May 2012
2 tags
Santa Monica grew seas of fragile poppies on these arms, ones that crave the embrace of salted winds and the coastal lick. I return to where the grains do lie, to where these bones have settled in their places: rooted like the flowers.
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I desired a word with you, but I came at you in tongues. I looked then, to my fingers: hoarse, gasping every syllable.
2 poems published in Spires magazine :) Thanks, readers and friends, for the support!
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The prosecco giggles again at the primal scene, where it once tasted sweeter in dry pairs yet now remains eclipsed as a maimed sunset of stale half-lights.
1 tag
“He wanted to ask Seven Seas where trees got names,
watching the ribbed branches...”
– Derek Walcott, Omeros
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The mud spoke to me in a cool dialect, and I lay soaked like thirsty rice paper because I was parchment written into being as the scrolls he used to recite by the roots of his heart. My anguish lashing, I feel the rain coarsen as the seconds cement into histories that will carve itself into my face in time: whispered like leaves scratching across the dark full of fireflies.
2 tags
Swiftest is his hand, raw and crying for salts, that corrals with crimson the feral night-fevers lancing through him, and whether he may be burning for sooth, or forcing Hell into three-lined stanzas, there are no masterpieces to be written in cooling waters.
3 tags
I feel my scalp, glazed with sweat, scalded by memory: there were pillars that fell that day when clouds were rising like fresh loaves and the sun had given us the kisses that are often exhaled yet left to spider away unsaid. You are to me as the frayed whiskers of the storm that my bones did feel yet discounted: little will you know of my half-naked shouts that leave me gasping for breath against...
2 tags
He hailed me like a cab, brusque with a certain heavy-handedness, that surrendered me later to the soggy gravity of being thrust curbside with parchment arms full of boxes pregnant with orphaned trinkets left to mingle in the deadspace of our garret.
2 tags
Lightning scalped
the smog from
flat tops crunchy
with concrete crusts,
and I huddled beneath
the awning with the
ever-flickering lights,
as I fingered the keypad
for his voice so dry.
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Sunset hunter, (one of your enveloping epithets) for I stopped to watch the dusk against your jaw break like strokes of a child’s handwriting. Childish was I to envy the dying day, decrepit with color and bloom, but I, suffused with creeping jasmine, could not kiss nearly with such ferocity.
2 tags
As I gingerly savored my piece of sake on the platter, he lifted the cup to his lips with laughter along the rim: “Los Angeles is the worst place for intellectuals to date.” He was right, and as I shifted my weight uneasily in my seat, I rifled in the span of seconds through the faces and the beds I had come to know. I relived him, relived them. Anyone who meets me knows I am nothing...
1 tag
He carried his three and twenty years as if they were fewer than ten, and his lightness sweetened my tongue like a tartlet that I ate to the very last crumb. Yet he remained on my fingers, weighing in heavy creams on these cracking knuckles. So I lick them clean, yet there is no escape from the palate he has graced: I file down my sweet tooth for my just desserts.
4 tags
Silence falls in striped veils, like the thickest of night, and I collide with your outline to see your jowl so changed, changed as if the years had passed over it in breaking waves that kissed away the hard of your grave-stone, that which these lips so failed to perform at the precipice of our last meeting: where I chose to leap, whereas you took to parting, again, again, again only to return as...
2 tags
My appraisal took but one handtouch along the lines of your chapped face before I unbuttoned your coat to press myself against your heated center fueled by fallen pines: where I’d be seized with a cherishing, a silent arresting of my breath.
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As he tore away from me, he stopped in his Italian way to spin for me with his tongue spools of gold for my dreams, as if I had to pay my way with coins in my eyes along what I fantasize to be rivers: there, a boy may finally forget himself.
1 tag
“But, ah me! Where is the woman who had ever really torn from her heart the image...”
– Wilkie Collins; The Woman in White
2 tags
In stabs of light,
Sol, into my chamber,
prowls in gasping
heats,
throbbing wild
with visions
seared by
yonder horizon:
limbs and sky
laugh in
clotted blood.
3 tags
Sensation is how we five-fingered, even with the press of your manhandled hands so unlike my stradivarius-brittle, which sung in your lifelines that my mother taught me once to read.
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Mark me: how I’ll clutch at cloud-shadows weighing on the golden rushes, how I’ll sink my teeth into the twilight trembling over the knolls until the horizons are on my lips again as they were when we sang in the dead-dark of a midnight not yet silenced.
1 tag
My undergraduate career is about a month away from its conclusion.
I’m thinking of retiring “graffitiesprit.” I have had that inclination for a long while. To be honest, this tumblr has lasted far longer than I expected it would, and you know, I’ve accomplished so much while here. Met so many of you that gave me reasons to continue writing and exploring.
It scares me to...
