[x]

No oceanNo one sleeps the night the army comes home,
and memory storms the shore, bipolar and sexy.
You always knew where to go and what to drink,
where to find the crows that stalked the summers
left lying wrinkled on shorn boardwalks,
Augusts headless and Julys scuttling over hills.
When you were gone I fucked Arthur Rimbaud
in a Parisian basement. He hooked his eyelashes
under mine and made waves on my skin.
Tolle, lege, like the parable tells me.

StargrazingOn nights like these
we like to call ourselves stargrazers,
deep sky tourists.

We head up to the headland,
where heaven grafts itself to earth,
stitching the breeze between
our cheekbones, our fingertips.
Below, the sea stretches out
with an endless hush. You tell me
we'll sit in the rift
of the tide's smile to keep in touch
with the muchness of being
and believing. But seeing

beyond that pale of blacklight
is another matter. You have a map,
so you take the back of my hand
and paint a picture in mime
and synaesthesiac rhyme:

Our sky is like cats' eyes
kaleidoscopin

immolatethe first step
to sadness is to
have.

[3]

poseidon
punctuates the bruised
shorelines with broken hearts and
shattered abelone
shell fragments.
sometimes the
shore creeps up, kisses
my feet. sometimes he rips through
the distance between
us, taking
what's his.

[5]

the air here
vibrates to a fire,
sparrow's heart humming in c
major. it does scare
me sometimes,
how i might love you
more than ibuprofen, or
the way the light might
oscillate
through an ether storm.

the person i am now is
not compatible
with who i
was before you. but
how do i scrape myself out
from under my own
fingernails?

[7]

we caught the
moon

petrichorNiobe weeps.

gold scattered rough across
cracked earth and the last
remains of summer - they fell
like leaves in the arms of the wind.

some scents cannot be captured.
the gods bleed onto rock,
and the stone sends her prayers
in return: petrichor.

listen - the heavy thud of
rain on parched ground;
the monsoon sealing life back in;
the sky bows and kisses earth.

Niobe weeps.

.SetIt is Akhet, the season of sorrow and silt, and Set
must tense his sandbreath against the slick of wet
once more. It's always the same: though he's unsure
who started the game, or whose face he wears,
he knows he must prepare for the beginning of the end,
the bite of night and all the slippages in the inbetween.

And he swore he'd bait their breath,
but they'd rather choose death than fear,
with their tombstone legs, arms pegged
in sockets and their locked ears,
burying themselves beneath blocks
built to the sun. They outrun him, every time.

It's a crime. He remembers what his mother said:
do what you're able to keep them faithful

HousewarmingShe opens windows
in their wintery home, hopes
to let the cold out

when it doesn't work
she scratches matches to life
and burns the house down.

exhibit.Nanny thinks the carpet is too soft
to be my torturecage

and the sofa and endtables are poor
jailbars, but we

are feline and we're too tough to care
bigsister and littlesister are lioncubs today
baby lionesses, authentically,
we even lap milk from
ceramic bowls, bellies swollen from
the orders we give: 'emily, you're the

zookeeper.
Get us more milk.'

She hates serving us, she's only four
but she's getting strong and someday
she'll earn predator status.
(give thanks that we do not consume you, emily,
your fingers peek through the cagebars and
they are white and young and blood
is sweeter than breastmilk)

Roar. We are learni

The Farmers SonWe sat sipping grappa as the storm clouds rolled in from the ridges
like the smoke from some great unseen inferno,
the wood walls and shingles of the house complained to us
in low groans,
of the wind coming up hard, through the valley,

and there was flickering light from a candle,
and she told me how light from a prism dissects into different colours that correspond
in some way to our bodies and that all of life was a rhythm

and I believed that part,

and I believed there were stars beyond the sight of man on any grey day
and that they might hold some greater secret than prisms or rhythms
or any question a farmers son could ever

OrientalismIn the day, yellow sand
from the Taklamakan
coats the motorbikes
of your overlords

At night, this city's towers
gleam, a Chinatown of lights
(dragon gold, lantern red)

Here, you can eat
a Philadelphia roll
or a fortune cookie
with fictional
Confucian quotes
on the side

Or you can dive
into a Pacific of
specific patterns,
woven with
living threads
in wire cocoons

Don't get distracted
by the innumerable
neon kanji; trace
the tiny green
lights to the
computer shop
at the end of
the way.

.vesta.

