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The Three SongsThe First Song
The first song is easy; it is the song of magic and love. It is a song for the world and, therefore, it is the sort of thing you hear murmuring through the streets late at night or in the hum of young people dancing. I first heard it long ago; I was travelling deep into the recesses of my mind, and I discovered the image of myself. It was like a mirror, but one that was thousands of years old. Rather than bother him, the image that is, I decided to just watch. And to just see where he might be going.

The image of myself was walking

TritonIt was a story about the ocean, great and powerful and sad;
And the little boy who lived in the surf and played in the waves;
A little boy who had learned to swim deep with the whales
And sing their song.
As the ages past, the sea filled with other noises:
The crush of machines washed away the music,
The nets clutched for fish,
And he was very alone.
And one day he ended up on the shore with nothing;
With his entire story drying away in the sun.
So he put his ear to a conch shell and listened.
And he heard a sound that he'd almost forgotten;
He thought about his grandmother and grandfather
And the whales and the great sea beasts

AnniversaryI commemorated you last night,
Although
Completely by accident.

You darted out from the powder pavements
Skirting my memory
- like a wild wretch
Paltry in register and reason.
The season has been unkind,
Sealed in static and skeletal
Treason: trees illuminated grey and disconnected stars,
Disconnected veins.

I traced the place where we once parted.

Pencil gallows, plainly fallow fields of
Shameful chagrin pinned the hawk cry
Like an arrow. We were frozen there,
Marred by a detonated letter,
A blinding bouquet of devastation.

I dreamed I could wind back this cruel clock-
And undo the shock absorptions that have
Never
Cea

WolfsbaneIt is too far south for wolves,
and when we heard the howls,
our hackles rose
and it set the dogs ablaze.

It is too far north for hallucinations though,
and it had been a lean winter.

Of course,
when the moon was down,
a shaggy haired rats-coat stranger
with a pipe and a lupine smile
stumbled into the village,
played a tune
and waltzed the children
out of town.

And no parent wants to explain
why the cows have been disappearing
or why they bring chains to the rooms
of their tiny blessings
on evenings without clouds.

No one wants to explain
the blood on pastel curtains,
the screaming,
the dolls made of bone.

No one

you're better in my bonesMy favorite architect built that parking ramp that inches closer to the shoreline with each high tide. It is the first to flood and the last to fall. He reminded me that forever can change with a tsunami so don't build beauty, build roots.

My favorite artist starved herself to sticks and bones, proving words can't hurt if you could eat them. If the world would eat their words then hatred would be a lot less satisfying. She showed me that I can't feel for something I don't understand.

My favorite teacher kicked me out of class the third day of school. She said I wouldn't listen to instruction and adhere to rules. She taught me that creativit

QuestionsCould you recast your shackles into swords? Can you tend a fire?
Can you nurture the rage of a generation
Into a lightning-bolt that brings down the tower?
And when you walk your streets, do you cast glances
At the early tremulous chords of minute-revolutions
And inward wars?
Do you see them?

And you - when you look in the mirror,
Do you see a face you recognize
Or just the image
Of the righteousness of your people?
Do you see water or flame?

Or do you see nothing,
Nothing but the world-that-will-be:
The people united,
The land re-sanctified?

Is it made real by you living in it?
Are there crops?

*

In the land of dreams, d

The Oasis – Êthos anthrôpôi daimôn.

With you: I remember halcyon eternities –
Once, upon peaking the birdsong-mountain,
We cradled into those roots;
Curled deep in the nesting veins,
Our hearts transmuted
From flesh & into a seed,
And in that Garden; that rich, dark earth,
I was a child and you were a child –
Finding unstable ease, the joy,
(Dancing those ten thousand fires)
And a feral affection: spring's ice,
And its first hallowed crack.

For years then, in moonlit, my reveries:

Understudy of a Prop GirlOdessa dislikes the spotlight. Always blinding her when she stares out into the audience to deliver a love letter in song, always tripping her when it swoops down at her feet at curtain call, it is the only thing that may tempt her back to the grand piano in cold Ms. Merola's living room. But she will not go, not unless Beethoven's fifth returns to her mind intact, untouched ebony and ivory.

She is a performer. When she describes herself as such to strangers, she tastes the irony sour in her mouth. It is a taste that stays there when she returns to her solitary school lunch table with a program for A Streetcar Named Desire, and it doesn'

sick hydrangea and my bonesi bare my bones to the screeching moon.
twenty-nine days, and i claw again.
take my flesh, take it, dye me maroon.

ribcage and spine: shadows soften too soon.
light, light, as i crawl through the glen.
i bare my bones to the screeching moon.

i gouge myself open to find the rune,
hacking, peeling, like do all wise men.
take my flesh, take it, dye me maroon.

pooling skin-folds, i want them scattered, strewn.
this skin's all bark and oozing holes when
i bare my bones to the screeching moon.

bubble, swell; i can hear the snakes croon.
beauty of being lies beneath the vein.
take my flesh, take it, dye me maroon.

crazed lust for hu

REGRETSRegrets come from altars and dried flowers from special days. They grow in cupboard of past homes and apartments. Regrets blow on the breeze of lost words, missing kisses and last breaths. Regrets are what guilt is left as a residue, a reminder of the past, a harsh penalty for not doing something, for doing something, for feeling wrong. The heart knows there is regret, the head knows there is regret but you can't fix regrets. You'll sit and wonder, sigh with sadness, knowing, feeling that you can't change what you did, change what you said, change for better or for worse. Regrets last a lifetime. All those memories you have, most of them will

strawberrieswhen you are mine i sit in my mother's kitchen wearing polka-dot dresses, tangling my feet together and trying to remember what you told me about love. you keep what i've told you in the back of your wallet and i wonder if you ever read it. i will drink flat diet coke and sing to you on the phone and neither of us even mind that my voice is as flat as the coke.