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The champagne flutes recall in frothing mirth that dusk of spring when your eyes arrested me: pale faces flushed red with my breath having wandered from me towards the tails of sea air, crisp against lips of salt.
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The cavalcade of her shining marched into the brushwork of my hair, marooning on each shadow the print of her lightening kisses flecked with dusts of gold.
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I wrestled with dawn’s arms, white smooth heat, because I intended to remain a still-life, sandy-eyed and shadowed, beside you in blanket dunes.
Anonymous asked: Hey. Would like to know your thoughts about poetry. What is it to you and in what ways are you it. Many thanks
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The spindles broke in the zone of breaths left to die between us, and the day broke into greys, wet with discordance, as I broke my bread full of prayers to the Architect and his broken blueprints.
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I committed my lagging eye to the turrets at ghost’s walk, which I saw melt like kingdoms evacuated into slothful rivers crawling proudly with fluid flag into cavern maws laden with crystal teeth.
3 tags
The days bite
like his leg exposed
from sheets stacked
Napoleon-style,
cream white off the
edges shivering
as we lay bedridden
with fevers worthy
of hot jazz:
our own speakeasy
with passwords
composed of what
the flesh did say.
2 tags
λωτοφάγοι
My molars grind against the lotus seeds, (sweet bursts like dates) as apathy blooms in fallals, whisking into white the grey mindsea.
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Crumpling myself
beside the small of
him like an
unloaded gun,
we had stopped to feed
our habits made
of pulses quickening
to the pace of his
reading me like
tea leaves.
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Gripping to the trails of her skirt were the wind’s tousled memorandums, a criss-crossing parchment of my plainer, dryer sentiments wound tightly in the way letter kisses letter until sealed with moist gravity.
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The candles faint in the twilight of their waxen days and though we like to shimmer, I bite my lips at the dusk of when we might one morrow fail to glow until we, as hearths, are mansioned overhead in the house of the sun to burn brilliantly in thousands of other eyes.
April 2012
2 tags
Wrung dry,
the sieve shakes
itself of hooked
dreamlings with
a tooth caught
in the netting
of malcontents and
cabarets of
sweating nights
whiskey-bound,
spent climbing
for breath.
1 tag
La Noyée
She puffs in my direction dogeared love letters of how she drowned in marine tide pools, but I catch the siren smoke rings wrought of her lipwriting that betrayed her head-first dive into the layers of him.
9 tags
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Disregard the flitting of sore eyes that trace the flight path of your fingers across steel strings to the cadence paved by toe taps and fragrant sprigs of heartrhythms that I may never be privy to.
3 tags
It took a single misstep before I had to muster the once-torn fibers and glass heel to pad your footing with my own. I felt then the jolts of your knee that buckled not in deference but in growing pains, and there we would lay, grounded where for just a minute or two the world would revolve around us.
1 tag
I’ve resisted for a good while now writing about this, but I believe this might be a good learning moment for both myself and my readership.
For awhile now, an anonymous person claiming to have a MFA has been plaguing my inbox with scathing critiques of my work. At first, I was pretty numb to it having received criticism in that way countless times before. My usual method is not to validate...
2 tags
I am willed toward
the white arms of
Anaktoria,
beloved for her
lovely walk that
spills over in
fragmented lilies
blooming in
stirs of water:
palms and
thighs open to
painter’s blue,
she marks where
I will be face first,
limp as dead.
2 tags
The way I learned to write was to trace the malformed letters, looped with flesh as cursive seedlings, of those with ambrosia and ennui between their teeth.
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Long long before you, I had resorted to pushing aside to the chipped fringes of salvaged china the haricots verts overboiled. Habitual, indeed, that I forsook old greens so salted against my forked tongue to make of them the irises that possessed Van Gogh.
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I think often of apple cores, and how it took but one to fell cities and slander her now tucked away as a willing prisoner in the silent immensities of concrete seas. Think now of the bodies that paid for the weaving of one bone-torn from him, who will now join her to wring atonement from high hearts and swallow the core whole.
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I once told him that I wanted this to be a repository of beautiful things. But perhaps I have failed in my endeavors to collect the words properly, to arrange them better than Victor did when he dared to peruse the charnel houses for those beautiful parts. Uprooted wildflowers and gutter trinkets make for such filthy pastiches. So cluttered, unbreathable.
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Suspension is this lanky form in the mire of phantoms that coalesce into the night air threading its hydra heads into the notches in my bones humming flatly an old blues tune.
1 tag
I come upon
these arcing lips
straining to shape
a name that
melts the shaft
of crossbow glances
with corpse-fires
quenchless.
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Mighty shall these palms ever be that knead the frozen halfness of stakes driven into the titan arms with which I’ve cathected.
1 tag
Look, dear sir, at the phantom games of how the shuttle hustles along the rails of sinister designs, how I seem to find these hands engaged in the deepest games of chess with the very ghostly sinews of an adversary.
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