[x]

The Post*
The blue mail-satchel bumps and sways, brings them in,
rigid with the weight of promise;

envelopes, dessert-colored, a delicacy,
the brittle folds filled with scent,
a creme transfer over time, to me.

I open each with the reverence
of seashells and oceanic loves.

I cut apart the shore that separates us
with a letter-opener, the sound of water.

You have arrived
before your body.

I settle into my pulse
and the resounding ambiance of my privacy
while your words touch my lips.
*

I.
We stand in our reamed maze of consent--
faces, throats thrumming
on parallel shoulders;

a doorway, at dusk;
a barefoot dance sung over by bird

Caughtin the helium of a night
where constellations ignite
the blood-spattered atrium
of a late summer's sky,

I find myself a comet
shooting the urban grid
in an urgency as I race
a suicidal rim on two wheels

in the blackness between the fires,
my red-shifted thoughts crossing
light years out-of-body
and outliving me

till the awareness of you
slingshots me at Mach speed
to await your arrival
long before it happens,

caught at the last light
so close to my destination,
inhaling the danger of you,

where to idle the demon
begs disaster, even if the
interlude proves a watershed –

by Neptune's light, I will
wish to death

Learning GodThese beloveds of mine
wend their way through minefields of learning,
dig through layers of deadliness for you.

Me, too
blinded still by the glitter of my tripwire,
I dance along the edges of these cliffs
believing there is an invisible bridge, casting sand
out into the sky, ready to run along the glimmer of walkway
it reveals, assume
there is no bottom to this gorge, launch off
and grow my wings as the wind hits me in the face

and think I have help to give to my beloveds.

Maybe the difference is that
I have left the ground, and they are still pushing poles into
the next bit of dirt, mincing toward the next buried mine.

zzznight's limbo is retrospective,
lights whim & akimbo and the shadows are epileptic
but stiller than still— this is me leaning on my windowsill,
testing nonsleep's nimble rim till I tumble upwards etched & wrenched come early morn,
thinking what my wallclock must think of time & I
hounding sane, sound sounds, dreaming of the brick tongues of fireflies
and the many realms of the weather.

god yes
such as
well I

have you ever tried miming a dialogue with a handheld moment
only to find its spasm as warm as a cat's ninth life?
and that the past that the present has passed is a limber lie
from the moment your eyes pretend to memori

memories, making glorious mudhis memories are making a glorious mud

i.

it is a lumberjack's wife whose veins are budding twigs,
arms feeble as every dried branch to soak a shining star.

it is her who bares such troubled wrists for oven mitts,
so ardently delivers her hoggish assembly some hulking bird
whose body cavity is crammed tight to the sphincter
with a spiced bread. instinctively, she goes for the knife.
there is some raucous applause as she serrates

its oiled, peppered and flightless skin and on
into its succulent chest meat as every spectator
dreams of flying. her blade burrows farther in
and under enough to dredge up a pinkish marrow,

where

RipcordIt is warm black cloth
that tumbles my loose head

My eyes shrink softly
below the ragged line
of neck

under the camphor blankets.

there is a man at the back door.

Under trembling turkey-pink-

Heart jangles on the ripcord kick
flay these arms at the silhouette
snatching at the hot light prickles

it is black behind him.

My gorge is dry packed
a dust wall – a dumbed jam
and trying to force the tight
broken glass scream
out panic! out panic! out
out out out
is like tearing plastercast with teeth
like defecating a tumour-

the noise thumps!

mouth roof from beef chest,
a solid bark gasp,

coughing a nightma

EnvyMaiden.

The space between us is slant rhyme,
Burning-in, saturation, and exposure time,
Ink curves he drew from a lead line,
The way his fingers fit in yours,
Instead of mine.

Mother.

You are difficult to hone, granite.
I am prone to severing.
You are a vestige made of stone
That I could never be.

Crone.

Are you what is happening to me?
Rain and gravity have
Weathered the weaker parts
They leave you standing
Strong, a pyramid, a mountain.
I am haunted: a cliff, daunted
By the sea.

Depressing Russian Literature.Guilt is a piano on top of you
instead of a man. Street noises
drain you like bleach on a rainbow.
Indecision becomes a washer & dryer
you can't stop putting things into
& taking things out of all through
a painful fluorescent night. The

brain becomes smoke, a hidden stash
of dark red cigarettes, dipped in
formaldehyde, waiting for you.
Depressing Russian literature
becomes your best friend & you
can't remember what it is like

to have a flesh & bone best friend,
a soft voice at the other end, someone to cough up
pounds of dirt and flashlights and floods with you.
Fun becomes self-destruction in the for

Up and Aparti.

