Kay's Poems

[Kaydene]

Hey guys. Let me know if any of this is questionable. Feel free to leave constructive criticism or whatever.

Cartographer

This is the problem;
we remember the uncharted territories of bodies
we washed, powdered, pressed in secret
and then covered or harassed.

Our eyeballs never meet and yet
our hips are always mingling
lingering in some forbidden punge.

With our bodies creasing your sheets,
we unwrinkle ourselves
and smear the curled pinion of our pose
in several breathy falls
we climb into each other's mouths
and in not finding it there, retreat

to the cells of the inch of the corner
of the skin on my back laid out like a floorboard.

And still you did not find it.



November's Lyric

Fifty-one weeks a year,

tombstones are sighs,
pushed up out of crusty lungs.
We dare to run, pallid, to their sides
holding our forgotten sense where epitaphs hover.

Dear Lucifer,
Everyday we end.
Everyday we are ice.

God poses wordlessly now,
so I am wringing out philosophy,
harvesting my little theology garden.
I believed such things.

We were pieces and verses,
muses and hollow ponds,
actors and playwrights,
unabashed, bare-mattressed lovers.

We were honeysuckled to the night,
as poets and opinions,
opinions and Purcells.

We were such reflections.


8/29/05 tanka

Bleary morning fog
stirred creamer in my coffee.
I can't help but feel
like the bowl of the valley;
picking at leftover dreams.

[Avatar]

Love the last one. The other two somehow seem just a little bit off to me personally, (not sure why), but I do like the last 3 lines of the first one.

--A

[Kaydene]

Mother Jezebel

She, with her brown wheatfields of sadness,
locusts sifting around the womb of her dreaming.

She, with the grain barns empty,
the cattle all lean and picked,
she will crack her outline in depravity
--thirsty craters where
--mouths once were

Her eyes and their clarity,
her head and its incessant burning,
the autumn licks of flame all singed around
a mouth like bare legs, the box of her jaw
and that sorrow I inherit.

I launch myself into her sight
and so into the oars of her deception
thinking myself the blaze of her bright bursting,
the sun in a galaxy so far away

she must think me
a pinprick of light.

[Worm of Despite]

Maybe the nicest one of yours I've read yet, though I've no idea what you're objectifying. But you did a good job of it!

[Kaydene]

Thank you Av and LF for the feedback!


LF,
I wanted to use an archetype of a misunderstood woman (Jezebel) to balance the power and weakness concepts in her, and where it resides.

The first two stanzas focus on her weakness, what she does without, and the sadness in that helplessness. The next stanza focuses on the power in her sensuality:

a mouth like bare legs, the box of her jaw

(using "box" in more than one way)

and then following it with

and that sorrow I inherit.

Which is to say, that the narrator finds the sadness in that as well and, seeing this balance, compares herself to such radiance as Jezebel only to draw back, unworthy:

she must think me
a pinprick of light.

Anyway, it's pretty heavily obscured, I think. But there's where my head was at.

[Kaydene]

Untitled

The crinkled sheet of your kisses
sparked fires underneath the lip of the fountain
with the little Spanish ceramic man in the courtyard
where we visited your grandmother and her beaded curtain
where she gave us bottles for our innards
candied cigarettes for our mouths.

This was when you hid your hairbrush
and I picked leaves from my head, you
grunting Aveyronian, --I
longed to be raised by wolves.

This was when your mother watched jazz slides
drunk in her paisley recliner, you told me to come
to your room to get the shovel and bucket for our windows
but I could not stop watching the monstrous piano
its hungry tooth and string eating away at my eyes.
And this was when you started hating me
when I hummed silly tunes on our park bench,
learned how to kick a soccer ball.

You are all of June, bug, and fire, fly,
and the sheets of sparks underneath the lip
of fountain all cracked and warm,

And the calls you cocked your head for,
that I tried so hard to hear.

[Kaydene]

Friday Night Bites

Who does this body belong to? I
sit, like a seasoned sardine
in a tin to be opened by a curlered housewife
during daytime television
routine.

And all the couples on Friday nights
make love on the sidewalks
arm-in-arm or hand-in-hand
they go at it when they hear my suspension screaming
then fix themselves after I pass by them
discuss reservations, tickets, or
meals.

I cannot turn Cohen off of my car stereo.
He is stuck clenching his teeth somewhere
between a woman's thighs
and depravity. Gets me every time.

[Kaydene]

I could use some "picking-apart" on this one, if anyone wants to step up. I'm constantly trying to shift things around and fine-tune it since I wrote it years ago.

Solstice
At the open door, the draft scraped its feet.
I hoped the raging pulse of Spring's last shudder
would force us to knees in its lusty come cry,
our heads bent to the end of an adulterous breath.

Half an hour I sat on the swing-set smoking,
soaking in the charge that snaked
through the olive branches, before it even started.

When the first blemish of rain kneeled
on my blue jeans and spread through the fibers,
I swung higher and kicked at the limb of a tree
gravid with that suspended mist.

It wetted the dead snarl of ground
with a satisfying shimmer.

I wandered down to the backyard,
cigarette hissing at each violent drop.
The ground opened up and bred rivulets
veining angrily over the gravel.

Willow over my head rushed to a whisper again.
Puddles glassed over.
Air stinking of fresh dirt, piss, but I breathed nonetheless,
my palate soaked in the earth's heavy breath.

I followed a footpath to the back porch,
saw laundry hung limp, drenched on the line.

Since then, you have not called.

[Kaydene]

Anaphase

The paltry sorrow
a halo of blood
broken in sections of
heart
of tooth.

He opens the list:
the upturned palm
in prayer in offering
in need.

I begin to protect
the cabalistic things
inside of me
from the slingshot of
his mouth.