&.&.&

Noodles coagulate
Unable to disentangle
From the choking mass
Gathering in my throat.

Syllables unutterable
All that I cannot hear
Resenting quavers
Startling the bar.

Nothing worse
Than the insincerity of silence
Dinner of the unspeaking
Orders cut off in mid air -

Your fingers aren’t grasping
My throat, and still I am strangled
By these swollen threads
Of your heart, pining elsewhere -

While my dough feet remain stubbornly plastered
Here, no yearnings else, but to grow
Large in this place of my choosing.
This bowl cannot hold your steaming desires.

Not a dish, but an idea,
Loose and unfixed
It must see worlds -
Check - the meal is over.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.

Isabella guessed the word that Giles had not spoken. Well, was it wrong if he was that word? Why judge each other? Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust-

In the time it took to hold my breath

and slip under the bathwater

– to hear the blood-thud in the veins,

for me to rise to the surface –

my parents had died,

the house had been sold and now

was being demolished around me,

wall by wall, with a ball and chain.

I swim one length underwater,

pulling myself up on the other side, gasping,

to find my marriage over,

my daughters grown and settled down,

the skin loosening

from my legs and arms

and this heart going

like there’s no tomorrow.

Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?

I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet,
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.

Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb,
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.

No longer the barbaric yawp from the rooftop - 

Just the silent celebration, in small and measured spoonfuls

Packed carefully against your tightening chest, as you

Perch precariously on the arc of two wheels

That perpetually spin beyond your will.

He holds the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Crickets and pools
Sing memory songs of you.

In case I ever were to forget - my love for you is beyond circumstance and regret.

Twelve moons past, 

We had squeezed past brown men like toothpaste 

Unelegantly discovered ourselves by the edge of the sidewalk

The garish red and purple lights casting an electric pall on your brown face

You brought me to the god that you worshipped

Only after something good had transpired - retroactive thanks

Her many hands clenching the air and the whispers of her devotees

Twisting promises into gold knots and banana leaves easily deposited into one’s purse

My widened eyes could not frame the noise

The muddy puddles that pooled in between my toes 

While we navigated through the wailing screeches imitating love 

A web between our ears, your words pulling me to prostrate between your knees 

I remember, it was your gentle face

That I saw on that goddess’ countenance

Benevolent at first, but ultimately, human, and once again,

Tragically limited and loveless. Moons later, I would weep at your feet 

Unable to lift your heart from the wreck 

That our own hands had devised. Dirt trails

We had thought once divine, now, only dust and frail memory.

Because I can no longer call upon you, this is the only sign of all that you meant to me. 

My mind grown soft from too much Internet usage… Whether on my laptop with its glowing piece of violated fruit on the lid, or the awful little slab I’ve made the mistake of entrusting with my phone calls and, more and more, my higher faculties. Plato’s slab. It is the last metaphor.

meganmcisaac:

samantha.
los angeles, california.
spring 2012.

The greatest economic disaster of all time was caused by the most data-oriented sector of our society. Wall Street didn’t fail because it had too few quants; it had too many.