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They Also Serve Who Only Stand and WaitI don't know when we first went underground. I don't even know if it was one mass exodus, a swarm of mankind trickling through the earth's crust so vehement we carved our own caverns by the force of trampling feet, or whether it was a gradual process, perhaps even a repetitive one, a family here, a neighborhood there. For all I know, the echo of the damp subterranean machine has always reverberated off the cave walls, created long past by the Angels, who think of our well-being even while they shake their heads helplessly at our flaws.

They say that those who remained on the surface were raptured away in a great flash of light, like a millio

The Hungry SeasonThe Hungry Season
“The next season will be the hungry season.”
Moses M. Kolinmore

A stem, a leaf, a stem,
a stem again,

and the army of our bodies
hanging from the branches
of the Dahoma trees.

We come to this as moths
on Saharan winds

with no malice but the wings’
direction, our caterpillar mouths,
our waiting numbers

cocooned in dirt. We are
aching and glutted

but hungry still, even as
we strip the canopy bare of leaves
and foul each river black

with waste below us –
our gruesome chatter asking,

as we fall into the dirt
to reshape what we are,
can you imagine the hunger?

But of course you can; of c

The Order of Sublime Simulacra Kamon woke to the sound of bells and saws. The ceremony must have started hours ago; there was invigorating yellow sunlight outside the gauzy curtains. Kamon's Self was intoning eight o'clock, eight o'clock with all the insistence of a song looping in his head.

Flesh brain, he thought, you should have caught that alarm. Sometimes the flesh was louder than the devices supposed to make it properly quiet. The flesh insisted on the persistence of the Real. This was exactly the type of lesson that the brothers were supposed to learn, and Kamon hoped that relaying to the abbot how thoroughly he had learned it might lighten the inevitable punishm

RatsWhen I was a little girl, I went to church. Our church was an illegal one: the building was unregistered.

We would sit on the benches made from stolen floorboards and listen to a man dressed in black as he read us tales of angels coming to save righteous men from evil, their swords clean and their trumpets blaring.

The man dressed in black was old. He was sick. His Bible was missing pages.

One day in March, my mother turned to me and said clearly, "Masha, I want you to remember something for when you grow up." Maybe she knew she was dying. "God loves murderers."

I just looked up at her, thumb in my mouth. My mother was still a beautiful w

preludesi.
blue rose into the city backdrop
like balloons, a million for the
morning sun prelude.

ii.
i've not slept a dream
but i have cried a salty face
and letters spilled like beans
into my moleskine,
almost as virgin as i once was
with few stories between my covers.

iii.
the kettle's belly boils
like my head upon a pillow.

iv.
i am guilty for rarely finishing my tea
even when i use the small mugs;
pour, rinse, repeat.

v.
perhaps today i will play dead.

vi.
perched behind my blinds
it dawns on me that i am surrounded
by walled neighbours, strangers,
they're just preludes to lovers
the way i am always
prelude to the one.

The Nature of LungsThere's that
feeling
you get
when you
keep
breathing in and
are
so concerned with getting
air into
your lungs,
to fill them up
so fully
that
you'll never
need
to inhale again,
that you forget
about
breathing

out.

But when you do,
the emptiness feels
so
much better than all
the oxygen in the world
pressing out on that one
overcrowded lung.

WhitmanI am all that grows from me
and all that grows from me is sacred—
              my hair, dirty roots reaching towards sky,
fed by sky, shifted by its undulating currents
              my fingers, spiders, crescents, twigs,
gaunt, blunt, probing, inquisitive...prurient
              my ears, awkward conch shells jammed on as if by mistake,
rigid and ridged, elven,
innocent like unexplored caves for children to bound gaily into
resounding with echoed cheers of courage wanting
as if a dozen more children waited within, fearless guides;
              my nose, obdurate.
The reach of my eyes knows no bounds;
what walls are there to throw my body against?

001. beginnings.Beginnings are vague things. Quite often you can't pin them down to one event – you have to trawl back further and further through foggy past, peeling apart what ifs and untangling strands of memories.

Eventually one has to go all the way back to the start of the universe, and that's a question even the experts have to shrug their shoulders at. It's not like you can plug it into a calculator and come out with a balanced algorithm. At least, not yet.