-

when you are mine you play piano on the bones in my hands and you play guitar on my spine and your friends ask why but we both know you do it for the freckles on my shoulderblade and collarbone and for the auschwitz movies we cry over every sunday in my basement. your tongue slips

Totems and Godhoodi. As a child, confronting giants.

I take the pine tree as my totem,
learn to love the nakedness of its nether-regions
and its northerly fibers stretched and waiting
for the weft to its warp.

Girlhood is still a part of me as the
learning what I am. In the end,
I haven't climbed a tree in a long time;
I am small, and scared, and ringed round with walls,
and I beg the moon to teach me
to use my pine trees as a ladder.

ii. In the way only young love can.

You, sir—
you are pine chips, and I carry you
like a fetish in my mind.

You are the first vampiric sweetness
to suck the breath from my body:
unknowing, the feeling of ye

Bleachingi.
So far beyond black
there has been a whiting

Ten arrows shot
and the moon blew out

Took my color as I
took her heart

ii.
Do not be surprised
when night follows

Puts his shadow at your back
and tugs at your ankles

I will be at your neck
a finger trailing

iii.
The moon
I rarely give thought

Her pale too stark
for my black

Her pale now paled
to yours

iv.
Did I love her?
No one holds an orbit

No one; she told me
black was much the same

well-
I'm willing to wager my pale
if you'll wager in kind

eucalyptusthey tell me i am writing confessional
poetry and i tell them, no, i am not,
i am writing my world.

i did not burrow in guilt's throat
and choose to spell out the softness,
no, i screamed out my soul and it was then
that i remembered how i used to pray.

i wanted to tell stories
but instead i sat and wrote:

about rain, and sorrow,
and the greek gods,
and pain, and the greek gods,
over and over, and dionysus, dionysus:

i plunged and dived dolphin-beaked.

*

i want you know
that death is a responsibility
and saltwater immersion
a fierce talent we cannot escape

so this is a confession for you:

i am not selfish
i am self only

LimbsI am barely more than a thought, and yet -
I am everything,
at once ghost and creature
crawling ghoul-like and monstrous from nightmare depths.
I am comprised entirely
of your words and fears -
a collection of scraps, jumbled bones and epithets.

I was not born as magazine photographs.
I am not metal and cut glass,
nor am I smooth, swift acrylics -
I am not a painting.
I will not be beaten and used,
but neither will I be your porcelain doll.

No -
at times I am merely a bird,
wings beating against the wires of my cage.
But at times I am also Yggdrasil itself,
with deep, deep roots and limbs
holding the worlds themselves.

On

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Late Evening, July

by ~ProvenParadox, Jul 25, 2011, 6:45:10 PM
Literature / Poetry / Romantic / Post-Teen (Mature) / Free Verse

You and I, world – I think we have the same heart;
I think that you've got the same crazy bits stuck
Right behind everything you're made of.
You've got the same contradiction as I do
And I think I've gotten muddled in exactly the same way.
It's the most beautiful muddling. The prettiest one
That you could have.

It's the wind over the dry grasses and the white pine
And the hills of sandstone and old men's dying farms.
And it's the late night drives into nowhere
And the look of the joyful befuddlement.
And I think, world, that you and I
And all the other muddled people out there –
We'll get along all right. And maybe, I think we might,
If we're lucky and if the grasses flow just right in the breeze,
We can go down to the brook, world, and hold hands
And smile quietly and watch the geese
And smell the sweet rain over the rivers.

Late Evening, Julyby ~ProvenParadox

Literature / Poetry / Romantic / Post-Teen (Mature) / Free Verse

Open your eyes, dear, it's nearly morning.

~D

love 1 1

~~joy 0 0~~

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

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~~neutral 0 0~~

~celestialfeatherfox Aug 17, 2012

perfect

~IsabellaMichel Jul 13, 2012 Student Writer

This has some great imagery and that first line just kills it!

Wow.

~HeartofPoetry Apr 18, 2012

I really enjoy the flow of this poem. The symbolism is beautiful and there is something about the imagery that really plays at the heart strings. I read it a few times so I could relive it, it's beautiful. Your work is excellent. The relationship this represents seems so pure, the kind of relationship thats most coveted and you portrayed it perfectly

~ProvenParadox May 14, 2012 Student Writer

Thanks, friend.

~ilyilaice Mar 29, 2012

the first stanza for me, could have stood on its own. i guess the second helps illustrate the point made in the first stanza, though. but that first stanza ... it just makes so much sense, and i was nodding the whole time i was reading it. lovely, lovely writing. well done!

~Mysterysolved96 Mar 26, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

You just keep astonishing me with beautiful writing. I don't think anything I say can do this piece justice, so I'll just have to settle for the fact that it is truly amazing.

~humatinee Mar 25, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

I absolutely love the last two lines of the first stanza. They made me smile. This is really very beautiful.

My only suggestion concerns the fifth line in the last stanza. As a reader, I feel like there is supposed to be a small shift there, and the fact that it carries on the "and" pattern hides that shift.

~WanderingHere Aug 22, 2011

_{it's too cute. i just can't.}

~marikob-k Jul 28, 2011 Hobbyist General Artist

I can just hear you reading this to a group of people huddled around a fire in the wilderness. Like bam.

~ProvenParadox Aug 7, 2011 Student Writer

That would be the ideal location for any reading of poetry. I'm not sure if this poem is one to be read to people or one best overheard from a meaningful distance. But the wilderness, you are right about that.

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Late Evening, July

Late Evening, Julyby ~ProvenParadox

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