Debellatio

[DiggerTractor]

Tears. (In my heart a pulsating glitch: an electric
pain inherited from father's, father.) From your blue
eyes brine shrimp skate down your cheek and I
catch them on the tip of my tongue (I devour).
I search the flavor profile. (I think it's broken) the betrayal
the love or the sadness all taste the same. It's one
brackish mix of sea and lost memories. An outline
of the dark evolution from cell to shark to human.
The next one (the last one I saw): an anomaloy--
an earthy peel bug rolled hard onto the cotton sheet
and fixed itself. (In fluid memory) it swirls with the childless
semen caked on your legs swished with the praire-dust
on your shins. (Sanitized and chlorinated for your protection).

Remember:after the run to the dam. The time you lost
your yellow water-bottle and we found it on the way
back. A kind soul placed it neatly in the middle of the trail.

[DiggerTractor]

Cotton flakes swirl and swift through the currents
of gnats. Alone and together naked on the wooden
deck. Waxed and inviting. Primordial and gentle. She
glistens. The salt and scents lacquer my tongue
with tastes and smells of you-only you. Heat: two
bodies in the sun. From the north, traffic hums

and reflects from the canyon walls, buzzes peach leaves
and shakes the sweet inner-flesh. The vibrations move up:
exactly due East, exactly 178 feet from the mesa top
a small rock makes a momentous nameless movement--
nothing will happen now. But a chain of Earth movements
has begun in ignorance. A checkered whiptail lizard fearing
the noise scurries and edges over another stone. Nothing

is seen. But the rain will come and then the snow and the
the rains and freezes and sun will cycle and recycle
the thaw finally releases the boulder, the size of the car
I bought from the young lady who went back to college.

It shifts and tumps and bounces over a scared bunny. Crushing
rocks and breaching over the deer fence, diving back under
into the orchard. A billion years of sand, built grain upon grain
upon grain stealing time and cementing the past: finally kinetic
from the potential. Destroying the deck where we had lain.

A fresh scar appears on the old wounds and testifies to a jump
in the devolution of a monument. In time it will all end
into nothing but free grains of sand piled at the feet of the table.

[Andrea345]

Wish I had more energy to put into commenting on this. L4 "the" vs "my" decision to be made - and yes, there is some clean up to do, but really strong start to the work.

[Julie]

"long enough for the lizard/ brain"

I like this linebreak. I did not expect the twist!

"if we round up it’s 7 years by
365 days and that adds up to 2555 days we fought
to convince ourselves we're soulmates"

Nice!


"the 'tszszs' of not being
tired and the hum of not being lonely"

I LOVE this description.

"But the rain will come and then the snow and the
the rains and freezes and sun will cycle and recycle
the thaw finally releases the boulder, the size of the car
I bought from the young lady who went back to college."

Love the repetition and the mundane close.

[larryrap]

Hi Billdozer,

I'm enjoying your high-power language machine run slightly amok, busting things and doing graceful hairpin turns. The effort of trying to stand still for a moment in an excess of stimuli, everything slipping. I think Adam's Lament captures the sensation beautifully.

[DiggerTractor]

Arlene thanks! Julie, I appreciate you taking the time to come by. Larryrap, I love the description

[DiggerTractor]

Cut it up and eat it
Divide grind distribute

In this copse there is no phoenix
or thunderbird

The dead do not know what
comes from the ashes

[DiggerTractor]

"Now you see me. Now you don't."

There is a technique when correctly performed includes a finger
delicately placed and with a wispy flicker of a soft tongue springs forth

magic. You're wonderful, she said. In the end, behind the silence, she added
"just at that" each time. And that was tthe real magic-he never saw the words sitting

there, an incubus perched on the headboard-hard to read in the inkiness. Sometimes
she didn't hide them and in the morning they were still there. He would see

them, in the light unable to decipher. A witch-crafted spell:
a corpse selectively illiterate.

[Andrea345]

Love love love "After You" and "Magic Man"

Hope you don't give up your thirty pomes. This is a great thread of work.

[DiggerTractor]

Dear, Saint Anthony: Patron Saint of the Lost, I pray
to your holiness to assuage the constant gut-punches of pain
resulting from my lost one. No candles. No incense. No relic of cloth
or icons or beads can bring her back. But I ask, something special from you:
I ask that she remains lost to me. For you, finding her would be easy (If you seek
you shall). For you would know the trails she has left behind. The rancid earthy smell. Tracks
covered in snow can't hide from your sacred holiness. Please, if by chance, you find
find her-by all the Mother of the Bleeding Heart allows: prick her heart with a barb.
Pin it and fold the flap back so it drips slowly like that of the Holy Mother: so she will
feel the slow drain of life from an unhealing wound. When she checks her cup
she'll know it's source is from the hole in the heart. When her stomach bloats.
When a stress pain gusts across her chest. When her heart braces
against the morning. When it all seems like despair, she'll know
it was I who put the eternal thorn in the side of the left ventricle. Grief should tinge her
mornings, noons and nights. It is this only that I ask-if you find her-one barb, one thread
of grief weaving through her days. In your most Holy and Merciful name. Forever and Ever.
Amen

[DiggerTractor]

Thank Andrea, I appreciate the encouragement and am trying to stay with the pack without falling too far behind...

[DiggerTractor]

The last, the last break-up sex: it was dry and cold
outside but the tropics lingered. I fucked her in the ass.
And I'm glad. For her, she had to use her 'woman time'
as an excuse against her catholic guilt. Virgin-pressed
coconut oil and a dick in the ass. We could do that. Put
dicks into each other's asses, yet we could not live together. Fucked
Up. Coconut fills it all: inside, outside, mixing. Troubled history
like in Jamaica on Monkey Island: the topless white foreigner
edging along the coral and the young black woman with lighter
brown breasts and the girls finding a sea-star and I couldn't stop
the relentless gaze-but the urchins fanned out, sure of themselves
and everywhere we had to step carefully to not get poisoned. A cold
beer in the man's hand, sitting out there all alone all day hoping
to sell some Jelly: "no worries man" he told told the girls. Smiling
we could see he had a gold tooth.

[DiggerTractor]

You came into my yard, a word, begging for something and I didn't understand
your mumbling. My eyes are seeing and my head is quaking because someone
is in the wrong place and the time doesn't match my clock. It's not right: all the beauty

won from the pain.The words fracturing and splitting from tongues to move a heart. All
the epiphanies from the pain. The Actualizing self to individuation. I would pass over
learning the secrets in a grain of sand. Or riding the cosmic waves from the beginning

of time, blasting past the shoulder of Orion. I could be a tear lost in the rain, all this
forgotten-- If I could have but another year of you loving me like you did. Hiding
and knowing it was wrong. The touch behind the pines. The cricket sounds at night

in the playground: buzzing energy. I'd trade it all for one more year of that love
from you. Time. And never thinking, if only.

[larryrap]

These break-up poems are wrenching. Yes - vicious and painful and pretty damn great.

[M]

Ouch. You're killin me with this stuff. Here I am trying to self-actualize and move past the initial breakup shock (I'm coming up on 18 days since moving out), and here you keep writing all these damned beautifully heart and gut wrenching poems. But they're really really good.