But it is true that sometimes you can fasten down an occurrence or a moment or even just a single breath, like sticking a thumbtack through a dead butterfly, and label it as a 'beginning' i

minister'good morning,' the reverend bellows
'what a lovely collection of idols
we have gathered today'
they're a spectacle of a scatter plot on the pews

the bronzed hypocrisy of saved men sitting still,
saints on the neutral ground of benches
is an inconsistency i'll struggle
to reconcile with the jacob's ladders of rough-hewn grace
swooping in on souls or spirits
which have proven to be untouchable
not for sale in even the blackest of markets

speak, preacher. preach. i've always listened piously
and i'm not yet thinking of sunday dinner:
will the chicken be hot will the apple crisp burn

i mimic transcendence of the physical
i, bei

Ottumwa ShamanIn Iowa, weeping willows dream of
Tigers, born in pagan fog, their
Coat of stripes singing shaman
Songs; shrill symphonies of grief.
Heaven tilts, crashes, and we race
The dirt to get away. We drink the
Earth with bullets of air and grow
Dizzy, light-headed from breathing
Some far off flame. Perhaps a poet
Who braved the fog of Ottumwa, and
Caught fire. Every cowboy has his
Six chances before high noon, before
The fog forms wispy jackals to take
Them home again. Every son inherits
An empty gun, six voids to fill with
Answers, skimmed and guessed from the
Covers of books their fathers used
To read. There is no other way.
In s

GlassI always laugh when you refer to me as glass.
Not just because of the way you say it,
(glass-as-in-gas).
Or because I know it's a crack at my fragility.

Glass is pure.
I am like granite -
my body nullified from too many clashing traits.

Glass is transparent.
I am like clay -
illegible from all the plastered smiles.

Glass is unyielding.
I am like chalk -
easily broken and scuffed away by meagre things.

Glass is hung up on walls and in great cathedrals,
tinted for enhancement, but only ever painted on by fools.

I am hidden behind keypads and camera lenses,
coated in a thick paste of deceptiveness.

No, my love,
I was never glass. (Despite

AirYou do not have to be empty.
Go, now, to the high places, the thin spires
of mountains and skyscrapers
the roof of your house, tipped with snow,
and fill yourself up with the air.
Drink it in, taste it, roll it around
on your tongue, feel it settle
in the caverns of your lungs. Feel the dust
and the ice crystals and the scraps of newspaper
brush your lips, and fill yourself with them, too.
Fill yourself up with the moonlight, the frost,
the dusky rose of the rising sun,
the night, the morning, the calls of birds,
the sillhouettes of telephone poles,
the shadows of people and clouds and alley cats
that dance across the pave

MeanderingHardly a mountain, though on lowering days its head sits wreathed
By the mists of a passing front, aged and befogged as bygone elders
Doddering about – before there were names for the malaise
That hazed their thinking
And from this modest crown there slouched and sloped
A long shoulder, meandering down to meadows below
Pausing now and again to coddle a pleasant hollow
Casting a sloping pitch – enough to rush a torrent
After a sudden shower
Seldom pooling
Its glint and glimmer burble among the stones
To join a rill and plash and swirl and putter about a root
It's there I'm apt to wander

Not much of a path, hard passed a

Talking to YourselfWind drove snow over the trees with such force they seemed to step into the distance. The whiteness in the air covered everything until it was as faded as an old scent trail after a rainstorm. The snow was already deep enough to suck in a man's leg past the knee if he wasn't wearing snowshoes, but the figure trudging through it was no longer a man.

Wendigo had given up on snowshoes long ago in favor of simpler footwear. The straps challenged the clumsy fingers of his stolen human body, and he could never figure out how to move in them without tripping. He lurched onward with the tenacity of a wolverine gnawing through an inch of deer skull t

Nathan Turner Nathan Turner, aged thirty, was a modest earner, if nothing other. Son of no

father and a flighty mother, and raised in most part by troubled brothers, he was never

one to put his trust in those upon whom the dust of age had scarcely settled. For a time,

he had meddled, even peddled, looking for the light in his own eyes. But never enough was

it, just as well, in his own mind, for the brand of fire which he desired was the sort a

man might chase until he dies, and even at the gates of Hell, never find.

But one cool evening in July, he chanced to meet - just walking by - a woman with

an empty stroller. "Empty stroller?" he asked at on

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la musica dulce

by *dietcocaine, Apr 29, 2012, 9:47:54 PM
Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Urban & Spoken Word

heartbeats are psycho- -somatic, dear; the ocean has swallowed me whole. hay una guitarra bajo mi almohada, y sueño de música cuando estoy solo. you came here with city smoke in your lungs, and i forgot to breathe.

la musica dulceby *dietcocaine

Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Urban & Spoken Word

_{Actual title should be "la música dulce".

So you're gone and I'm haunted
And I bet you are just fine
Did I make it that easy
To walk right in and out of my life?

I should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do

-- A Fine Frenzy

* Second stanza, roughly translated:
There is a guitar beneath
my pillow, and
I dream in music when
I am alone}

Daily Deviation

Given 2013-01-10

There is a guitar under my pillow and I dream of music when I'm alone. la musica dulce is by *dietcocaine ( Suggested by =SilverInkblot and Featured by ^NicSwaner )