I was four and you were two. My Ma says she remembers me saying how it was such a bother when we had a playdate because you'd take my animal crackers and mash them between your fingers and your mouth but you'd never eat any of them.

ii.

I was seven and you were five, and my Ma told me to find a rose to give to you so she could take a picture with her new camera. I couldn't find any, so I went to Old Alfred's field and picked a wildflower instead. But it had a bee, and you had allergies, and you stuffed the petals in my mouth after your Pa fixed you up with the Epipen.

iii.

I was twelve and you were ten. You went to a Catholic girls' s

AphroditeFrom the very moment my eyes beheld thee -
Full adorned, head to toe, with shells shimmering -
Was when the sun and I first rose from the sea
And yet, apparition of time glimmering,
You stepped in the surf and came naked to me;
I, who's darkly ephemeral murmuring
Would by exposure thus mockingly decree,
But it was you became my Aphrodite.

From Alpha Centauri with LoveI'd like to write you a message
in hundred-foot high flaming letters.
It would tell you
you no longer needed glasses.
A passing spacecraft might mistake
my words for a signal
that the earth was running out of air
and, though we are very sorry,
there is no safe place for them to land.

If the words were bright enough
they may carry to the edges of the nearest
star, and there split in two.
Observers on Alpha Centauri
interpret it as a dialogue
on the subtle machinations of string theory.
In translation it becomes a bestseller
on Dagobah 7, and is summarily
taken out of print.

When atmospheric lensing distorts my message
you ma

Soichiro's RoarMom was a Honda girl. Always was, always would be. She spent her initial years driving a variety of shed-built Volkswagens, which would promptly have a major failure, which would promptly be dragged back home to get a motor swap. The regularity of this business got to the point where my Uncle Mike, her brother, can still pull and replace a motor in about twenty minutes, but I digress.

Somewhere along the line, Mom, or Robin at the time, needed a new car, and found herself in a Honda dealership. After approaching every vehicle with scrutiny, and likely yelling at the salesman (though she would never admit it), she bought herself the first-gen

ElegyThat ever-circling hawk you see is death.
It never leaves your sight; is air its home?
Alas, it mastered air so it may hunt.
It may come down so fast and steep one day
that none could see it dive, yet you are gone.
Today you are too big, you are too strong.
But you will shrink, you will become a mouse.

Or death will grow till all your size and strength
are vain, and float mere inches overhead,
then take you with a twitch of its great beak.
It will take all you are, or nearly all.
The love you had for others and the love
they had for you cannot be caught or held
by talon or by beak, cannot be lost.

As death soars up again and

On the Northside of Time
     It was a good day for the dogs and a bad one for the rabbits. I heard the big black dog howl his chase call through most of the afternoon, sometimes near and sometimes far. His little white shadow yipped along behind him. There were long pauses between yips heard. That little dog had short legs and needed extra wind and effort just to keep up.

     The air outside was cool and sharp. The dog

31:12N, 121:30Emy Dear i just noticed
my balcony is shaped
like wings

and the wind is billowing
the moon up, up to-night
in her dusty purple garb

and i think
no Dear i do not want
to leave here: where men

build bridges over oceans
and live inside of mountains
like river dragons

where the sun shines
not at all at noon but gleams
like an orange at sundown

where the moon walks home
surefooted to where my neck
cannot crane

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sometimes in april xviii.xviii.

a home that you don't remember is a street
winding its way to grandmother's house through
a neighborhood forest you should have skipped.
it's where cousins dressed in striped bell bottoms
congeal to inhale cigarettes lifted from parents
and talk about MD 20/20, marijuana and sex. it's
when you fail to relate to experience so pretend.
it's when your hair frizzes from the humidity and
your orange octagon glasses are laughed at.
it's when covering the truth of virginity with a lie
is more important than hiding your period.

a home that you don't remember is a junior high
caterpillar splintering brick and m

sometimes in april xvii.xvii.

i buried my first carved instructions under a bedroom window at dusk
the night before we deserted. i hesitated according to my mother. but
needed to leave something so i could feel my way through a past i
never returned to, so what i buried became the property of rooted
grass the color of mandrake. it only gets to be the color mango when
you impale it with something like a teaspoon until it bleeds.