It is time. We feel the pull of summer along our spines
as we head into hibernation. Bed is short respite for our leaden limbs,
our singed hair. The air aches with the wait of it, where the embers
click and sing like crickets. Snippets of sound from the underground.
"This," someone says, wide-eyed with awe, "is what the insides
of the earth look like" - the world beneath, struck through with
dragons' teeth, pocked with open sores. The slit smile of the crater
in a slack jaw. Our scarred skies are littered with lights, many
mechanical suns spun into the ceiling, glinting like electric sequins.

And in the middle of it all, where our

The Phillipians to St. PaulWhen light flooded your eyelids
& permanently blinded you
that was Jesus'

love, covering your skin
like the palm of a hand.

It was then you found you were as zealous
in persecuting trash

& the gods we make of our stomachs
as ever you were
in persecuting Christians

with the brand. How they
recoiled from you when you
began effusing to them

in fires & gibberish tongues! For the light
that filled you was eruptive

& though
you speak of your own life

as if it could be a drink offering,
you are a fire work

& we are attending the fuse.

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.

Rock Meautumn blunders in, clumsy
stiff fingers frosted still
by early winds, rocking trees
back and forth

red leaves splatter the ground
paint drops, hanging from drooping
branches, rotten fruit still litters the sidewalks

i head south for the fall with the ducks.

the train creaks like aching joints
there's a crow on
my windowsill, ruffling his feathers
the trees flash by
red -yellow-red

my ticket's got a hole in the middle
from being folded over and over
the crow says "summer ain't that great, Peach Girl."
i watch the sky and ignore his clicking black beak
"the autumn's gonna follow
right behind ya
'n turn the whole world re

swimming, not drowning.when you're waist-deep in a love you know you shouldn't have even dipped your toes into, you spend a lot of time cursing the current. you try to stamp your feet but find the sand's up to your ankles and seaweed is tied in bows around your calves. the waves begin to climb, breaking on your collarbones and splashing your face. breath seems to take up more space in your chest. you bring air into your body in the shortest bursts possible and it spills back out like machine gun fire.

sometimes, though-- mostly in the first hours after sunrise, when you're alone with the space she inhabited on your couch and her perfume on the back of your knees--

nowhere elseit rains hard enough

that i can finally sit quietly,
as if lighting candles.

maybe there is
nowhere else to be.

a cup of water trembles
on the table as if afraid,

kept too long
from the useful yearning of roots,
from the anonymous way rain falls.

i light one candle
then another,
quietly,
as if lighting candles.

the rain keeps pressing damp invisible flowers
against the window,
reminding me how long the near-dark lasts,

how the woods at the edge of the yard
never see,
but thirst enough to catch fire.

each candle moves like the rain,
each quieting life
from lives of their own.

in the half-light coming in,
i can pretend

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SleeptalkI buried the dead
and they came up stories.
- Angle of Repose, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

I am made of a series of stumbles;
of mispronunciations and a rhyming guide
to natural histories. Nights spent revisiting
the mysteries of the frame of a lightbulb,
fish nets, home. Such screams and sleeptalk
as dreams are made on and I am torn from –
as I am forcefed a pulse and a rhythm
and a mantra to forget them all by day.

I am the tempest:
the tongue of a soothsayer,
a palm full of future; and I'll keep
sleepwalking, snowfaced,
until I have nothing left to say.

.mercury.

It is the magnetism that brings him back,
back, to the indigenous days of May, with its
terrestrial tilt and cadence of moonshine.
That, or the wide smile of a rift – a chink
or broken link in time.

That's it: it's simply scientific, he tells himself;
the puckered truths, traded dreams, the guilt –
it's all just a trick of kinetics, the fevered frictions
(or fictions) of the messenger. Esoterics.

But still. It's with pursed lips he meets the rip –
the shafts of split light that belt Orion
like snakes stitched at the hip, or a cruel twist
of fate, quick as silver. And this time there's no note
for him to relay or

EarthspunHome is held in a dark place, a dank place,
beneath the musted plates of glass where, once,
I curled and crept into the rusting lungs of some cabbagepatch god.
Here, words are trapped, tapped into the husks
of my fingernails, the mouldering beds of marrow.

In the silence, I have learned to turn and face the wall;
to let the earth knot and clot in the back of my throat.
My tongue is swollen to a bulb: a stopped geranium that's fixed to falter,
enthralled by the depths at which I can slumber without
going under. In this silence, I have learned to burn

and breathe beneath my breadth. O the beauty of usage!
I will weight in this angle

Operation Enduring -Once in a while, it rains. And it rains hard.
A dislocated pictogram remains of the past:
the shafts of broken glass, the wedding ring picked
from the ash, the rag and bone anatomy that's
strewn across the street. Under the tin shell of a bunker,
the people stuttered to defeat whilst waiting out the storm,
watching as the debris of their lives is sunk into the sands
of Helmand province. A man laid waste land.

