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Threadbare Doll

Playing with threadbare doll,
Hestia waits
along a dusty path of rubble and dim lights.
The child hums, sweetly,
her own rhythmic fantasy adhered;
absent from the night of gunfire and blood.

High above on waning clouds
the Goddess is weeping;
she reaches for the girl--
the hearth of home is extinguished.
And the threadbare doll
has pleasure as she dances
between little grey pebbles
and the hands of the child.

Playing with threadbare doll,
Hestia waits
The child will soon see her.
The barefoot child with dirty
dress and dirty face crouched
over the ballroom floor
listening to invisible song.

Child, let me lift

RoadkillLast night, an owl hoot.
This morning, burnished sun. Blue
concrete and two wings.

ElegyThere is an emptiness in your mouth,
a gaping maw of black. You swallowed suns,
drank the star-dust dry.

Helene, raise your moon-arc face
and turn the sky. Part your lips.
Your breath - a prayer. Your words -
the black-hole roar;

merely a gasp.

winter footnoteswinter footnotes
e.bojnowski

your elbows were anchors
in a softly-lit parking lot,
where you sang to glass and paper:

and your visions are quiet hills
your visions are shy sounds
your visions are sheep covered in frost.

speaking
loose tongued,
like an old shoe-

that dry rasp
that leaves me covered in skin flakes,
leaves me
brushed onto the wall .

I am the raised bumps in spackle-
ripped off with the sound of a poor phonograph:

in my chain link home,
a residual ghost.

Makeshift SymphonyHe tied piano strings to his heart,
so that every time it beat
it didn't sound so empty inside.

But the music in his heart
couldn’t permeate the hollow air
as the metronome kept time for the clock.
One, two. One, two.

Reedy notes plummeted from his lips as
he made me pluck out Tchaikovsky and Bach
when all I wanted to play was twinkletwinklelittlestar.
"I'm just a little girl."

My fingers tripped and stumbled
and I know that I could never play
as well as he needed me to;
I could never keep his notes
from slipping off the page.

White and black sideswiped my fingers,
as I struck one chord too many.
"I've always wanted to

When It's Time

"I don't care if it's selfish, I don't want you to go." Sam stood halfway between the doorway and the foot of the bed, caught between staying and walking away.

"It is selfish, but I understand. I'm tired Sam, I'm worn out and it's time for me to give in to the natural order of things." The older man's voice was slow, patient but firm. "No man was ever meant to see as much as I've seen in my life, and a man can only take so much."

Sam wiped moisture from one cheek, quickly as though it might not be noticed. "Whatever it is that's broken, get it fixed. We've got lots of money..."

Jacob cut the sentence short. "It's not about money. There's n

Costume partyI'll go as Luke Skywalker
(shirking my duties on the farm)
You can be Princess Leia
(in her white gown, captive)

At first people will wonder if there's something
between us—until they realise
(there is)

AlwaysAlways

But certainly there’s always the fear that what I have to say won’t find an audience

A Tale of The WindCold, she wraps herself in a rouge sweater,
tucks her hands carefully in her jeans.
The wind wants to keep her.
He beats at her face, chaps her lips,
and occasionally, the leaves rise up around
her and resemble a hand. She walks through
them, knocks them to the ground, steps on the wind's
brittle fingers. So he pulls at her hair, tries to pull
her back with him, and when she won't listen,
he takes a stray hair that falls on the ground.

At night, he finds her again,
knocks at her window, tries to wake
her. The old juniper still beats at the panes,
but she isn't afraid anymore,
and the wind is discouraged.
And the win

ForeverTo put it in the words of
that one famous band
I want to love you but
I don't know if I can
And I decided—
Too late—
That I liked holding your hand better
than holding your arm when we walked
Together

It's all because
you make me smile
and I don't know if that's still right,
Good,
Acceptable—
And after seeing you, sometimes
Sometimes
I wish it were all better.
I wish God would come down and change it all,
Change everything.
But it's not my say,
and I know, someday
Someday
You'll forget,
Forget about me
and go on, careless, happy—
(I want you to be happy,
but…)
And then, probably, someday,

AmalgamationThis is an ode to plastic bottles swelling with ice,
skies pressed apart by white foam, and steam
gleaming where there used to be blue arches
starched across the daytime steeples. This

is an ode to rain forests and cassette tapes
draped in black tangles over green like roads,
exploding their winding way from civilization.