i had my first kiss 4348 nautical miles (which sounds closer than 5003
regular miles) away from that place. it's the only thing i remember except
Roberta Flack singing the first time ever she saw a face. i don't

sometimes in april xvi.xvi.

sometimes in april i watch tulips rise from their grave
a leaf split the branch
a pond boil ice
flowers invert
animals procreate
and people, wrapped alive.

sometimes in april i catch Winter sky-writing from the
back of a plane; a historic itinerary, trails of smoked-
mist, vapory hieroglyphs about how to love, nest and
survive so the tadpole evades the fish and the fish the
hook. so the blue jay escapes the honeysuckle snare
and a robin egg the jay's beak. so people can loose
themselves to breathe and love doesn't suffocate.

he leaves an hourglass full of desert map to avoid
condensation so we won't misinterpret his

sometimes in april xv.xv.

sometimes forgetting is remembering where you came from, especially if you're
sitting in the midst of 45 students whose names you don't know, staring at you
in a strange land of foreign language, darkened skin and spicy food.

sometimes forgetting is remembering who you're not in the midst of who you've
become. it's like being in the south of France placing a rock on the grave of Chagall
and hearing a southern accent from atop the wall. or, where Van Gogh harvested
yellow ocher and hearing a distinct laugh from the corridor.

when the following moments reveal that you still are (because despite the familiar,
it was only someth

sometimes in april xiv.xiv.

i don't remember a thing except things i'd never had: Dick Clark, burritos and
a cockapoo. i remembered the day the music died back home before boarding
that plane; i remember(ed); Bye Bye Miss American Pie...
(fare thee well,
luck go with thee
and when you're gone,
remember me.)
while gutting my suitcase again. (it burnt like scar tissue in a urinary tract. it stunk
like a barf bag in a window seat.) it was my first verse carried like a knapsack when
i began to write. i protected the paper it lived on for years, then one day it was gone.
gone like an unsnapped bra; like bone china and antiques; like a sister buried some-
whe

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Not this Island Music

by `Anavah, Jan 30, 2010, 1:16:01 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

I. What it was never

                                                       (on J reading Robert Kelly)

"And after luscious months of living they would say it's not so
very different from what they knew."

It was never the verse, but something thicker
   dangerous to the finger; a bait trap
of honesty foraged from a conformed colony by a dominant
drone possessing a new Queen.

It was never the voice, but something tougher
   sharper under the skin; tiny lancets
a barbed stinger from a defensive maneuver pumping venom
through a corpuscle of blood and water.

It was never the delivery, disoriented in direction
   from an insufficient species of pheromone; some pulsing doubt
of return despite having uttered these very words, "Then we
would see what all that nakedness was about."

II. What it was always

                                                            (…on T listening)

"Love didn't make all the difference we thought it would."

It was always the reader behind the words.  "Nothing can ever
be very different from what we know."

Not this Island Musicby `Anavah

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Robert Kelly is a phenomenal (and very under recognized) poet.

All work copyrighted and may not be used or reproduced without my written permission

Daily Deviation

Given 2010-08-24

Not this Island Music by `Anavah ( Featured by `GaioumonBatou )

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~Sugar-Bielbog Sep 4, 2010

This is one of the most interesting poems I've read on DA in a long time. Good job.

`Anavah Sep 8, 2010 Professional General Artist

Thank you.

`LadyLincoln Aug 24, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

I am sad to see people fail to comment on how beautiful this is - but I was moved.

`Anavah Aug 27, 2010 Professional General Artist

Don't be sad. Sometimes people just don't know what to say.

Thank you always for your kindness.

`LadyLincoln Aug 27, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

For you, always

*Lit-Twitter Aug 24, 2010

Chirp, congrats on the DD, it's been twittered. [link]

`Anavah Aug 27, 2010 Professional General Artist

Thank you.

*Markus43 Mar 11, 2010

"Love didn't make all the difference we thought it would."

indeed...perhaps we have had a misconception...in my case, not perhaps...but a definitive yes.

`Anavah Mar 15, 2010 Professional General Artist

You should read Robert Kelly, if you already haven't.

*Markus43 Mar 16, 2010

I did not until a few moments ago. Prose/Poetry has not been on my reading list, that total list being quite short...you know...
But as I grow older, I find myself stopping more often to see through the eyes of other's vision. It is facinating
(the sun is the shadow of the moon.
meaning is the shadow of desire.)
From Kelly's Dream desire

thanks

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Not this Island Musicby `Anavah

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