaty, warm
nose
to
nose

eyes still closed

Then open

Thwack –
A stunning velvet attack
innocent lids unwarned
warm sheets no safe haven

The morning erupts
on little cat feet.

the contortionisti hold her up like an offering.
salted slug spasms,
foam dribbles.
i want to stub out the face
like a cigarette.
suspended in the amber
of this awfulness,
still as a mosquito.

the worst is the sound,
the staccato choking, perfumed
by whiskey and bile.
when i open the door for
them, black suits, yellow bands.
like wasps, they ask, they
drone in unison.
what happened?

i am ashamed because
i am not crying.

to Yellow Plumto Yellow Plum (in blue
china bowl):


     afternoon's slit of sun slips
     between thick curtains
     & woos you to ripeness.

     it chooses you
     not for flecks of honey-russet
     held low in your seam of shadows,
     nor your symmetry & swell;
     but because

     you slink in shade, sink
     behind green pear & clementine

     & cannot hide
     from each spear of light
     that ricochets
     through--

even now
     nested warm
     against these lips

     even now:
     a tea-stain stone
     hugging close
     the trashbin floor.

31:12N, 121:30Emy Dear i just noticed
my balcony is shaped
like wings

and the wind is billowing
the moon up, up to-night
in her dusty purple garb

and i think
no Dear i do not want
to leave here: where men

build bridges over oceans
and live inside of mountains
like river dragons

where the sun shines
not at all at noon but gleams
like an orange at sundown

where the moon walks home
surefooted to where my neck
cannot crane

city drowned cleanbirds fly bluer before a hurricane,
wings sharper, the bricks neater.
one train is always longer than the
other. i cried about it. the saturated
city, droplets of colour caught on
tape & rewinding, cups me in its
palms, i am a bug on its window,
imagining all of it underwater &
people clapping in a silent film,
the last dying bubbles curtsying
on their lips, for their marble town
the white skied & terrible atlantis.

leavetakingi.
the world is brighter where
dregs of strangers' revels remain --
i keep this half-light for my own.

ii.
i'll stay until the wind sighs a scotch-and-smoke
cliché, til the Muscadet's slipped from the lip
of my wayward
hello.(i know you're there before you do.)
iii.
your night is told in
patchouli-pulse wanders; mine,
in whorls of liqueur-breath. come
close and i'll find the warp
through the weft, the trails telling tales
in synaesthesia --
Platinum Blonde's been 'round and gone.

iv.
(-- closer, find syllables strewn
in an exhale's wake; stolen from my throat-
ful of careless farewells, spin and sway

The Death of VenusIf there lived in the world a man
as rugged and as strong as I,
who could forbear with me yet go against,
who took to the black woods and the silver hills
mostly unafraid--
who savored salt and the lay of fur
with fingertips of dirt and weather,
whose lips rolled words like smoke, like fog-
I would creep into his arms in the prologue of the night,
air sweet with the scent of new-cut hay,
alive with the nightjar's call.

Ms. Foxrummaging through the night;
I find her buried in a handsome coat.
the darkness softens her
trash-strewn make up
to lay bags under her eyes.

I have always thought to chase
a beauty like that; blow my
hunting-horn like kisses
as I saddle up.
I would wear her around my arm and
discuss the big-game
and the beasts at bay
with boys that brandish
scorecards into the hundreds.

but,
she hid from the canines
lapping her neck with a head
buried in all fours.
I skinned her like a poacher
bearing my ivory smile
for her to unfurl
flushed and screaming
like a new born baby.
caught in my hooves the wrong way.

7.34mmA simple measurement
can make a man
lose himself; a blurring, no more
than a grainy smudge

a scant 7.34mm long
this rice-grain, seven weeks old
with one hundred and twenty nine
heartbeats per minute

—all this, from a mere sesame-seed of a heart

a memoryI remembered the afternoon I called you,
curled on my bed with someone's good book
in my palm, nestled softly in the waning light

and under my gently roaming fingers
the baby moved – not to my hand-touch,
but inside, an insistent flutter,

not like the swiftly beating heart
on the doctor's monitor, not like the slow
appearance of a plus-sign on a drugstore test.

I called you, my gently rolling daughter's
mother's mother. I called you like the woman
standing at my back while I held the kite string

on a pushy spring day, the diagonal shape so
far above us I could only feel the jerk of the
cord around my fingers, holding us t

The Cartographer's DaughterEvery night, he would fold her into his arms before she slept. Creases grew into her, turning brown with wear, and she loved them. When she woke up in the night, dreaming of darkness, he would take her to his desk and draw for her a map of her face, turning it into another world. Tracing the contours of her smile, he would scrawl a warning, "Here be monsters", whispering to her that she was a dragon when angry.

