Writing Gooder

catching wind,

slender fingers reach out,

grasping everything and nothing.

curling over like dead men: five fallen.

this smothering air you breathe in;

you live for the unobtainable.

yet it’s always moving around you,

for it cannot leave. it will not leave.

it fills you up,

and it pushes you away.

your foe is your friend.

Love me.
[Read full poem on YWS!]

Shell by shell, imperfection compresses itself into mid-air.

It creates a silent state of delirium throughout upstate New York.

Right before human eyes, it made the front page and we’re wondering (by the thousands) if this is Reality or a trick of the Times.

The wife: the Fantasy, He: the Island:

William, William wake up Honey—there are men out in front of the house and I

Don’t know what they want.

Biscuits were ready and there had been a slow day ahead of them;

A pot of tea, the Game, the Times: it was that Sunday morning when William woke up.

He wasn’t sleeping with the Fantasy anymore. He wasn’t on the Island anymore.

He was pleading with men on his front porch in neutral-colored trench coats.

[Read the full poem on YWS]

silence for the heart that sings,

the mute man's mile,

brings bandages and mysterious green

that turns the tiller towards tomorrow

an insatiable tomorrow - Oh when!

Words drip wet, weighty and worthless,

turning to steer towards torment,

the chilly lord of the word, lips n' tongue

the bitter captain of broken unspoken

unsatisfied, but on board, salty splintered

from sirens singing, 

"Sail bayward, sail bayward!"

and the sweet temptation, crashlanding

unhanding, towards a shallow dam,

then would the mast be tended?

[read the full poem on YWS!]

The rain has made spots 

on the window panes.

Now the long dish of gravel

and the almost-jaundiced shrubbery

are speckled, so maybe it's time

for your arrival.

You can dent the paving

with the soles of your old boots,

and watch the wall surge downwards

like the advent of absence.

[Read the full poem on YWS]

stairsteps up, each labeled like specimens
each promising a new plateau
where a name sits, in company of
a date of birth, of death, of christening –
your life before me, simplified like a fraction.

the weevils have gnawed you down to dates
and a few stories.

crinkly, suffering pages of an old bible
which you used to own, lie spoiled and aged and used
and you have marked the margins
with a red pencil. your handwriting is a shaky, splintered,
precise spider, weaving up the dry, godly words.

Read the rest at YWS

Parallel by erratik_statik (click to read it on YWS):

Good morning, darling

I hope you are well.

Take a breath,

inhale the ink-dredging sunrise

that creeps over the hilltops

and chases the frost back to the lake.

Let the children dance,

softly, raindrops on your irises,

as sparrows laugh at their stumbling

and their shadows catch them when they fall.

Feel the sand disintegrate between your toes

as the cats claim your vision with their backs,

and the flowers open like

curious clamshells.

Read the whole thing at YWS.