The moon wears a robe of silence,
the violet dust unsettles around her
in the pearly sky, dark and turbid
like my heart, viscous and heavy
with words that tore our world.
***
The night is mercurial swathed
in layers of luminescent clouds.
But the moon moves in a hasty arc,
I am anxious I gather pieces of the day
before darkness shrouds the earth.
The milky smell of spider lily fills the air
thick as beautiful sex; sky blue like
the vein on my neck, throbs in simple convulsions
that only birds can hear in their stillness.
They transform into aural trajectories of happiness
and sing, these songs tessellate as loops
between trees as ancient as this earth itself.
The sigh is a mist of dream above the arching trees;
a web, like a prism of light in tension, sags
under the weight of a spider fattened by its prey;
saliva of an insect is the wet lines on the lily
that disappear into the vortex – a map of final journey.
I slither from a wet branch heavy like a snake ,
but a leaf is what I want to be as I fall.
This poem is written in response to the two week prompt from We Write Poems. Read the prompt here and here. I have borrowed the title of the poem from WWP. Thank you ! I propose to write a series of poems in this title.
This is what I have been doing –
polishing the ring you gave me;
oxide in the grooves that I rub
leaves a welt of soot on muslin,
like desire it chokes my heart.
The naked bulb leaves imprints
of filament in my eyes that no amount
of winking can rub away.
I have to remove these from inside –
the filament, the trace of ring.
The way the beautician pushes
the cuticles, takes one finger at a time
to prod the dirt away till pale moon
appears on a bloodshot nail,
I burn the want out of every moment
and open my heart to love for you.
Poetic Asides Wednesday Prompt – use a line (‘burn the want out of every moment’) from Robert Lee Brewer’s personal notebooks
i don’t know you at all
the way I don’t know
where this poem will take me
the charcoal night creeps up
like the tar smeared on the sidewalk
that’s when I want to press the hill
to the folds of my skin
formed from the breath of your love
we pressed the chins on the grass
watched the train in the valley
serpentine like the desire
that coiled and tangled us
the warmth of bodies pressed
like flowers, petal on petal,
the breeze, the kiss print of longing,
fingers clasped in knots of love
you kick the rug, folds fall heavy
like a metaphor that does not work
knots of nerves in your neck
stream into the crispness of your shirt
tracing paths into places
that you will not let me touch now
run my tongue
to draw the map of love
My Garden 