The Art of AgingThere was a time he built
sand castles by the sea
without the fear of waves and wind
and careless birds
with fretful wings
and restless feet of human beings
that made his castles crumble down
again, again, again.

The crisp and salted seconds
dripped out of his days
Memories became his beaches,
his castles mere accounting forms,
and paper-thin bills his dragon kites.
And his grandchildren built sand-castles.

These ironed trousers
were not meant for beaches
as childhood is not meant for men.
But all his desires
would begin to conspire;
he'd fall into white sky sheets
and re-wind life
during dreamless nights.

He counted the

Field Notes.

  I: Insecta

  I snap: a sling-shot
  of sinew, tendons whipped
  to joints that buckle in lines as cleanly creased
  as an origami crane. Poised on a tripod of paper tips,
  I anticipate the wind but there is only steel
  shearing bone and then it all unfolds
  with a scritch-scratch and tickle
  of segmented limbs sprouting,
  barbed as berry-canes.

  II: Hymenoptera

  My skin
  once fed on your skin;
  sipped at honeyed pores
  with a thousand tiny, hollow tongue

MineMine

It happens all the time and so it is happening now, only this time for me, and so these are mine. Because I would like all of them, all of what I’m about to share really, to be mine – to become mine or remain mine – whichever it is that’s most correct. I say this as best I know how, with clarity the foremost concern, so that my mind and my title to its product is made plain and all by the action of my own hand – mine own hand. I wish to make this a matter of public record, one in which all can see my purpose and intention. I wish for no accidents of communication when speaking with this world. I wish for no conf

Incident on a BridgeIncident on a Bridge
after Donald Justice

There because I was unsure
where else to bear my loss,
I stopped at Haizhu bridge –

where many unsteady hands have given
every hope and sorrow to gravity.
And there I climbed out to wait,

bankrupt and listening to the river
cussing, the breath of the crowd
below. And the day was long

on the beams before I saw
the familiar stranger standing
hooded in his shadow –

black lips, black teeth, watching
among the passers-by, his eyes
hard as bone. His blade

brushed each back that pushed
past him as traffic thickened
in the alleys of Guangzhou.

And I knew him by this – his sp

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unexpectedlyby `nycterent

Literature / Poetry / Nature / Haiku & Eastern

©2009-2013 `nycterent

Not really about nature, but you knew that already.

~Warhammer89 Feb 1, 2010

How very John Donne of you!

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~phosphorene Jan 22, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

Nice twisting of the traditional subject matter. It really is 'unexpected'.

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~TwistedAlyx Dec 30, 2009 Hobbyist Writer

That always happens to me.

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~CailinLiath Dec 29, 2009

[link]

the formatting isn't exactly perfect, but it's the best I can find online. properly it has a bit more grace.

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`nycterent Dec 29, 2009 Professional Writer

I'm not sure how to take this comment, but thank you.

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~CailinLiath Dec 29, 2009

It's just something to read. One of my favorites though I can't seem to be bothered to remember more than the substance of it. I may have the poem memorized before I can recall the title and author.

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`nycterent Dec 29, 2009 Professional Writer

Ah, I thought it might have had some sort of relation to my submission, and so was confused. Again, thank you for the link! It's a lovely poem.

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~CailinLiath Dec 29, 2009

only through the vague tangent of laundry, I suppose.

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`nycterent Dec 29, 2009 Professional Writer

Right.

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~CailinLiath Dec 29, 2009

dunno. it's what I thought of and I thought you might like to read it is all. I'm a bit fuzzy right now, so I may not be making any kind of sense.

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