As she grew older, she populated his maps with creatures and peoples from the books she read, or her own creations. He taught her to draw, and to write with an old inkpen, in a cursive script her teacher could make neither head nor ta

for a friendThe sky is captured in his eyes, clear and blue.
The weather etched smile is honest.
The slender face says sixty; it lies.
It is that and half again.

Knobby hands sun baked and brown
peek out from ragged gloves.
They seem part of the old split locust post
where they are resting;
one of the row of soldiers
that keep watch on their field and its occupants.

The smile broadens as I approach.
I help stretch the wire.
His archaic dialect fills the road
with cows and snow and the yankees
that his grandparents saw marching.
The hours pass pulled by the mule
he plowed with as a boy.

He mentions his wife
they'd been marri

The HologramsBefore Casper we were a quantum band,
an act that only happened when unobserved.
Our drummer maintained we'd split
the world, then took a full-time position
in PR. Auditioning his replacement
round our Crouch End front room,
with his white vest, buffed All-Stars
and holographic principle patter,
Casper shone. 'These,' he said,
nodding at his drumheads,
'are my event horizons;
it's where the beat really happens.'
To prove it, he worked up an almighty storm,
while we puffed on our cigarettes.
Short of a singer, Casper made a call.
Yume Shirakawa, he explained,
would beam in her performance. Jay,
sliding milk down his

Rooibos TeaBreathe deep the chai haze—

Picasso's djinn,
a muse of eggshells and grandma's lace tablecloths,
cradles the tea kettle to her chest
and abandons Latin words and names—
flotsam and jetsam dribbling
irrelevant among the little red tea leaves;
the driftwood of genus and species bumping
against the shores of the South African scrublands.

She hovers orange and indigo,
a quavering flame of dreams
and drained tea dregs—
divination with a soft-spiced voice
at the bottom of the mug,
never quite gone—

a flock of Van Gogh crows
frozen in their hayfields.

tetherhookedYou shift around me, bejeweled
with currency which cannot be
exchanged because detaching your eyes
would be like hollowing a lighthouse,
would be smashing a rare beacon
with stubby fingers and because

trading your mouth would be like
silencing shellsongs and symphonies
and the cinders of your sentences,
the embers of your exhales would
welcome ash where once was warmth

and because your callouses catch on
clothes too well and your shoulders
are the base of a sturdy cradle
and every time you blink, I wake up
and I am uncovered and I am new

and because you would have to
watch the demolition of your
features, the thieving

Browse More Like This

more ▶

More from `poisonedrose

View Gallery · View Prints

Featured in Groups:

#artPUNJAB
Where Pakistan and India meet!

#da-NDIA
TRUE INDIANS

#DD-Catalogue
The Home of Daily Deviations

#Word-Smiths

#Tomes-and-Grimoires
literature, poetry, writings!

#TheSimulacrum
Keep your verse terse

Details

Submitted: April 13, 2011
File Size: 508 bytes

Thumb

Statistics

Comments: 42
Favourites: 159 [who?]
Views: 4,330 (1 today)
Downloads: 32 (0 today)

License

Creative Commons License

Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

[x]

`poisonedrose has limited the viewing of this artwork
to members of the deviantART community only.

You can log in or become a member for FREE!

unveiledby `poisonedrose

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

It's been a year and a half, but this will just have to do!

I really didn't see this one coming. I am touched.

Thank you, ^lightningmonkey

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-01-28

`poisonedrose's unveiled has a gripping quality to it that lasts the entirety of the poem. It is well worth a read, and re-read. ( Featured by $wreckling )

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~Doodelay Apr 24, 2012 Student Writer

I can understand the bottom half of this and i see why this has been recognized. Well done :]

Reply

`poisonedrose Apr 24, 2012

Thank you

Reply

`Anavah Jan 30, 2012 Professional General Artist

Nice re entry.

Reply

`poisonedrose Feb 1, 2012

I'm afraid there probably won't be very much shared on this site anymore, regardless!

Reply

~decadentsanctuaries Jan 29, 2012

Wonderfully descriptive.

Well done.

Reply

`poisonedrose Jan 30, 2012

Thank you

Reply

Mood: Love

~SoundlessWhispers Jan 28, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

This has officially awed me.

My favorite lines were: nor tread in red dye / to impress new memories upon old.
I adore the delicacy in your word choice and the gentle flow. It has beautiful imagery that is as clear to me as the picture on a High Def. Flatscreen.
This definitely deserved a DD. Congrats!

Reply

`poisonedrose Jan 29, 2012

Thank you for your kind words

Reply

~SoundlessWhispers Jan 31, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Happy to supply them

Reply

~TheDibLuver Jan 28, 2012

Grats on your DD. Beautiful imagery.

Love the line:
"Eyes should only be lowered for sleep-"

Reply