tramps like us

This a good one. Beautifully written *and* it gets steamy, folks. Don’t you just love sensual poetry?

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark. 

What happens when I try to understand my feelings. I’m not as angsty as it seems, I promise. Writing it down makes it a lot less raw for me. Contrary to what many may think, I’m HAPPY right now. Just needed to clarify that.

3-25-2012: In hindsight… This is strangely prophetic. 

  You love him so much that it hurts sometimes. The kind of pain that flares up in your whole chest and burns there while your throat slowly closes… As you wonder how it will end. Because most relationships do end. You have to see it. You’re rational, at least in theory. You love him so much that knowing there’s an end, to you, is knowing that one day he’ll leave you alone. 

You search his eyes for a trace of this. For the seed of the resolution he’ll make to let you go. You don’t find it, but that’s small comfort. You speculate about when the seed will show itself. You toy with the idea that you may have missed it. Does it lie in his frustrated sigh? You wonder, and as you do, you can barely calm the tremors of your fear. 

And still, in the midst of all that terror, the crazy, unreasonable, frantically beating organ in your chest lets forth a muffled query. You try not to hear it. You ignore it for a bit, but it persists. You petulantly tell it to shut up. But then, one pregnant moment later, the question is repeated, at full volume…

The words resonate from that cavity and ring all through your body. Jarring pieces of your facade with casual cruelty. Bones shake in a turbulent internal quake, as goose bumps rise in rapid procession like wildfire. 

What if it doesn’t have to end?

…Well? What then?

You are angry, desperate. You can’t acknowledge the question.  If you dare to, the flood you’ve been trying to hold back will rush forth with maddening force. Your dam of casual collectedness will shatter. And hope, wretched hope, will prevail. Hope, the poison. Hope which lifts you precariously up into the endless night, so that when you fall, it’s a long, long way down a dark and dreary abyss. 

You have your logic. Your inductive reasoning. Everything you’ve ever known or seen screams the truth: that almost invariably, it ends. And to hope for the exception? That is to make it all hurt infinitely more. Try it and you’ll get bruised, battered, burnt. 

You see all of this. It scares you so much that you can barely draw breath. So much that if you were a colder girl, if you loved him less, you would leave him first to save yourself. You’ve done it before. But this time it’s different. You love him so much that the thought alone is a treacherous one, and it brings the burning pain back to your chest, worse than before. You’d sooner claw your heart from your body with your bare hands. 

[Which, admittedly, you may have vaguely considered in a particularly dramatic moment of angst]

But you have no choice. That, perhaps, is the one thing you know for sure. All you can do is try to silence your mind, and absorb him. To snatch at moments that you share with him, and stow them in your curio box for safe keeping. 

Because someday

[most likely]

he’ll be someone else’s.

This is the mostly completed version of the poem I’ve been working on all summa. Tumblr keeps messing up my stanzas, so I’ve placed one of those obnoxious little swirly lines between each stanza….Without further ado: 

[a whistle in the black

awakes the pallid room,

its stubborn gloom,

shattering the illusion.

muscles moan,

shadows groan,

and i beg of gravity to fall.

i plead for the opiate dream,

until i slip away once more.]

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

oh step-worn cobblestones, oh familiar grime-filled crevices—

sing me to thy depths and cradle me beneath the feet of the restless wanderer

below the creaking park benches and their pondering, prodding inhabitants

among crumbling cellars and musty basements nestled in the knowing dirt

with the rusting grates, the cigarette butts, and the mush of the season.

~

oh meandering after-dark breeze , oh rustling leaves—

sing me through the watchful alley to alight on a drooping telephone line

where the crooked branches tangle with the fraying wires

and the invisible gas light ghosts hover above a heavy electric fug

as the droning traffic lights drudge through their drowsy ballet

~

oh stoic, creaking steeple, oh stale cement stairwell—

sing me to the quiet surface of the parking garage

where a solitary pickup truck sighs, forgotten for the night,

staring over the humble and clumsily patched quilt of faded rooftops,

all basking in the light of the one and only, strangely lonely moon.

~

oh tattered chain-link grid, oh lazy convenient store corner—

sing me down the slope that hides behind a gap in the fence,

sliding among the moss and silt, the trickling, lukewarm runoff,

to the ramshackle tarp shanties beneath a blanket of summer leaves,

tracing the indented trail carved by years of soot and spit from above.

~

oh seeping stone steps, oh night-blackened porthole—

sing me round the lazily unwinding ceiling fan,

where the jingling of tipsy keys in locks faintly echoes in the still

and cafe ghosts melt and blur with curling, yellowed pages

drifting lightly in the pale peach breeze of flowering trees

~

and then…

oh timidly tranquil, somber rain.

oh faintly gleaming, steaming pavement.

sing me.

oh sing me,

sing me please.

back to my slumbering, softly mumbling darling.

~

[the midnight wake of a lonesome train teasing her heavy curls,

her rhythmic breaths falling in line with sigh of the crying whistle]

~

to the sanguine silence.

the night before i left.

when she was still mine, and i

~

hers. 

~a poem by Carl Sandberg

This is a favorite poem of mine that sort of goes along with my whole spirituality thing and helped to inspire The Observers (see link below). So without further ado, here it is.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work -

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg 
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. 
Shovel them under and let me work. 
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.

Let me work.

http://chelsalea.tumblr.com/post/5926536280/the-observers