This is home, someone says of a lean-to:
a couple of knotted sheets, the smell of old blood.
Next door houses heartache, Hell.
There's an open wound in the concrete
where it's been blasted back into a gaping,
a hunger. The c

.neptune.

After the months spent in utero, walking feels strange.
Ground is sound in colour, synaesthesia beneath the heels,
watered down to reveal a horizon of endless blue, and Neptune.
Opening himself like a oracle. He is all mouth: a throat
of thunder, teeth a string of binary numbers. Kether of kelp,
barnacle bones strewn in every bottled message, each letter of
HELP scrawled into the shoreline. A missing-person clue.

Feet rubbed raw, he heads for the ocean, where those water-
logged wishers wash such surface wounds with their salted tears.
It's a pain that's only real when you're reeling, that you can only
find when hanging from fish

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Brackish

by ~angel-in-pieces, Mar 9, 2011, 1:23:47 PM
Literature / Poetry / Transgressive / Free Verse

After the wet season, before
the midsummer night's drought,
I flight for the floodplains, where
the northern downpour bleeds out
and sweeps its love to the mouth
of my lungs. I sleep in the crux
of an oxbow, let my dreams flux
and flow fractured, deltaic. For this
is the way I piece myself apart,
a resolution, my absolution
in a new avulsion.

During the day, I move south
towards the river mouth, picking
pebbles, coral fangs from the riverbed.
A loose tooth is a common truth
in these parts. Bones are febrile,
eyelashes are made of chalk, salt.
Tears turn brackish. They cake
and crack on the flats of my hands.

This is my Pangaea,
this swollen geography,
this slacken land.
The point of no return.

Here, all else ends.

By dusk I meet the saltmarsh
and dehusk, grow halophytic
in the nightlight. I pull out
my hair, my fingernails, and
fill the gaps in my spine
with reed rhythms, saline.
The final rite: turning flesh to grass.

Tomorrow, morning mist
will drag the whitewash back,
ashes to ash.

And I will walk the water,
with a pocketful of stones
and something new to throw
beneath the glass.

Brackishby ~angel-in-pieces

Literature / Poetry / Transgressive / Free Verse

edit: Wow, a DD?! That's incredible. Thank you so much to everyone who has 'd or commented - and especially to ^lightningmonkey who featured me. You're all amazing

Spite is a dangerous vice, but I still think I'd rather crucify than learn.
I hope this hurts like it's supposed to. As much as you hurt me.

.

Let's play spot the obscure literary / lyrical / geographical reference! Any excuse to indulge my love of random geographical terminology...

Daily Deviation

Given 2011-10-29

Brackish by ~angel-in-pieces ( Featured by $wreckling )

love 1 1

joy 3 3

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~Albalannae Oct 29, 2011 Student General Artist

Geography is such an interesting subject. Not only are the names very fun to say, the way the words themselves are spelled makes sentences using them very pleasurable to read. This is a well deserved DD, and I must watch you so I can read your other works. If they're anything like this then I know I'm in for a treat!

~angel-in-pieces Nov 1, 2011 Student Writer

It really is - there's such a wonderful language of geography, one that really captures the landscapes and imagery of it all, as well as the science and process. The imagery in this was partly inspired by my study of it, I have to say. (:
Aww, thank you so much! I'm really glad you like it.

~Albalannae Nov 1, 2011 Student General Artist

I really think that the names came into being from those people who really -saw- the beauty in the land around them. Plus the words are just fun to say, they are very full and roll off the tongue! I'm excited to see what else you write in the future!

*deviantdeeva Oct 29, 2011

THIS...is incredible.

Thank you for sharing.

I love it.

~angel-in-pieces Nov 1, 2011 Student Writer

Thank you so much! I'm really glad you like it.

*deviantdeeva Nov 1, 2011

I think it's awesome.

~angel-in-pieces Nov 2, 2011 Student Writer

*riparii Oct 29, 2011

This is so intensely of the earth, it's impossible to tease out the
person from the rich land and waterscape. Such a strong voice,
such a churning, vivid scene upon scene.

~angel-in-pieces Nov 1, 2011 Student Writer

That's a wonderful reading of it! Thank you

~girlwhosangtheblues Oct 29, 2011 Hobbyist Writer

This is amazing. Maybe one of the best poems I've read this year- including published poets.

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