the ocean is melting
everything is falling as far as it can
the sun will devour us
babies are tumors
we fear our own bones
all blood is starlight
the alphabet has no order
a bed builds itself in letters
language was never planned
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
eyeteeth before eyes
grabbing the stranger’s wrist
chin tilted towards the neon
she floods her face
familiar with his jawline
glass spreading skin
in the bottle, underwater
the world spins
two, two, three, four
the dance floor is sewage
breathing, old saliva welling
ankles twist
memory is a tricky thing
he’s like all the rest
just sweat and want and fingernails
good night, let’s bite
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
Wet wood, creaking, salt on lips.
Lethargic, waking, marooned, I lift
my hand. Dusty light splits
between my fingers. Sun scatters
across my chest. My mouth is dry.
The sky threatens to wrap around me.
Underneath the sea beasts sigh, and
I close my lids again.
Take heed. Across
a wieldy hill we have
a barefooted girl, her big
toe in the dirt, her fingernails
hanging in pieces of
retribution.
She kicks into the
giving grass
and storms.
A way down the hill
a stone is pitched.
It sings,
upended, reprimanded —
it finds a burrow
in the lake,
a lake that laments
on how flat it must
seem to the
overhanging ones.
It swallows the
stone, and hears
the girl’s cries in its
coiling gills.
She suffocates on
uprooting things,
on watching them drown
in the lake’s watery mouth,
on losing a piece
of what was sure to her.
Back up the hill, on
a boulder’s back,
she rests her toe
and holds her breath.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
But we did not lose the sun that night to the hem
of dark and day. Our mouths, our tongues, our teeth, our gums
held tight to that plump fruit of light and let it spin
in the back of our throats, made to reel at the edge
of shade. Our eyes gleamed bright, each nose did beam, as we
crouched to wait for dawn. Our ears flashed with shafts of light,
and there we were shards of glass forced to know the stars.
But we did not eat the sun that night, though its taste
bled sure and sweet. Our task was to hide it with our
locked off lips, and then, when broke morn, set its flame free.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
Here in the heat of the cemetery, in the peeling heels of children’s feet, in the sweat of stone-watchers and ghost-hunters.
Here among the living headstones, among the itchy onion grass that whets naked shins and smells of cutting boards.
Here the worms are unashamed of their slime, of the apple core that’s marked with man spit, of the millennia that they chew up and excrete.
Here there is a fork skewering the dirt, behind a wizened rock. Do we eat the dead or the macaroni?
Here near driveways and dining halls that pump bodies like blood vessels.
Here puddles deceive, and wary boots wonder how deep they have to splash before they squish mummified ligaments and moldy old teeth.
Here spiders are overlooked architects; redesigning wreaths of webs, forever breaking in the path of kneecaps and night things.
Here a boy of blackheads and hope breathes close to a girl who believes that the shadows are alive.
Here where hand carvings reign, where cubist hearts and communist quotes and severed genitalia are art unlike anywhere else.
Here where hand carvings hurt, where death stares back at the vandal’s split tongue, where the rain promises to restore the memoriams.
Here in this place of picnic and prayer, of half-drunk beer bottles and half-hearted psalms.
Here among the incense-wringers, among the flag-stickers and the flower-bringers, among the rusted rosaries and framed pictures of withered, smiley grand-people.
Here for the remembered ones, and their forgetful nieces who hop from patch to patch of green grave grass while their parents hiss, “Not here!”
Here for the forgotten ones, for the moss-masked stones that once bore names that now no one knows, that died from yellow fever/diphtheria/polio before their time. Long before ours or within their own?
Here lie not the forgotten ones, but the rotten ones.
Here there are mysteries of after beings, of what becomes when the earth contains us, of who we are when we are dust.
Here there are no mysteries, only such.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
A sophistication in a retiring of hopeful polymers. Such that honesty sculpts the kidnapped resin of bumble and husk, and refuses to climb the undecided walls. Bulbous paws and paunch and arms, but only half an amber likeness. A bust in bending. Smeared not clear, but see-through. The contents could tumble from its mind. Or drip. Or ooze. But the knowing is sticky inside the feet.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
undulate without
want for anything
into sea cream
and red berry
brew
apart from smoke
i see nothing
but the crown
of underage
falanges
and parted lips
of flounder fish
with this
my sleeping mind
insists
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
Can the wind remember when
you spat into its lungs?
When you spoke ill of ancient
things and unloaded
grief into its squall?
How much do you suppose
it holds to heart?
How much do you think
it resents?
Could it be that
knowing songs
of winding, whistling
old windstorms
carry with them
the curses
of their passerby,
of mortals slim
and fit to die,
of loners looking
to blame their pain
on bits of unfossilized breath?
Of air that dares
to never end?
But what is squeamish,
red-faced jealousy
to, well, face it,
eternity,
and to the wisdom of
perpetuity — the kind
that revolves
around itself?
Can the wind remember the
slights of maddened men?
Or is the wind
unconcerned,
and just pleased
to spin again?
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
a thousand old beaches
feel that sleep, in a simple way,
holds buried spirit
those waves stir
the rocks deeper than
that dark mystery
in the throat of a
most ancient
music, I,
all marble and salt,
listen
since the
arsenical lobster
exhausts the
voice of shadows,
listeners,
in liquid flesh,
raise their contours
to silent contemplation
but I,
unforeseen,
must bow to
weeping,
and the damp wonder
of gypsum roots,
from which flow
the dark sounds
of the spirit
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
Stellular Scribe 